Eastern Norwegian patriciate

The Norwegian patriciate (in Norwegian borgerskap or patrisiat) was a social class in Norway from the 17th century until the modern age; it is typically considered to have ended sometime during the 19th or early 20th century as a distinct class. 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. Thus it corresponds to term patriciate in its modern, broad generic sense in English. The patricians did not constitute a legally defined class as such, although its constituent groups, the civil servants and the burghers held various legal privileges, with the clergy de jure forming one of the two privileged estates of the realm until 1814.

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 "" and by other names such as "the thousand academic families," as it was called by Jens Arup Seip with reference to the 19th century. The Norwegian term borgerskap thus largely corresponds to the English term patriciate in its modern, broad, generic sense, which vaguely refers to prominent families which did not belong to the nobility, typically members of the bourgeoisie and elite professions, and usually before the 20th century.

In Norwegian, the native term patrisiat (patriciat in older spelling) was used at least from the 19th century, based on a Danish and continental model. In Denmark the term patriciat denotes both the non-noble bourgeoisie and the non-noble class of higher civil servants, lawyers and members of other elite professions, especially before around 1900, as seen e.g. in the series Danske Patriciske Slægter (later Patriciske Slægter and Danske patricierslægter), which was published in six volumes between 1891 and 1979. In Denmark usage of the term patrician is typically restricted to families that belonged to this class no later than around 1800.

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