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.
In: Other
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.
Latest Answers