The term “gentry” as used in England is somewhat vague, and used either broadly or narrowly by different historians at different times.1 Here I use the term to refer solely to the knights and squires (aka “the squireocracy”), who owned land in the countryside and ran local affairs, populated the House of Commons, and were the junior partners in the ruling class. This differentiates them from the nobility, mainly dukes and earls, who as peers of the realm traditionally held hereditary seats in the House of Lords.
Similarly, the term “aristocracy,” which at least in America is usually synonymous with nobility, is sometimes used by academics to include the “commoners” of the gentry, and here I use it in this latter collective sense of the entire ruling class, along with the terms “landlords” or “landowners.”
Note also that in this period the term “gentleman,” which meant someone who did no physical labor, applied to all of the foregoing, but did not always imply direct land ownership. Younger sons of the gentry or nobility who inherited no land were nonetheless considered gentlemen, which gave them the legal right, for example, to wear a sword. (Women of course didn’t own land, unless they were widows with no male relatives to take it away from them, and even then the crown could, and often did, impose itself on them.) Younger sons retained their status until such time as, failing to make, marry, or inherit their own fortunes, or be provided for by their families, they found a niche for themselves in another social group (such as lawyer, clergy, doctor, merchant, mercenary, mariner, master craftsman or colonist).2 Rich merchants, on the other hand, might be treated as gentlemen by the lower classes, but not the higher, although some bought themselves country estates in the hopes of becoming respectable and accepted as such.
1 See the discussion in P. R. Coss, “The Formation of the English Gentry,” Past & Present, no. 147 (May 1995), https://www.jstor.org/stable/651039 Accessed 24 January 2019
2 Richard Grassby, “Social Mobility and Business Enterprise in Seventeenth-century England,” in Puritans and Revolutionaries, eds. Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 372-375. See also Joan Thirsk, “Younger Sons in the 17th Century,” History 54, no. 182 (October 1969), https://www.jstor.org/stable/24407104 Accessed 31 October 2018