Page:The Complete Peerage Ed 2 Vol 1.djvu/37

 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION xxvii accurate account than any hitherto published is greatly to be wished), they are not included, save in two or three cases, such, more especially, as Abergavenny, Berkeley, i^c, where it has been contended that the tenure per Baroniam constituted the actual peerage. Baronies by Tenure are a class of dignities which are best dealt with by themselves, and the account ot them given in Nicohu and reproduced in Courthope is, when tested by the light of the researches made during the last threescore years, very inaccurate, besides also that a vast number of such Baronies are altogether omitted in those publications. The object of the present work being not only to amplify and continue any previous account of the hereditary Peerage of England, i^c., but to insert therewith that of Scotland and Ireland, some difficulty arises in determining, with respect to these last two kingdoms, as to what in them constituted a Peerage, in the same sense as that term (mutatis mutandis) is applied to England. As TO Scotland, an accurate distinction between such Barons as may be considered Peers {i.e., the Greater Barons, who were ' Lords of Parliament') and such {i.e., the Lesser Barons) as held only a territorial Barony, is, at an early period, hardly attainable. In this work an account will be given of such Scotch Baronies only as were Lords of Pari., or which (though, in some cases, almost imperceptibly) developed afterwards into such. One of the best authorities on such a subject, the well-known John Riddell {'Scotch Peerage Lav:,' edit. 1833, p. 89, note 2) remarks that in Scotland ' we had no hereditary Lordships of Pari, till about [143 7- 1463] the reign of James II. ' [S]. R. R. Stodart, Lyon Clerk Depute, in a letter (1885) to the Editor, writes that ' It does not seem that there were Barons by tenure here [S] as in England, or rather, one might say that the Minor Barons were all Barons by tenure ; they certainly were not Lords of Pari. ' G. Burnett, Lyon, adds, in a similarly directed letter (1889), that 'the Scotch Pari., as it existed in the 14th and 15th centuries and the greater part of the i6th, was an assemblage in one Chamber of three separate orders of the Communit)-, the Prelates, Barons and Burgesses. The Earls belonged to the order of Barons. All Barons in the old sense, i.e., landholders holding their land as a Barony, had the right, or, more properly speaking, were under the obligation, to attend the meeting ot the Estates, sometimes expressed as part of the reddendum of a charter. By the less considerable landowners the obligation to be present was often held a grievous burden, and a statute of James I [S], in March 1427/8, enacted that the Small Barons should be excused from attending Pari., provided they sent two or more wise men from each Sheriffdom to represent them. Though this act, as well as a later one, was a failure as to its main object (Parliamentar}' representation) it was probably held to afford a quasi-sanction to the habitual absence of the Small Barons, with the bestowal of a new title, that oi Lord of Parliament, on the more considerable ot the order, who might regard parliamentar)' attendance as a privilege rather than a burden, contributed further to the same result. No such creations, however, existed prior to the time (i 406-37) of James I [S], who created