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A significant factor, which explained the seeming ease with which a British aristocrat could dispose of his ancestral seat, was the aristocratic habit of only marrying within the aristocracy and whenever possible to a sole heiress. This meant that by the 20th century, many owners of country houses often owned several country mansions. [20]
The British nobility is made up of the peerage and the (landed) gentry.The nobility of its four constituent home nations has played a major role in shaping the history of the country, although the hereditary peerage now retain only the rights to stand for election to the House of Lords, dining rights there, position in the formal order of precedence, the right to certain titles, and the right ...
It is the British element of the wider European class of gentry. While part of the British aristocracy, and usually armigers, the gentry ranked below the British peerage (or "titled nobility") in social status. Nevertheless, their economic base in land was often similar, and some of the landed gentry were wealthier than some peers.
The term big house (Irish: teach mór) refers to the country houses, mansions, or estate houses of the historical landed class in Ireland.The houses formed the symbolic focal point of the landed Anglo-Irish political dominance of Ireland from the late 16th century, and many were destroyed or attacked during the Irish revolutionary period.
The history of the British peerage, a system of nobility found in the United Kingdom, stretches over the last thousand years. The current form of the British peerage has been a process of development. While the ranks of baron and earl predate the British peerage itself, the ranks of duke and marquess were introduced to England in the
The United Kingdom never experienced the sudden dispossession of the estates of the nobility, which occurred in much of Europe after the French Revolution or in the early 20th century, and the British nobility, in so far as it existed as a distinct social class, integrated itself with those with new wealth derived from commercial and industrial sources more comfortably than in most of Europe.
(The British gentry was the rich landowners who were not members of the aristocracy.) [1] Economic historian R.H. Tawney had suggested in 1941 that there was a major economic crisis for the nobility in the 16th and 17th centuries and that the rapidly-rising gentry class was demanding a share of power. When the aristocracy resisted, Tawney ...
William FitzGerald, 2nd Duke of Leinster. A modest number of titles in the peerage of Ireland date from the Middle Ages.Before 1801, Irish peers had the right to sit in the Irish House of Lords, on the abolition of which by the Union effective in 1801 by an Act of 1800 they elected a small proportion – twenty-eight Irish representative peers – of their number (and elected replacements as ...