mour is apparently of recent growth, and
is possibly not unconnected with the not unnatural desire of the
herald's office to magnify its work.

It is evident that noble blood in those days was no more a guarantee of
good character than it is in this, for, according to one of the writers
on the subject, the premier gentleman of England in the early days of
the 15th century was one who had served at Agincourt, but whose
subsequent exploits were not perhaps the best advertisement for gentle
birth. According to the public records he was charged at the
Staffordshire Assizes with house-breaking, wounding with intent to kill,
and procuring the murder of one Thomas Page, who was cut to pieces while
on his knees begging for his life[19].

The first gentleman, commemorated by that name on an existing monument,
is John Daundelion who died in 1445.

In the 14th and 15th centuries the chief occupation of gentlemen was
fighting; but later on, when law and order were more firmly established,
the younger sons of good families began to enter industrial life as
apprentices in the towns, and there began to grow up a new aristocracy
of trade. To William Harrison, the writer to whom I have already
referred, merchants are still citizens, but he adds: "They often change
estate with gentlemen as gentlemen do with them by mutual conversion of
the one into the other."

Since those days the name has very properly come to be connected less
with blue blood than--if I may coin the phrase--with blue behaviour. In
1714, Steele lays it down in the _Tatler_ that the appellation of
gentleman is never to be fixed to a man's circumstances but to his
behaviour in them. And in this connexion we may recall the old story of
the Monarch, said by some to be James II, who replied to a lady
petitioning him to make her son a gentleman: "I could make him a noble,
but God Almighty could not make him a gentleman."

Before we leave the class distinctions based mainly on birth and blood,
it is well to remark that in England they have never counted for so much
as elsewhere. It is true of course that the nobility and gentry have
been a separate class, but they have been constantly recruited from
below. Distinction in war or capability in peace was the qualification
of scores of men upon whom the highest social rank was bestowed in reign
after reign in our English history. Moreover, birth distinction has
never been recognised in law, in spite of the fact that the mani