Norwegian patriciate

Members of the patriciate of Skien shortly after the Napoleonic Wars. To the right Henrik Ibsen's mother Marichen Altenburg; also seen are her parents, ship-owner Johan Andreas Altenburg and Hedevig Christine née Paus, and her cousin Henrik Johan Paus

The Patriciate of Norway was a social class, referred to as patricians, in Norway, from the 17th century until around 1830–1840. While not a legally defined class as such (although the burghership existed as a legally privileged group in Norway), the term was used by contemporaries and is used by historians to denote the leading mercantile families. The patriciate was a small group of families, especially in the cities of Eastern Norway, and many of them based their wealth on timber trade and shipping. Together with the higher civil servants and clergy and the small number of (mostly Danish) noble families, the patricians constituted the leading class of Norway. A number of the patrician families were themselves raised to the Dano-Norwegian nobility in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The patriciate is often referred to by city, for, for example as the Christiania patriciate, the Skien patriciate and so forth. These were usually small circles of related families who played a dominant role in the cities and their surrounding areas

In a letter to Georg Brandes from 1882, playwright Henrik Ibsen gave an example of patrician families dominating his native Skien when he grew up there, mentioning the families Paus, Plesner, von der Lippe, Cappelen and Blom. The families Aall and Collett were also considered part of the patriciate, as were the families Løvenskiold (ennobled in 1739), Anker (ennobled in 1778) and Treschow (ennobled in 1812).

Following the Napoleonic Wars, many of the patrician families struggled financially, and a new upper middle class emerged.