Aristocracy: Theory and Practice 55
after the reconquest of central Hungary in 1699, where such families as the Ester-
hazys received princely status in the eighteenth century. The Irish peerage had
been created by the British crown for much the same purpose; the union of Ireland
with Great Britain in 1801 was made more acceptable to Irish magnates by the
creation or promotion of new batches of Irish peers. Often governments created
new nobles in order to weaken or dilute the old ones. Thus the French monarchy,
especially before 1700, had sold patents of nobility not only to make money but
also to reward its servants, to please the ambitious middle class, and to build
strength against the older feudal nobility. In England the frequent creation of new
peers began in the time of George III and especially under the younger Pitt. Here,
too, one purpose was to combat the aristocracy already established by creating a
new one. “Pitt swamped the Whig oligarchy in the House of Lords.”^21
In general there were two possible lines of development, toward segregation or
toward assimilation. A nobility or a patriciate might become more exclusive, im-
penetrable and purely hereditary. Or it might from time to time assimilate new-
comers from the next lower classes. Exclusiveness was most rigid in the aristocratic
republics, such as Venice or Bern or Nuremberg or Holland, or in monarchical
states at times when the King was weak, as chronically in Poland, or during the
Freedom Era in Sweden, or in England during the Whiggish generations before
1760, during which very few new peers were created. The class line was also all but
impassable in the small German princely states, which had as many nobles as they
needed; in the larger ones, even Prussia, and in the Austrian empire, with their
more complex governments, cases of commoners rising to nobility through gov-
ernment service were more frequent.
It had long been easiest, in all probability, to rise to the aristocracy in England
and in France. Blackstone was able to quote a sixteenth- century writer, Sir Thomas
Smith: “As for gentlemen, they be made good cheap in this kingdom: for whoso-
ever studieth the laws of the realm, who studieth in universities, who professeth
the liberal sciences, and, to be short, can live idly, and without manual labor, and
will bear the port, charge and countenance of a gentleman, he shall be called mas-
ter, and taken for a gentleman.”^22 Much the same could be said for France, where,
however, the way to nobility had lain more through government service or pur-
chase of titles. And if in England anyone with the proper bearing could pass as a
gentleman, so in France all kinds of plausible people gave themselves out to be
noble.
There are signs, however, that passage from the mercantile to the aristocratic
ranks was becoming less common in both countries about 1750. In England, as
land ownership became more concentrated with the enclosure movement, it was
the men who already owned land that were buying more land.^23 Unbreakable en-
tails of landed estates, recognized in English law only since the Restoration, were
now producing what amounted to family trusts in the third and fourth generation.
There was less movement from city to country than in the Tudor period. City men
21 A. S. Turberville, “The Younger Pitt and the House of Lords,” in History n. s. X XI (1937), 355.
22 Blackstone, Commentaries (Philadelphia, 1860), I, 406.
23 Habakkuk, op. cit.