Landed Gentry Quotes

The landed men are the true owners of our political vessel, the moneyed men are no more than passengers in it.

The Stately Homes of England, How beautiful they stand, To prove the Upper Classes, Have still the Upper Hand.

I'm now the Lord of the Brighton Manor.

I come from a class which used to be called the gentry - which is nowadays mistakenly used to include the nobility, but in fact is not. The gentry was essentially the untitled landowning class.

The other classes of which society was composed were, first, freemen, owners of small portions of land, independent, though they sometimes voluntarily became the vassals of their more opulent neighbors, whose power was necessary for their protection.

Today nobility is gone: there is only a peerage.

A lot of people have it - that fantasy of being lord or lady of the manor, either in the present or at some time in history.

I wouldn't mind being a lord.

It seldom happens, however, that a great proprietor is a great improver.

In the western part of England lived a gentleman of large fortune, whose name was Merton.

It's no longer possible to simply build English country houses out of words, because they've already been so thoroughly described that all the applicable words have been used up, and one is forced to build them instead out of words recycled and scavenged from other descriptions of other country houses.

…those are called gentlemen who live idly in abundance from the returns of their possessions without having any care either for cultivation or for other necessary trouble in living. Such are pernicious in every republic and in every province, but more pernicious are those who, beyond the aforesaid fortunes, command from a castle and have subjects to obey them.

Now, the old man happened to be the Lord.

I am the last of Britain's stately homos.

What baron or squire Or knight of the shire Lives half so well as a holy friar.

The ancient nobility and gentry of the kingdom... have been thrust out of all public employment... a race of merchants, and manufacturers and bankers and loan-jobbers and contractors have usurped their place.

The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.

Noble houskeepers neede no dores.

I was once naïve enough to ask the late Duke of Devonshire why he liked the town of Eastbourne. He replied with a self-deprecating shrug that one of the things he liked was that he owned it.

It doesn't sound too good to say I am the son of a landowner, so let us rather say I am the grandson of exploited Galician peasants.

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Barontage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; . . .

When you go back to the days when I was studying how to paint, some of the things that excited me most was to go into the Huntington Library and Gardens and to see the amazing pictures of the landed gentry.

Many labourers can trace their descent from farmers or well-to-do people, and it is not uncommon to find here and there a man who believes that he is entitled to a large property in Chancery, or elsewhere, as the heir.

The English country house is certainly an icon of British culture.

My stepfather is a baron. He has a castle in Belgium that's been in his family for hundreds and hundreds of years. It's not fancy; it's really sort of brimstone and dark. It's got a moat and a drawbridge.