noun
definition
A noble or privileged social class, historically accompanied by a hereditary title; aristocracy.
synonyms
definition
The quality of being noble.
synonyms
Examples of nobility in a Sentence
Such nobility may be immemorial or it may not.
From the hall of the nobility the Emperor went to that of the merchants.
Here, then, is a nobility in the strictest sense.
That the English peerage does not answer to the true idea of a nobility will be seen with a very little thought.
Nor is nobility the same thing as aristocracy.
This is not nobility in the true sense; it is not nobility as nobility was understood either in the French kingdom or in the Venetian commonwealth.
They were not a nobility or a privileged class as long as there was no less privileged class to distinguish them from.
But if differed from the old patriciate in this, that, while the privileges of the old patriciate rested on law, or perhaps rather on immemorial custom, the privileges of the new nobility rested wholly on a sentiment of which men could remember the beginning.
Or it would be more accurate to say that the new nobility had really no privileges at all.
Sparta is the best case of a nobility of conquest.
Aristocracy implies the existence of nobility; but nobility does not imply aristocracy; it may exist under any form of government.
But their position as a nobility or privileged class arose solely because a class with inferior rights to their own grew up around them.
Livy could never get rid of the idea that the old struggle between patrician and plebeian was something like the struggle between the nobility and the people at large in the later days of the commonwealth.
In strictness nobility and gentry are the same thing.
The way in which nobility has arisen in different times and places is very various, and there are several nations whose history will supply us with examples of a nobility of one kind giving way to a nobility of another kind.
This new nobility gradually became as well marked and as exclusive as the old patriciate.
This nobility consisted of all those who, as descendants of curule magistrates, had the jus imaginum - that is, who could point to forefathers ennobled by office.
In the first place, I tell you we have no right to question the Emperor about that, and secondly, if the Russian nobility had that right, the Emperor could not answer such a question.
In the wars against the English in the 14th and 15th centuries and the religious wars of the 16th century the town had its full participation; and in 1665 it acquired a terrible notoriety by the trial and execution of many members of the nobility of Auvergne who had tyrannized over the neighbouring districts.
In Tuscany, where the Guelph party was very strongly organized, and the commercial constitution of Florence kept the nobility in check, the communes remained as yet free from hereditary masters.
In England nobility is apt to be confounded with the peculiar institution of the British peerage.
Again, it is sometimes thought that both nobility and aristocracy are in some special way connected with kingly government.
This definition seems to take in all the kinds of nobility which have existed in different times and places.
Nobility thus implies the vesting of some hereditary privilege or advantage in certain families, without deciding in what such privilege or advantage consists.
What we may call the nobility of earlier occupation makes way for the nobility of office.
The old people of Rome thus grew, or rather shrank up, into a nobility by the growth of a new people by their side which they declined to admit to a share in their rights, powers, and possessions.
Yet practically the new nobility was a privileged class; it felt itself to be so, and it was felt to be so by others.
We hardly look on the Spartans as a nobility among the other Lacedaemonians; Sparta rather is a ruling city bearing sway over the other Lacedaemonian towns.
The renowned patriciate of Venice was as far removed as might be from the character either of a nobility of conquest or of a nobility of older settlement.
As Athens supplies us with a parallel to the older nobility of Rome without any parallel to the later, so Venice supplies us with a parallel to the later nobility of Rome without any parallel to the earlier.
In one point, however, the Venetian nobility differed from either the older or the newer nobility of Rome, and also from the older nobilities of the medieval Italian cities.
Where this power exists the nobility is no longer in any strictness an aristocracy; it may have great privileges, great influence, even great legal powers, but it is not the real ruling body, like the true aristocracy of Venice.
But the nobility of a large country, even though used to act politically as an order, could never put on that orderly and legal character which distinguishes the true civic patriciates.
All that kind of pre-established harmony Wagner left behind him the moment he deserted the heroes and villains of romantic opera for the visionary and true tragedy of gods and demi-gods, giants and gnomes, with beauty, nobility and love in the wrong, and the forces of destruction and hate set free by blind justice.
The upper consists of princes of the grand-ducal family, heads of mediatized houses, the head of the Roman Catholic and the superintendent of the Protestant church, the chancellor of the university, two elected representatives of the land-owning nobility, and twelve members nominated by the grand duke.
For this the nobility never forgave him.
Christian revenged himself by executing the magnate Torben Oxe, who, on very creditable evidence, was supposed to have been Dyveke's murderer, despite the strenuous opposition of Oxe's fellow-peers; and henceforth the king lost no opportunity of depressing the nobility and raising plebeians to power.
The dauphins flight from Paris excited a wild outburst of monarchist loyalty and anger against the capital among the nobility and in the statesgeneral of Compigne.
The nobility don't gwudge theah lives--evewy one of us will go and bwing in more wecwuits, and the sov'weign" (that was the way he referred to the Emperor) "need only say the word and we'll all die fo' him!" added the orator with animation.
Though the rule of Podébrad had proved very successful and Bohemia had under it obtained a degree of prosperity which had been unknown since the time of Charles IV., the Calixtine king had many enemies among the Romanist members of the powerful Bohemian nobility.
His brass instruments have lost nothing of their ancient nobility.
The former existence of so many separate sovereignties and fountains of honor gave nse to a great many hereditary titles of nobility.
The masses were still more or less indifferent, but among the nobility and the educated middle Secret classes, cut off from all part in free political life, there societies, was developed either the spirit of despair at Italys The Car..
His grandson Thomas succeeded him in 1554, and in 1556 made the second of those marraiges which have given the Howards their high place among the English nobility.
As the non-privileged order increased in numbers, while the privileged order, as every exclusive hereditary body must do, lessened, the larger body gradually put on the character of the nation at large, while the smaller body put on the character of a nobility.
The Athenian eb rarpl8at, who were thus gradually brought down from their privileged position, seem to have been quite as proud and exclusive as the Roman patricians; but when they lost their privileges they lost them far more thoroughly, and they did not, as at Rome, practically hand on many of them to a new nobility, of which they formed part, though not the whole.
The Venetian nobility is an example of a nobility which gradually arose out of the mass of the people as certain families step by step drew all political power into their own hands.
This was what the later nobility of Rome was always striving at, and what they did to a great extent practically establish.
But, as the exclusive privileges of the nobility were never recognized by any legal or formal act, men like Gaius Marius would ever and anon thrust themselves in.
The privileges which the Venetian nobility took to themselves were established by acts which, if not legal, were at least formal.