ABSTRACT
The amount of information available about such exalted people is very great, and since about 1700 seems to be almost as complete demographically as it is reasonable to desire. In 1676 Sir William Dugdale produced his Baronage, and in 1710 Arthur Collins his Peerage, and these works account for the great improvement in the completeness of peerage records at that time. Many studies using peerage records have been undertaken, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century. The methods used were often fallacious and the results were sometimes very odd. A careful study of the complete peerage would be interesting from many points of view: historical, demographic, sociological and biological. The simplest way of expressing mortality as a whole is the crude death rate. However, the base population is difficult to compute from genealogical data and no attempt has been made to calculate crude death rates.
