Page:The Complete Peerage Ed 2 Vol 2.djvu/618

 6o2 APPENDIX C the coat armour is described, a knowledge of it would often come in handy. It is, however, devoutly to be wished for the purposes of identification, that the writers of the Edwardian period had had sufficient prophetic instinct to realise that the gentry of their time who were summoned to Parliament by writ, would hundreds of years after their death be by action, not of the Crown but of the House of Lords, retrospectively created hereditary Peers with a limitation of the amplest character. As it is they almost invariably describe themselves and are described by their contemporaries as what they really were, viz. Bannerets or Knights Bachelor.