THE SCIENCE OF GENEALOGY.
HEGEL rejected from his "Encyclopaedia of Philosophy" what he called the "quasi-sciences, which are „founded on an act of arbitrary will alone," and among these he included heraldry. But genealogy, to which heraldry is only a hand- maid, has some claim to be held a true science, with a method and principles of its own. It is history in miniature. Instead of wars and treaties we have family quarrels and marriages, the family is the unit rather than the nation, and the influence of high politics appears in its chronicles much as the move- ments of Weltpolitik show in the history of a people. An event in Russia may have a profound ultimate effect on the fortunes of a knot of gentlefolks in Devon, but the common incidents which make up their career are trivial to the austere historian's eye, and narrow in their consequences. There are, however, true and false methods in genealogy, as in more ambitious history. The same qualities of accuracy, lucidity, and imagination are needed, though the scale be smaller. The old type of genealogist was, as a rule, the paid back of some noble family, and his business was not to ascertain the truth, but to flatter the vanity of his patrons. He accepted family tradition—that least veracious of oracles— as his unquestioned foundation, and built out of its findings and the results of a cursory search in the muniment-room an imposing structure, most satisfying to family pride. Some later antiquary may have kicked away the foundations; but it had become a point of honour with the family to maintain the legend of its past intact, and, since it was no one's interest so much as theirs to make inqury, the matter remained undecided. Demand creates supply, and the noble lord who coveted a Norman ancestor found ready helpers. The Heralds' College in the past was far from strict in its interpre- tation of its duties. Mr. John Warren, ex-club-waiter from St. James's Street, had no difficulty, when he became Lord Fitz-Warene, in getting an official pedigree from the old Barons of that name. There were plenty of booksellers' hacks who would find a lordly descent for any one who would pay for it. A recent Scottish Lyon-King-at-Arms once published a witty little book called "The Gentle Art of Pedigree-Making," in which he analysed one famous example. It was well, if possible, to begin with Tacitus, and claim one of his British chiefs as the first ancestor. The dark ages before 1100 gave excellent scope for an inventive genius. After that you simply went through the pedigrees of the more famous houses, and whenever an unmarried daughter appeared you claimed her for your client. The result was that Mr. Peter Smith, who had made a
fortune in the East and bought a country seat, was surprised and delighted to find that he had the blood of Howards and Percys in his veins, and he gladly paid his hundred guineas for so unexpected a windfall.
But the new Muse of genealogical history is an austere lady and wholly intolerant of humbug. Mr. J. H: Round is her best-known votary, and in Mr. Oswald Barron's "Northampton- shire Families," one of the " Victoria County Histories" series -(London : A. Constable and Co., E5 5s. net), we have an admirable specimen of the true rigour of the game. He points out in his introduction that the revival of genealogical studies springs from the Romantic movement, which created the desire to know more intimately the life of our forefathers. He wishes, therefore, to retain the old view of the noblesse as those long- descended and long-settled. This is the Continental view, and in a German Stammbuch our noble houses and our humble but ancient squirarchy would enter by a common portal It is the English view that the ownership of land is roughly the test of family. An English genealogical history must, there- fore, be a history of landed families. Armorial bearings, as Mr. Barron rightly argues, are no true test. They are at best an accident, and not a proof of nobility. The method of recording arms has never been above suspicion, and, however strict our modern practice, it is only a locking of the stable- door when the steed has been stolen. "Were we indeed to set up the possession of rightfully borne arms as a condition for inclusion in our volumes, we should bar the door to some of the greatest names in England, for even in high places it is possible to discover shields of arms borne under official direc- tion which when set beside the true genealogy of their bearers show themselves as false assumptions." Mr. Barron's con- ditions of inclusion are two. He asks, first, that the family be " landed,"—th at is, the possessor of a sufficiently important free- hold domain. This in a volume of a "County History" series is legitimate enough, though there are several ancient families, notably in Scotland, who have long been landless. In the second place, he asks for length of tenure. An estate must have been enjoyed by an ancestry in the male line before the accession of George III. on October 25th, 1760. The date seems to us wisely chosen. Mr. Evelyn Shirley took for his limit the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII., which would have included scarcely more than from two to three hundred noble families. But the accession of George III. fairly represents the beginning of modern England, when new men and new types of wealth began to fill the shires. The man whose forefathers had a landed estate in 1760 may fairly claim nobility by virtue of kinship with an older world.
Scientific genealogy lops off many interesting legends, and reduces Norman ancestry to narrow limits. "Simple faith "is no doubt better than "Norman blood," but in most cases the one is required if we are to believe in the other. We hear no longer of descents from Hapsburgs and Emperors of Byzantium. The new method is rigorous in its demand for proof, and family tradition is winnowed with an unsparing fan. But if it drives away romance in one form, it brings it back in another. We are shown scions of the most ancient families embarking in all manner of trades without loss of caste. The long-descended squire of earlier days had no paltry snobbery. "His younger sons, as our genealogies will show, followed honest trades without shame, his brother the London merchant or linen-draper visited him, all unknowing that commerce was a grease-spot on the pedigree. Squire Poyntz of Midgham might tell the generations of his ancient Norman stock un- disturbed by the fact that as the son of a London undertaker and upholsterer he was born over the shop in Corn-hill, an origin which the early nineteenth century would have made matter for giggling whispers." It was Disraeli's De Warenes and Be Mowbrays, themselves of base birth, who -fostered that vulgar prejudice against trade which was so wholly against the English tradition. The new method, too, shows us the life of the past, not as an affair of crusades and tourneys, but in all its intimate and homely detail. No man, however remote his interest in pedigrees, can read the narratives of the fortunes of the Northamptonshire houses without finding much of the charm of a romance. The noble families of the shire, the Cecile of Exeter, the Graf tons, the Lilfords, the West- mm-lands, are generally newcomers ; but the Spencers are a fine instance of a local house which began in the fifteenth century as graziers, at the time when fortunes were made out
of sheep. They gave to English history that notable trimmer, Lord Sunderland ; the beautiful G-eorgiana, Duchess of Devon- shire ; and Lord Althorp, the best beloved of Early Victorian statesmen. The great house of Cecil owns as its ancestor one David Cecil of Stamford, a yeoman who came out of Wales, and married a fortune. Mr. Barron takes all the glamour from Tennyson's idyll of the Lord of Burghley,— and such losses are the price we must pay for the new genealogy. But the great interest of the shire is not in the titled houses, but in the plain landed gentry, the 'shams of Lamport, the Palmers of Carlton, the Knightleys of Fawsley, and the Wakes,—but especially the Wakes. The Palmers since the beginning of the fifteenth century have held their seat continuously in the male line. The Knightleys are among the oldest of houses, for a year after Agin- court they appear at Fawsley, and can be traced still further back to a Staffordshire house who held the seat from which they take their name in 1166. With the Wakes we find that thing so common in novels and so rare in life, an undoubted Norman descent. The " Hereward ancestry, as Mr. Round has shown, is a myth, but the present holders of the name can count twenty-seven generations back to the Norman Geoffrey Wake, whose son founded the Abbey of Longues, in Calvados. The main line was broken when the old inheritance of Liddell and Bourne was carried from the name by the marriage of a daughter with a son of Richard II., and it is possible that, as Mr. Barron suggests, the "heir-male of Wake may be living to-day among Lincolnshire plough- men." The new genealogy, it will be observed, is a levelling instrument, for while it casts down pretentious pedigrees, it suggests possibilities of lordly descent for the unregarded commoner.
Previous page
