Old family; or, The Setons of Scotland and America

I 593] PEERAGE FAMILIES. 49
known were incident to the tenure of land held immediately
from the Crown, and every tenant in chief by knight's ser-
vice was an honorary or parliamentary baron by reason of
his tenure, but yet did not always receive a Writ of Sum-
mons to attend. With the gradual decay of Feudalism and
the concentration of power in the Crown, certain rules of
procedure became established by legislative enactment with
the royal assent; and the higher order of the Nobility was dis-
tinguished from the lower one, by having conferred upon its
members an hereditary right to be summoned and to sit and
vote irrespective of feudal tenure or even of the possession of
any land at all. They then formed a separate chamber in
Parliament, which constituted the Peerage, or House of Lords.
Thus certain baronial families became by favor of the sover-
eign or other accidental circumstance peerage families, while
many others of an origin equally good never attained to the
peerage, although their ancestors sat in what were then, as
now, called parliaments ; and their descendants are only Com-
moners. Hence the absurdity of speaking of an ancient and
feudal family as having been ennobled, when the proper expres-
sion would be " raised to the peerage." In a manuscript of
the British Museum, Sir William Seton is styled " Wilhelmus
primus Dns. Seton," and several other documents confirm
the title to him. His descendant refused an earldom in the
sixteenth century, because he preferred the distinction of
being the Premier Baron of Scotland. The precise date of
the creation is unknown, but it is reasonably presumed to
have been some time before 1393. Lord Seton married
Catharine, daughter of Sir William St. Clair of Herdmans-
ton, a great house at that time. By her he had two sons and
six daughters. The eldest son, John, succeeded his father,
while the second son, Alexander, married, in 1408, Eliza-
beth, daughter and heiress of Sir Adam Gordon by his wife
Elizabeth, daughter of Sir William Keith, and founded a fam-
4