Page:The Complete Peerage Ed 2 Vol 4.djvu/669

 65 APPENDIX HO EARLDOMS AND BARONIES IN HISTORY AND IN LAW, AND THE DOCTRINE OF ABEYANCE TENURE BY BARONY The only title of honour which forms a link between the peerao;e of to-day and the nobility of the time of Edward the Confessor is that of Earl, and this is also the only name of personal dignity known for a long time after the Conquest. Those feudal tenants under the Normans who were collectively called Barons were not peers in our sense of the word, and they did not bear the hereditary title of Baron until much later than modern legal decisions would lead us to suppose. Their right to the honours with which a credulous posterity has endowed them forms the subject of another AppendiXjC") but it will be necessary to say something here also of the status of barons from the 1 2th to the 15th century. These two titles of Earl and Baron are the only ones of great antiquity; Duke, Marquess, and Viscount are of later creation, derive their origin differently, and do not concern us in this paper. Materials are lacking for a reconstruction in any detail of the life of the community before the Conquest. Charters, laws, poems, and chronicles leave so much unsaid that we get only vague outlines of Saxon institutions. ('^) (*) Contributed by H. Arthur Doubleday. The main object of this Appendix is to give a short account of ancient earldoms and of the development of barony by writ, with a view to throwing some Hght on the fitness of the apph'cation of the doctrine of abeyance to these dignities. The writer is indebted to W. Pak-y Baildon, Sir Henry Maxwell-Lyte, K.C.B., Deputy Keeper of the Public Records, Professor T. F. Tout, and G. W. Watson, for much helpful criticism and for valuable sugges- tions. He also has to thank the Librarian and other officers of the House of Lords for many courtesies. Although the references in footnotes indicate to some extent the writer's obligations to the works of J. H. Round, he desires to make special acknowledgment of the debt which he owes to that author's incomparable studies in English institutional history and the peerage. (■>) Appendix A in vol. xii of this work. (') An excellent work, Studies on Anglo-Saxon Institutions, 1905, by H. .M. Chadwick, is one of the most recent contributions to this subject.