During the reign of King George V the volume of local administrative work was very greatly increased by various Acts of Parliament and by the growth in the complexity of our civilization.  It was recently pointed out that a County Council which was able adequately to perform all its statutory functions with the assistance of no more than five committees in the days of King Edward VII had found it necessary to appoint fifteen before 1935 and if the successors of the Elizabethan Justices no longer have to carry out the multifarious duties, which the Tudor Queen laid upon their predecessors, in a magisterial capacity, they have far more to do nowadays as members of Parish, District or County Councils and in helping with the almost innumerable organizations on which the public has learned to rely for promoting the welfare and protecting the very varied interests of the dwellers in the countryside.  It is in all this work that the new recruits to the Landed Gentry are expected to help by local public opinion which still expects a high standard of public service from a class on which in the not very distant past both Crown and people had to rely almost entirely for rural administration in this kingdom. 

The families which used to be allowed to fade into extinction before their estates passed through heiresses to other names, nowadays see their property pass to new possessors under the economic pressure of modern political science while they are, genealogically speaking, still vigorously in being.  Families may not be so numerous in the sense that the children of any particular couple nowadays seldom have to be reckoned in double figures but infantile mortality has been reduced and cadet branches are still founded and flourish just as they did of old, but Cadets may wander far afield nowadays before they settle down, and even the Head of a Family may expatriate himself.  It may indeed be asked whether a family which has been squeezed out of all or nearly all of its ancestral property in the traditional “Three Kingdoms” has really ceased to be “landed” when its members are found farming their own estates in Kenya or in those Dominions where His late Majesty was just as much King as he was in these islands. The head of a famous family of Norman stock no longer possesses the manors which King William gave to his ancestor as part of the spoils of the Conquest but he owns more acres in Australia than did his predecessors in England.  An Australian-born landowner is very possibly the Heir Male of a line of Highland Chiefs whose historic castle and estates have passed to an heiress at home; the representative of a family of English squires which became landed in the days of King Henry VIII now reckons his property by the square mile in Canada; but has no more than a house and a handful of acres in England.  Other families which once inhabited hams and thorpes, dales or glens in Great Britain have now taken root in South Africa or Rhodesia or New Zealand - they own large properties in Ceylon or Malaya, historic plantations in Jamaica, estates in Tasmania  but they still bring their pedigrees up to date, generation by generation, in the Heralds' College in London, or matriculate their Arms at the Lyon Office in Edinburgh.  In such cases it is open to question whether, although dislanded in the United Kingdom, they have ceased to be Landed Gentry.

If we adopt the standard of Western Asia where Arab Princes can rehearse their pedigrees through Adnan from Ishmael the elder son of Abraham and Christian families in Georgia are proud of being branches of the House of David, where Seyyids of the Blood of the Prophet are numerous and the Tartar stock of Ginghis Khan is still well-represented the pedigrees of most of the Landed Gentry of these kingdoms are comparatively short.  In turning over the pages of the present genealogical history and reckoning from the date given for the first ancestor in the male line from whom descent is continuously recorded it appears that the earlier centuries are but thinly represented by extant families, although some of these older families still have many cadet branches. There are family groups, of very distant agnatic kinship, which are descended in the male line (although sometimes with an absence of legitimacy in some generations) from the Celtic Kings of Scotland whose pedigrees from Feargus Mor Mac Earc used to be chanted by the High Seannachie of Scotland as an essential preliminary to their coronation at Scone.  On the western Asiatic analogy this is a longer descent by more than a century than that of a Seyyid from the Prophet Mohamed's daughter Fatima and the Caliph Ali; but falls short of the descent from Abraham by some eighty generations.  Then there are groups of similarly connected families which descend from the Danish Kings of York and the Norse Kings of Man and the Isles.  One group claims Anglo-Saxon descent through a thousand years from a Northumbrian Thane. Other families descend from Vikings, more or less contemporary with that Thane, who settled in Normandy before their more civilized but equally predatory grandsons came over to England with the Conqueror, but such families are very few in number for it must have been a difficult task for any but the most far-sighted, influential or unprincipled to preserve a family's estates, if at all desirable and near any powerful neighbour, through the Wars of the Roses and the disturbed period which preceded them.  It is for that reason perhaps, and not genealogical causes only, coupled with the toll of Recusancy fines after the Reformation and compositions for Malignancy during the Commonwealth, that the number of families which date from before the 16th Century in this history is so very small.  The sudden increase in the number of families which can trace from the 16th Century may in part be due to the fact that in many cases Parish Registers begin to be available in that century and other records survive which make it easier to take a pedigree to the reign of Queen Elizabeth than it is to carry it back into that of her grandfather.

Among the 16th Century families is that of Sir Austen Chamberlain, the only living Knight of the Garter to be the Head of a Family in this volume.  His most recent predecessor among the Landed Gentry who was also a Knight of the Garter and did not become a Peer was Sir Francis Knollys, of Caversham (d. 19 July, 1596), whose father Robert Knollys received the Manor of Rotherfield Greys in Oxfordshire in grand serjeantry by the tenure of rendering a red rose to the Sovereign at midsummer. Sir Francis was the husband of Katherine Carey, niece of Queen Anne Boleyn and first cousin to Queen Elizabeth, and his son Sir William Knollys, K.G. was cr. Viscount Wallingford in 16i16 and Earl of Banbury in 1626. Another 16th Century family is that of Baldwin of Astley; but it is possible that it may still be proved that the present Prime Minister can trace back his pedigree in the male line before 1523, which is now the earliest recorded date in its history.  Sir James Brooke, the scion of an 18th Century family, which may perhaps be a branch of the older 16th Century house of Brooke of Horton, made himself Rajah of Sarawak in 1842 and his great nephew, who in the male line comes of an 18th Century family of Johnson, is the only Sovereign Prince in this volume.

Reference has already been made to the effect, during the reign of King George V, of death duties and other taxation on the Landed Gentry and their association with their land, and the public is repeatedly being assured by the owners of historic estates that if present conditions continue their sons will not be able to afford to live in the houses which they have inherited from their fathers.  Even novi homines who acquired properties during the present century are subject to the same financial disabilities as are landowners of many generations' standing, and many people seem to fear that we may be approaching a period when the demands of the Treasury will be so much increased as to make it unnecessary for a man to make a will or take the welfare of his posterity into consideration during his lifetime as on his demise the sacrifice of his entire fortune may be exacted in the supposed interests of the community.  Those who have observed the cumulative effect of the closing of a succession of country houses round a village or small town upon its prosperity may be tempted to wonder whether the community at large really benefits from the decline in fortune of so many of its component parts in rural districts, and will, therefore, have been greatly interested by the remarkable announcement recently made by Sir Charles Trevelyan, the present owner of Wallington, a beautiful country estate in Northumberland, which came into his family in 1777 through a marriage with the heiress of the Blacketts who had held it since the reign of King Charles II.  He wishes to ensure four things - that the control of Wallington and the enjoyment of its surplus values should no longer be in private hands; that Wallington, its grounds and its valuable contents should be accessible for all time to the people and should never pass into selfish or unsympathetic ownership; that the Wallington estate should not be broken up; and that the connexion of his family with Wallington should not be severed.  To this end he proposes to bequeath the house, grounds and estate to the National Trust, so that after his death it will become public property in public ownership and he secure from disruption and dispersion subject to the provision that his family may continue to live at Wallington as tenants of the National Trust as long as they may wish to do so.  The Times, in commenting upon this writes of Sir Charles:

“As a good Socialist, he wants the people - the ‘thousands from industrial Tyneside’ whose visits he welcomed recently in his speech to the National Trust - to get all the benefit of Wallington.  Wallington must pass out of private ownership. As a Trevelyan, he yields to a sadly unproletarian weakness for his family tradition. Trevelyans must not own Wallington; but Wallington must not lose its Trevelyans. And so, with two strokes of a most ingenious pen, he makes the best of both worlds.”

It is an interesting experiment and it may well be that other families may consider that it is better to face the prospect of a future tenure of their historic estates by a sort of grand serjeantry of acting as resident caretakers on behalf of the community, with some reasonable provision for privacy in the enjoyment of their amenities as hereditary tenants, than to be compelled to sever the family connexion with a cherished home, and have to see the familiar building being altered out of recognition in order to adapt it as an asylum or a school, or to watch it being pulled down in order that it may be “developed” as an “estate,” or falling into ruin, as is happening to some formerly useful and busy mansions for which the Community has no use now that its economic demands have made it impossible for the children of their former inhabitants to live there any longer.