Social Changes 379

Notice the marked contrast

between the poor worker
and the elegant member of
the gentry in this English
etching from the eigh­

teenth century.

seventeenth century, and the purchase of noble titles was nonexistent. Yet
the crown occasionally elevated spectacularly successful, wealthy com­
moners into the peerage with hereditary noble titles (baron, viscount, earl,
marquis, and duke), which carried with them a seat in the House of Lords.
The monarchy rewarded other landed gentlemen with various titles, includ­
ing knight (a nonhereditary title) and baronet (a hereditary title, granted
less frequently), both of which carried the title of “Sir.” Very few people,
however, ever rose from trade into a peerage, or even to the upper gentry.
Entry into the British elite, however, was generally more open than into
its continental counterparts. Gradual shifts in social structure in English
society, beginning in the seventeenth century, contributed to the nation’s
social stability. No legal or cultural barriers in Britain prevented bankers,
manufacturers, merchants, and urban professionals from ascending through
wealth to social and political predominance as “country gentlemen” through
the purchase of landed estates that made them gentry.
Daniel Defoe, who wrote Robinson Crusoe and other novels for an
expanding middle-class readership, claimed that “men are every day start­
ing up from obscurity to wealth.” Trade and manufacturing in England
were honored occupations. Unlike on the continent, where second and
third sons often were automatically relegated by their fathers into Church
or military posts, many of these sons marched proudly into business. A
Manchester cobbler wrote in 1756:

See, as the Owners of old Family Estates in your Neighborhood are

selling off their patrimonies, how your townsmen are constantly pur­

chasing; and thereby laying the Foundation of a new Race of Gentry!

Not adorn’d, its true, with Coats of Arms and a long Parchment