The acre-ocracy of England, a list of all owners of three thousand acres and upwards. [Entitled.] The great landowners of Great Britain and Ireland

NOTE ON ARRANGEMENT.

WHERE the letter occurs after a name, it denotes that the person to whom it is attached, or his father, is noticed in Mr. Shirley's "Noble and Gentle Men of England" as being either head of, or head of a junior branch of, a family who held land in the same county, since the time of Henry VII., in unbroken male line.

I am indebted to Mr. Shirley for having carefully gone over the present list; his book, I may say, excludes all families which did not in Henry VII.'s time hold land enough to give what we now call the position of a "county family."

Some correctors, however, demur to my omission of the S in their cases, and being no genealogist myself, and unable to take up the genealogical cudgels for Mr. Shirley, I have inserted in a condensed form their claims.

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Attached to a name means that the corrector has added or
included his woods.

3 asterisks mean a careful or minute correction, or that the
notice has been sent me as "correct" or "now correct."
2 asterisks mean that the notice has been returned me as
"fairly right," "approximately true," or "not far from the
mark," "roughly corrected," and so on, as well as in a few
cases returned without remark, implying that all was about
right; these last, however, are but few.

I asterisk points to an unsatisfactory correction, either of
acreage only (this is very common) or to a correction in
part only of the figures, or to an admission (in three cases)
that the figures were "not as far wrong as some the
corrector had seen in Domesday.'"

To many landowners' names I have added a list of their services to the Queen or the Parliament, irrespective of such local services as are the usual penalties of local greatness,ie, Shrievalties, Lord and Deputy Lieutenancies, Militia and Volunteer commands, and Justiceships of the Peace. Almost every great landowner worthy of his salt (and not a few quite unworthy) have filled one or more of these posts; had I inserted them the volume would have been far too bulky.

Where dates of succession of widows are given, these dates only refer in nine cases out of ten to the year of their widowhood.