ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on those strategies and resources that the gentry employed during their years of "private life", that is, of their quiet withdrawal and silence. While private matters were often quickly resolved with the help of some highly positioned person, public demonstrations of aristocratic heritage were deliberately suppressed. Ironically, the efforts of the regime to ostracize them had the unintended consequence of making the gentry, as a class, more unified; they dropped many of their internal distinctions and became unified as a group against their social others. The gentry employed in the horse-breeding industry were competent and committed to the tradition. As a matter of fact, the discourse of poverty helped integrate gentry as a community, since obligations of material displays of one's status were lifted by the circumstances. They produce this conclusion through their habitus, exclusionary practices, and fetishism of all old things, be it family genealogy or material objects with which they surround themselves.
