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Notes -
There was also the alternative definition of a gentleman, namely a man with sufficient wealth from acceptable sources (primarily land and government bonds) that he could enjoy an upper-middle-class standard of living without working or being actively involved in the management of a nonfarm business. In Tudor through to early Victorian England, demonstrating that you possessed this level of wealth would (eventually) lead to you being recognised as a gentleman and your children as being born into a gentry family. The old gentry families never really succeeded in pushing back on this (did they even try? - I'm not sure) and "gentry are armigerous" didn't help because the heralds needed money and would happily sell a coat of arms to anyone vaguely suitable who could afford one. Burke's landed gentry used land and office holding as inclusion criteria, not antiquity.
A key difference between the British class system and the pre-French Revolution continental European class system, was that the British considered the gentry to be a non-noble class, so we tended to adopt the wealth-based definition. Whereas the analogous class in continental Europe was the untitled nobility, and was supposed to be a closed-blood class, or at least one where entry required spectacular battlefield achievement recognised by the Crown and could not be bought. A gentilhomme had to be a legal noble, although not necessarily rich (younger sons inherited noble status and privileges, but not the family estates).
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