The Invention of Pedigree

The peerage seems a near-eternal fixture of European society, but Mark Greengrass (Christendom Destroyed) argues that it was a creation of the early modern period. Dukedoms and peerages “hardly existed before 1500,” but a century or so later “titled aristocrats had mainly taken over as the means by which states admitted new families to the ranks of the highest nobility” (137).

It was an advantageous system for princes and kings: “Letters patent for a peerage involved no investment; rather the reverse, since they could be sold or turned into a reward for services rendered.” This inflated honors: “In England, the monarchy sold baronetcies and peerages in profusion in the early seventeenth century. King James I tripled the number of English knights” (138). European monarchs saw the trade in honor as an essential to stable order: “Without reward or punishment no monarchy can be preserved,” theorized Philip IV. “Now rewards may be either financial or honorific. Money we have not, so we have thought it right and necessary to remedy the fault by increasing the number of honours” (138).

But how did these new peers and dukes and baronets justify their position? Greengrass claims that “the ideology justifying rank and privilege was not service to Christendom but pedigree.” He elaborates,

“Genealogy had strong biblical legitimacy, through the patriarchs of the Old Testament to Christ himself. It was male-dominated since biblical begetting was largely from father to son. Pedigree was not confined to nobility or gentry, not even to human beings. It was individual and corporate, part of a chain of being that extended to the animal kingdom. Genealogy had immediate and practical significance . . . but it was also the key to patrimony and legitimacy. In all Europe’s customary laws, the concern was always the continuity of a lineage, even though it might be secured by various means. There were no better claims to legitimacy in this period than lineage. Ancestor-worship was a way of justifying the status quo and also a spur to be worthy of one’s forebears” (130).

Genealogy was “paraded, painted, emblemized and documented” (130). Nobles paid large sums for research that could justify their standing. “By 1650, the nobility was on the way to being a more classified and defined elite, for whom lineage constituted their right to own and to rule” (132).

One wonders what Paul, in his Galatian mood, or the writer to the Hebrews, might have said.