PEER (OF. per, pair. Fr. pair, peer, equal. from Lat. par, equal). A general name applied to the various members of the titled nobility of England. The peerage comprises the ranks of duke. marquis. earl. viscount. :Ind baron. The dignity of the peerage, still heredit3ry, was in early times alto territorial. Life peerages seem to have been not unknown at one time in England: but in in the case of the law lord Banat Wensleydale, the House of Lords ruled that his creation and during the term of his natural life" did not convey the privilege of a seat and a vote in their House. Women may be peeresses in their own right. either by creation or by inheritance. In France the groat vassals of the Crown were very early known as peers. while the legal fiction of a silni.egliality ww ith the King was still maintained: the title occurs under Robert I. and Louis VII.. though the earliest letters patent creating a peerage which are known are those issued by in favor of Robert II., Count of Artois. Under Philip Augustus there were six lay peers and six ecclesiastical. When three
of the lay peerages were extinguished by union with the (horn, the King created new ones, at first of the blood royal, to counterbalance the ecclesiastical peerages. The policy of Richelieu and Louis XIV. reduced the prerogatives of the peerage to a simple question of precedence, the debates over which occupy such a large part of Saint-Simon's memoirs. Their only privilege was that of sitting in the parliaments and being judged only by these high courts: At the Revo lution there were forty-nine peerages, including five princes of the blood, six spiritual peers (the same archbishops as in the Middle Ages), and thirty-eight lay peers, ranging in seniority from Uzes. 1572. to Aubigny, Choiseul, and Coigny, 1787. The peerage was then suppressed. From 1814 to 1848 a House of Peers was in existence, modeled on the English Upper House. Heredi tary succession was abolished in 1S30.