During Elizabethan times, the term "gentleman" referred to a whole way of life, not simply an accident of birth. Appropriate lineage may have been a prerequisite, but to be a gentleman one had also to live in a certain style: to be better educated, have better manners, wear better clothes than the masses; to engage in certain recreations (and not others); to live in a large, well-furnished house; to maintain a certain aloofness with subordinates; in short, never to lose sight of his class "superiority."
The origin of the word gentleman
