Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that can help answer the question.
Query: What are landed gentry?
The landed gentry, or simply the gentry, is a largely historical British social class consisting in theory of landowners who could live entirely from rental income, or at least had a country estate. It was distinct from, and socially "below", the aristocracy or peerage, although in fact some of the landed gentry were wealthier than some peers, and many gentry were related to peers. They often worked as administrators of their own lands, while others became public, political, religious, and armed forces figures. The decline of this privileged class largely stemmed from the 1870s agricultural depression; however, there are still a large number of hereditary gentry in the UK to this day, many of whom transferred their landlord style management skills after the agricultural depression into the business of land agency, the act of buying and selling land.
In the history of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, "gentry" is often used in English to describe the Polish landed gentry (, from "ziemia", "land"). They were the lesser members of the nobility (the "szlachta"), contrasting with the much smaller but more powerful group of "magnate" families (sing. "magnat", plural "magnaci" in Polish), the Magnates of Poland and Lithuania. Compared to the situation in England and some other parts of Europe, these two parts of the overall "nobility" to a large extent operated as different classes, and were often in conflict. After the Partitions of Poland, at least in the stereotypes of 19th-century nationalist lore, the magnates often made themselves at home in the capitals and courts of the partitioning powers, while the gentry remained on their estates, keeping the national culture alive.
Manorialism Polish landed gentry Rent-seeking
The ratio of the gentry and peasants in the south of Muscovy was unstable up until the late 1600s. For instance, the Yelets "desyatnya" (a list of boyar scions) of 1622 stated 1256 peasants for 820 boyar scions. By 1678 the number of peasants in the area increased to 3500 as opposed to 1850 boyar scions. By the second half of the 17th century only 17% of the Yelets gentry had serfs, while 83% either were odnodvortsy and harvested their lands on their own, or did not have any land at all. In the Veliky Novgorod district by 1665 the serfless gentry made 15%, while landless one made 38%. At the same time, the gentry who had 1 to 14 peasant homesteads was considered small-landed.
The last three-volume edition of Burke's Landed Gentry was published between 1965 and 1972. A new series, under new owners, was begun in 2001 on a regional plan, starting with Burke's Landed Gentry; The Kingdom in Scotland. However, these volumes no longer limit themselves to people with any connection, ancestral or otherwise, with land, and they contain much less information, particularly on family history, than the 19th and 20th century editions.
The term landed gentry, although originally used to mean nobility, came to be used of the lesser nobility in England around 1540. Once identical, eventually these terms became complementary, in the sense that their definitions began to fill in parts of what the other lacked. The historical term gentry by itself, so Peter Coss argues, is a construct that historians have applied loosely to rather different societies. Any particular model may not fit a specific society, yet a single definition nevertheless remains desirable.[3][4] The phrase landed gentry referred in particular to the untitled members of the landowning upper class. The most stable and respected form of wealth has historically been land, and great prestige and political qualifications were (and to a lesser extent still are) attached to land ownership.
At the end of World War II, because of the Polish Land Reform Act passed in 1944 by the Polish Committee of National Liberation, landed gentry with larger estates was dispossessed and eliminated as a social group. Many land-owning families were eliminated or had their estates confiscated by the Germans or Soviets, earlier during the war.
The term Landed gentry usually refers to a privileged social class in the United Kingdom. 
So devastating was this for the ranks formerly identified as being of the landed gentry that Burke's Landed Gentry began, in the 20th century, to include families historically in this category who had ceased to own their ancestral lands. The focus of those who remained in this class shifted from the lands or estates themselves, to the stately home or "family seat" which was in many cases retained without the surrounding lands. Many of these buildings were purchased for the nation and preserved as monuments to the lifestyles of their former owners (who sometimes remained in part of the house as lessees or tenants) by the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. The National Trust, which had originally concentrated on open landscapes rather than buildings, accelerated its country house acquisition programme during and after the Second World War, partly because of the widespread destruction of country houses in the 20th century by owners who could no longer afford to maintain them. Those who retained their property usually had to supplement their incomes from sources other than the land, sometimes by opening their properties to the public.
The Colonial American use of "gentry" followed the British usage (i.e., landed gentry) before the independence of the United States. The Southern plantation was commonly evidenced in land holdings by estate owners in Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas. North of Maryland, there were few large compatible rural estates, except in the Dutch domains in the Hudson Valley of New York.
The primary meaning of "landed gentry" encompasses those members of the land-owning classes who are not members of the peerage. It was an informal designation: one belonged to the landed gentry if other members of that class accepted one as such. A newly rich man who wished his family to join the gentry (and they nearly all did so wish), was expected not only to buy a country house and estate, but also to sever all financial ties with the business which had made him wealthy in order to cleanse his family of the "taint of trade". However, during the 19th century, as the new rich of the Industrial Revolution became more and more numerous and politically powerful, this expectation was gradually relaxed. From the late 16th-century, the gentry emerged as the class most closely involved in politics, the military and law. It provided the bulk of Members of Parliament, with many gentry families maintaining political control in a certain locality over several generations (see List of political families in the United Kingdom). Owning land was a prerequisite for suffrage (the civil right to vote) in county constituencies until the Reform Act 1832; until then, Parliament was largely in the hands of the landowning class.
The term gentry, some of whom were landed, included four separate groups in England:[1]
Polish landed gentry (, from "ziemia", "land") was a social group or class of hereditary landowners who held manorial estates. Historically, "ziemianie" consisted of hereditary nobles ("szlachta") and landed commoners (). The Statutes of Piotrków (1496) restricted the right to hold manorial lordships to hereditary nobility. The non-nobles thus had to either sell their estates to the lords or seek a formal ennoblement for themselves (not an easy task), or had their property taken away. A rare exception was the burgesses of certain specially privileged "ennobled" royal cities who were titled "nobilis" and were allowed to buy and inherit manorial estates and exercise their privileges (such as jurisdiction over their subjects) and monopolies (over distilleries, hunting grounds, etc.). Therefore, in the "szlachta"-dominated Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth there was almost no landed gentry in the English meaning of the term, i.e. commoners who owned landed estates. With the Partitions these restrictions were loosened and finally any commoner could buy or inherit land. This made the 20th-century Polish landed gentry consist mostly of hereditary nobles, but also of others.
David Cannadine wrote that the gentry's lack of titles "did not matter, for it was obvious to contemporaries that the landed gentry were all for practical purposes the equivalent of continental nobles, with their hereditary estates, their leisured lifestyle, their social pre-eminence, and their armorial bearings".[10] British armigerous families who hold no title of nobility are represented, together with those who hold titles through the College of Arms, by the Commission and Association for Armigerous Families of Great Britain at CILANE.[11]
The term "landed gentry", or "gentry", originally used for Britain, does not correspond to any single term in Chinese. One standard work remarks that under the Ming dynasty, the elite who held privileged status through passing the Imperial exams were called "shenshi" 紳士 or "jinshen" 縉紳. These literati, or scholar-officials, are "loosely known in English as the Chinese gentry". Through education this elite held a virtual monopoly on office holding, and overlapped with an unofficial elite of the wealthy. After the Tang dynasty, the Song Dynasty developed the civil service exam to replace the nine-rank system which favored nobles. Under the Song dynasty, their power and influence eclipsed that of the hereditary and largely military aristocrats. They are also called 士紳 "shishen" "scholar gentry" or 鄉紳 "xiangshen" "local gentry". Attempts have been made to define them as a social class who had passed the examinations and so were eligible to hold office, as well as retired mandarins or their families and descendants. Owning land was often their way of preserving wealth.
Pettman was president emeritus of "Burke's Peerage". In 2005, he published the first Yorkshire edition of "Burke's Peerage and Gentry". His aim was to undo what he saw as a Southern bias in "Burke's Peerage". Besides listing members of the landed gentry, he added lawyers as well as powerbrokers in showbusiness and the media, arguing that they were equally prominent.
Gentry were from the Gentry Society. Most Gentry owned land, which was where most of their income came from. Their main source of income however was from their government service because they had certain academic degrees. Unlike other elite individuals who lived in rural areas, gentry usually resided in large cities or towns, where they managed political, social and economic affairs. Once they were done with their service to the government, they would rejoin Gentry Society.
Gentry (from Old French "genterie", from "gentil", "high-born, noble") are "well-born, genteel and well-bred people" of high social class, especially in the past. In the United Kingdom, the term "gentry" refers to the landed gentry, the majority of the land-owning social class who were typically armigerous (having a coat of arms), but did not have titles of nobility. "Gentry", in its widest connotation, refers to people of good social position connected to landed estates (see manorialism), upper levels of the clergy, and "gentle" families of long descent who never obtained the official right to bear a coat of arms. The historical term "gentry" by itself, so Peter Coss argues, is a construct that historians have applied loosely to rather different societies. Any particular model may not fit a specific society, yet a single definition nevertheless remains desirable. Linguistically, the word "gentry" arose to identify the social stratum created by the very small number, by the standards of Continental Europe, of the Peerage of England, and of the parts of Britain, where nobility and titles are inherited by a single person, rather than the family, as usual in Europe. 
The designation "landed gentry" originally referred exclusively to members of the upper class who were landlords and also commoners in the British sense – that is, they did not hold peerages – but usage became more fluid over time. Similar or analogous social systems of landed gentry also sprang up in countries that maintained a colonial system; the term is employed in many British colonies such as the Colony of Virginia and some parts of India. By the late 19th century, the term was also applied to peers such as the Duke of Westminster who lived on landed estates. The book series Burke's Landed Gentry recorded the members of this class. Successful burghers often used their accumulated wealth to buy country estates, with the aim of establishing themselves as landed gentry.
As descendants of landed gentry and servicemen, odnodvortsy often owned hereditary landed estates measured in the units called "'chetverty"' ("cheti"). On average the size of their lands was relatively small, ranging from a few hectares to 50 hectares. By 1724 their land ownership had been similar to formal gentry. Later, it was restricted by the government. In 1766 they were limited in land transfer rights allowing them to sell lands only within their class. Eventually, they were ranked with the state peasants and their lands were nationalized and considered 'state-owned lands'.
After the section dealing with the current owner of the property, there usually appeared a section entitled Lineage which listed, not only ancestors of the owner, but (so far as known) every male-line descendant of those ancestors, thus including many people in the ranks of the "Landed Gentry" families who had never owned an acre in their lives but who might share in the status of their eponymous kin as connected, however remotely to the landed gentry or to a county family.
Landed gentry may also refer to:
The popularity of Burke's Landed Gentry gave currency to the expression Landed Gentry as a description of the untitled upper classes in England (although the book also included families in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, where, however, social structures were rather different). An alternate name was employed by the publishers of a similar, though less genealogical, series, known as Walford's County Families, wherein the term county family referred more or less to the same people Burke covered by the term, landed gentry. They were also known as the upper ten thousand.
Burke's Landed Gentry (originally titled Burke's Commoners) is a reference work listing families in Great Britain and Ireland who have owned rural estates. The work has been in existence from the first half of the 19th century, and was founded by John Burke. He and successors from the Burke family, and others since, have written in it on genealogy and heraldry relating to gentry families. It has evolved alongside "Burke's Peerage, Baronetage & Knightage".
Gentry is a city in Benton County, Arkansas, United States. The population was 3,158 at the 2010 census. The city was founded in the Ozark Mountains in 1894 along what would become the Kansas City Southern Railroad. The city's prior prosperity in the orchard industry, especially apples, was further strengthened by the rail connection. Following the decline of the apple industry in the 1930s, Gentry shifted its economy towards poultry along with many other areas of northwest Arkansas. Today, Gentry is located within the Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers Metropolitan Area. Gentry is known for the Wild Wilderness Drive-Through Safari, located north of the city limits.