Barons in the Lyon Court’s own words

The baronage is older than any record the Lyon Court keeps: barons sealed the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, and Innes of Learney traced the title to before the Norman Conquest. From its earliest surviving registers the Court called barons barons, and Lords Lyon signed as barons themselves. Five Letters Patent and a matriculation, from 1992 to 2018, are set out in the Court’s own words.

Lords Lyon who were barons

The baronage is far older than the Court’s registers. Barons sealed the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, and Innes of Learney, following Craig, held that the title of baron in Scotland was first borne by the chiefs of the tribes, and that feudal organisation “existed in Scotland prior to the Norman Conquest in England”.¹ The Court of the Lord Lyon did not merely tolerate the baronial style; its own heads used it. The birthbrief of Innes of that Ilk, which predates the surviving Register of Genealogies, describes the petitioner and his ancestors as barons and their wives as daughters of “the Baron of Fyvie” and “the Baron of Gight”, and in it “the Lord Lyon, Sir Alexander Erskine, officially describes himself as ‘Baron of Cambo’”. When Sir Thomas Innes of Learney examined the next volume, which begins in 1727, he found “the same practice and that Lord Lyon Brodie styled himself Baron of Brodie”.² Birthbrief after birthbrief entered a baron as “A.B. Baro de C.”, and the Court was still doing so in 1861, when the pedigree of Leslie of Balquhain named him “twenty-sixth Baron of Balquhain”.²

Innes kept the custom as Lord Lyon. His certificate of 10 March 1946 on the genealogy of Wilfrid James Plowden-Wardlaw opens “We, Thomas Innes of Learney, Baron of Learney, Kinnairdy and Yeochrie, Advocate, Lord Lyon King of Arms”, and in the same document styles Brodie of Brodie “Baron and Thane of Brodie”.³ His predecessor, Sir Francis Grant, had found in 1943 that the minor barons were recognised in the Lyon Court and the Court of Session “as a ‘titled nobility’”, and in 1945 declared a baron to be “received amongst all Nobles and in all places of Honour” (see The Lord Lyon’s Case for the Baronage). Grant had already settled the form in 1934: after proof in the Esslemont petition he awarded the chapeau and recorded the petitioner as “Baron of Esslemont”, not “Baron of the Barony of” (see The Esslemont petition of 1934).⁴

The office itself ran in families of the baronage. Sir Charles Erskine of Cambo held it from 1663 and was succeeded in 1677 by his son Sir Alexander, who is recorded as obtaining a patent making it hereditary in the family; the Lindsays held it for most of the years between 1542 and 1630; and in the twentieth century Sir Thomas Innes of Learney was followed in it, after one intervening Lyon, by his son Sir Malcolm Innes of Edingight, Lord Lyon from 1981 to 2001 — himself a baron: as Lyon Clerk in 1965 he matriculated his arms with the chapeau of a minor baron, and the Edinburgh Gazette listed “Innes of Edingight, Malcolm Rognvald” among the Heads of Territorial Houses officially recognised by the Lord Lyon.⁵ The office ran in families, and the families were baronial.⁶

Under Innes of Edingight the practice stood as it had under Grant. On 25 November 1992 David Charles Irvine of Drum, “Baron of Drum in the County of Aberdeen, Chief of the Name of Irvine of Drum”, matriculated his arms with the full baronial achievement: “his feudo-baronial Mantle Gules doubled of silk Argent, fur-edged of miniver and collar Ermine, and fastened on the right shoulder by five spherical buttons Or”, “a chapeau Gules furred Ermine (for his feudal Barony of Drum)”, a helmet befitting his degree, and two savages as supporters. The line is the one Innes traced in 1945 from a certificate of 1757, “Alexander Irvine, baro de Drum”.⁷

It was still the ordinary practice at the end of the feudal era. When the Court of Session needed an example of the Lyon Court’s practice before the appointed day, it took Letters Patent subscribed by Lord Lyon Blair on 27 July 2007 naming the grantee “Baron of Ballencrieff”, with a nobility clause at the end.⁸

The Roll and the Pledge

The Lyon Court’s own instruments named barons as barons for as long as its records run. The Roll publishes such instruments beside each holder’s entry.

The Baronage of Scotland Association keeps the Roll of Scottish Barons, which enters a holder only on evidence, and offers the Pledge: an undertaking, in honour and not in law, to preserve a barony within the family for future generations and to uphold the Baronial Code of Honour. The precedent is the baronets’ Roll of 1910.