Estate (land) in the context of "Stormont Estate"

Han (Japanese: 藩, "domain") is a Japanese historical term for the estate of a daimyo in the Edo period (1603–1868) and early Meiji period (1868–1912). Han or Bakufu-han (daimyo domain) served as a system of de facto administrative divisions of Japan alongside the de jure provinces until they were abolished in the 1870s.

Crown land, also known as royal domain, is a territorial area belonging to the monarch, who personifies the Crown. It is the equivalent of an entailed estate and passes with the monarchy, being inseparable from it. Today, in Commonwealth realms, Crown land is considered public land and is not part of the monarch's private estate.

The landed gentry (also known as the squirearchy or simply gentry) is a largely historical British and Irish social class of landowners who could live entirely from rental income, or at least owned a country estate. The British element of the wider European class of gentry, while part of Britain's nobility and usually armigers, the gentry ranked below the British peerage in social status. Nevertheless, their economic base in land was often similar, and some of the landed gentry were wealthier than some peers. Many gentry were close relatives of peers, and it was not uncommon for gentry to marry into peerage. With or without noble title, owning rural land estates often brought with it the legal rights of the feudal lordship of the manor, and the less formal name or title of squire, in Scotland laird.

Generally lands passed by primogeniture, while the inheritances of daughters and younger sons were in cash or stocks, and relatively small. Typically the gentry farmed some of their land through employed managers, but leased most of it to tenant farmers. They also exploited timber and minerals (such as coal), and owned mills and other sources of income. Many heads of families also had careers in politics or the military, and the younger sons of the gentry provided a high proportion of the clergy, military officers, and lawyers. Successful burghers often used their accumulated wealth to buy country estates, with the aim of establishing themselves as landed gentry.

A shōen (荘園 or 庄園, shōen) was a field or manor in Japan. The Japanese term comes from the Tang dynasty Chinese term "莊園" (Mandarin: zhuāngyuán, Cantonese: zong1 jyun4).

Shōen, from about the 8th to the late 15th century, describes any of the private, tax free, often autonomous estates or manors whose rise undermined the political and economic power of the emperor and contributed to the growth of powerful local clans. The estates developed from land tracts assigned to officially sanctioned Shintō shrines or Buddhist temples or granted by the emperor as gifts to the Imperial family, friends, or officials. As these estates grew, they became independent of the civil administrative system and contributed to the rise of a local military class. With the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate in 1192, centrally appointed stewards weakened the power of these local landlords. The shōen system passed out of existence around the middle of the 15th century, when villages became self-governing units, owing loyalty to a feudal lord (daimyō) who subdivided the area into fiefs and collected a fixed tax.

Gentry (from Old French genterie, from gentil 'high-born, noble') are "well-born, genteel and well-bred people" of high social class, especially in the past. Gentry, in its widest connotation, refers to people of good social position connected to landed estates (see manorialism), upper levels of the clergy, or long established "gentle" families of noble descent, some of whom in some cases never obtained the official right to bear a coat of arms. The gentry largely consisted of landowners who could support themselves entirely from rental income or at least had a country estate; some were gentleman farmers.

In the United Kingdom gentry specifically refers to the landed gentry: the majority of the land-owning social class who typically had a coat of arms but did not hold a peerage. The adjective "patrician" ("of or like a person of high social rank") describes comparable elite groups in other analogous traditional social elite strata based in cities, such as the free cities of Italy (Venice and Genoa) and the free imperial cities of Germany, Switzerland and the Hanseatic League. The term "gentry" by itself, the historian Peter Coss argues, is a broad construct applied by scholars to different societies, sometimes in ways that do not fully align with historical realities. Whilst no single model perfectly fits every society, some scholars favour a unified term to describe these upper social strata.

The First Schleswig War (German: Schleswig-Holsteinischer Krieg), also known as the Schleswig-Holstein uprising (German: Schleswig-Holsteinische Erhebung) and the Three Years' War (Danish: Treårskrigen), was a military conflict in southern Denmark and northern Germany rooted in the Schleswig–Holstein question: who should control the Duchies of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg, which at the time were ruled by the king of Denmark in a personal union. Ultimately, the Danish side proved victorious with the diplomatic support of the great powers, especially Britain and Russia, since the duchies were close to an important Baltic seaway connecting both powers.

While Schleswig had been predominantly Danish with a German elite concentrated in the cities and estates, modernisation brought extensive German influence. German became the language of administration, education, and the church, creating an environment in which it was omnipresent and speaking Danish offered no advantages. Due to top-down pressure, many Danish South Schleswigers gradually adopted German in their daily lives. This linguistic shift led to the extinction of the two Danish South Schleswig dialects, Fjoldemål and Angeldanish – first in favour of Low German, and later High German. Over time, these now Low German-speaking South Schleswigers became fully Germanized, came to identify with the German question, and sought to separate Schleswig, along with Holstein, from Denmark entirely. Therefore, by the outbreak of the war, Schleswig was divided: a Danish-speaking North and a Low German-speaking South, while Holstein and Lauenburg were entirely ethnically German.

Landed nobility or landed aristocracy is a category of nobility in the history of various countries, for which landownership was part of their noble privileges. The landed nobility show noblesse oblige, they have duty to fulfill their social responsibility. Their character depends on the country.

• The notion of landed gentry in the United Kingdom and Ireland varied over time.
• In Russian Empire landed nobles were called pomeshchiks, with the term literally translated as "estate owner".
• Junker is the landed nobility class of Prussia and eastern Germany.
• Landadel were the landed nobility of the Holy Roman Empire.
• In Poland, szlachta were usually landowners, with magnates being the class of the wealthiest szlachta. Middle and smaller landed szlachta was called ziemiaństwo/ziemianie (from the word ziemia, land), usually translated as landed gentry.
• In some places, e.g., in Low Countries before Spanish rule, urban nobility with landed estates was distinct from landed nobility. In general, relations between landed nobility and towns was very complex in Europe.