A directory of British titles of nobility and the surnames of those who have borne them, compiled with rank, nationality, ownership, approximate period, and fate.

Debrett's revised and updated Wedding Handbook is the definitive guide to planning your wedding day. It provides practical and expert advice on all aspects of the planning process, from announcing the engagement, to drawing up a guest list, budgeting, recruiting a wedding team, finding a venue and choosing food, drink and entertainment. The Wedding Handbook is an essential tool to smooth the planning and organisation stages and ensure you and your spouse-to-be are fully versed in what to expect from the day itself.

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Eileen Spring presents a fresh interpretation of the history of inheritance among the English gentry and aristocracy. In a work that recasts both the history of real property law and the history of the family, she finds that one of the principal and determinative features of upper-class real property inheritance was the exclusion of females. This exclusion was accomplished by a series of legal devices designed to nullify the common-law rules of inheritance under which--had they prevailed--40 percent of English land would have been inherited or held by women. Current ideas of family development portray female inheritance as increasing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but Spring argues that this is a misperception, resulting from an incomplete consideration of the common-law rules. Female rights actually declined, reaching their nadir in the eighteenth century. Spring shows that there was a centuries-long conflict between male and female heirs, a conflict that has not been adequately recognized until now.