#class structure

Accidentally had an "Archie 2" there.

The recoloring --darkening -- reddening -- of the sands is interesting. Like, the cacti lead to a decision to place it in the Southwest.

"Gay" is out. "Groovy" remains.

Maybe losing sight of the color here.

I wrote about this here.

The gentry were a liminal class, existing at the very boundary of the aristocracy and the “commonalty,” and sharing both cultural and material characteristics of both.

Like the aristocracy, the gentry were defined by landed wealth; they didn’t work for a living (which would make them “in trade”), but lived off of rental income from their estates, which made them “gently born” and thus “gentlemen.” (This also meant sharing the aristocracy’s cultural values and practices.) In no small part because their economic basis came from inherited wealth, they shared the aristocracy’s obsession with lines of descent, arranged marriages with people from the “right families,” and of course, with coats of arms. One of the few remaining perks of being ex-noble was that you got to keep your coat of arms, and were thus from an “armigerous” family.  

Like the commonalty, the gentry did not have peerages or knighthoods, because possessing those lifted you out of the gentry and into the nobility. In part because estate management isn’t cheap, the gentry would from time-to-time make marriage alliances with cash-rich merchant families looking for social advancement, so that the boundaries between the two classes could be somewhat porous and ambiguous. They occupied a similar position in the political system as well: if urban seats in the House of Commons were over-represented by elite merchants, guildmasters, and movers and shakers in local government, rural seats in the House of Commons were dominated by the gentry.