The English class system and the Marlows in't

[tabouli.livejournal.com]

Being one of them iggerant colonial types, I don't really understand the English class system. I have seen the Marlow family described as both 'upper middle class' and 'landed gentry'. Some questions:

1. What is the difference between 'upper middle class' and 'landed gentry' in terms of typical profile, assets/income, attitudes and behaviour?

2. Seeing Trennels is a large farm entailed to the Marlow line, the family is presumably 'landed', but does this necessarily make them 'gentry'?

3. Whereabouts do senior naval officers stand in the grand scheme of social status and income?

Tell all, ye wise and knowledgeable...

Comments

[liadnan]

The other point worth noting that English class, in the social perception sense as opposed to the distinct strict economic and particularly marxist sense, has an awful lot to do with where the observer is standing...

[liadnan]

Actually, cycling home last night it occurred to me that there's perhaps a better way of putting it: the landed gentry is the lower ranking bit of the upper classes, specifically, that bit without a peerage (?or baronetcy).

Which fits well for the Merricks. Typically, while catholic peers managed to quietly hang on (Howards, Mowbrays etc), those of the upper class families of Englandwho were steadfast recusants missed out on the vast expansion of the peerage after Elizabeth (except, to some extent, under James II of course). For example, the Stonors, (who I occasionally suspect had something to do with Forrest's perception of the Merricks though if so she's downgraded them a little bit*): have held their large estate since at least shortly after the conquest, possibly earlier, though they sold all their other lands to pay recusancy fines, but didn't acquire a peerage (or even a baronetcy I think) until one of them married the female only heir of an ancient barony and persuaded Victoria, with whom they had an in, to re-grant it on the basis it would be a shame if the title died).

*The Stonors continue to hang on at Stonor Park, near Henley. It was Campion's main base and the press on which he ran off Decem Rationes remains in place (compare "Blessed Edmund Campion said mass at our place once", though that's a proud boast of many recusant gentry families), and like certain Merrick's some of the Elizabethans made the long list for the Forty Martys but fell off for suspected more political motives. They included the magnificent Dame Cecily Stonor, whose facing-down of the Justices at Oxford when in her 80s ought to qualify her as patron saint of the crabby old bat brigade.

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

Very interesting. What do you make, in light of what you've said above, of Patrick's almost invariable habit of referring to the priest who says Mass in the Merricks' private chapel as 'our old lad'? It always strikes me as astonishingly disrespectful and rather odd, particularly in view of his personal devoutness and the family's very deliberate identification with their recusant tradition and pre-Vatican II Catholicism. I grew up in a very different, but also devoutly Catholic, provincial Ireland (source of the stable boys who presumably inject a touch of much-needed proletarian oomph into the rarefied atmosphere of the Merrick chapel), and priests were invariably referred to as 'Father So and So', with (a rather excessive amount of) respect now completely banished by disgust at clerical abuse revelations.

I wondered idly whether Patrick's references to the priest rather as though he were a type of valued family servant suggested a kind of latter-day recusant arrogance and class entitlement, with priests essentially being adjuncts to family adherence to the faith?

[liadnan]

I think it's quite believeable for someone of Patrick's social position and age (he is posing though and if Anthony heard him his eyebrow might well go up).
My father grew up in much the same environment as you.

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

Hurrah for the Censuring Eyebrow of Anthony Merrick.

[richenda.livejournal.com]

I supposed that the "old" was literally the case, and that he was too old for parish life, perhaps living in a clergy house but supported financially by the Merricks. I'd supposed that referring to him as lad was a facetious way of disguising the socially embarrassing fact (to someone like Patrick by that date and in those surroundings) that they were in a position to supply a priest to the neighbourhood