genterie

Genterie comes from Old French gentil (well-born, noble), from Latin gentilis (of the same clan or family), from gens (clan, race, family). The root idea is family: a person of 'gentle' birth belonged to a recognized family. In medieval England, the gentry were the class between the nobility (peers who sat in the House of Lords) and the yeomanry (independent farmers). The gentry held land, often served as justices of the peace, and dominated county society without holding peerage titles.

The English gentry included knights, esquires, and gentlemen — three sub-ranks that mattered intensely to the people within them. A gentleman was a man of good family who did not need to work with his hands. The definition was negative: a gentleman was not a laborer, not a tradesman, not a mechanic. The word gentle, which now means kind, originally meant well-born. The assumption that well-born people would behave kindly embedded class prejudice in the language itself.

The gentry's power in England peaked between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, when county society revolved around the great gentry houses. Jane Austen's novels are set almost entirely within the gentry: Mr. Darcy, Mr. Knightley, Sir Thomas Bertram are all gentry, not nobility. The distinction mattered. A peer was a public figure; a gentleman was a private one. The gentry ran the countryside without appearing in London headlines.

The word gentrification — coined by sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964 — derives from gentry and describes the process by which middle-class people move into working-class neighborhoods, raising property values and displacing existing residents. The word for a social class became the word for the displacement that class causes. The gentle people gentrify. The displaced people leave.