Gentleman [ Taste & Manners / Politics & Society ]
… of land, of an estate. The word gentleman signified a high status that set a man apart from the lower orders, or plebeians. However, from the late seventeenth century British society was slowly being transformed. The growth of a … work […] into money’. 1 This in turn created a new social grouping, the middling sort, which was neither patrician nor plebeian. The middling sort comprised some one million people in a population of seven million. Its ‘membership’ included …
Benevolence | Middling sort | Politeness | Rank
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