Page:The Complete Peerage Ed 2 Vol 1.djvu/23

 PREFACE xiii EARLY WRITS In an historic peerage the compiler is constantly confronted with the difficulty that it is impossible to reconcile the facts of history with the Law of Peerage. More especially is this the case when the question arises of how to describe men who were sum- moned to Parliament by writ before the time of Henry V. Take for example the incidental mention of, say, Ferrers of Groby ; when we find that in the most formal documents Henry IV never describes this man otherwise than William de Ferrers of Groby knight, it seems both inaccurate and anachronistic to describe him as Lord Ferrers of Groby. On the other hand, he cannot con- veniently be described otherwise in the article " Ferrers, " and it seems unreasonable to give no indication that the Sir William de Ferrers of one part of the work is the same as the Lord Ferrers of another. On the whole the best compromise in the case of a man summoned at an early date to Parliament, appears to be to refer to him when mentioned incidentally as Sir ( — ) ( — ) [Lord — ], and, when he is dealt with directly in the article which gives an account of him, to set out the dates of his writs of summons and to add " whereby he is held to have become Lord — ." To write a peerage from a purely historic standpoint would be to exclude a number of men summoned at an early date to Parliament whose descendants in some cases are now sitting in the House of Lords in virtue of those summonses. To write a peerage from a purely legal standpoint would be to produce a work demonstrably and grotesquely untrue in fact. Even in the case of a peerage written from a strictly legal standpoint, the arbitrary, conflicting, and unhistoric, decisions of the House of Lords would render it impossible for the compiler to feel any confidence that he had correctly decided as to who should, and who should not, figure in his work as peers, or that even if his list were correct at the moment of going to press it would be so six months later. -E.^., the decision on the Mowbray and Segrave Case in 1877 had the effect, not only of treating the writs of 1264 as bad, although all the men then summoned might have been (on account of the precedency of 1264 having been allowed to the baronies of Despenser and de Ros) included in former peerages, but it held the hitherto universally discredited writs of