They effectively transferred political power from the monarchy and the privileged estates to the general body of propertied citizens.
The princely and boyar families tracing their roots to Kievan Rus had largely merged and become part of the privileged noble estate of Lithuania and Poland.
Estates-General, also called States General, French États-Généraux, in France of the pre-Revolutionary monarchy, the representative assembly of the three "estates," or orders of the realm: the clergy and nobility which were privileged minorities and a Third Estate, which represented the majority of the people.
The endowment of some privileged proprietors with extensive estates facilitated, despite continued adherence to partible succession, the growth of a class of landowners who were linked with the rulers by ties of service and provided the personnel of their administration.
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — The Bush administration has no closer friend in South America than President Álvaro Uribe, an Oxford-educated lawyer raised in the privileged world of cattle estates and elite schools.
But the area eventually devolved into what critics feared it would always be: a suburban-style shopping center unworthy of its real estate, pairing a privileged view of the Brooklyn Bridge with $10 massages and Arthur Treacher's Fish and Chips.
Rumours of an "aristocratic conspiracy" by the king and the privileged to overthrow the Third Estate led to the Great Fear of July 1789, when the peasants were nearly panic-stricken.
Great Fear, French Grande Peur, (1789) in the French Revolution, a period of panic and riot by peasants and others amid rumours of an "aristocratic conspiracy" by the king and the privileged to overthrow the Third Estate.
In place of some of the character's more hysterical monologues, for instance, his adaptation looks at exactly why Julie wants to leave the estate – and her privileged position – behind.
At 80, Lydia Blessing leads a privileged but isolated existence on the estate named for her family.
Born into a privileged family with money from real estate, Ms. Holzer married a wealthy businessman, Lenny Holzer, in 1962.
