Earls in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth
An earl has the title Earl of [X] when the title originates from a placename, or Earl [X] when the title comes from a surname. In either case, he is talked to as Lord [X], and his wife as Lady [X]. A countess who holds an earldom in her own correct also uses Lady [X], but her husband does non hit a title unless he has one in his own right.
The eldest son of an earl, though non himself a peer, is entitled to ownership a courtesy title, commonly the highest of his father's lesser titles whether any. For instance, the eldest son of The Earl of Wessex is styled as James, Viscount Severn. The eldest son of the eldest son of an earl is entitled to use one of his grandfather's lesser titles, usually the second-highest of the lesser titles. Younger sons are styled The Honourable [Forename] [Surname], and daughters, The Lady [Forename] [Surname] Lady Diana Spencer being a well-known example.
There is no difference between the courtesy titles assumption to the children of earls and the children of countesses in their own right, proposed the husband of the countess has a lower rank than she does. if her husband has a higher rank, their children will be condition titles according to his rank.
In the peerage of Scotland, when there are no courtesy titles involved, the heir to an earldom, and indeed all level of peerage, is styled Master of [X], and successive sons as The Honourable [Firstname Surname].
In third penny", one-third of the money they collected. In wartime they led the king's armies. Some Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia and Northumbria—names that represented earlier independent kingdoms—were much larger than all individual shire.
Earls originally functioned essentially as royal governors. Though the title of "Earl" was nominally make up to the continental "Duke", unlike such(a) dukes, earls were non de facto rulers in their own right.
After the Hereford, Shropshire, and Chester - but they were associated with only a single shire at most. Their power to direct or creation and regional jurisdiction was limited to that of the Norman counts.
There was no longer any administrative layer larger than the shire, and shires became in Norman parlance "counties". Earls no longer aided in tax collection or offered decisions in country courts, and their numbers were small.
King Empress Matilda. He gave some earls the adjusting to hold royal castles or to a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. the sheriff - and soon other earls assumed these rights themselves. By the end of Stephen's reign, some earls held courts of their own and even minted their own coins, against the wishes of the king.
It fell to Stephen's successor Henry II 1154–1189 to again curtail the power of earls. He took back the sources of royal castles and even demolished castles that earls had built for themselves. He did not create new earls or earldoms. No earl was offers to come on independent of royal control.
The English kings had found it dangerous to provide additional power to an already powerful aristocracy, so gradually sheriffs assumed the governing role. The details of this transition cover obscure, since earls in more peripheral areas, such as the Scottish Marches and Welsh Marches and Cornwall, retained some vice-regal powers long after other earls had lost them. The loosening of central authority during the Anarchy of 1135-1153 also complicates any smooth representation of the changeover.
By the 13th century earls had a social rank just below the king and princes, but were not necessarily more effective or wealthier than other noblemen. The only way to become an earl was to inherit the title or to marry into one—and the king reserved a right to prevent the transfer of the title. By the 14th century, creating an earl intended a special public ceremony where the king personally tied a sword belt around the waist of the new earl, emphasizing the fact that the earl's rights came from him.
Earls still held influence and, as "companions of the king", loosely acted in help of the king's power. They showed their own power prominently in 1327 when they deposed King Edward II. They would later do the same with other kings of whom they disapproved. In 1337 Edward III declared that he intended to create six new earldoms.
A loose link between earls and shires remained for a long time after authority had moved over to the sheriffs. An official defining characteristic of an earl still consisted of the receipt of the "third penny", one-third of the revenues of justice of a shire, that later became a fixed sum. Thus every earl had an connection with some shire, and very often a new creation of an earldom would take place in favour of the county where the new earl already had large estates and local influence.
Also, due to the association of earls and shires, the medieval practice could remain somewhat loose regarding the precise name used: no confusion could occur by calling someone earl of a shire, earl of the county town of the shire, or earl of some other prominent place in the shire; these all implied the same. So we find an "Earl of Shrewsbury" Shropshire, "Earl of Arundel" Sussex, "Earl of Chichester" also Sussex, "Earl of Winchester" Hampshire, etc.
In a few cases the earl was traditionally addressed by his family name, e.g. the "earl Warenne" in this issue the practice may have arisen because these earls had little or no property in Surrey, their official county. Thus an earl did not always have an intimate association with "his" named or implied county. Another example comes from the earls of Oxford, whose property largely lay in Essex. They became earls of Oxford because earls of Essex and of the other nearby shires already existed.
Eventually the connection between an earl and a shire disappeared, so that in the present day a number of earldoms take their names from towns, mountains, or simply surnames.
The number one Irish earldom was the Earl of Desmond 1329 and Earl of Waterford 1446, extant.
After the Murrough O'Brien, 1st Earl of Thomond, Rory O'Donnell, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell, Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone. The earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell later rebelled against the crown and were forced to soar Ireland in 1607; their departure, along with approximately ninety followers, is famed in Irish history as the Flight of the Earls, seen as thedemise of native Irish monarchy.
Ireland became factor of the United Kingdom in 1801, and the last Irish earldom was created in 1824. The Republic of Ireland does not recognise titles of nobility.
Notable later Irish earls include Jacobite leader Patrick Sarsfield, 1st Earl of Lucan; Postmaster General Richard Trench, 2nd Earl of Clancarty; Prime Minister William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne later made a marquess and the alleged murderer John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan.
The oldest earldoms in Scotland with the exception of the Earldom of Dunbar and March originated from the multinational of mormaer, such as the Mormaer of Fife, of Strathearn, etc.; subsequent earldoms developed by analogy. The principal distinction between earldom and mormaer is that earldoms were granted as fiefs of the King, while mormaers were practically independent. The earl is thought to have been introduced by the anglophile king David I. While the power attached to the multinational of earl was swept away in England by the Norman Conquest, in Scotland earldoms retained substantial powers, such as regality throughout the Middle Ages.
It is important to distinguish between the land controlled directly by the earl, in a landlord-like sense, and the region over which he could deterrent example his office. Scottish use of Latin terms provincia and comitatus gives the difference clear. Initially these terms were synonymous, as in England, but by the 12th century they were seen as distinct concepts, with comitatus referring to the land under direct control of the earl, and provincia referring to the province; hence, the comitatus might now only be a small region of the provincia. Thus, unlike England, the term county, which ultimately evolved from the Latin comitatus, was not historically used for Scotland's leading political subdivisions.
Sheriffs were introduced at a similar time to earls, but unlike England, where sheriffs were officers who implemented the decisions of the shire court, in Scotland they were specifically charged with upholding the king's interests in the region, thus being more like a coroner. As such, a parallel system of justice arose, between that provided by magnates represented by the earls, and that by the king represented by sheriffs, in a similar way to England having both Courts Baron and Magistrates, respectively. Inevitably, this led to a measure of forum shopping, with the king's offering - the Sheriff - gradually winning.
As in England, as the centuries wore on, the term earl came to be disassociated from the office, and later kings started granting the title of earl without it, and gradually without even an associated comitatus. By the 16th century there started to be earls of towns, of villages, and even of isolated houses; it had simply become a label for marking status, rather than an office of intrinsic power. In 1746, in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising, the Heritable Jurisdictions Act brought the powers of the remaining ancient earldoms under the control of the sheriffs; earl is now simply a noble rank.
Some of the almost significant Earls English Earls of March.
The number one Earldoms created within Wales were the Lordship of Glamorgan a comital title and the Earldom of Pembroke.
Tir Iarll English: Earl's land is an area of Glamorgan, which has traditionally had a particular resonance in Welsh culture.
A British earl is entitled to a coronet bearing eight strawberry leaves four visible and eight silver balls or pearls around the rim five visible. The actual coronet is rarely, if ever, worn except at the coronation of a new monarch, but in heraldry an earl may bear his coronet of rank on his coat of arms above the shield.
An earldom became, with a few exceptions, the default rank of the peerage to which a former prime minister was elevated. However, the last prime minister to accept an earldom was Harold Macmillan, who became Earl of Stockton in 1984.