Excerpt from Collections for a History of Staffordshire, Vol. 12

Writing to the late General Wrottesley, within a year of his lamented death, I ventured to say that one of the points which had always impressed me in his work was that, although he belonged, in years, to an older generation of genealogists, his attitude and his critical methods were those of the modern school. For the achievements of Eyton, whose valuable contributions are a feature of the early volumes of the William Salt Society, he had a sincere admiration but his own critical sense was, I think, more developed, and he was always ready to verify Eyton's assertions and to reject them if doubtful, for no genealogist, perhaps, could claim with better reason that he placed truth foremost. It may have been from Eyton that he first learnt the supreme importance of those records in public and private collections, the value of which, for family history, his labours have made manifest. In the Preface to the history of his own family he mentioned that every step of the pedigree from the reign of Henry II. To the present time, is proved by public documentary evidence, which is accessible to all the world, and observed that it illustrated the value of the Public Records for the elucidation of local and family history and the mine of wealth which lies under our feet, which has passed almost unnoticed before the rise of the modern school of archaeology. He also pointed out that an author, by researches amongst our Public Records, can lift a family history above a dry genealogical chronicle and throw some light upon the laws and customs of the past. In these passages there is heard the dominant note of his work.

But he did not confine himself to using the Records for his own histories of Staffordshire families; his industry made available in print, for the use of his brother genealogists, great collections of evidence which might otherwise have remained in ms. It is for Staffordshire antiquaries to speak of his servicesin this respect to the history of his own county but I would recall their value in a wider field also. His Crecy ana' Calais provides the genealogist, in all parts of England, with a precious fund of material for illustrating family history derived from sources, I believe, previously untouched.

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