What is the English gentry?

Answer 1

From the Dark Ages into the nineteenth century and beyond all European countries have possessed a noble elite. England differed from its neighbours, each with a single broad noblesse, because its aristocracy were divided between a numerically restricted, titled nobility, who sat in the House of Lords, and the gentry, who were merely genteel and eligible for election to the Commons. The gentry were thus 'a kind of lesser nobility' whom, as K. B. McFarlane long ago suggested, were what remained when the parliamentary baronage were defined in the fourteenth century.