The most influential of Tudor-Stuart England's constitutional writers, Sir Thomas Smith, divided the English into two classes, rulers and subjects. The ‘common wealth, or policie of England’, he wrote, was ‘governed, administered and maintained by three sortes of person’. The first of these ‘governing sorts’, or ruling classes, of course, was ‘the monarch … in whose name and authoritie all things be administered’. Second were ‘the gentlemen’, whom Smith also divided into two distinct ‘partes’. Highest in rank was ‘the Baronie or estate of Lordes’, consisting of barons ‘and all that bee above the degree of baron’: marquises, dukes, earls etc. Below these national magnates came a much larger class of gentlemen ‘which be no Lords, as Knights, Esquires and simple gentlemen.’ Henry French suggests that a ‘concept of gentility’ was ‘accorded universal (if not always positive) recognition’ in early modern England; the ideal gentleman embodied ‘social distinction, political autonomy, intellectual authority and material independence’. ‘Alone among social groups’, writes French, ‘gentlemen were the people who acted upon a national stage.’

The third and lowest ‘sort’ of Smith's ruling class was ‘the yeomanrie’. The local gentry (‘second sort’) and yeomen (‘third sort’) were responsible for putting ‘policie’ ordained by the senior ranks into practice in the districts and localities.