The Landed Gentry of Great Britain are the only untitled aristocracy in the world. There is a rare and indefinably proud distinction in holding no constitutional title and yet enjoying the prescriptive right to call yourself, for example, the Knight of Gun, the Hereditary Captain of Dunstaffnage, or the 23rd Dymoke of Scrivelsby, Queen's Hereditary Champion and Standard Bearer. There is, too, something intensely romantic in territorial surnames when the holders are still associated with the places from which they derive, like Crauford of Craufordland (the 25th), Craster of Craster, Fulford of Great Fulford, Medlicott of Medlicott or Plowden of Plowden (all incidentally unbroken associations since the twelfth century). No wonder that until the nineteenth century the squires, on the whole a dutiful, stay-at-home race, looked upon themselves with certain puritanical complacency as morally superior to the spendthrift, gadabout aristocracy. "And here's a confounded son of a whore of a lord," Fielding makes Squire Western exclaim, "... for he shall never have a daughter of mine by my consent. They have beggared the nation, but they shall never beggar me." And again, "I'll ha' no lords nor courtiers in my family." Marriage into the proletariat was equally unthinkable.

The squires' sense of station was nicely balanced. They remained for the most part exclusive but unassuming, and little different, apart from their greater wealth, in habits and ideals from the yeoman class from which quite half of them were sprung.

Until about 1930 the squirearchy in spite of progressive adversities was still a power to be reckoned with. It was something which one took for granted. At an average interval of two miles throughout the country there was what local people referred to as "the big house." It might be literally a palace like Blenheim, or a small manor-house like Owlpen in the Cotswolds. Quite apart from size it was noticeably different from its neighbours in that its carefully groomed elevations and sprucely mown lawn radiated a beneficent well being denoting authority and ease. The surrounding fields, checked with neatly laid hedges and punctuated by ancient low-spreading trees like gigantic tea cosies, still belonged to the nearest big house, the capital of its little kingdom. The resident squire - and the less grand and rich the more resident - cared for the village on his estate, built the parish hall presented the playing-fields, contributed largely to the upkeep of the church, expected to be, and was consulted before any major improvements were put in hand by the vicar or other local persons downwards. In rural districts his guiding hand was everywhere apparent, and that parish in which there was for some reason no squire was instantly recognisable by its neglected, unkempt, unloved appearance and the reputedly "bolshie" attitude of its inhabitants.

In other words the squires had not yet abrogated all the self-imposed duties which had been indubitably theirs up to the creation of county and rural District councils in 1888. Until that date they ruled the country autocratically, as it were by divine right: for several decades after it unconstitutionally by passive consent. Indeed during the 1920s the physical aspect of the countryside still resembled what the squires, with the help of Capability Brown and Repton, had made it in the eighteenth century with unerring taste - namely one vast, luxuriant park.

Even in that decade steel pylons, sagging cables and television aerials were unknown; only the neat, taut telephone wires on wooden poles followed the most important main roads. Ribbon development was just beginning and petrol stations were a rarity. The English landscape was surely the most beautiful in the world, just as the squirearchical system of local government was the best that history had devised for the pre-motor car ages. It was patriarchal, wise and efficient.

The hang-over, so to speak, of the squires' authority after 1888 could only be maintained so long as they owned their lands and lived in their country houses. But as soon as they were deprived of their possessions and trappings these unacknowledged county legislators began to disappear from the rural scene. It is a commonplace that the first serious blow to knock them down was taxation after 1918; the second to knock them out was the inability after 1945 to engage domestic servants.

There was a joke in Punch during the 1930s which was then thought funny. A prospective parlour maid being interviewed by a lady asked: "Madam, are you gentry? Or do you stack?" Today it does not raise a smile because only a handful of dukes and business tycoons are waited upon at meals, but at least it indicates that before the last War the upper classes expected to engage properly trained servants. Lack of them has made life in a big house almost an anachronism; and those old-fashioned owners, who have not yet thrown up the sponge nor adapted themselves to a more restricted way of living, endure discomforts which few council house dwellers would tolerate for a fortnight. They emerge from large, dusty, chilling apartments into Arctic corridors leading to cavernous kitchens, where on hard stone floors they struggle with antiquated ranges and boilers.

Is it surprising therefore that since the last edition of the Landed Gentry was published in l952 over four hundred country houses with pretensions to architectural interest have been demolished or are empty and ruinous? The additional numbers of vanished and vanishing country houses without this qualification have not been computed.

In an article in the l952 issue it was said that "...the landed gentry can only hold their ground by the inner strength of a belief in themselves" advice which today, only twelve years later, reads awkwardly. The pious sentiment is already out of date. No amount of "belief in themselves" can now uphold a class of the community which is being liquidated by social and economic pressures. For the first time in our history their depleted ranks do not attract recruits from the new rich, who prefer a suburban villa with every "mod. con." limitless Jaguars and mink to the cold rewards of territoria1 aggrandisement.

The squires no longer form a phalanx with any stake worth envying or attacking. And when a body ceases to invite criticism we may be sure that it is moribund. This does not mean that there are not a few country gentlemen today dedicated to county services, which they perform, selflessly without payment and usually without public recognition. But the performance of these duties is no longer their exclusive prerogative. It is gallantly shared by numbers of retired professionals and commercial men and women who have chosen to end their days in the country, where they may have no established roots, rather than in towns. Some county families on the other hand positively seek to throw off the troublesome responsibilities accepted as a matter of course by their forebears. For example, a memorial tablet erected in a Gloucestershire parish church in 1961 by a son to his father succinctly describes him as "the last of the squires." The clear implication is that the son does not wish his neighbours to regard him in the same light and to make the traditional demands upon his time and charity.

Nevertheless in spite of the social revolution of the past four decades a number of families are still clinging to their inherited lands and even to their houses. A sense of history and heredity is deeply implanted in most British hearts. Therefore some families which have weathered the vicissitudes of two world wars and their aftermath may hold out a little longer still. Their reasons for doing so cannot be entirely sentimental. Farming has become an extremely prosperous industry when tackled seriously. Provided the heir to a few hundred acres is prepared to make farming his profession he should earn a good living out of his land. Moreover the younger generation who have not known what the cushioned conditions of country house life were like in the old days are far readier than their parents to adapt themselves to a flat in part of one floor, with all the labour-saving devices which their tractors and broilers can supply. The running of an ancestral home is made easier if it qualifies as a national monument. Then the state rooms may be thrown open to the public so as to become, if not profitable, at least self-supporting. Financial help too can be claimed from the Government now that the Historic Buildings Councils have been set up, even if the house has not been handed over to the National Trust. In the latter event the family nay remain as tenants at will and need only look upon the arrangement as a different sort of socage to the feudal one, when they held their lands and houses from an overlord or the Crown - an arrangement involving possibly less onerous obligations.

Families like the Massingberds of Gunby, the Lucys of Charlecote and the Throckmortons of Coughton are some which have come to such terms with the National Trust. It is a fact that houses still in the custody of their original owners are on the whole the best cared for, and are besides the most popular with visitors, who delight in easy family continuity. The harder the British electorate makes it for the old families to retain their ancestral homes the more it rejoices to see them inhabit them. It has even happened in recent years that ancient properties, which are not over-large have been bought back by the descendants of those who built them, like Compton Castle, Devon by Commanded Walter Raleigh Gilbert and Curry Mallet Manor, Somerset by Mrs. (Dita) Mallet.

It was after the Reformation that a man's acreage was first to be assessed by the size of his house. With the destruction of the monasteries and the enrichment of the new Tudor families by grants and sales of church lands from the Crown the country house as a symbol of territorial greatness sprang into being. The Burghleys, the Longleats, the Hardwicks, and the Wollatons were built in the sixteenth century on a palatial scale. They were for the first time unfortified, civilized and domestic. They were intended for show as much as for comfort because they marked the rise of the landed dynasties who henceforth were to govern the shires instead of the monk.

At first this new state of things was by no means to the advantage of the poor. The substitution of private palaces surrounded by high, exclusive palings for the benefit of single families in place of the monasteries which had been open to all men and the dispensers of education, medicine and charity was small consolation. The accruing benefits to the lower classes came only gradually as the conscience of the squirearchy developed. The Elizabethan palaces were followed by Jacobean, Caroline and then Georgian mansions of equally impressive dimensions and splendour befitting the status of their owners a status always to be measured by land. Without land to feed it a large country house ceases to flourish and be relevant; it becomes meaningless and inoperable.

Proven descendants in line of families which flourished in Saxon times are, according to historians, three:-Arden, Berkeley and Swinton, of which the oldest seems to be Swinton. Only the last family held before 1066 the land they still own at Swinton in Berwickshire. In England there are a few families still owning estates granted them in the eleventh century immediately after the Conquest. Amongst them are Dymoke of Scrivelsby, Berkeley of Berkeley and Shirley of Ettington (mentioned in Domesday and now represented by Earl Ferrers). Giffard of Chillington (a tenth century family which came over with the Conqueror and is mentioned in Domesday) were not granted Chillington until 1178.

Several other families have held land since the twelfth century, including Tremlett, Tichborne, Plowden, Fulford, Lucy, Mallet, Medlicott and Saltmarshe. They never ranked, as they do not rank today, among the great ennobled families, the Cecils, Thynnes, Cavendishes and Comptons, who date from post reformation days, nor even the FitzRoys, Churchills, Bentincks and Wellesleys, who date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They are older by far than these, and less distinguished. The first qualification is explained by the deficiency of the last. Many of them owe their survival to their very lack of past renown. By not aspiring to royal favours they ran no risks of attainder and forfeiture, consequent upon the disgrace of many an over-ambitious mediaeval and renaissance name, and few risks of losing all they possessed in later centuries at the gaming-table and on the turf. Whereas in 1618 Sir Walter Ralegh had his head cut off and his estates confiscated, and whereas in 1741 Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford, came to it premature end through dissipation, after being obliged to sell Wimpole and his unrivalled collections in order to pay his debts, the Plowdens still live unostentiously at Plowden in Shropshire, and the Fulfords at Great Fulford in Devon ~ two manor houses of moderate size as they have always done since the twelfth century.

How long can this precarious state of affairs be expected to continue? Even if taxation does not rise higher it is unlikely ever to get lower. It is true that the servant situation may improve, but under a different guise. Just as rat-catchers have been replaced by pest officers, dustmen by refuse-disposal officers, and nannies by mothers helps, so servants are being replaced by domestic helps. The reason why the last are gradually becoming obtainable at, admittedly, a price, is because their job, if not so lucrative as that of feeding a conveyer belt from morning to

night in a factory, is more attractive. Is inducements are nowadays considerable. Usually a free cottage or flat, free heat and light, good food and even good air for those who value such things, and congenial enough duties. To be a satisfactory domestic help a man or woman needs more than an automaton. Besides, as the vacancies get fewer so they will be increasingly more sought after.

On the other hand there is one overriding consideration on which the future of the landed estates depends absolutely. Will there in another generation's time be any land left for the gentry to possess? It is being frittered away at an alarming rate: and the cause is not only high taxation. Existing towns are spreading, new towns are rising, industries are encroaching upon rural areas, roads with their concomitant sprawl of building development are increasing in number, and what land is left in between is overrun with pylons and wire. Unless legislation is introduced to control the drift there will soon be no county outside a few national parks. At present even these are no less likely to be encroached upon than green belts round large cities. On the specious pleas of national interest atomic stations and other such erections are being allowed upon them.

Until a Government is prepared to grapple with the problem and is interested enough to do some co-ordinating, England will within the next twenty years become like Holland. That overpopulated little country now resembles Middlesex, with very intermittent scenic zones no more rural and no less residential than Sunningdale. England likewise suffers from far too many inhabitants. The birth rate shows no sign of falling. When people are born they clearly have a right to live somewhere; and so more and more houses will have to be built for them. Faced with these needs local authorities will not scruple to appropriate sites from the larger landowners. It is within the terms of this article to recommend what sort of planning ought to be undertaken. But those who live in the country and love it are well advised to recognize its dire need of defence, and to unite in a hard fight to preserve what remains of its landscape beauties.

J. L.-M.