The first comprehensive study of gentry coming of age celebrations, offering insights into the social and cultural dynamics of estate communities in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Wales.

"Coming of age" celebrations were landmark events in the annals of gentry families and for local society, marking the occasion when the heir or heiress to an estate attained their majority at the age of twenty-one, with an assumption that they would eventually inherit the land together with all the privileges and responsibilities attached to its proprietorship. Hundreds of these lively dynastic occasions were celebrated in Wales from the late eighteenth through the "long" nineteenth century, involving masses of participants in an array of public festivities; they provide fascinating evidence for understanding the social and cultural dynamics of estate communities in a rapidly changing environment.

This book provides the first comprehensive study of these events, examining their development, purpose and significance. It considers the role that gentry and aristocracy played in their communities, why landed estates were an integral part of Welsh society, and how they contributed to the character and experience of place, landscape and landowner-tenant relations. Overall, it offers a reassessment of still-prevalent interpretations of an anglicised, alien and absentee landowning elite bearing no connection with or consideration for Welsh communities, culture and consciousness in the two centuries prior to the mass sale and breakup of their country houses and estates in the early-mid twentieth century.