EPONYMOUS FAMILIES o DORSET. iii 



assessor; and, in a corresponding manner, it was incumbent 

 upon the Greater Barons to attend the Parliament or great 

 Court Baron of the Realm, as one of the King's Peers, in 

 obedience to a " Writ of Summons." 



As time went on, and the attendance on the King in Parlia- 

 ment came to be regarded as a valued privilege rather than a 

 troublesome necessity, the Writ of Summons formed the 

 touchstone by which the claims of an aspirant to the dignity 

 of a peerage were tested. To what Parliament was his ancestor, 

 or, it might be, his wife's ancestor, summoned, and in relation 

 to what Barony ? 



By the transmission of these feudal relations through the 

 female line, the title became the permanent factor, whereas the 

 family name was subject to frequent changes, whenever the 

 heiress of the fief married into another family. Thus the title 

 and fief of St. John of Basing, after being held by St. Johns and 

 Poynings, either passed out of existence under the family name 

 of Browne, or, more probably, is still in abeyance among 

 possible claimants belonging to collateral branches ; of whom 

 perhaps the descendants, if any, of the Dorset Bonvils might 

 have a slightly superior claim. 



In this connection it should perhaps be noted that of the vast 

 number of our countrymen and women who believe themselves 

 descended in the male line from companions of the Conqueror, 

 possibly one in a thousand may have grounds for that belief, 

 and perhaps one in a million may be able to prove the fact. 

 On the other hand, we may all lay this flattering unction to 

 our souls that the ancestors of each member of this gather- 

 ing, if in England at the time, must have been present in some 

 numbers at the battle of Hastings, as will become obvious from 

 the following brief calculation : 



Each individual having two parents, four grandparents, eight 

 great-grandparents, and an ancestry increasing in the same 

 ratio with each generation, it is clear, on allowing the usual 

 thirty years to a generation (a sufficiently liberal allowance for 

 that stage of imperfect civilisation), that the number of the male 



