marycatelli (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
marycatelli) wrote2013-01-31 09:11 pm
marycatelli) wrote2013-01-31 09:11 pm
Entry tags:
nature of nobility
Interesting sets of possibilities, even in history.
In England, it was strictly tied to titles. Being made the duke, the earl, the baron made you noble. Your children, even your heir, were commoners until one of them inherited, and only the heir became noble. Though titles were granted, and occasionally you could even resurrect a peerage out of abeyance.
In France, any noble's child was noble. It was even conferred through the female line. Since most titles were not thus tied to the legal prerogatives, they were rather more loosey-goosey, and indeed, some royal officials dismissed the notion of investigated fraudulent titles when they weren't one of the handful that actually got rights.. After all, what it got them was a different form of address from their social inferiors. There were still ways in. Money, for instance, or official posts. Not that that meant you were well-off, A large percentage of noble household in ancien regime France had no servants at all.
In Venice, you were noble if your family was written in the Golden Book. You would be enrolled at the age of eighteen. No getting out of it -- with all its duties, no matter how poor you were -- and virtually no getting into it. To be sure, being forced to be noble has long been a widespread problem, especially when it means you can't work, or can't work without losing your noble prerogatives that are all that's protecting you in some other situation.
Of course, then you start to get the moralized meaning: noble is not someone of a given rank, but someone who behaves fittingly for it, and five seconds after that one gets "noble is as noble does" and a wedge between the rank and the moral meaning. Still, it gives a glimpse in, because what virtue is enthroned tells you something about the noble class. "Frank" for instance, or "gentle" or "noble." Some, of course, need some digging because of semantic drift, such as "cavalier" as an adjective, which no longer carries the same connotations of "nonchalance." Or "ingenuous," which still sometimes means "honest" but no longer carries its old connotations of modesty and ability to be disinterested. (C. S. Lewis's Studies in Words traces some interesting permutations of status words.)
In England, it was strictly tied to titles. Being made the duke, the earl, the baron made you noble. Your children, even your heir, were commoners until one of them inherited, and only the heir became noble. Though titles were granted, and occasionally you could even resurrect a peerage out of abeyance.
In France, any noble's child was noble. It was even conferred through the female line. Since most titles were not thus tied to the legal prerogatives, they were rather more loosey-goosey, and indeed, some royal officials dismissed the notion of investigated fraudulent titles when they weren't one of the handful that actually got rights.. After all, what it got them was a different form of address from their social inferiors. There were still ways in. Money, for instance, or official posts. Not that that meant you were well-off, A large percentage of noble household in ancien regime France had no servants at all.
In Venice, you were noble if your family was written in the Golden Book. You would be enrolled at the age of eighteen. No getting out of it -- with all its duties, no matter how poor you were -- and virtually no getting into it. To be sure, being forced to be noble has long been a widespread problem, especially when it means you can't work, or can't work without losing your noble prerogatives that are all that's protecting you in some other situation.
Of course, then you start to get the moralized meaning: noble is not someone of a given rank, but someone who behaves fittingly for it, and five seconds after that one gets "noble is as noble does" and a wedge between the rank and the moral meaning. Still, it gives a glimpse in, because what virtue is enthroned tells you something about the noble class. "Frank" for instance, or "gentle" or "noble." Some, of course, need some digging because of semantic drift, such as "cavalier" as an adjective, which no longer carries the same connotations of "nonchalance." Or "ingenuous," which still sometimes means "honest" but no longer carries its old connotations of modesty and ability to be disinterested. (C. S. Lewis's Studies in Words traces some interesting permutations of status words.)
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My French history is a little rusty, but I thought I had read that where in the UK we have both nobility and gentry (with the gentry being the land-owning class without titles from which promotions are made) in France they used 'nobility' for everything - hence the problem of lots and lots of nobles?
ISTR once I went to an Oxford historian's lecture about noble families in the fourteenth century that suggested that on average they only lasted about 3 generations from founding to extinction, because being a noble was so dangerous, so people were being brought up from the gentry all the time to fill the holes. I think the argument was that people think of social mobility as a Renaissance thing, but if you keep chopping heads off and having bloody wars at the top, then you kind of have to have some social mobility all through or you just run out of people.
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