The Magna Charta Sureties 1215 - Fifth Edition by Frederick Lewis Weis

The Magna Charta (or Carta) is generally considered to be the cornerstone of Anglo-Saxon law, since it is the earliest agreement between sovereign and subject on the rights of both parties - that is, what each can do, and the limitation of powers. In addition, the Great Charter set up watchdogs for both sides: twenty-five men representing the barons, which twenty-five signed for the barons and were sureties for the baronial performance, and the friends of the king, who were named in the Charter.

At the signing of the Magna Charta, twenty-five men, representing the barons, signed as sureties of the baronial performance, in effect pledging the barons to fulfill their obligations to the Crown in accordance with the terms of the Great Charter. Of these twenty-five sureties only seventeen have identified descendants. Each of the seventeen is represented in the celebrated Magna Charta Sureties, which traces their connections--line by line and generation by generation--to approximately 160 American colonists. Four had no known surviving issue; the issue of one died out in the third generation, and of another in the fourth. Nothing whatever is known of William de Hardell and his family. The twenty-fifth, Richard de Percy, left only an illegitimate son, Henry, to whom he gave the manor of Settle (Yorks). Henry is known to have had a son Alexander, but further information about this line is lacking, and since Henry surrendered his manor of Settle to his cousins, efforts to learn more by land records have been unsuccessful. All of the first seventeen are represented in the pedigrees which follow.

Eight years have passed since the publication of the last edition of this work, however, and in the interval a great many additions, corrections, and revisions have accumulated. Brought to a very high standard by the unremitting efforts of its editor, Walter Lee Sheppard, Jr., this fifth edition incorporates new lines, corrects errors in existing lines, adds recently discovered material, and supplies references where they had previously been omitted. The result is a reliable and authoritative collection of interlocking pedigrees which carry the ancestry of some 160 American colonists back to the thirteenth century. With the possible exception of Weis's Ancestral Roots, this is probably the very best work ever written on the pre-colonial ancestry of American colonists. For the convenience of the users of this book the editor has provided two tables, each with footnotes, to supply lineage information, one on the Sureties, the other on those persons who appear as friends of the king. Though there is some overlap between this work and Ancestral Roots, much of the material here supplied is different, and the two books may be used together.