Zombie thread, but I respectfully request the mods keep it open–I’ve had a few other questions in the back of my mind that I may decide to ask in this thread.
Tripler
Thanks!
This thread’s revival does give me the opportunity to nitpick that post - Michael Ancram was never a member of the House of Lords. He did inherit the title Marquess of Lothian, for what it’s worth, but only after hereditary peerages had been abolished (that is, hereditary membership of the House of Lords).
Tripler writes:
> 2.A. Forgive me–I assume ‘peerage’ equates to “pecking order in nobility”. I
> know nothing of nobility other than my own applications of military knowledge
> to a family hereditary: I know a baron is lowest, earl is next, duke is next
> highest . . . and there on forth. . . (my ignorance ain’t in question).
Not quite. The order is as follows:
Baron < Viscount < Earl < Marquess < Duke
All of these are lords.
Not just any “title.” A peerage: Barony, viscountcy, earldom, marquisdom, or dukedom.
Peers are only those five listed above. Knights and baronets (hereditary knights) are not peers.
It used to be that merely being a peer would get you into the House of Lords. Since the reform mentioned by several posters you either have to be (1) a life peer (a non-hereditary peerage), or (2) a hereditary peer elected by your fellow hereditary peers to fill one of the limited number of seats allocated to them.
So, in a slight hijack from my OP: I take the above with the order of peerage (with a little liberty for cause)
(Lowest) Common peasant/Average Joe > Baron > Viscount > Earl > Marquess > Duke > King (Highest).
. . . as in Barons ‘report’ or are granted title by Viscounts, who are granted titles by Earls, etc.? I’m a little tainted by my military experience, assuming that nobles ‘report’ to their higher ups. And are these titles associated with any particular size of land or population? Such as, a Baron is baron of a township and 1,000 commoners, while an Earl is the leader of a county (or “shire”) with several Viscounts underneath him with 10,000 folks each?
Now, as I understood the ‘old days’, military commissions for the Royal Army were bought and sold to those that could raise the money. Are peerage titles the same way, or are they usually hereditary?
And now the kicker: In the House of Lords, does that buy/sell peerage or hereditary peerage lend to a “Good ol’ Boys” network? I would think a hereditary-based peerage system would keep a static network of politicians in place, while a buy/sell system would, in theory keep a more fluid sytem?
Does it really matter at all, or is a peer a peer a peer? [Sub]Note to self: depending on the answer of buy/sell or heredity, I ought to ask how that’s influenced the politics of the House of Lords and the Parliament at large–does the House of Commons have checks and balances to keep the Lords-a-leaping?[/sub]
Tripler
I’m a Baron. But I won’t tell you how.
Tripler,
All peers derive their title from the Crown whether Duke, Earl, or Baron - a peer can’t create another peer. Even when Duke and Earls etc actually exercised power there was no fixed rule about their respective power or wealth and certainly no fixed hierarchy with a Baron reporting to an Earl who reported to a Duke.
These days very few hereditry peerages are created instead people can be honoured with a “Life Peerage” as Baron So and So of Wherever (referred to as Lord So and So). Again these honours come from the Queen but - as with so many things - they are mostly on the advice of the Prime Minister. These Life Peers have the right to sit in the Hose of Lords and scrutinise, amend, and delay legislation but they can’t stop legislation going through indefinately if the Commons is in favour of it.
These Life Peers will be former members of the Commons (from all parties - the leader of each party can nominate their own people), former senior officers from the forces and the police, ex civil servants, heads of various learned bodies (Doctors, scientists etc), business figures, people from the arts, and a very few nominated by the public.
You ask about buying peerages - that is a live issue. It is crimminal offense to sell honours but there have been recent cases where business men who have been nominated have turned out to have made large donations or loans to the nominating political party. Ended up with Tony Blair and others being questioned by the police but no prosecutions.
If you want to include all titles it’s; Knight, Baronet, Baron, Viscount, Earl, Marquess, Duke, and Prince. Knighthoods and baronetcies have never been considered peerages because they never confered the right to sit in the House of Lords. A baronetcy is a hereditary knighthood (eg when Sir John Doe dies his eldest legitimate son becomes Sir Richard Doe). A female knight would be known as Dame Jane Doe, but Sir John’s wife would be known as Lady Doe. Barons, Viscounts, Earls, and Marquesses are usually known simply as Lord X, but Dukes are always known as the Duke of X. “Prince of Wales” is sometimes considered a peerage title, but it’s not actually hereditary (granted most holders eventually become kings themselves. A wife automatically take the female form of all her husband’s titles, but she can (with royal permission) use one of his lesser titles. Take Prince Charles’s wife Camilla. By law she is the Princess of Wales everybit as much as Diana was, but she chooses to style herself Duchess of Cornwall (Charles is duke) to distance herself from Diana.
A more full range would be the following:
Commoner without title < Companion of [some order] < Knight Companion of [some order] < Knight Grand Cross of [some order] < Knight Bachelor < Baronet < Life Baron < Hereditary Baron < Viscount < Earl < Marquess < Duke < Member of the Royal Family
There are a number of orders. There are levels within each of them. There are knights who are not in orders and are thus knights bachelor. I’ve still probably got this mixed up, so will some Brit correct me on this?
Nobody except the monarch (i.e., the Queen at the moment) can give anybody a title. (The monarch is advised by the Prime Minister about who should be given a title.) There is no hierarchy of control within the titles. No knight reports to a Baronet who reports to a Baron, etc. It should be mentioned that very few Brits care about any of this. The number of people with titles isn’t very large anyway, and it’s unlikely that you would ever meet anyone with one of these titles if you visit the U.K. In my three years living in the U.K. from 1987 to 1990, I only met one person who years later became a Companion of the Bath (one of the orders), and I knew a lot of intelligent, successful people during my time in the U.K.
Couple of things: the distinction in rank among noblemen in the U.K. (e.g., viscount vs. marquess) is purely one of precedence and courtesy; the ranks have no particular meaning other than relative precedence. In the old days on the Continent, it was otherwise: a County was ruled over by a Count (=British Earl), a Duchy by a Duke. A Viscount was the count’s backup guy, in charge locally when the Count was off campaigning or at court with the King. Barons were at the bottom, lords of local manors. And a few of the top-line Counts were either Counts Palatine, i.e., with a palace. or Count of a March, a borderland. In German, “Count of a March”, or March-Count, became Mark-Graf, or Margrave, leading to the title Marquess or Marquis. The Counts of the Rhineland were Counts Palatine, i.e. Pfalzgrafs. The lands around Brandenburg were part of two Marks, leading to them becoming Margraves (before they became Kings of Prussia, a long story).
But all this intricate infeudation of land holding did not apply to England after the Wars of the Roses, and only in a very limited way before that. Scotland’s history w/r/t noble titles is a little more complex, and I’m not clear on the details, so I’ll omit that. As for Wales nad Ireland, don’t ask. English lords, some accepted after time and some bitterly resented even after centuries, were superimposed in place of the native royalty and nobility.
Final note: You’d think with all this that Knights would be simple. Wrong!! Some knights are knights bachelor, having nothing to do with their marital state but meaning that they hold their knighthood singly, and not as part of an order of knights. Then there’s well over a dozen orders of knighthood, of differing levels of prestige. The top two are the Orders of the Garter and of the Thistle, the latter exclusively for Scots (actual or honorary, for service to Scotland). Next are the Bath and Sts. Michael and George, and so on down to the Order of the British Empire. which is about as exclusive as Rotary Clubs (and has pretty much the same admission requirement). Most of the orders from the Bath on down have three or five levels of membership; when the full five are present, they are usually Member, Companion, Officer or Knight, Knight Commander, and Knight Grand Cross. in ascending rank. The bottom two don’t even entitle you to a “Sir” before your name.
Just to confuse the issue, there are in addition to baronets (style is “Sir Eustace Fussy, Bart.”) three Irish knighthood from before independence which are hereditary.
Change the order I gave above to the following:
Commoner without title < Member of [some order] < Companion of [some order] < Knight of [some order] < Knight Commander of [some order] < Knight Grand Cross of [some order] < Knight Bachelor < Baronet < Life Baron < Hereditary Baron < Viscount < Earl < Marquess < Duke < Member of the Royal Family
I still probably don’t have it right.
Just to confuse things even more the Archbishops of Canterbury and York are both peers by virtue of office as are 24 ordinary bishops. I think retiring archbishops are subsequently made life peers too. The UK’s highest judges are know as “Law Lords” and sit in the House of Lords (this is set to change). Oh and not only are there seperate orders of precedence for England (& Wales), Scotland, and Nothern Ireland, there seperate orders for men and women (the sovereign is at the top of both). Wives derive precedence from their husbands, but husbands can’t derive precedence from their wives. Hereditary peerages aren’t confered any longer except for members of the royal familty. Occasionaly when a male commoner marries a princess he’s created an earl. Princess Margaret’s husband was, but neither of Anne’s husbands recieved any title (as a result her children are Mr Peter Phillips and Miss Zara Phillips, not Lord Peter and Lady Zara).
No, these titles are nothing like ranks. They all “report” directly to the monarch. Even in feudal days, any individual baron might have more land, money, arms, or influence than a particular earl or duke. The specific title had to do with the degree of favor that the monarch wanted to communicate. Even then, anything higher than a baron was exceedingly rare.
Each peerage is independent. A duchy isn’t made up of marches nor a county made up of baronies. And an earl isn’t in charge of a certain number of viscounts who each are reported to by a certain number of barons. Each peer is a “peer.”
While in some distant past a “dukedom,” for example, might be related to an actual “duchy,” that is land, and the rents paid by the tenants thereon, these days a title carries with it no land rights whatsoever. And again, the title was not related to any relative value but merely to the whim of the bestower. A duchy was not necessarily bigger than a county.
British peerages and titles cannot be sold. You might be thinking of other kinds of titles, like “lord of the manor,” but those really aren’t part of the system of titles that derive from the monarchy. They are purely private matters and carry with them no rights of the nobility.
Most hereditary peers wouldn’t consider themselves to be politicians, even when they all did have the right to sit in the House of Lords. Life peers are overwhelmingly from party ranks.
The House of Lords has very little power. Up until the Blair reforms, the lords were overwhelmingly members of the Conservative party, so a Labour government would do their best to ignore them. These days, hereditary peers no longer hold the balance of power, so I suspect that whenever a party comes to power, it will try to appoint as many life peers it can get from its own ranks. But considering the limited power of the House of Lords, this probably is not a huge consideration.
What a nice zombie thread!
IIRC, at least twice in the past, when the Lords actually had some power and the budget of the day was in jeopardy, kings have offered - on prime ministerial advice - to create enough additional lords to help the government get its budget passed. The most recent was King George V and PM Lloyd George, IIRC.