BARONAGE. This term is used, not so much to describe the collective body of the barons in the restricted sense which now belongs to the word as siguifyin& a component part of the hereditary nobility of England, but the whole of that nobi lity taken collectively, without regard to the distinction of dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons, all of whom form what is now sometimes called the baronage.
In this sense the term is used in the title of one of the most important works in the whole range of English historical literature, for the sake of giving a short notice of which, we have introduced an article under this word. We allude to the' Baronage of England,' by SirWilliain Dugdale, who was the Norroy King at Arms, and one of the last survivors of one of those eminent antiquarian scholars who, in the seventeenth century, raised so high the reputation of England for that particular species of learning.
Sir William Dugdale was the author of many other works, but his history of the baronage of England is the one to which reference is more frequently made; and there is this peculiarity belonging to his labours, that the' Baronage' is quoted by all subsequent writers as a book of the highest authority; and it has, in fact, proved a great reservoir of information concerning the families who, from the beginning, have formed the baronage o.. England, from which all later wrihos have drawn freely.
The first volume was published it 1675 ; the second and third, which form together a volume not so large as the first, in 1676. The work professes to contain an account of all the families who had been at any period barons by tenure, barons by writ of summons, or barons by patent, together with all other families who had enjoyed titles of higher dignity, beginning with the earl of the Saxon times.
But Sir William Dugdale has collected from the chronicles, from the chartula ries of religious houses, with which he became acquainted while preparing his great work on the history of the monas teries, from the rolls of parliament, in his time only to be perused in manu script, and from the public records, which he could consult only in the public repo sitories, or in the extracts made from them by his fellow-labourers in historical research, and finally from the wills in the various ecclesiastical offices throughout the kingdom, the particulars of the lives of the most eminent men cf our nation.
Not the least merit of the work is the careful reference to authorities. One pas sage in the preface to the Baronage con tains a striking truth: "As the historical discourse will afford at a distance some, though but dim, prospect of the magni ficence and grandeur wherein the most ancient and noble flimilies of England did heretofore live, so will it briefly ma nifest hbw short, uncertain, and transient earthly greatness is ; for of no less than two hundred and seventy in number, touching which this first volume doth take notice, there will hardly be found above eight which do to this day con tinue ; and of those not any whose estates, compared with what their ances tors enjoyed, are not a little diminished ; nor of that number, I mean two hundred and seventy, above twenty-four who are by any younger male branch descended from them, for aught I can discover."