| During the 18th century and well into the 19th, class governed Britain.
In the House of Lords sat the Lords Temporal and the Lords Spiritual. The former consisted of hereditary nobility such as dukes and barons; the latter, of bishops and archbishops.
Membership in the House of Commons was more diverse: lawyers, military officers, a few wealthy merchants, and most importantly, the landed gentry, which consisted of knights of the shire, men with large estates and an eminent lineage, and country gentlemen, who were one tier down but “of high birth or rank, good social standing, and of wealth, especially the inherited kind.”
While tradition and culture did allow some social fluidity, a gentleman owned land and didn’t dirty his hands or his reputation with trade or manufacturing. Ideally, his money derived from property rentals to tenants and income from his own farm, on which others performed menial labor.
Land ownership gave him the right to vote, and his position in local politics and governance gave him status and clout. As the 18th century closed, there were approximately 20,000 officially designated gentlemen in England.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the republic, which had just escaped the bridle and bit of British rule, was fashioning its own definition of a gentleman.
While serving as ambassador to Britain from 1785 to 1788, John Adams wrote and published his three-volume “A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America.”
Here, he wrote that in America a gentleman no longer “meant the rich or the poor, the high-born or the low-born, the industrious or the idle: but all those who have received a liberal education, an ordinary degree of erudition in liberal arts and sciences.
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