The Gentry reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Gentry

The gentry refers to a social class of landowners.

In Chinese history, the gentry has a specific meaning and refers to the shen-shi or the class of landowners which had passed the bureaucratic examinations in the Ming and Qing dynasties.

In European history gentry refers to well-to-do or wealthy English landowners below the level of nobility; who played an important role in the English Civil War of the seventeenth century .

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