Page:The Complete Peerage Ed 2 Vol 1.djvu/18

 viii COMPLETE PEERAGE one needful, extinctions, creations, promotions and successions, involving no small alteration. As regards the plan or scope of the work very little change has been made, and none at all except after confer- PLAN OF ence with the former Editor. Baronies by tenure THE WORK not being Peerage dignities, and having only been dealt with in the first edition under the letter "A", have, except in one or two cases such as Abergavenny and Berkeley, disappeared altogether. As G. E. C. wrote, when de- ciding to discontinue them, " The reproduction of such accounts without accurate supervision (which the Editor has neither the will nor the capacity to bestow) does more harm than good." The heirs apparent of living Peers, who come within its scope, are set out in the body of the work in all cases, and not merely, as in the previous edition, when they enjoyed a courtesy title. The longer notes have been removed to appendices, because in some cases they so much reduced the text on a page as to interfere with its continuous and convenient examination. Where notes have been added which did not appear in the first edition, the present Editor has affixed his initials; where notes which did so appear have been altered or modified, the Editor has sometimes attached his initials and sometimes not, being conscious that which- ever course he elected to pursue he must lay himself open to one of two charges, that of saddling G. E. C. with opinions for which he is not responsible, or that of claiming credit for remarks which are in truth due to another. In those parts of the book which deal with the medieval period an attempt has been made to describe people by the Christian names and Surnames which they may be supposed to have borne and by which they were known to their contemporaries, and not by the charter Latin equivalents or (even less suitably) by anglicized variants of the Latin, as has been the custom in all Peer- ages since the time of Dugdale. As this matter will be found fully discussed in vol. iii, Appendix C, it is not necessary to dilate further on it here. The brackets which appear round the Surnames of Peers are not meant to support the foolish modern phantasy that peers have no Surnames, but are merely inserted for convenience, with a view to indicating where the Christian names end and the Surnames begin. The text is confined to giving, concisely and precisely so far