The Complete Peerage

The Complete Peerage, exhaustive 14-volume (in 15 books) guide to the peerage families (titled aristocracy) of the British Isles, recognized as the greatest British achievement in the field of genealogy. The first edition in eight volumes was published in London (1887–98) by George Edward Cokayne, Clarenceux King of Arms. The second edition, revised and much enlarged by a series of editors, was issued in 13 volumes from 1910 to 1959, with one final volume published in 1998 to include in the series the peerage titles created since 1938.

This huge work is “complete” in the sense that it covers all extant, extinct, and dormant peerage titles of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain, and the United Kingdom, but it confines its material only to those who held the titles and those through whom the titles passed when they died prematurely. It does not include siblings (as do, for example, the peerage directories of Burke and Debrett). Biographical details are complete regarding parentage, birth, law proceedings, awards and honours, marriages and divorces, politics and public service, and death and burial. Entries include extensive and meticulously detailed bibliographical citations, with frank and uninhibited commentaries on the activities and character of the subjects. A few families have their ancestry taken back to periods before their peerage title was awarded, but generally genealogies are restricted to those who followed the parents, and sometimes the grandparents, of the first peer.

Peerage law is a complex discipline, much muddled by the many errors perpetrated by the decisions of judges, politicians, and peers who did not understand the issues involved in the situations on which they ruled. Too often such decisions were based on intuitive guesses that ignored the indisputable facts of history. The single most important contribution to scholarship made by the authors of The Complete Peerage has been their clear exposition of these errors and the manner of their development, an exposition in which they triumphed resoundingly over, as they expressed it, “the difficulty that it is impossible to reconcile the facts of history with the Law of Peerage.”