Not for twelve years had there been a new edition of Burke's six-inch-thick Landed Gentry. Last week, in a rickety office in Fleet Street, Burke's genealogists put the finishing touches to the first postwar edition, in a melancholy atmosphere of impoverished squires and mortgaged manor houses. Landed Gentry used to limit itself to owners of domains that could properly be called "stately" (i.e., more than 500 acres). Now it has lowered the property qualification to 200 acres for all British families whose pedigrees have been "notable" for three generations.
Even so, almost half of the 5,000 families listed in the new volume...
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