Gentry in A Sentence

    1

    A cut above bustling and brassy Blackpool, Lytham St Annes attracted gentry eager to make their homes in the town.

    2

    A great hunting match was organized at Danchurch in Warwickshire by Digby, to which large numbers of the Roman Catholic gentry were invited, who were to join the plot after the successful accomplishment of the explosion of the 5th of November, the day fixed for the opening of parliament, and get possession of the princess Elizabeth, then residing in the neighbourhood; while Percy was to seize the infant prince Charles and bring him on horseback to their meeting-place.

    3

    After failing to rally the catholic gentry of the Midlands to join him in a rebellion he reached Holbeach House in Staffordshire.

    4

    All that the gentry contributed at present was two pence (groschen) per hide of land, and this only for defensive service at home.

    5

    All that the gentry could do was to depress the lower orders, and this they did at every opportunity.

    6

    Among the gentry of the province Nicholas was respected but not liked.

    7

    An enormous crowd of factory hands, house serfs, and peasants, with whom some officials, seminarists, and gentry were mingled, had gone early that morning to the Three Hills.

    8

    An immense number of people, including many of the neighboring gentry assembled to witness the event.

    9

    Antonio's claim, which was inferior not only to that of Philip II., but to that of the duchess of Braganza, was not supported by the nobles or gentry.

    10

    Any necessary alterations in these articles were only to be made with the common consent of the king, Duke Charles, the senate and the gentry of Sweden.

    11

    Armorial devices of the gentry first appear on seals at the close of the 12th century; and from that time there is a gradual development of the heraldic seal, which in the 14th century was often a work of fine decorative sculpture.

    12

    At that moment Count Rostopchin with his protruding chin and alert eyes, wearing the uniform of a general with sash over his shoulder, entered the room, stepping briskly to the front of the crowd of gentry.

    13

    At the porch he met two of the landed gentry, one of whom he knew.

    14

    At the same time many of the gentry were won by his undoubted sincerity and devotedness as well as by his eloquence.

    15

    At the very beginning of his reign he came into collision with the turbulent szlachta or gentry, who had already begun to oust the great families from power.

    16

    Brydall, Jus Imaginis aped Anglos, or the Law of England relating to the Nobility and Gentry (London, 1675), p. 20.

    17

    But the old abuses continuing to multiply, the Prussian towns and gentry at last took their affairs into their own hands, and formed a so-called Prussian League, which demanded an equal share in the government of the country.

    18

    But though the treasury was thus temporarily replenished and the army increased, the gentry who had been so generous at the expense of their richer neighbours would hear of no additional burdens being laid on themselves, and the king only obtained what he wanted by sacrificing his principles to his necessities, and helping the szlachta to pull down the magnates.

    19

    By 1550, when he summoned his second diet, a reaction in his favour began, and the lingering petulance of the gentry was sternly rebuked by Kmita, the marshal of the diet, who openly accused them of attempting to diminish unduly the legislative prerogative of the crown.

    20

    By the compact of Zborow (Aug 21, 1649) Chmielnicki was recognized as hetman of the Zaporozhians, whose registered number was now raised from 6000 to 40,000; a general amnesty was also granted, and it was agreed that all official dignities in the Orthodox palatinates of Lithuania should henceforth be held solely by the Orthodox gentry.

    21

    By this time the gentry, as well as the barons and prelates, took part in the legislature.

    22

    Clusters of sixties and seventies-style subdivisions had blossomed during the post-war era of rush to the 'burbs. These look-alikes that originally carried names like Camelot or South Pacific were at first scorned by Parkside's gentry but had slowly gained a level of respectability.

    23

    Despite the ferocity of partisans in " the Douglas wars," an English envoy reported that the power of the country gentry and the boroughs had increased, while that of the great wavering nobles, Hamilton, Huntly and others, was diminishing.

    24

    Did the gentry really seek (or need to seek or feel the need to seek) to control the populace territorially?

    25

    During the lifetime of Griffith Jones the course of Welsh Methodism had run in orthodox channels and had been generally supported by the Welsh clergy and gentry; but after his death the tendency to exceed the bounds of conventional Church discipline grew so marked as to excite the alarm of the English bishops in Wales.

    26

    Equestrian seals of barons and knights; the seals of ladies of rank; the armorial seals of the gentry; and the endless examples, chiefly of private seals, with devices of all kinds, sacred and profane, ranging from the finely engraved work of art down to the roughly cut merchant's mark of the trader and the simple initial letfer of the yeoman, typical of the time when everybody had his seal.

    27

    Every attempt to improve matters, by reforming the impossible constitution, stranded on the opposition of the gentry.

    28

    Excommunicated by the pope and placed under the ban of the Empire, the Prussian cities and gentry naturally turned to their nearest neighbour, Poland, for protection.

    29

    External pressure, here as elsewhere, created a patriotic military caste, and the subsequent partitional period, when every little prince had his own separate court, still further established the growing influence of the szlachta, or gentry, who were not backward in claiming and obtaining special privileges in return for their services.

    30

    Extremely well suited for sheep-farming, the natural pastures of the country were quickly parcelled out into huge pastoral crown leases, held by prosperous licensees, the squatters, who in many cases aspired to become a country gentry by turning their leases into freeholds.

    31

    Featured artists have included Montgomery Gentry, Weird Al Yankovic, Hootie & the Blowfish, Lonestar, and the Beach Boys.

    32

    Gentry Lane of Gentry de Paris is an amazing designer and is such a god-send for Knickers -- she really believes in the site, and is always giving me ideas and pushing me along to aspiring to greater things.

    33

    Growse, who was active in erecting public buildings, and in encouraging the local gentry to beautify their own houses.

    34

    Hamilton's Meredith Gentry series, the Unseelie Court is brought front and center when her main character Merry Gentry is in line for the throne.

    35

    He entered the Swedish army at an early age and was already a captain when, in 1689, at the head of a deputation of Livonian gentry, he went to Stockholm to protest against the rigour with which the land-recovery project of Charles XI.

    36

    He even made dangerous political concessions to secure the support of the gentry.

    37

    His first experiment in treason was Rising of the so-called rising of Robin of Redesdale, which Robin of was ostensibly an armed protest by the gentry and Redes- commons of Yorkshire against the maladministration dale, of the realm by the kings favoriteshis wifes relatives, and the courtiers whom he had lately promoted to high rank and office.

    38

    His first letter from Cawood to Cecil told that he had not been well received, that the gentry were not "well-affected to godly religion and among the common people many superstitious practices remained."

    39

    His notorious sympathy with the peasantry further alienated the official classes and landed gentry, and his campaign against enclosures brought him into conflict with the strongest forces of the time.

    40

    If coat-armour, and thereby the rank of gentry, has been lavishly granted, some may think that the rank of peerage has often been lavishly granted also.

    41

    Ignaz Jozsef Martinovics (1755-1795) and his associates, the Hungarian Jacobins, vainly attempted a revolutionary propaganda (1795), and Napoleon's mutilations of the ancient kingdom of St Stephen did not predispose the Hungarian gentry in his favour.

    42

    Immediately dependent upon the prince, from whom they obtained their privileges, the most important of which were self-government and freedom from taxation, these traders soon became an important factor in the state, counterpoising, to some extent, the influence of the gentry, enriching the land by developing its resources, and promoting civilization by raising the standard of comfort.

    43

    In 1563 Amboise gave its name to a royal edict allowing freedom of worship to the Huguenot nobility and gentry.

    44

    In 1659 he was giving directions as to the suppression of the revolt of the gentry which threatened in Normandy, Anjou and Poitou, with characteristic decision arresting those whom he suspected and arranging every detail of their trial, the immediate and arbitrary destruction of their castles and woods, and the execution of their chief, Bonnesson.

    45

    In 1925, the Waters Gentry Company made the toaster into the familiar product that it is today.

    46

    In addition to this, a reserve force called the telekkatonasag was recruited from among the lesser gentry according to their teleks or holdings, every thirty-three teleks being held responsible for a mounted and fully equipped archer.

    47

    In an article in the Quarterly Review he threw out a suggestion for "an association of our nobility, clergy, gentry and philosophers," which was taken up by others and found speedy realization in the British Association for the Advancement of Name.

    48

    In both rebellions the magistrates took the side of the Crown and were supported by the townsfolk generally, the Jacobites drawing their strength mainly from the county noblemen and gentry with their retainers.

    49

    In England indeed a variety of causes hindered nobility or gentry from ever obtaining the importance which they obtained, for instance, in France.

    50

    In general we may perhaps define them as nobles and commons, though in view of the numbers of the higher classes it would probably be more correct to speak of gentry and peasants.

    51

    In Russia they constitute, with Jews, Lithuanians, Ruthenians and White Russians, the town population, as also the landed nobility and the country gentry, in several governments west of the Dvina and the Dnieper.

    52

    In strictness nobility and gentry are the same thing.

    53

    In the domain of the Knights the gentry, parochial clergy and townsmen, who, beneath its protection, had attained to a high degree of wealth and civilization, for long remained without the slightest political influence, though they bore nearly the whole burden of taxation.

    54

    In the Domes day Survey only five lay tenants-in-chief are mentioned, all the chief estates being held by the church, and the fact that the Kentish gentry are less ancient than in some remoter shires is further explained by the constant implantation of new stocks from London.

    55

    In the first were the nobility and gentry in their uniforms, in the second bearded merchants in full-skirted coats of blue cloth and wearing medals.

    56

    In the narrow " wynds " the nobility and gentry paid their visits in sedan chairs, and proceeded in full dress to the assemblies and balls, which were conducted with aristocratic exclusiveness in an alley on the south side of High Street, called the Assembly Close, and in the assembly rooms in the West Bow.

    57

    In the same year the landed gentry of Herefordshire lodged a petition.

    58

    In the Upper House he was the spokesman of the gentry against the magnates, whose inordinate privileges he would have curtailed or abolished.

    59

    Indeed, from first to last, the Polish gentry as a body took good care to pay and fight as little as possible, and Casimir depended for the most part upon the liberality of the Church and the Prussian towns, and the valour of the Hussite infantry, 17c,000 of whom, fighting on both sides, are said to have perished.

    60

    It all started in the taxidermy shop of my good friend, Frank Gentry.

    61

    It is the residence of many Mahommedan gentry.

    62

    It marks the dawn of a public spirit as represented by the gentry, who, alarmed at the national peril and justly suspicious of the ruling magnates, unhesitatingly placed their destinies in the hands of Hunyadi, the one honest man who by sheer merit had risen within the last ten years from the humble position of a country squire to a leading position in the state.

    63

    It was a family of lesser gentry, owners of modest estates.

    64

    It was by an assembly that the second reformation was effected; but the assembly contained the most influential of the nobility and gentry, and was carried on the crest of a great national movement.

    65

    It was he who restored something like order by intervening between the magnates and the gentry at the diet of 1525.

    66

    It was saved by the refusal of the lesser gentry to rise, and by the alliance of the king with the citizen class, which was not led astray by the pretences of regard for the public weal which cloaked the designs of the leaguers.

    67

    It was still, however, essentially an assembly of notables, lay and clerical, at which the gentry, though technically eligible, do not seem to have been directly represented.

    68

    It was with the help of the gentry of the duchies that Christian had conquered Denmark.

    69

    James and his leaders, Atholl and Huntly, with their Stewarts and Gordons, and the levies of burgesses, and the mounted gentry of Fife, encountered the wild border spearmen of Hepburn and Home and the Galloway men, the whole being led by Angus and the rebel prince at Sauchie burn, near Bannockburn.

    70

    Leslie appears to have intended a surprise, as at Philiphaugh, but " through our own laziness," he confesses, the surprise came from Cromwell's side, and few of the Scots except the mounted gentry escaped from the crushing defeat at Dunbar (3rd of September).

    71

    Louis the Great placed the burgesses on a level with the gentry by granting to the town council of Cracow jurisdiction over all the serfs in the extra-rural estates of the citizens.

    72

    Lutheranism, moreover, was at first regarded with grave suspicion by the intensely patriotic Polish gentry, because of its German origin.

    73

    Maryan Dubiecki's Karol Prozor (Pol., Cracow, 1897) shows with what self-sacrificing devotion the gentry and people supported Kosciuszko's rising.

    74

    Might we eventually return to the iniquitous polarity of a land-owning gentry v the serfs?

    75

    Money was no longer centered in the landed gentry exclusively, and this new class had cash to spend and wanted to flaunt it.

    76

    Necessity compelled him to work rather with the people than the gentry; hence it was that the Riksdag assumed under his government a power and an importance which it had never possessed before.

    77

    Nor are the Welsh landowners and gentry devoid of this new spirit of nationalism, and although some generations ago they ceased as a body to speak the native tongue, they have shown a strong disposition to study once more the ancient language and literature of their country.

    78

    On the 25th of December 1289 he issued a manifesto to the lesser gentry, a large portion of whom sided with him, urging them to continue the struggle against the magnates and their foreign supporters; but on the 10th of July 1290 he was murdered in his camp at Korosszeg by the Kumanians, who never forgave him for deserting them.

    79

    On the Continent the distinction which is commonly but incorrectly made between the nobility and the gentry has never arisen, and it was unknown here while chivalry existed and heraldry was understood.

    80

    Only a few years later, Harris tweed jackets were being worn by gamekeepers and gentry alike in outdoor sports.

    81

    Philip endeavoured to placate the Portuguese by the fullest recognition of their constitutional rights, and in particular by favoring the fidalgos or gentry.

    82

    Pittodrie Estate is steeped in history and you can live among country gentry when you stay here.

    83

    Receiving no support from the welsh gentry, however, Byron was unable to join Hamilton.

    84

    She also attracted the gentry to her capital by forming a Magyar body-guard from the cadets of noble families.

    85

    She appointed an agent to reside at Rome, and a papal agent, a Scotsman named George Conn, accredited to her, was soon engaged in effecting conversions amongst the English gentry and nobility.

    86

    She was accompanied in her journey by the Earl of Surrey and a splendid retinue of English nobility and gentry.

    87

    Sir John Howard, only son of the match between Howard and Mowbray, took service with his cousin the third duke of Norfolk, who had him returned as knight of the shire for Norfolk, where, according to the Paston Letters, this Howard of the Essex branch was regarded by the gentry as a strange man.

    88

    Suffice it here to say that it was both antimonarchical and anti-democratic, tending, as it did, to place all political authority in the hands of the szlachta, or gentry.

    89

    That coat-armour has been lavishly granted and often assumed without right, that the word "gentleman" has acquired various secondary senses, proves nothing; that is the natural result of a state of things in which the status of gentry carries with it no legal advantage, and yet is eagerly sought after on social grounds.

    90

    The ancient royal tenants became the feudatories of the great nobles, and fell naturally into two classes, the nobiles bene possessionati, and the nobiles unius sessionis, in other words the richer and the poorer gentry.

    91

    The baronies of Bourke of Connell (1580) and Bourke of Brittas (1618), both forfeited in 1691, were bestowed on branches of the family which has also still representatives in the baronetage and landed gentry of Ireland.

    92

    The chief magnates sat on high- backed chairs at a large table under the portrait of the Emperor, but most of the gentry were strolling about the room.

    93

    The claim of the heralds to make "gentry" depend on the bearing of coat-armour, and the right to this depend on grant or recognition by themselves as officers of the crown, is of comparatively late growth.

    94

    The clergy recruited themselves therefore from the class next below them, and looked more and more to the crown for help and protection as they drew apart from the gentry, who, moreover, as dispensers of patronage, lost no opportunity of appropriating church lands and cutting down tithes.

    95

    The clergy, the chief official class, were naturally less ignorant than the gentry.

    96

    The court was frivolous, vacillating, stone deaf and stone blind; the gentry were amiable, but distinctly bent to the very last on holding to their privileges, and they were wholly devoid both of the political experience that only comes of practical responsibility for public affairs, and of the political sagacity that only comes of political experience.

    97

    The diet of 1497 passed most of its time in constructing, and then battering to pieces with axes and hammers, a huge wooden image representing the ministers of the crown, who were corrupt enough, but immovable, since they regularly appeared at the diet with thousands of retainers armed to the teeth, and openly derided the reforming endeavours of the lower gentry, who perceived that something was seriously wrong, yet were powerless to remedy it.

    98

    The family has, since the 14th century, belonged to the landed gentry, and many members had held high office in the kingdom of Prussia.

    99

    The family is assumed to have sprung from Walsingham in Norfolk, but the earliest authentic traces of it are found in London in the first half of the 15th century; and it was one of the numerous families which, having accumulated wealth in the city, planted themselves out as landed gentry and provided the Tudor monarchy with its justices of the peace and main support.

    100

    The family whose names are recorded have held at best a modest place among English gentry.

    101

    The first stage was the popular uprising under Wallace and Andrew Moray, whose backbone was an armed peasantry led by minor gentry.

    102

    The gentry and landowners are all, broadly speaking, members of the established Church, but it is impossible to name any other class of society as belonging definitely either to " Church " or " Chapel."

    103

    The gentry, who had proclaimed their inability to suppress conventicles, were ordered to sign a bond making them responsible for their tenants, and were bound over to keep the king's peace by " law burrows," a method common in private life but unheard of between monarch and people.

    104

    The good he has done to everybody here, from his peasants up to the gentry, is incalculable.

    105

    The great bulk of the farming and labouring members of the Church now definitely abandoned their " Ancient Mother," to whom, however, the Welsh gentry still adhered.

    106

    The Irish Catholic gentry were removed bodily with their servants and such tenants as consented to follow them, and with what remained of their cattle.

    107

    The Irish gentry, long excluded, as landlords and Unionists, from political life, now felt to a great extent that they had no field for activity in local affairs.

    108

    The landless younger sons of the gentry and the Servian and Vlach immigrants provided him with excellent and practically inexhaustible military material.

    109

    The lesser gentry were protected against the tyranny of the magnates, encouraged to appear at court and taxed for military service by the royal treasury direct - so as to draw them closer to the crown.

    110

    The local gentry tried to help poor children by setting up National Schools from 1811.

    111

    The loss of revenue consequent upon the secession of Lithuania placed John Albert at the mercy of the Polish Sejmiki or local diets, where the szlachta, or country gentry, made their subsidies dependent upon the king's subservience.

    112

    The lower classes, bullied by sabbatarianism and deprived of the old revels, were restive and hostile; but the educated middle class was with the preachers; so were many lesser country gentry; and the nobles, securing the spoils of the church, were acquiescent.

    113

    The men who carved the spoons were not the landed gentry, and what ever Sweet sayings include " A Heap of Love " .

    114

    The men who carved the spoons were not the landed gentry, and what ever Sweet sayings include " A Heap of Love ".

    115

    The netsuke and the pipe, with all that pertained to it, were for the commoners what the sword-hilt and guard were for the gentry.

    116

    The nobles and gentry clung to the wealth of the old church; the preachers, but for congregational offerings, must have starved.

    117

    The peasants had always been on friendly terms with the gentry, and the agrarian changes made by the Revolution had not been appreciated so highly as elsewhere.

    118

    The peer - in strictness, the peer in his own person only, not even his children - became the only noble; the ideas of nobility and gentry thus became divorced in a way in which they are not in any other country.

    119

    The pernicious practice of livery and maintenance was now at its zenith; all over England in times of stress the knighthood and gentry were wont to pledge themselves, by sealed bonds of indenture, to follow the magnate whom they thought best able to protect them.

    120

    The Polish gentry on the other hand exhibited far less energy in the field than in the council chamber; they were defeated again and again by the knights, and showed themselves utterly incapable of taking fortresses.

    121

    The Polish gentry were still the umpires as well as the stake-holders; the best candidates generally won the day; and the defeated competitors were driven out of the country by force of arms if they did not take their discomfiture, after a fair fight, like sportsmen.

    122

    The Polish gentry's jealousy of the clerical estate, whose privileges even exceeded their own, was at the bottom of the whole matter.

    123

    The Polish nobles, gentry and Church - the educated classes generally - were crushed.

    124

    The privileges conferred upon the magnates of which these councils were composed, especially upon the magnates of Little Poland, who brought the Jagiellos to the throne, directed their policy, and grew rich upon their liberality, revolted the less favoured szlachta, or gentry, who, towards the end of the 14th century, combined for mutual defence in their sejmiki, or local diets, of which originally there were five, three in Great Poland, one in Little Poland and one in Posen-Kalisz.'

    125

    The rebellion spread like lightning, principally in the central or purely Magyar provinces, where hundreds of manor-houses and castles were burnt and thousands of the gentry done to death by impalement, crucifixion and other unspeakable methods.

    126

    The regime of the present rector being conspicuous for the liberality of the surrounding gentry.

    127

    The Roman Catholic gentry and lawyers, headed by Sir Patrick Barnewall, succeeded in proving the flagrant illegality of these mandates, and the government had to yield.

    128

    The scheme alarmed the Coalition, which saw that universal suffrage might destroy not only the hegemony of the Magyar nobility and gentry in whose hands political power was concentrated, but might, by admitting the non-Magyars to political equality with the Magyars, undermine the supremacy of the Magyar race itself.

    129

    The seats of the nobility and landed gentry are called Herregaarde.

    130

    The Sikh nobility and gentry wear two turbans, either both of pagri form or one of pagri and one of amamah form.

    131

    The sons of the gentry, denied proper instruction at home, betook themselves to the nearest universities across the border, to Goldberg in Silesia, to Wittemberg, to Leipzig.

    132

    There can be no doubt that the class in England which answers to the noblesse of other lands is the class that bears coat-armour, the gentry strictly so called.'

    133

    There is only one answer; the principal cause of this complete and irretrievable collapse is to be sought for in the folly, egotism and selfishness of the Polish gentry, whose insane dislike of all discipline, including even the salutary discipline of regular government, converted Poland into something very like a primitive tribal community at the very time when every European statesman, including the more enlightened of the Poles themselves, clearly recognized that the political future belonged to the strongly centralized monarchies, which were everywhere rising on the ruins of feudalism.

    134

    There now, the gentry and merchants have gone away and left us to perish.

    135

    These gentry were incensed against Emin for the energetic way in which he had dealt with their comrades while in German territory, and against Europeans generally by the campaign for their suppression begun by the Congo State.

    136

    They had power to transport royalists and those who could not produce good characters, and supported themselves by a special tax of 10% on the incomes of the royalist gentry.

    137

    They held whatever privileges or advantages have attached in different times and places to the rank of nobility or gentry.

    138

    They state that the colleges were provided to repair the ravages caused by the Black Deaths in the ranks of the clergy, and for the benefit of those whose parents could not without help maintain them at the universities, and the names of the boys appointed by Wykeham and in his time show that "poor and indigent" meant the younger sons of the gentry, and the sons of yeomen, citizens of Winchester or London, and the middle classes generally, who needed the help of exhibitions.

    139

    They used to gobble the same food as the gentry.

    140

    This at once led to an explosion, and at the diet of Piotrkow, 1J52, the szlachta accepted a proposition of the king, by way of compromise, that the jurisdiction of the clerical courts should be suspended for twelve months, on condition that the gentry continued to pay tithes as heretofore.

    141

    This increase of villenage morally depressed the peasantry, and widened still further the breach between the yeomanry and the gentry.

    142

    This, at least, was the belief of the local gentry and magistrates and in 1796 the dole was temporarily discontinued.

    143

    Thoroughly reactionary, and absolutely devoted to the Habsburgs, he contributed more than any one else to the curtailing of the privileges of the Magyar gentry in 1687, when he was created a prince of the Empire, with (in 1712) succession to the first-born of his house.

    144

    Those who possessed the right of coatarmour by immemorial use, or by grant in regular form, formed the class of nobility or gentry, words which, it must again be remembered, are strictly of the same meaning.

    145

    Throughout the latter part of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, the Hungarian gentry underwent a cruel discipline at the hands of their Habsburg kings.

    146

    Throughout the Ukraine the gentry were hunted down, flayed, burnt, blinded and sawn asunder.

    147

    Throughout the Ukraine the Polish gentry were hunted down, flayed and burnt alive, blinded and sawn asunder.

    148

    Thus the Magyars were saddled with two rival kings with equally valid titles, which proved an even worse disaster than the Mohacs catastrophe; for in most of the counties of the unhappy kingdom desperadoes of every description plundered the estates of the gentry, and oppressed the common people, under the pretext that they were fighting the battles of the contending monarchs.

    149

    Thus, for instance, they organized a police to clear the country of brigands, and attached a special jurisdiction to it, but they gave it the old name of Hermandad and the very superficial appearance of a voluntary association of the cities and the gentry.

    150

    To guarantee still further the integrity of Poland, Casimir, who had no male issue, concluded a compact with Charles Robert whereby he recognized Louis, Charles Robert's son, as the successor to the Polish crown; Louis on his part contracting to confirm the privileges of the Polish gentry and clergy, and to rule Poland through natives only.

    151

    To the eighteenth century gentry MP his country was much more his county than England.

    152

    Unfortunately, too, for Norway's independence, the native gentry had gradually died out, and were succeeded by immigrant Danish fortune-hunters; native burgesses there were none, and the peasantry were mostly thralls; so that, excepting the clergy, there was no patriotic class to stand up for the national liberties.

    153

    Well provided with funds, he speedily bought over many of the leading magnates, and his popularity reached its height when he strenuously advocated the adoption of the mode of election by the gentry en masse (which the szlachta proposed to revive), as opposed to the usual and more orderly "secret election" by a congress of senators and deputies, sitting with closed doors.

    154

    William would have decided for Episcopacy in Scotland, as the great body of the nobles and gentry adhered to it, but only on condition that the Episcopalians agreed to support him and that they had the people with them.

    155

    Within four years there rose upon its site a pile of stately buildings under the title of St Benedict's Abbey and school, a monastic and collegiate institution intended for the higher education of the sons of the Roman Catholic nobility and gentry.

    156

    Without the wealthy landed gentry, village cricket would probably not have existed.

    157

    Yet even if all the wealthy landowners resided on their estates, their number would not be sufficient to enable them to play in local public life a part corresponding to that of the English gentry.

    158

    Yet they continued to multiply, and exercised at times considerable influence; though they had few supporters among the baronage, yet among the lesser gentry and still more among the burgher class and in the universities they were strong.

    159

    You belong to the gentry? he concluded with a shade of inquiry in his tone.

    160

    You're of the gentry yourself, aren't you?