Norwegian patriciate

Jørgen Haave defines the Norwegian patriciate as a broad collective term for the civil servants (embetsmenn) and the burghers in the cities who were often merchants or ship's captains, i.e. the non-noble upper class.

In Norwegian the term borgerskap in modern usage is usually taken to mean both members of the bourgeoisie in its oldest sense, that is to say the burghers in the cities, and the class comprising the clergy and the civil servants, also known as the "aristocracy of officials" and by other names such as "the thousand academic families," as it was called by Jens Arup Seip with reference to the 19th century.

In a Norwegian context, Jørgen Haave defines the patriciate as a broad collective term for the civil servants (embetsmenn) and the burghers in the cities who were often merchants or ship's captains, i.e. the non-noble upper class.

From the same period, the King also increasingly appointed non-nobles to state offices, and thus the bourgeoisie, typically consisting of merchants and ship's captains, and the civil servants, in many ways constituted a common social class and often intermarried.

[7] However the majority of patrician families, while affluent compared to ordinary people, were not exceedingly wealthy, and what made them stand out was more than anything their shared elite culture, social status and education.

[6] Together with the higher civil servants and clergy, but below the nobility, burghers such as merchants and ship's captains constituted the leading non-noble class in the kingdom in an era that lasted until some years after the Napoleonic Wars.

[10] The most prominent members of the old elite in the Skien area were descended from Jørgen von Ansbach, who became a major sawmill owner and timber merchant in the 16th century.