with additions by the author, by A. Saffi (1884); the preface to a new
edition of the De jure belli (1877) and Studies in International Law
(1898) (which see, for details as to the family and MSS. of Gentili),
by the same; works by Valdarnini and Foglietti (1875), Speranza
and De Giorgi (1876), Fiorini (a translation of the De jure belli,
with essay, 1877), A. Saffi (1878), L. Marson (1885), M. Thamm
(1896), B. Brugi (1898), T.A. Walker (an analysis of the principal
works of Gentili) in his History of the Law of Nations, vol. i.(1899);
H. Nézarel, in Pillet’s Fondateurs de droit international (1904);
E. Agabiti (1908). See also E. Comba, in the Rivista Christiana
(1876–1877); Sir T. Twiss, in the Law Review (1878); articles in
the Revue de droit international (1875–1878, 1883, 1886, 1908);
O. Scalvanti, in the Annali dell’ Univ. di Perugia, N.S., vol. viii.
(1898). (T. E. H.)
GENTLE (through the Fr. gentil, from Lat. gentilis, belonging
to the same gens, or family), properly an epithet of one born of a
“good family”; the Latin generosus, “well born” (see Gentleman),
contrasted with “noble” on the one side and “simple” on
the other. The word followed the wider application of the word
“gentleman”; implying the manners, character and breeding
proper to one to whom that name could be applied, courteous,
polite; hence, with no reference to its original meaning, free from
violence or roughness, mild, soft, kind or tender. With a
physical meaning of soft to the touch, the word is used substantively
of the maggot of the bluebottle fly, used as a bait by
fishermen. At the end of the 16th century the French gentil was
again adapted into English in the form “gentile,” later changed
to “genteel.” The word was common in the 17th and 18th
centuries as applied to behaviour, manner of living, dress, &c.,
suitable or proper to persons living in a position in society
above the ordinary, hence polite, elegant. From the early part
of the 19th century it has also been used in an ironical sense,
and applied chiefly to those who pay an excessive and absurd
importance to the outward marks of respectability as evidence of
being in a higher rank in society than that to which they properly
belong.
GENTLEMAN (from Lat. gentilis, “belonging to a race or
gens,” and “man”; Fr. gentilhomme, Span, gentil hombre, Ital.
gentil huomo), in its original and strict signification, a term
denoting a man of good family, the Lat. generosus (its invariable
translation in English-Latin documents). In this sense it is the
equivalent of the Fr. gentilhomme, “nobleman,” which latter
term has in Great Britain been long confined to the peerage (see
Nobility); and the term “gentry” (“gentrice” from O. Fr.
genterise for gentelise) has much of the significance of the Fr.
noblesse or the Ger. Adel. This was what was meant by the rebels
under John Ball in the 14th century when they repeated:
| “When Adam delved and Eve span, |
Selden (Titles of Honor, 1672), discussing the title “gentleman,” speaks of “our English use of it” as “convertible with nobilis,” and describes in connexion with it the forms of ennobling in various European countries. William Harrison, writing a century earlier, says “gentlemen be those whom their race and blood, or at the least their virtues, do make noble and known.” But for the complete gentleman the possession of a coat of arms was in his time considered necessary; and Harrison gives the following account of how gentlemen were made in Shakespeare’s day:
“... gentlemen whose ancestors are not known to come in with William duke of Normandy (for of the Saxon races yet remaining we now make none accompt, much less of the British issue) do take their beginning in England after this manner in our times. Who soever studieth the laws of the realm, who so abideth in the university, giving his mind to his book, or professeth physic and the liberal sciences, or beside his service in the room of a captain in the wars, or good counsel given at home, whereby his commonwealth is benefited, can live without manual labour, and thereto is able and will bear the port, charge and countenance of a gentleman, he shall for money have a coat and arms bestowed upon him by heralds (who in the charter of the same do of custom pretend antiquity and service, and many gay things) and thereunto being made so good cheap be called master, which is the title that men give to esquires and gentlemen, and reputed for a gentleman ever after. Which is so much the less to be disallowed of, for that the prince doth lose nothing by it, the gentleman being so much subject to taxes and public payments as is the yeoman or husbandman, which he likewise doth bear the gladlier for the saving of his reputation. Being called also to the wars (for with the government of the commonwealth he medleth little) what soever it cost him, he will both array and arm himself accordingly, and show the more manly courage, and all the tokens of the person which he representeth. No man hath hurt by it but himself, who peradventure will go in wider buskins than his legs will bear, or as our proverb saith, now and then bear a bigger sail than his boat is able to sustain.”[1]
In this way Shakespeare himself was turned, by the grant of his coat of arms, from a “vagabond” into a gentleman.
The fundamental idea of “gentry,” symbolized in this grant of coat-armour, had come to be that of the essential superiority of the fighting man; and, as Selden points out (p. 707), the fiction was usually maintained in the granting of arms “to an ennobled person though of the long Robe wherein he hath little use of them as they mean a shield.” At the last the wearing of a sword on all occasions was the outward and visible sign of a “gentleman”; and the custom survives in the sword worn with “court dress.” This idea that a gentleman must have a coat of arms, and that no one is a “gentleman” without one is, however, of comparatively late growth, the outcome of the natural desire of the heralds to magnify their office and collect fees for registering coats; and the same is true of the conception of “gentlemen” as a separate class. That a distinct order of “gentry” existed in England very early has, indeed, been often assumed, and is supported by weighty authorities. Thus, the late Professor Freeman (Ency. Brit. xvii. p. 540 b, 9th ed.) said: “Early in the 11th century the order of ‘gentlemen’ as a separate class seems to be forming as something new. By the time of the conquest of England the distinction seems to have been fully established.” Stubbs (Const. Hist., ed. 1878, iii. 544, 548) takes the same view. Sir George Sitwell, however, has conclusively proved that this opinion is based on a wrong conception of the conditions of medieval society, and that it is wholly opposed to the documentary evidence. The fundamental social cleavage in the middle ages was between the nobiles, i.e. the tenants in chivalry, whether earls, barons, knights, esquires or franklins, and the ignobiles, i.e. the villeins, citizens and burgesses;[2] and between the most powerful noble and the humblest franklin there was, until the 15th century, no “separate class of gentlemen.” Even so late as 1400 the word “gentleman” still only had the sense of generosus, and could not be used as a personal description denoting rank or quality, or as the title of a class. Yet after 1413 we find it increasingly so used; and the list of landowners in 1431, printed in Feudal Aids, contains, besides knights, esquires, yeomen and husbandmen (i.e. householders), a fair number who are classed as “gentilman.”
Sir George Sitwell gives a lucid explanation of this development, the incidents of which are instructive and occasionally amusing. The immediate cause was the statute I Henry V. cap. v. of 1413, which laid down that in all original writs of action, personal appeals and indictments, in which process of outlawry lies, the “estate degree or mystery” of the defendant must be stated, as well as his present or former domicile. Now the Black Death (1349) had put the traditional social organization out of gear. Before that the younger sons of the nobiles had received their share of the farm stock, bought or hired land, and settled down as agriculturists in their native villages. Under the new conditions
- ↑ Description of England, bk. ii. ch. v. p. 128. Henry Peacham, in his Compleat Gentleman (1634), takes this matter more seriously. “Neither must we honour or esteem,” he writes, “those ennobled, or made gentle in blood, who by mechanic and base means have raked up a mass of wealth ... or have purchased an ill coat (of arms) at a good rate; no more than a player upon the stage, for wearing a lord’s cast suit: since nobility hangeth not upon the airy esteem of vulgar opinion, but is indeed of itself essential and absolute” (Reprint, p. 3). Elsewhere (p. 161) he deplores the abuse of heraldry, which had even in his day produced “all the world over such a medley of coats” that, but for the commendable activity of the earls marshals, he feared that yeomen would soon be “as rare in England as they are in France.” See also an amusing instance from the time of Henry VIII., given in “The Gentility of Richard Barker,” by Oswald Barron, in the Ancestor, vol. ii. (July 1902).
- ↑ Even this classification would seem to need modifying. For certain of the great patrician families of the cities were certainly nobiles.
