Elites are the more privileged members of society exercising the greatest authority or enjoying the highest standing. They are the people who govern and command, who regulate, sanction and discipline others, and who receive concomitant privileges and acquire exclusivity amongst their fellows in return. In the mid-sixteenth century this tended to be those of gentry status and above. But identifying precisely who constituted the gentry ‘plunges us immediately into a quagmire’. Applying modern methodologies to assess its precise composition based on perceptions, legal definitions, or even land-holding and wealth, ‘inevitably involves building “guestimates” upon one another’, so that it is difficult to argue with Heal and Holmes's conclusion that ‘the task of evaluating the total size of the group is well-nigh impossible’. Added to this, the emergent urban groupings in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries make for an analysis increasingly fraught with difficulties. Taking Marshall's prescription as a guide, that ‘a cardinal task’ for historians is ‘attempting to discover how contemporaries saw their own … social grouping’, this investigation will be conducted in reference to early modern categorizations. Yet even contemporaries were perplexed. ‘What a gentleman is, tis hard with us to define’, wrote the legal historian and antiquary, John Selden, early in the seventeenth century. In the 1560s, Sir Thomas Smith, Queen Elizabeth's secretary of state, had attributed gentlemanly status to anyone who ‘studies the laws of the realm, who studies at the universities, who professes liberal sciences and to be short, who can live idly without labour’. One of the definitions of gentlemanly status offered by Selden was ‘he that is reputed one’, specifically in Westminster Hall, which housed the courts of law and was one of the chief centres of London life. This confirmed Smith's much quoted test of gentility as a willingness to display appropriate ‘port’ (that is, deportment), ‘charge and countenance’. In other words, gentlemen and women ultimately were defined as those who were acknowledged as such by others.

Qualitative judgements are important: but how do they translate into actual numbers? An alternative criterion provided by Selden for establishing gentility was ‘he that hath arms’ as determined by the Court of Honours, and confirmed in the regular heraldic visitations to establish families’ armigerousness. This suggests a firmer footing for constructing aggregates of gentlemen; but it, too, has its limitations.