58 



The Earldom of Wiltes. 



position towards Sir Stephen Scrope as docs Mr. Simon Scrope of 

 Dauby towards Sir Stephen's elder brother Sir Roger, being directly 

 descended from him in continuous male line. Genealogists will 

 allow it to be a rare, perhaps almost an unexampled occurrence, 

 that two separate branches of the same stem should have thus con- 

 tinued in parallel male lines, son succeeding to father, for some 

 eighteen or twenty generations, through a period of nearly five 

 centuries, as has happened in the case of the Yorkshire and Wilt- 

 shire branches of the ancient family of Scrope. Our old Wiltshire 

 gossip, Aubrey, in his " Fatalities of Families " writing about the 

 year 1680, sets it down as a very remarkable circumstance that 

 "the Scropes of Castle Combe had continued there ever since the 

 time of King Richard the Second and enjoy the old land, and the 

 estate neither augmented nor diminished all this time, neither doth 

 the family spred." How much more notable he would have looked 

 upon the fact that the same family was continued in precisely the 

 same circumstances for nearly two centuries longer, while another 

 parallel branch of the same stem, the Scropes of Yorkshire, equally 

 continued through the same long period to exhibit the same re- 

 markable fatality. 



The last male representative of the former (the Castle Combe 

 line) the late Mr. William Scrope, died in 1852. The representa- 

 tive of the latter survives in the present claimant to the Earldom 

 of Wiltes. As Wiltshiremen then, we may be permitted to wish 

 him success. And the more heartily since the collateral branch of 

 his ancient race which has so long held an honourable position in 

 this county is likely before long to pass away altogether from 

 amongst us. 



