What social class would a Lord of the Manor fall under in feudal England?

by BaronIronside

Would they have been considered gentry, or aristocracy, or something else altogether?

TheGreenReaper7

Manors are a type of property, they vary in size and economic output. A lord of a manor might be a very powerful individual or a very insignificant person in the grand scheme of things. A lord might possess a dozen manors or just one. Ultimately I don't think that just because someone is a lord of a manor means we can abstractly ascribe to them a particular social class or status.

Manors existed before the Conquest and the emergence of a gentry class is not usually ascribed to English society before the mid thirteenth-century at the earliest by historians. Thus thinking about this, or using the term, 'feudal' England is something of a error.

The terms you are using are, for the most part, constructs of historians to help categorise what they saw in medieval society. So perhaps think about these terms more carefully.

Here is a useful definition, alongside 'nobility', from Timothy Reuter:

Western European languages offer two other terms—nobility and aristocracy—which have been more generally used. The terms ought to be used to distinguish between two different things. A noble is, strictly speaking, a person whose (normally privileged) status is legally defined, which means that one can be a noble without exercising power. An aristocrat, by contrast, is someone who exercises power as a result of being well-born in a socially rather than legally defined sense: this implies the inheritance of wealth, power and social (but not legal) status, and it does not preclude some degree of social mobility.

Reuter, T., 'The medieval nobility in twentieth-century historiography', in The Companion to Historiography, ed. M. Bentley, pp.166-190, (London, 1997), p.167.

Compare this with Peter Coss's definition:

I would suggest, then, that the defining characteristics of the gentry as a social formation are as follows:

  1. A gentry is a type of lesser nobility.
  2. Although based on land and landownership, it is able to encompass other types of property, including urban property, and to accommodate a steady influx of professionals.
  3. It is a territorial elite. It transcends status derived from service or personal association, on the one hand, and the authority derived from mere landlordship, on the other. Given that levels of wealth vary, there is a natural tendency towards the development of social gradation.
  4. It relates to a public authority which is both active and relatively distant; that is to say, a public authority which requires the services of a local elite but which is unable to support a paid bureaucracy in the localities.
  5. It seeks to exercise collective social control over the populace on a territorial basis, reinforcing individual status and power.
  6. It has a collective identity, and collective interests which necessitate the existence of some forum, or interlocking fora, for their articulation.

Coss, P., The Origins of the English Gentry, (Cambridge, 2003), p.11.

Reuter's definition is overarching. It is designed not to speak to a particular period or place in medieval history but instead help set a historiographical basis for students. Coss is setting out an argument for the emergence of a gentry class in England during the mid thirteenth-century.