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Open Elites: Recruitment to the French Noblesse and the English Aristocracy in the Eighteenth Century*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Michael W. McCahill
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Over the past fifteen years historians of Britain have debated the degree to which the nation's aristocracy was open to newcomers. First, W. D. Rubinstein suggested that the new rich of the nineteenth century broke with the pattern of centuries and refrained from large-scale land purchases, in part because the established aristocracy had assumed a more “caste-like” mentality that held outsiders at bay. Then in 1984 two important works extended the challenge to earlier centuries. John Cannon demonstrated that throughout the eighteenth century recruits to the peerage were chosen from among the upper reaches of the landed aristocracy, a fact that suggested to him that the British nobility was a closed group, more closed than its continental counterparts. More significantly, Lawrence and Jeanne Stone completed an immense study of the elite of three counties over a 340-year period; they concluded that the proportion of newcomers was small and that new recruits were drawn mainly from groups already affiliated with the aristocracy. It was not businessmen but small gentry, office holders, and members of the professions who dominated the ranks of newcomers to their county elites.

Other leading students of the British aristocracy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have taken exception to the claims of these iconoclasts. Sir John Habakkuk concluded in his Ford Lectures that “there was no weakening among new men in the eighteenth century of the desire to acquire landed estates. Almost all the wealthiest (or their descendants in the next generation) joined the landed elite….” In greater detail F. M. L. Thompson called into question Rubinstein's findings by challenging the usefulness of his probate data and by showing that millionaire Victorian businessmen or their direct heirs made substantial land purchases.

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Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , Winter 1998 , pp. 599 - 629
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1998

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Richard Davis, Grayson Ditchfield, Michael Kwass, Standish Meacham, and Ellis Wasson for their comments on earlier drafts of this article, which I began a number of years ago as the result of an independent study grant from the Council for Basic Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

References

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