Excerpt from A Second Series of Vicissitudes of Families Through these means, and the fearful loss of life in the bat tle-field and on the scaffold, very many of the chief historic houses were destroyed. Of the survivors, some that bore the territorial prefix De, dropped it, having lost the inherit ance to which it applied; and others were so impoverished, that an act passed to degrade to a lower rank such of the nobility as had not adequate estates. Ruined lords and gentlemen went into exile, to be the miserable pensioners of foreign courts, or wandered in beggary and wretchedness through many of the countries of Europe. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.