A characteristically English love of paradox is displayed in preserving the Title Burke's Landed Gentry into an age when a large proportion even of the heads of families here listed, though they may still live in the country and own a few acres, are certainly no longer "landed" within the former meaning of the term; while "gentry," if not entirely outmoded, has become in the contemporary world an awkward word to use indiscriminately. The short answer to any such demur might be made under three heads; first that a surprising number of families to this day retain their ancient lands in spite of the upheavals of a thousand years: secondly, that the earlier editions of this work, under cadet hr branches equally record persons not themselves "landed," though stemming from "landed" stock: thirdly, that in the past no less than today - though for rather different reasons - argument was far from unknown regarding pretensions to the second qualification specified. This last extenuation touches of course on issues both deep and delicate, at the same time indicating the difficulty of providing any one definition at all satisfactory for the persons to be found in the pages that follow.

If it is agreed then that, with all the ramifications of relationship included, the large majority of the living set down here are not "landed" it is reasonable to enquire further. Who are these people? It is an interesting question. Is this, for instance something like a "Social Register" in the American manner? Decidedly not. Apart from excluding the Peerage, names that would no doubt figure in any such volume are not necessarily found, while others present might not be at all appropriate in that more worldly context.

Are they all rich? Far from it, though some could certainly be so described. Not only are they not all rich, but one would not be surprised to find amongst them, materially speaking some of the least prosperous of the "affluent society." Do they possess long pedigree? Some do: some, on the other hand, do not. Pedigrees of all length are recorded, though only ones which every effort has been made to set out accurately.

Are they all armigerous? Certainly not some indeed descend from "disclaimers," persons who deliberately disavowed at the Heraldic Visitations the right to bear arms, marginal cases who did not wish to pay the fees or preferred not to be bothered with such matters.

Anyway, they all reside in this country? Nothing could be further from the case. Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, South Africans, Americans are often to be found.

At least they are all of British descent? Not even that is true. Quite a sprinkling of these families originated abroad: France, Germany, the Low Countries, Poland, Greece, India.

No doubt it is possible to exaggerate the complex nature of our own social structure in comparison with that of other countries. In France, for example, the facts, when examined historically, are less logical, systematized, hierarchical than is sometimes supposed.

A book like Stendhal's autobiographical La Vie de Henri Brulard shows the family connections, and social pretensions of a "bourgeois" French provincial family on the eve of the Revolution, as not so very unlike - however differently handled by the author - those of the same sort of English family described by Jane Austen.

The lower echelons of the French noblesse were in many ways indistinguishable from the higher of the bourgeoisie, with whom they intermarried. In the far from simple social situation of pre-Revolutionary France it was, among other complications, possible to be "noble" without a title, to have a title and not be "noble." The fact remained that, however blurred the line of demarcation a noblesse existed - as in most other European countries - enjoying privileges derived from the legal fiction that they performed military service in the feudal manner for the monarch in time of war. In other words, it was in principle possible - though the picture is confused and borderline cases seem to have not been uncommon - to say whether or not an individual belonged to the noblesse.

Such an arrangement was never true of England. That fact has often been stated before, but must always be borne in mind if the English social system of the past is to be understood. England did not possess a "caste" society. Whig lords in the eighteenth century may have been relatively successful in creating a gulf between themselves and the "mere gentry," but even the Peerage did not restrict marriage by any means to its own families. Accordingly, there never grew up here an haute bourgeoisie which in other countries balanced a "nobility," sometimes setting up serious competition in the political and intellectual fields; especially if the "nobility" allowed themselves to relinquish power and property at the price of marriage only within the their own order.

In the English "landed gentry" are to be found elements of the continental noblesse and also its haute bourgeoisie - with others, too, peculiar to this country, like the "yeomen" from whom so many of the families here derive - but the differences remain more remarkable than the similarities; most of all the absence of all rule as regards entering the class that on the Continent would be the noblesse.

In England such a position always rested on "living like a gentleman"; and for persons coming up in the world, there can be no doubt at all that individual acceptability among neighbours played an enormous part. This is perhaps why England is so particularly taxed with "snobbishness," the more exact and definitive rules of other social systems putting less strain on personal behaviour. A patent of nobility was handed out once and for all in most countries, and that was the end of it. There were no heart-burnings about doing or not doing, the right thing. Again, such a generalisation can obviously be carried too far, French noble families both before and after the Revolution, possessing long memories for dates of ennoblement and mesalliances. At the same time, ennoblement had to take place sooner or later. It was the lack of rule in England which caused foreigners to despair, and, if the truth be known, was at times not without its embarrassment even domestically.

"Landed gentry," undefined yet vigorous, was in itself an essentially English development. In Wales, the other hand, a caste system did exist, the bonheddig ("men with pedigrees," estimated at some three-quarters of the population) being in the past the only class who could inherit land.

Welsh law, before Henry VIII's Act of 1536 imposed primogeniture, divided inheritance equally within a family, specifying in detail potentially complicated situations in administering the system. This naturally required carefully kept genealogies for legal processes. These documents disregard every thing but birth, so that it is not unknown, in Welsh pedigrees going back to remotest antiquity, to find persons described as "labourer", "pedlar", or even "pauper". "Landed gentry" in anything like the English sense of the phrase did not take shape in Wales until the late seventeenth or even eighteenth centuries, although the land itself often remained in the hands of its immemorial owners. Indeed (as Major Francis Jones, Herald Extraordinary for Wales, has pointed out) in 1957 the Lords Lieutenant of three adjacent Welsh counties possessed estates their chieftain-ancestors had even owned in the eleventh century.

In Scotland, too the clan system operated a different machinery, a common surname not necessarily implying a blood relationship, no sharp line existing between peer and chieftain.

In Kidnapped, Stevenson amusingly illustrates something of what was felt about these things:

" 'Why, then,' said he, 'what 's your name?'

'David Balfour' said I: and then thinking that a man with so fine a coat must like fine people, I added for the first time, 'of Shaws.'

It never occurred to him to doubt me, for a Highlander is used to see great gentlefolk in great poverty; but as he had no estate of his own, my words nettled a very childish vanity he had.

'My name is Stewart,' he said, drawing himself up, 'Alan Breck, they call me. A King's name is good enough for me, though I bear it plain and have the name of no farm-midden to clap to the hind-end of it.' "

However, these wildly differing aspects tended to even be ignored by Victorian writers, inclined to seek in Great Britain's "Landed gentry" something akin to the continental noblesse, even at times going so far as to hint that they were the same thing.

The Press notices quoted in the 1852 edition of Burke's Landed Gentry supply some of these contemporary views. The Examiner, for example, says:

"The landed gentry of England are a more powerful body than its peerage. The office of peerage is hereditary, it is true; but when the strict line of succession terminates, the Crown substitutes a new family. The new peers are selected from the landed gentry, or from successful adventurers in law, commerce, arms, and divinity, who having acquired wealth, contrive to get themselves adopted into the landowning class. In the identification of the peers with the great land owning class lies their strength. As an isolated body they could not exist for a year… a mere peerage conveys a very inadequate notion of the position and consequence of the peers."

The tone is characteristic of the period, not least in its insistence that the peerage should not be allowed to get away with too much prestige. The landed gentry, the reviewer implies by his words - so one feels - might live less spectacular lives than lords - no bad thing perhaps - but they were solid, commendable, unpretentious, their descents by no means shorter than those of the Upper House, their acres possibly even wider.

That the "landed interest" was politically powerful in the first half of the nineteenth century is, of course, undeniable. At the same time, we should not be impressed by Victorian rhetoric to the extent of misunderstanding what these people were really like. There were other sides to the "landed gentry" than portentous rivalry with the peerage, since human beings cannot be reduced exclusively to figures plotted on a political or economic graph. For example, if we turn to the novels of Surtees (who occurs himself in the 1852 Burke's Landed Gentry, Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour being published the following year) we find another sort of material for showing how life was lived by persons of this kind The scenes of the novel are certainly no less true, and decidedly livelier, than the picture the Examiner adumbrates.

To begin with, the Earl of Scamperdale, living in the servants' quarters of his ancestral mansion and dining off beefsteak and butter pudding, is by no means unthinkable today, though he might come under the Examiner's heading of one of those "mere peerages" which "convey a very inadequate notion of the peers' position." Lord Scamperdale is, of course, out side the scope of this article, but the "landed gentry"' who surround him are no less striking than himself in their way of life.  Their variety is unexpected and picturesque.

Nothing could be less hidebound or further from the picture of Victorian country life popularly envisaged today. Money is often lacking. Masters of Foxhounds are City tea-brokers, or live in rooms over a chemist's shop: Miss Lucy Glitters, her reputation of the frailest, finds beauty and dash quite sufficient introduction to local society: everyone drinks to their hearts content. In fact panorama Surtees presents is in many respects crammed with the very circumstances so often lamented now as symptomatic of a world in decay; yet Surtees wrote at a time when the world he describes was at its peak. This point is worth making, simply because it is so often forgotten. No one suggests that vast changes have not taken place since those days, nor that every one who lived in the country a century or more ago spent their time in the Surtees manner. The picture is a composite one. There were large, thriving estates, there were also small ones; and estates, both large and small, which hardly throve at all. There were "landed gentry" of the most miscellaneous origins rubbing shoulders with those of antedeluvian standing. All this should be remembered if a sense of proportion is to maintained.

If we move on a hundred years, some of the statistics from the 1952 edition of Burke's Landed Gentry may be of interest in relation to this earlier picture. To estimate the number of living individuals named in the 1852 volume is not so easy, because in those days typographical blobs were not yet used to indicate survival. However, their number might be guessed at something like 20,000. A century later, four times that figure – rather less than 80,000 – would probably be nearer the mark. One hundred consecutive pages, taken at random and analysed in a rough-and-ready manner, reveal some hundred and sixteen families. It is hard to speak with greater precision, owing to changes of name, or because some are branches of the peerage, or another L.G. family. However, this approximation should not be far from the mark. From it certain averages may be inferred for the whole volume.

Of these one hundred and sixteen families, thirty-seven (say an average of a third) are described as "formerly of" their original country seat: the "seat" itself varying greatly in length of possession and status as a dwelling, the grander houses not always having been owned for the longest series of generations. Seventy-four families (say an average of half) are shown as bearing arms. The inclusion of these arms here, if not an absolute guarantee of registration at the College of Arms would certainly denote at least "bearer"' standing of the most respectable order.

With regard to pedigrees, some approximation must again be made as to how far a family may be said to go back. Some families, for example will name two or three persons of their name and residence, who cannot be fitted on to the earliest known generation, although obviously earlier members of the same family. For statistical purposes these have been ignored, the dates that follow indicating the century to which the earliest connected ancestor belongs. Following this rule' therefore, one family traces back to the twelfth century, two to the thirteenth, two to the fourteenth, eleven to the fifteenth, eighteen to the sixteenth, thirty-five to the seventeenth, thirty-four to the eighteenth, thirteen to the nineteenth. The documentation of these dates can be regarded as trustworthy. It will be noted 70 per cent record no further back than the seventeenth century, though no doubt this is often as much due to lack of a genealogically-minded member of the family as to impossibility in achieving an earlier direct forbear. On the other hand nearly 14 per cent may be said to have their roots in the Middle Ages - one would say an unexpectedly high proportion.

The question of professions is also of interest. That of the heads of these hundred and sixteen families is not always stated. Probably they are less often "country gentlemen," pure and simple, than omission of any other might be held to imply, though one mentions farming activities and another designates himself "agriculturalist". Half-a-dozen or more heads of families are represented by ladies. The stated professions of others include twenty-five officers retired from, or serving with, the regular army (several Indian Army, one Royal Army Medical Corps), but several of these only served for a few years as subaltern, so that to regard the army as representing nearly a fifth of the whole would probably be deceptive. Four are naval officers (one Royal Indian Navy, one Royal Canadian Navy), one from the Royal Air Force, thereby bringing the average of the Services, on paper at least, up to over a quarter of the whole. Nine are, roughly speaking, Civil Servants (three Foreign Office, one Forestry Commission, two former Indian Civil).

There are two Members of Parliament (one Conservative, one Liberal), two company directors (probably more of these exist undeclared), two barristers, a parson, a surgeon, a mining engineer, an underwriter at Lloyd's, a schoolmaster, an accountant, a bank manager in the Far East, an author of works on "history, mythology, philosophy and psychical research," a celebrated writer of travel books. Seventy-one heads of families (over 60 per cent) are shown as having served in the armed forces (excluding Home Guard) during the First or Second World War (some in both), one of these as "another rank" in the Army Dental Corps. It should perhaps be added that the second fifty of the consecutive hundred pages worked out about the same as regards seats and arms, but increased the number of regular soldiers by twenty-one (as opposed four in the first fifty), that number can scarcely be looked upon as average. The second fifty pages also produced both MPs. There is, of course, much more diversity of professions in cadet branches where a calling is stated.

It is clear even from this rapid glance that we are dealing with nothing like a closely integrated category of hereditary landowner. Investigation of the pedigrees confirms this. Indeed, the records here are on the whole more interesting than those of such a narrowly defined class would be, certainly far more varied. They are, in fact, a kind of chronicle of those families who, for one reason or another, have kept their history intact, usually, though not always, against a background of land.

Many of the pedigrees support the conclusion of Sir Anthony Wagner, Garter King of Arms' study British Genealogy, in which the extreme social fluidity of families in this country was remarked. Side by side with a steady and unexplosive rise and fall is to be noted the really amazing survival of certain families - or perhaps one should say branches of families, for some of the same name are to be found in less exalted positions - who continue to live where they have lived for centuries, producing over long periods representatives of distinction and even eminence.

There is much talk these days of the stratification of our social structure. It might be thought that a book of this kind confirms such a view. In certain respects perhaps it does; in others, strangely illustrates the contrary. The English approach to such matters continues in many ways to defy rationalization. Have we a deeply rooted, even eradicable, taste for drawing social distinctions for their own sake and then disregarding them? It is worth considering.

In Doomsday Book, for instance (when about two hundred magnates found place in a population of perhaps a million and a half, the lord of a manor possessing about 7,000 tenants), nothing is more remarkable than the varied status of members of the lower-middle class in England before the Norman Conquest: freemen, sokemen, holders of Thegnland, holders of commendation land, radmen, drengs (or drenches), and finally the miles, for whom the styles "soldier" is too low, "knight," too high. There is not a village in England that does not still reflect these subtle labyrinthine relationships to this day. Is it something innate, a subtlety in human contacts due as much to appreciation of special circumstances, even friendly diffidence, rather than to less desirable characteristics sometimes put forward in explanation?

Burke's Landed Gentry is an enormous and unique repository of the history of individual families - something unlike anything else to be found in Europe, or probably in the world.

A.P.