Just started watching "Downton Abbey." Can someone explain to me what these people did?

Just to round out some of the other comments here.

Landowning in Britain, especially circa 1910, was a big deal. Typically when discussing landowners we're talking about Peers (ie, people with noble titles), and the "landed gentry", who technically speaking are commoners, but effectively just below the aristocrats. British peers also have a system of ranking - the head of the Crawley family is an earl, which is basically mid-pack (not a Duke, but not a Viscount), and there would have been about a hundred or so in the UK at the time.

Anyway, around landownership - whoever becomes the Earl of Crawley inherits the lands associated with the title. under an entail (this becomes kind of a big point in the series). Basically this means that lands granted with the title cannot be sold or subdivided: whoever inherits the peerage gets the land ownership and all the rents that come with it. These are more or less structures that had existed in the country since the Norman Conquest.

And land ownership in Britain was quite concentrated. The Return of Owners of Land, which was a property survey conducted in 1873, was slow to come out and be analyzed, and contained many discrepancies and double countings, but provides a very stark analysis of landownership at the time. 95% of the population of England and Wales owned no land. Of 972,836 landowners outside of London, 703,289 owned less than an acre (they were essentially the freeholding cottagers). Of the 269,547 who owned an acre or more, much of the land ownership was concentrated among a very tiny number: almost half of the land in England and Wales, some 18 million acres, was owned by just 4,217 families (about 400 peers, and the rest landed gentry). About 20 years later, it's estimated that 2,500 families owned more than 3,000 acres apiece, with annual rents income of £3,000, while some 60-65 peers were estimated to own more than 50,000 acres of land with an annual income of over £50,000, with 15 of those peers raking in over £100,000. That's at a time when about three million white collar workers earned about £75 a year, 15 million manual laborers (including agricultural laborers) earned about £50 a year, and an estimated "poverty rate" for a family of five was £55 a year.

One thing I would mention about the peers and landed gentry is that their part to play was generally not business. This might be hard for Americans to understand, as the wealthiest Americans of the past 150 or so years tend to be captains of industry. While industrialists did get wealthy in Britain at the time, business itself was considered something unseemly and a bit vulgar for the landed classes, and any new rich who hoped to fit in would try to buy estates and convert some of their wealth to traditional landholdings if possible. The landed elite themselves could be land-rich but cash-poor, relying as they did on rents paid mostly by agricultural workers, and this was a constant theme in works of fiction and nonfiction about the landed elite in the 20th century. The Crawleys themselves squared the difference (temporarily) by marrying into American industrial money via Cora, and this was a not-unheard of phenomenon, ie for peers to marry rich Americans, Winston Churchill's parents being a famous real-life example.

So what was the role to be played by this landed elite? Part of it was to pay taxes (income taxes started on incomes of £160 a year, which meant 20 million or so people didn't pay it at the time). From the 1890s this largely meant death duties (ie inheritance tax) on a graduated scale from 1% on estates of £500 to 8% on estates over £1,000,000. The income tax was eightpence to the pound over the above-mentioned income threshold (since this is before decimalisation, remember that there were 240 pence to a pound, so it was a tax rate of 3.33%). Much of this was for local projects, such as road construction. The landed elite also played a part in maintaining the social order. The Crawleys are something of an idealized version of this, being (in their minds at least) the paternalistic caregivers to their tenants. Tenants would rely on the landowner to, for example, repair their leaky cottage roofs, or let them stay on in their homes even if they got too old to continue working to pay rents. Or not.

But finally, the part the landed elite played was to rule. Quite simply, this is where Britain's ruling class comes from. For those with enough political ambition or interest, they could expect to become Members of Parliament or Cabinet Members. Or, if Peers, could expect to sit in the House of Lords, which until 1911 very much had veto power over bills passed by the House of Commons (this power was reduced because of the 1909-1911 constitutional crisis brought on specifically by the House of Lords vetoing land tax from the Liberal "People's Budget"). Members of these families would often try for senior positions in the civil service, officer commissions in elite military units, positions in the Navy or Church of England clergy if a bit less wealthy (and except for perhaps a few English Catholics I should stress that this elite was very much bound up with the Church of England - even being a Protestant from one of the Dissenter/Nonconformist denominations put you outside the mainstream). Possibly a legal or journalistic career could be done if you really needed to work: Matthew Crawley is a lawyer, although also distinctly middle class, at least initially, and Winston Churchill again pursued a sometime career as a journalist in the Boer War. But being a member of the landed propertied elite very much was considered the natural and desirable source of rulers for Britain - the necessity of their not needing to work, and their property ownership, were considered (especially by their class) to make them objectively better at making decisions for the country as a whole. Of course, Marx and Engels would disagree with that - namely that their "objectivity" in ruling and upholding the social conventions they did materially benefitted themselves. By the early 20th century much of the British public was coming around to this point of view as well.

A lot of my facts and figures are drawn from Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914