Page:The Complete Peerage Ed 2 Vol 2.djvu/11

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME II In the; course of preparing this volume for the press the Editor had occasion to test the statements made in Dugdale's Summonses, with the result that he found that work to be not only inaccurate but quite untrustworthy. This is the more unfortunate as it is the only printed book that genealogists have on which to rely for the dates and particulars of writs of summons after the reign of Edward IV, at which point the Report on the Dignity of a Peer stops giving the lists of summonses to Parliament. On various occasions the Editor, being led to suspect Dugdale's accuracy, asked the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records to compare his statements with the original documents, and found therefrom in every case that Dugdale was wrong. In the end so many mistakes and misstatements were discovered that the Deputy Keeper thought it worth while systematically to collate Dugdale's account of the reign of Henry VIII with the dorse of the Close Rolls and the Parliamentary Pawns; it then appeared that not only has Dugdale frequently given wrong Christian names, omitted peers that were summoned, and added peers who were not summoned, but that, worst of all, he has fabricated whole lists of bogus writs which never in fact issued, adding the orthodox Latin formularies " consimilia brevia," etc., and giving them the false appearance of being reproduced from original documents. Pages have been written in the past by Nicolas, Courthope, G.E.C., and other genealogists, in the endeavour to explain why men had been summoned after their death, or why sons had been summoned in the lifetime, and instead, of their fathers, when all the time an examination of the Close Rolls or the Parliamentary Pawns would have revealed the fact that nothing of the kind had occurred, and that Dugdale had misstated the facts. The first person to establish the untrustworthiness of Dugdale was J. H. Round, as will be seen by anyone who refers to the valuable chapter on "Henry VIII and the Peers" in Peerage and Family History. Unluckily for himself the Editor had overlooked this work, and with the help of Sir Henry Maxwell Lyte had pursued his investigations independently. The result has been to confirm all J. H. Round's criticisms, and materially to enlarge the list of Dugdale's literary crimes. It can hardly be conceived that a great antiquary like Dugdale should