Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 8.djvu/261

 y s. vm. SEPT. 2i, 1901.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

253

Your correspondent should refer to 3 rd S. v. 418, but I will send him a MS. copy of the article, should he be unable to do so.

EVERARD HOME COLEMAN. 71, Brecknock Road.

NOBILITY (9 th S. viii. 140). Your French correspondent may well be puzzled by the loose and inaccurate way in which this word has been used for nearly two centuries. Now it is commonly understood to mean only peers and their immediate issue. In former days it included all persons entitled to coat armour. Coke's statement is conclusive as to what was the opinion of his own time. He says :

arma gentilicia antecessorum suorum proferre possunt.' " ' Institutes,' sixth edition, vol. ii. p. 595.
 * ' At this day the surest rule is ' Nobiles sunt qui

Hollingshed says :

" Gentlemen be those whom their race and bloud, or at the least their virtues, do make noble and knowne. The Latines called them 'nobiles' and 'generosos,' as the French do nobles or 'gentle- hommes.' " ' Description of England,' c. v., quoted in Richardson's ' Dictionary,' sub voc. ' Gent.'

Whitelock bears similar testimony when speaking of Fairfax. We are told he was " a gentleman of a noble family, descended from the law" ('Memorials,' ed. 1853, vol. i. p. 194).

The following references may be of ser- vice :

Legh, ' Accidence of Armorie,' p. 17.

Heylin, * Ecclesia Restaurata, ed. 1849, vol. i. p. 63.

Laurence (James), ' The Nobility of the British Gentry ; or, the Political Ranks and Dignities of the British Empire, compared with those of the Continent.' Second edition. 1825.

The Quarterly Review, April, 1846.

The Gentleman's Magazine, 1861, vol. i. p. 625.

The law dictionaries of Cowel and Jacob, sub voc. ' Gentleman.'

Several important letters on this subject appeared in the Morning Chronicle newspaper some time about the year 1853.

EDWARD PEACOCK.

Dunstan House, Kirton-in-Lindsey.

FRENCHMAN may well be puzzled at the vague ideas and confused terminology of English people with regard to their noblesse. This confusion is one of the results of the isolation imposed upon Englishmen in the sixteenth century. In the main, however, the question is rather one of terms than of things. On the Continent noblesse means the condition of gentility by royal grant or by descent. In England nobility means the peers and their immediate descendants. The stilted English phrase gentlefolk is, perhaps,

the nearest equivalent to the foreign term. The vague and almost sentimental significance of the word gentleman, as now used, retains but little of the original meaning, though gentilhomme, gentiluomo, still imply what all three first meant, namely, a man entitled to armorial bearings. When all has been said, this remains the actual test of gentilitas, whether in England or any other country of Christendom. Poetry apart, if you are legally entitled to coat armour, you are a gentleman or, as they say on the Continent, a noble. In this primary sense of gentilesse, the country squire's youngest grandson is the equal of the premier duke. In England, just as abroad, titles are a mere matter of precedence inter pares. The term "nobleman" was re- stricted to the peerage, in this country, at the time when, if a gentleman could not stifle his conscience sufficiently to share in the plunder of churches, abbeys, and hos- pitals, and say " Amen " every time the king said, " For ever and ever," he might as well never have been born at all.

JOHN HOBSON MATTHEWS. Town Hall, Cardiff.

The question might be discussed at great length. It is well treated in the 'Ency- clopaedia Britannica,' s.v. ' Nobility ' and of Technical Terms' towards the end of Porny's ' Heraldry.' The difference between our use and that on the Continent is mainly a distinction between the nobility and the members of the peerage, due consideration being also given to the bearers of coat armour, who are numbered among the minor nobility. Another point with regard to continental nobility is the questionable status of families bearing names of distinctly artisan origin, such as (de) Taillandier= tool-maker, and yet bearing the ennobling prefix of locality "de." ARTHUR MAYALL.
 * Peerage '; also succinctly in the * Dictionary

The reasons for the difference which FRENCHMAN has observed to exist between the English nobility and that of the Con- tinent hardly come within the scope of a reply in *N. & Q.' There is a discussion of the matter in Stubbs's ' Constitutional His- tory of England,' chap. xv. (vol. ii. p. 192 in the "Library" edition), which will, I think, interest him, and explain what he does not understand. R. B. McKERROW.

THE SITE OF BRUNANBURH (9 th S. viii. 100, 150). That Bourne in Lincolnshire could have been the site of King ^Ethelstan's famous victory seems most improbable. Skene's suggestion that the battle was