Cracroft's Peerage - Introduction to peerage reference works

For almost 750 years, a peerage has been the highest honour that a grateful Crown could bestow on its most well-deserving subjects. From Admirals to Generals, politicians to Royal bastards, superannuated back bench MPs to Nobel Prize winners, agrarian experimenters to social reformers, those ennobled have been the makers of history in the British Isles. While modern sociologists might condemn the whole concept of peerage as being an abuse of privilege and class, it is impossible to study the history and heritage of the British Isles without taking into consideration the contribution, for good or for bad, of this remarkable group of people. The Crown has created over 2,560 hereditary peerages since the mid-13th century, of which 828 still survive. There have also been about 1,130 life peerages created in the last one hundred and thirty years, of which 595 are currently sitting in the House of Lords.

Cracroft's Peerage is the latest in a long and distinguished line of peerage reference works stretching back to Selden's Titles of Honour, first published in 1614. Some of these, such as Crawford's Peerage of Scotland in 1716 or Lodge's Peerage of Ireland in 1754, have restricted themselves to specific parts of the peerage, whilst others, such as Cockayne's The Complete Peerage, first published in 1887, have attempted to cover all peerages created in any of the three Kingdoms.

Perhaps the most famous are those peerage works still published under the name of John Debrett and Sir Bernard Burke. Although Debrett's Peerage appeared frequently from 1802 under the editorship of John Debrett and his successors, it only became an annual publication in 1864. This magnificent publishing record ceased in 1971 and since 1980 it has only appeared every five years. The 105th edition of Burke's Peerage was published in 1970 (with reprints in 1975, 1978 and 1980) but it was some 29 years before the 106th edition was published in 1999 by Burke's Peerage (Genealogical Books) Ltd, a subsidiary of Morris Genealogical Books SA, which had obtained the publication rights from Burke's Peerage Ltd some years before. The 107th edition was published in 2003. The publishers of Burke's Peerage also produced on an infrequent basis Burke's Landed Gentry and Burke's Landed Gentry of Ireland, the three publications combining to form an amazing and detailed record of the top levels of British society.

The three remaining published peerage works are decidedly different from each other. The Complete Peerage, republished in a 6 volume microprint version of the original 13 volumes in 1982 by Alan Sutton Publishing Ltd (with a 14th volume of addenda and corrigenda edited by Peter Hammond and published in 1998) contains "a history of the House of Lords and all its members from the earliest times" but has no information about baronets. It contains information about life peers created under the Appellate Jurisdiction Act 1876 (i.e. the Law Lords) but has no information about life peers created under the Life Peerage Act 1958 nor does it contain information about the children of the peerage holders nor any form of name index to its 14 volumes. Debrett's Peerage & Baronetage contains information about current peers and baronets but has only scant information about their predecessors and a not very helpful way of showing people in remainder (i.e. capable of inheriting) to the peerage or baronetcy. Debrett's also has no name index. Burke's Peerage, Baronetage & Knightage contains a lot of information about the ancestry and genealogies of each hereditary peer or baronet, although it makes no claim to completeness and often includes the phrase "and had further issue" when showing the children of hereditary peers or baronets. Like Debrett's, it has information on current life peers and their children and also contains some information about extinct hereditary peerages and baronetcies but only in so far as they have some connection with a current hereditary peer or baronet.