Page:The Complete Peerage Ed 2 Vol 4.djvu/684

 666 APPENDIX H the elder of her "antenatio" there is nothing to show on what ground the younger sister was ignored in the disposal of the Mandeville fief.(*) Here we see how little any rules of law prevailed against the will of a King who could be bribed to divert the succession from the person who, in the King's own charter, is stated to have an hereditary right to succeed. Again, the elder sister got not only the caput baronia, but the whole of the estates, which, as we understand the law of the time, was much more than her due. This same earldom affords evidence of the fact that hereditary succession to the dignity of an earl was not always in itself sufficient at that time to invest the heir with the dignity without ceremonial recogni- tion by the Sovereign, which was by way of girding with the sword of the county. Geoffrey htz Piers was so girded by John at his coronation. He died in 12 13, but his son and heir, Geoffrey de Mandeville, did not at once succeed as Earl of Essex. In 12 14 Geoffrey de Say, above mentioned, claimed of this Geoffrey de Mandeville the manor and honour of Pleshy, which had belonged to William de Mandeville, Earl of Essex {d. 1189). Geoffrey de Mandeville replied that he, who was not earl, had not been girded with the sword, and had not received the third penny. C") The girding of an earl with the sword of the county from which he took the name of his dignity, and of giving him the third penny of its pleas, were both survivals of the Saxon earl's official status; but the ceremony of girding, which survived for many years, lost some of its significance in the next century, when in 1328 Roger de Mortimer was created Earl of March, a name, as Courthope remarks, "derived neither from county nor city."() In order to bring out the facts regarding earldoms the male issue to which failed, a series of chart pedigrees has been prepared showing the descent of the earldoms existing at Stephen's accession and of those created by him and the Empress Maud.() These number in all twenty- three. The earldoms of Bedford, Cornwall, Norfolk, Oxford, Salisbury, Somerset, and York do not require charts, and the facts are therefore set out in the following brief summaries: Bedford. — Hugh de Beaumont was cr. Earl of Bedford about 1138. In the course of a few years he had lost the estates of the earldom and was no longer recognised as Earl. The next creation of an (») Ancient Charters, edited by J. H. Round, Pipe Roll Soc, 1888. ('') Abhreviatio Placltorum, Mich, and Hil. 15 John, rot. 21 dorso. Pike, in his Constitutional History of the House of Lords, p. 6 1, has confused William de Mandeville, 3rd Earl of Essex, who d. s.p., 1 189, with Geoffrey de Mandeville, 1st Earl, who d. 1 144. (■=) Historic Peerage of England, by Sir Harris Nicolas, edit, by William Courthope, 1857, P- ''• ^^ should be observed, however, that his title was not unmeaning, for he was Earl of " the March," i.e. the Welsh border. C^) The charts do not profess to show the complete genealogies of the families represented on them.