Laird
Laird is a generic name for the owner of a large, long-established Scottish estate equivalent to an esquire in England, yet ranking above the same in Scotland. In the Scottish order of precedence, a laird ranks above a gentleman; this rank is only held by those lairds holding official recognition in a territorial designation by the Lord Lyon King of Arms. They are styled of, are traditionally entitled to place The Much Honoured before their name. Although the UK Government deems that "for Scottish lairds it is not necessary for the words Laird of to appear on any part of a passport, requests from applicants and passport holders for manorial titles and Scottish lairds to be included in their passports may be accepted providing documentary evidence is submitted, recorded in the passport with the observation e.g.: THE HOLDER IS THE LORD OF THE MANOR/LAIRD OF....... ". The Lord Lyon, Scotland's authority on titles, has produced the following guidance regarding the current use of the term laird as a courtesy title:The term ‘laird’ has been applied to the owner of an estate, sometimes by the owner himself or, more by those living and working on the estate.
It is a description rather than a title, is not appropriate for the owner of a normal residential property, far less the owner of a small souvenir plot of land. The term ‘laird’ is not synonymous with that of ‘lord’ or ‘lady’. Ownership of a souvenir plot of land is not sufficient to bring a person otherwise ineligible within the jurisdiction of the Lord Lyon for the purpose of seeking a grant of arms; the term bonnet laird was applied to rural, petty landowners, as they wore a bonnet like the non-landowning classes. Bonnet lairds filled a position in society below lairds and above husbandmen, similar to the yeomen of England; the word "laird" is known to have been used from the 15th century, is a shortened form of laverd, derived from the Old English word hlafweard meaning "warden of loaves". The word "lord" is of the same origin, would have been interchangeable with "laird". In the 15th and 16th centuries, the designation was used for land owners holding directly of the Crown, therefore were entitled to attend Parliament.
Lairds reigned over their estates like their castles forming a small court. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the designation was applied to the head chief of a highland clan and therefore was not personal property and had obligations towards the community; the laird may possess certain feudal rights. A lairdship carried voting rights in the ancient pre-Union Parliament of Scotland, although such voting rights were expressed via two representatives from each county who were known as Commissioners of the Shires, who came from the laird class and were chosen by their peers to represent them. A certain level of landownership was a necessary qualification. A laird is said to hold a lairdship. A woman who holds a lairdship in her own right has been styled with the honorific "Lady". Although "laird" is sometimes translated as lord and signifies the same, like the English term lord of the manor "laird" is not a title of nobility; the designation is a'corporeal hereditament', i.e. the designation cannot be held in gross, cannot be bought and sold without selling the physical land.
The designation does not entitle the owner to sit in the House of Lords and is the Scottish equivalent to an English squire, in that it is not a noble title, more a courtesy designation meaning landowner with no other rights assigned to it. A laird possessing a Coat of Arms registered in the Public Register of All Arms and Bearings in Scotland is a member of Scotland's minor nobility; such a person can be recognised as a laird, if not a chief or chieftain, or descendant of one of these, by the formal recognition of a territorial designation as a part of their name by the Lord Lyon. The Lord Lyon is the ultimate arbiter as to determining entitlement to a territorial designation, his right of discretion in recognising these, their status as a name, dignity or title, have been confirmed in the Scottish courts. Several websites, internet vendors on websites like Ebay, sell Scottish lairdships along with minuscule "plots of land" – one foot squared; the Court of the Lord Lyon considers these particular titles to be meaningless because it is impossible to have numerous "lairds" of a single estate at the same time, as has been advertised by these companies.
A contemporary popular view of Lairdship titles has taken a unique twist in the 21st century in millions of sales of souvenir land plots from buyers who show no interests in the opinions of the Registry of Scotland or of the Court of Lyon. They see their contract purporting to sell a plot of Scottish souvenir land as bestowing them the informal right to the title Laird; this is despite the fact that the buyer does not acquire ownership of the plot because registration of the plot is prohibited by Land Registration Act 2012, s 22. As ownership of land in Scotland requires registration of a valid disposition under Land Registration Act 2012, s 50 the prohibition on registration of a souvenir plot means the buyer does not acquire ownership, accordingly has no entitlement to a descriptive title premised on landownership. A study in 2003 by academics at the Universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen concluded that:"The modern Scottish Highland sporting estate continues to be a place owned by an absentee landowner who uses its 15-20,000 acres for hu
Gentry
Gentry are "well-born and well-bred people" of high social class in the past. In the United Kingdom, the term gentry refers to the landed gentry, the majority of the land-owning social class who were armigerous, but did not have titles of nobility. Gentry, in its widest connotation, refers to people of good social position connected to landed estates, upper levels of the clergy, "gentle" families of long descent who never obtained the official right to bear a coat of arms; the historical term gentry by itself, so Peter Coss argues, is a construct that historians have applied loosely to rather different societies. Any particular model may not fit a specific society, yet a single definition remains desirable. Linguistically, the word gentry arose to identify the social stratum created by the small number, by the standards of Continental Europe, of the Peerage of England, of the parts of Britain, where nobility and titles are inherited by a single person, rather than the family, as usual in Europe.
Before creation of the gentry, there were analogous traditional social elites. The adjective patrician describes the governing elites in a medieval metropolis, such as those of the free cities of Italy, the free imperial cities of Germany and Switzerland, the Hanseatic League, which were different from the gentry; the Indo-Europeans who settled Europe and Western Asia and the Indian subcontinent conceived their societies to be ordered in a tripartite fashion, the three parts being castes. Castes came to be further divided as a result of greater specialisation; the "classic" formulation of the caste system as described by Georges Dumézil was that of a priestly or religiously occupied caste, a warrior caste, a worker caste. Dumézil divided the Proto-Indo-Europeans into three categories: sovereignty and productivity, he further subdivided sovereignty into two complementary sub-parts. One part was formal and priestly, but rooted in this world; the other was powerful and priestly, but rooted in the "other", the supernatural and spiritual world.
The second main division was connected with the use of force, the military, war. There was a third group, ruled by the other two, whose role was productivity: herding and crafts; this system of caste roles can be seen in the castes which flourished on the Indian subcontinent and amongst the Italic peoples. Examples of the Indo-European castes: Indo-Iranian – Brahmin/Athravan, Kshatriyas/Rathaestar, Vaishyas Roman – Flamines, Quirites Celtic – Druids, Plebes Anglo-Saxon – Gebedmen, Weorcmen Slavic – Volkhvs, Krestyanin/Smerd Nordic – Earl, Thrall Greece – Eupatridae, Demiurgi Greece – Homoioi, HelotsKings were born out of the warrior or noble class. Emperor Constantine convoked the First Council of Nicaea in 325 whose Nicene Creed included belief in "one holy catholic and apostolic Church". Emperor Theodosius I made Nicene Christianity the state church of the Roman Empire with the Edict of Thessalonica of 380. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, there emerged no single powerful secular government in the West, but there was a central ecclesiastical power in Rome, the Catholic Church.
In this power vacuum, the Church rose to become the dominant power in the West. In essence, the earliest vision of Christendom was a vision of a Christian theocracy, a government founded upon and upholding Christian values, whose institutions are spread through and over with Christian doctrine; the Catholic Church's peak of authority over all European Christians and their common endeavours of the Christian community—for example, the Crusades, the fight against the Moors in the Iberian Peninsula and against the Ottomans in the Balkans—helped to develop a sense of communal identity against the obstacle of Europe's deep political divisions. The classical heritage flourished throughout the Middle Ages in both the Byzantine Greek East and Latin West. In Plato's ideal state there are three major classes, representative of the idea of the "tripartite soul", expressive of three functions or capacities of the human soul: "appetites", "the spirited element" and "reason" the part that must guide the soul to truth.
Will Durant made a convincing case that certain prominent features of Plato's ideal community were discernible in the organization and effectiveness of "the" Medieval Church in Europe: For a thousand years Europe was ruled by an order of guardians like that, visioned by our philosopher. During the Middle Ages it was customary to classify the population of Christendom into laboratores and oratores; the last group, though small in number, monopolized the instruments and opportunities of culture, ruled with unlimited sway half of the most powerful continent on the globe. The clergy, like Plato's guardians, were placed in authority... by their talent as shown in ecclesiastical studies and administration, by their disposition to a life of meditation and simplicity, and... by the influence of their relatives with the powers of state and church. In the latter half of the period in which they ruled, the clergy were as free from family cares as Plato could desire... Celibacy was
Equites
The equites constituted the second of the property-based classes of ancient Rome, ranking below the senatorial class. A member of the equestrian order was known as an eques. During the Roman kingdom and the 1st century of the Roman Republic, legionary cavalry was recruited from the ranks of the patricians, who were expected to provide six centuriae of cavalry. Around 400 BC, 12 more centuriae of cavalry were established and these included non-patricians. Around 300 BC the Samnite Wars obliged Rome to double the normal annual military levy from two to four legions, doubling the cavalry levy from 600 to 1,200 horses. Legionary cavalry started to recruit wealthier citizens from outside the 18 centuriae; these new recruits came from the first class of commoners in the centuriate organisation and were not granted the same privileges. By the time of the Second Punic War, all the members of the first class of commoners were required to serve as cavalrymen; the presence of equites in the Roman cavalry diminished in the period 200–88 BC as only equites could serve as the army's senior officers.
After c. 88 BC, equites were no longer drafted into the legionary cavalry, although they remained technically liable to such service throughout the principate era. They continued to supply the senior officers of the army throughout the principate. With the exception of the purely hereditary patricians, the equites were defined by a property threshold; the rank was passed from father to son, although members of the order who at the regular quinquennial census no longer met the property requirement were removed from the order's rolls by the Roman censors. In the late republic, the property threshold stood at 50,000 denarii and was doubled to 100,000 by the emperor Augustus – the equivalent to the annual salaries of 450 contemporary legionaries. In the republican period, Roman senators and their offspring became an unofficial elite within the equestrian order; as senators' abilities to engage in commerce was limited by law, the bulk of non-agricultural activities were in the hands of non-senatorial equites.
As well as holding large landed estates, equites came to dominate mining and manufacturing industry. In particular, tax farming companies were all in the hands of equites. Under Augustus, the senatorial elite was given formal status with a higher wealth threshold and superior rank and privileges to ordinary equites. During the principate, equites filled the senior administrative and military posts of the imperial government. There was a clear division between jobs reserved for senators and those reserved for non-senatorial equites, but the career structure of both groups was broadly similar: a period of junior administrative posts in Rome or Italy, followed by a period of military service as a senior army officer, followed by senior administrative or military posts in the provinces. Senators and equites formed a tiny elite of under 10,000 members who monopolised political and economic power in an empire of about 60 million inhabitants. During the 3rd century AD, power shifted from the Italian aristocracy to a class of equites who had earned their membership by distinguished military service rising from the ranks: career military officers from the provinces who displaced the Italian aristocrats in the top military posts, under Diocletian from the top civilian positions also.
This reduced the Italian aristocracy to an idle, but immensely wealthy, group of landowners. During the 4th century, the status of equites was debased to insignificance by excessive grants of the rank. At the same time the ranks of senators were swollen to over 4,000 by the establishment of a second senate in Constantinople and the tripling of the membership of both senates; the senatorial order of the 4th century was thus the equivalent of the equestrian order of the principate. According to Roman legend, Rome was founded by its first king, Romulus, in 753 BC. However, archaeological evidence suggests that Rome did not acquire the character of a unified city-state until ca. 625 BC. Roman tradition relates that the Order of Knights was founded by Romulus, who established a cavalry regiment of 300 men called the Celeres to act as his personal escort, with each of the three Roman "tribes" supplying 100 horse; this cavalry regiment was doubled in size to 600 men by King Lucius Tarquinius Priscus.
That the cavalry was increased to 600 during the regal era is plausible, as in the early republic the cavalry fielded remained 600-strong. However, according to Livy, King Servius Tullius established a further 12 centuriae of equites, a further tripling of the cavalry, but this is anachronistic, as it would have resulted in a contingent of 1,800 horse, incongruously large, compared to the heavy infantry, only 6,000-strong in the late regal period. Instead, the additional 12 centuriae were created at a stage around 400 BC, but these new units were political not military, most designed to admit plebeians to the Order of Knights. Equites were provided with a sum of money by the state to purc
Grand duke
Grand duke is a European hereditary title for either certain monarchs or members of certain monarchs' families. It is traditionally ranked in order of precedence below the title of emperor or king and above that of sovereign prince or sovereign duke, it is used in some current and former independent monarchies in Europe, particularly: In the present-day Grand Duchy of Luxembourg Historically the sovereigns of former independent countries such as: Tuscany. The self-styled monarchs of several micronations claim use of the title. Translations for grand duke include: in Latin, magnus dux; the term "grand duke" as a monarch reigning over an independent state was a invention to denote either a mighty duke or a monarchy playing an important political, military and/or economic role, but not large enough to be a Kingdom. It arose because the title of Duke had lost status and precedence during the Middle Ages by having been granted to rulers of small fiefs, instead of the large tribal regions or national territories to which the title was once attached.
One of the first examples occurred when Count Gonçalo I Mendes of Portucale took, in 987, the personal title of Magnus Dux Portucalensium and rebelled against his feudal lord, King Bermudo II of León. He was defeated by the royal armies but obtained a remarkable autonomy as a Magnus Dux, leading to Portuguese independence from the Spanish Kingdom of Castille-León. Another example was the line of self-proclaimed grand dukes of Burgundy in the 15th century, when they ruled most of present-day north-eastern France as well as the entire Low Countries, they tried—ultimately without success—to create from these territories under their control a new unified country between the Kingdom of France in the west and the Holy Roman Empire in the east. Philip III, Duke of Burgundy assumed the subsidiary void style and title of "Grand Duke of the West" in 1435, having brought the Duchies of Brabant and Limburg as well as the counties of Holland, Friesland and Namur into his possession, his son and successor Charles the Bold continued to use the same title.
The title magnus dux or grand duke has been used by the rulers of Lithuania, who after Jagiello became Kings of Poland. From 1573, both the Latin version and its Polish equivalent wielki ksiaze, the monarchic title of the rulers of Lithuania as well as of Russia, Mazovia, Kiev, Podolia, Livonia, Smolensk and Chernigov, were used as part of their full official monarchic titles by the Kings of Poland during the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; the first monarchs officially titled grand duke were the Medici sovereigns of Tuscany, starting from the late 16th century. This official title was granted by Pope Pius V in 1569. Napoleon I awarded the title extensively: during his era, several of his allies were allowed to assume the title of grand duke at the same time as their inherited fiefs were enlarged by annexed territories belonging to enemies defeated on the battlefield. After Napoleon's downfall, the victorious powers who met at the Congress of Vienna, which dealt with the political aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, agreed to abolish the Grand Duchies created by Bonaparte and to create a group of monarchies of intermediate importance with that title.
Thus the 19th century saw a new group of monarchs titled Grand Duke in central Europe in present-day Germany. A list of these is available in the article grand duchy. In the same century, the purely ceremonial version of the title "grand duke" in Russia expanded massively because of the large number of progeny of the ruling House of Romanov during those decades. In the German and Dutch languages, which have separate words for a prince as the issue of a monarch and for a sovereign prince, there is a clear linguistic difference between a sovereign Grand Duke reigning over a state of central and western Europe and a non-sovereign, purely ceremonial Grand Duke of either the Russian Imperial family or other non-sovereign territories which are de facto dependencies of a major power. In 15
Dauphine of France
The Dauphine of France was the wife of the Dauphin of France. The position was analogous to the Princess of Wales. Dauphine of Auvergne List of Angevin consorts Countesses and Duchesses of Maine List of consorts of Alençon List of consorts of Bourbon List of consorts of Vendôme Countess of Artois Countess of Provence List of consorts of Lorraine List of Princesses of Condé List of consorts of Montpensier List of consorts of Conti List of consorts of Étampes Countess of Évreux Countess of Champagne List of consorts of Joinville
King-Emperor
A king-emperor, the female equivalent being queen-empress, is a sovereign ruler, a king of one territory and emperor of another. This title results from a merger of a royal and imperial crown, but recognises that the two territories are different politically or culturally and in status, it denotes a king's imperial status through the acquisition of an empire or vice versa. The dual title signifies a sovereign's dual role, but may be created to improve a ruler's prestige. Both cases, show that the merging of rule was not a case of annexation where one state is swallowed by another, but rather of unification and equal status, though in the case of the British monarchy the suggestion that an emperor is higher in rank than a king was avoided by creating the title "king-emperor" instead of "emperor-king"; the British Crown had taken over the governing of British India from the East India Company in 1858, in the aftermath of what the British called'the Indian Mutiny'. Henceforth, the new British Raj was ruled directly from Whitehall via the India Office.
Following the Delhi Durbar in 1877, Queen Victoria was given Imperial status by the British Government, she assumed the title Empress of India. She was thus the Queen-Empress, her successors, until George VI, were known as King-Emperors; this title was the shortened form of the full title, in widespread popular use. The reigning King-Emperors or Queen-Empress used the abbreviation Ind.. Imp. after their name. British coins, those of the British Empire and Commonwealth dominions included some variation of the titles Rex Ind. Imp. although in India itself the coins said "Empress", "King Emperor." When, in August 1947, India became independent, all dies had to be changed to remove the latter two abbreviations, in some cases taking up to a year. In Great Britain, coins of George VI carried the title up to 1948. Another use of this dual title was when, in 1867, the multi-national Austrian Empire, German-ruled and facing growing nationalism, undertook a reform that gave nominal and factual rights to Hungarian nobility.
This reform revived the Austrian-annexed Kingdom of Hungary, therefore created the dual-monarchic union state of Austria-Hungary and the dual title of "emperor-king". The Habsburg dynasty therefore ruled as Emperors of Austria over the western and northern half of the Empire, as Kings of Hungary over the Kingdom of Hungary and much of Transleithania. Hungary enjoyed some degree of representation in joint affairs; the federation bore the full name of "The Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Imperial Council and the Lands of the Crown of St. Stephen". In 1936, with the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, Victor Emmanuel III was proclaimed Emperor of Ethiopia, thus he became King-Emperor, i.e. King of Italy and Emperor of Ethiopia, because conquered Ethiopia was an Empire. In the following years foreign countries recognized the Italian rule in Ethiopia; the King-Emperor was represented by the Viceroy, appointed as Governor-General of Italian East Africa. The capital city of the Viceroy and Governor-General was Addis Ababa.
The Serbian emperor Stefan Dušan, earlier king, is attested with the title "Emperor of Greece and King of All Serb Lands and the Maritime" in a document dating to between 1347–56. Dušan has been described as a "king-emperor"; the German Empire was ruled by a King-Emperor, as the German Hohenzollern Emperor was King of Prussia. The Holy Roman Emperors were Kings of Italy and Burgundy for most of the time that title existed. Emperor Napoléon I of the French was King of Italy, his title was shortened in "Emperor-King" rather than "King-Emperor". John VI of Portugal was made titular Emperor of Brazil alongside being King of Portugal and was titled as King-Emperor until his death. After John VI's death, his son Pedro acceded him as King of Portugal while reigning as Emperor of Brazil. Kaiserlich und königlich King-Grand Duke
.svg)
listen) VY-kownt, for male[1]) or viscountess (/ˈvaɪkaʊntɪs/, for female[2]) is a title used in certain European countries for a noble of varying status. In many countries a viscount, and its historical equivalents, was a non-hereditary, administrative or judicial position, and did not develop into an hereditary title until much later.[3] In the case of French viscounts, it is customary to leave the title untranslated as vicomte [vi.kɔ̃t] and vicomtesse.
