an Entity references as follows:
The Storm over the gentry was a major historiographical debate among scholars that took place in the 1940s and 1950s regarding the role of the gentry in causing the English Civil War of the 17th century. (The British gentry was the rich landowners who were not members of the aristocracy.) Economic historian R.H. Tawney had suggested in 1941 that there was a major economic crisis for the nobility in the 16th and 17th centuries and that the rapidly-rising gentry class was demanding a share of power. When the aristocracy resisted, Tawney argued, the gentry launched the civil war.