NOBILITY, that distinction of rank in civil society which raises a man above the con dition of the mass of the people. SoCiety has a tendency to inequality of condition, arising from the natural inequality, physical, moral, and intellectual, of those who com pose it, aided by the diversity of external advantages, and of the principles and habits imbibed at an early age. This inequality is apt to increase; the son, inheriting the faculties of his father, is more favorably situated than his father was for making use of them; and hence, in almost every nation, in even the very early stages of civilization, we find something like a hereditary nobility. Privileges originally acquired by wealth or political power are secured to the family of the possessor of them; and the privileged class come to constitute an order, admission into which requires the consent of society or of the order itself.
The ancient Romans were divided into nobiles and ignobiles, a distinction at first cor responding to that of patricians and plebeians. A new nobility afterwards sprung out of the plebeian order, and obtained (336 B. c.) the right to rise to high offices in the state; and in course of time the descendants of those who had filled curule magistracies inherited the jus imaginum, or right of having images of their ancestors—a privilege which, like the coat-of-arms in later ages, was considered the criterion of nobility. The man entitled to have his own image was a moms homo, while the ignobilis could neither have his ancestor's image nor his own.
The origin of the feudal aristocracy of Europe is in part connected with the accidents which influenced the division of.conquered lands among the leaders and warriors of the nations that overthreW the Roman empire. Those who had acquired a large share of territorial possession, and their posterity to whom it was transmitted, were naturally looked on as the fittest persons to occupy the great offices of state and wield political power. The Frankish kingdom in Gaul was divided into governments, each under the authority of a chieftain called a count or comes—a designation derived from the cornea of the Roman empire—whose Teutonic equivalent was, graf. A higher dignity and more
extensive jurisdiction was conferred on the dux or duke, a term also of Roman origin, and implying the duty of leading the armies of the country. In the Lombard kingdom of Italy, the same term was applied to the great officers who were intrusted with the military and civil administration of cities end their surrounding provinces. The marquises were guardians of the frontier marches. In the subinfeudations of the greater nobility originated a secondary sort of nobility, under the name of vavasours, castellans, and lesser barons; and a third order below them comprised vassals, whose tenure. by the militiiry obligation known in England as knight's service, admitted them within the ranks of the aristocracy. In France the allegiance of the lesser nobles to their intermediary lord long continued a reality; in England, on the other hand, William the conqueror obliged not only his barons who held in fief of the crown, but their vassals also, to take an oath of fealty to himself; and his successors altogether abolished subinfeudation.
The military tenant who held but a portion of a knight's fee participated in all the privileges of nobility, and an impassable barrier existed between his order and the com mon people. Over continental Europe in general, the nobles, greater and lesser, were in use, after the 10th c., to assume a territorial name from their castles or the principal town or village on their demesne; hence the prefex "de," or its German equivalent " von," still considered over a great part of the continent as the criterion of nobility or gentility. Britain was, to a great extent, an exception to this rule, many of the most distinguished family names of the aristocracy not having a territorial origin. See NAME.