I was doing some reading and I found out that Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron succeeded his father’s Scottish peerage. I also read about that the peerage of Scotland is a part of the peerages of the United Kingdom. However I’m still not sure was a peerage is. Is it something that is inherited? Is it associated with wealth and land ownership? I am not British but would like to have a better understanding about the peerages of the UK and to learn more about British history.
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Peerage means the hereditary system of titles (Dukes, Lords, Barons, etc.)
The UK used to be a much more structured society where the ruling class inherited their position from their fathers, and in some aspects it’s still like that (they’re still a monarchy.) However, over the centuries, the power of the peerage has dwindled down and the power of the common people has significantly grown.
The UK Parliament, who passes the laws and governs the country, is comprised of two houses – the House of Commons, who are directly elected by the citizens they represent (much like the USA’s House of Representatives,) and the House of Lords. The House of Lords consists of 784 seats, most of them serve for life, and 90 of the 784 are chosen from among the Peerage. It’s a vestige of the old system where the wealthy aristocrats got to rule the country alongside the King. Nowadays the King has no real political power, and the House of Lords has very limited political power. The true political power in the UK is in the House of Commons and its leader, the Prime Minister.
So in 2024, being in the Peerage is mostly a title. It mostly just means your ancestors were rich as hell.
To add to the other replies, peerages come from feudalism; a system of government where you have layers of nobility (with the monarch on the top), with people in each layer having obligations to serve the person above them (including providing military support), and obligations to care for the people below them. In the British Isles this developed into a fairly strict, formal system, with the monarch granting titles (and usually land – the valuable part) to people in favour, and sometimes stripping them from people who were out of favour. People in the system who did well might get promoted, with a new title created for them. Most of the titles were hereditary, with their own individual rules – based on when the title was created – for how it would be passed on (mostly eldest son).
Members of the peerage would be “upper class” or “ruling class”, and would have power (and obligations) over the common folk. The lowest level of the English peerage are barons, then viscounts, earls, marquesses and finally dukes. The UK still has a fairly entrenched class system, although the upper class (titled nobles) is much smaller and less powerful than it used to be. But essentially they used to own most of the land and money, and many of them still do.
It gets a bit more complicated because the Kingdom of England joined with the Kingdom of Scotland to form the Kingdom of Great Britain, which then joined with the Kingdom of Ireland to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Most of Ireland then left, leaving the current United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Each kingdom had its own peerage system, with its own titles and rules. Titles created before the kingdoms joined remained in their old system, but new titles created afterwards were part of combined new systems.
So the modern UK has 5 systems of peerages; England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain, and the UK.
Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron was the great great grandson of Thomas Fairfax, 1st Lord Fairfax of Cameron. The 1st Lord Fairfax was the son of a knight, Sir Thomas Fairfax, from Yorkshire in England (so already nobility, but not a peer). Fairfax was a soldier (and officer), fighting in various conflicts in the 1580s, was a Member of the English Parliament, and was knighted himself in 1591. As a reward for his service (as an MP, a soldier, and a loyal courtier to Kings James I and Charles I) he was given the title of Lord Fairfax of Cameron in Scotland. It was a title in the peerage of Scotland despite Fairfax being English, in part due to the work he did in Scotland liaising between Queen Elizabeth of England and the then King James VI of Scotland (later also King James I of England, father of King Charles I); King James had offered him a title back before he became kind of England, but Fairfax turned him down.
The Scottish peerage doesn’t have barons, instead just having Lords, so the title Lord Fairfax is equivalent to an English baron – the lowest level in the peerage.
The current Lord Fairfax is Nicholas Fairfax, 14th Lord Fairfax of Cameron, who inherited his father’s title at the age of 8, in 1964.
Peerage mean to be a Peer, an equal to the highest level of nobility. Forget what someone else said about hereditary system, that’s just not true. Some Peer are for life, but can’t pass their title, and some noble hereditary title are not peer.
Specifically for the UK a Peerage went through different period. After the Normand Conquest there were 170 Barons, which at the time was the highest feudal land tenure with specific rights, Baron was neither a title, nor was it hereditary at the time (very different from the Baron we know today), around 20-25 of those Barons had the title of Earl which was title and was hereditary. You could say that those were the Peers, but Peerage wasn’t an official concept at the time for the English. One of the responsibility of Barons was the duty to answer when summoned to the Great Councils, which later evolve into the Parliament.
13th century. In the Magna Carta they talk about Free man needed to be lawfully judged by their Peers, but it wasn’t clear who were Peers of Barons/Earls and would have a right to pass legal judgment on them. There was dispute over the usage of Peer and Peerage as a legal concept at the time. The nature of Baron also changed during that time, the first Hereditary Baron was appointed, it was becoming more of a tool for the King to appoint their allies in the struggle for power between the King and the high nobility.
14th century, by that point Peerages was an accepted concept in England and it become more and more of an hereditary seat to the Parliament which started to gain a bit more power than before. Still the people summoned at the Parliament was a mix of tenure and writs of summon.
15th century, the Parliament had gain a lot of power by that point and even some Peer by writs claimed to be hereditary. There was still some life peer, but they become more rare in the next couple of centuries until the 19th century. Life Peer went from 18 in the 17th century to 28 in the 19th century to 664 today.
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