A craving to know more about the considerable number of my namesakes living today, of whose derivation and relationships scarcely any mention was to be found in the archive I inherited, was (I suppose) an inevitable by-product of my work on the "Origins of the Name and Family of Perowne". With the enthusiastic co-operation of many of them located as often as not in the pages of published Telephone Directories.

I was thus led to embark upon some further research, in the light of which certain conclusions reached in that earlier effort were seen to require modification. A more important result, however, is that "Perowne Pedigrees" has become not simply the presentation which I had intended of the findings of my predecessors relating to their own particular branches, but also of more recent discoveries regarding the entire clan.

The picture which emerges is that of mostly humble people deriving from immigrant Flemish (or Walloon ) weavers established in Norwich by the middle of the seventeenth century and still represented in that City; of subsidiary concentrations in the East End and southern districts of London, induced by the Industrial Revolution and facilitated by the increasing mobility characteristic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and of offshoots scattered worldwide in the twentieth and all but lost after the manner of a volatile liquid evaporating into thin air. Of this panorama some eminencies punctuate the plain and the shadows shield our share of rogues, of characters and of mystery.

I have set an arbitrary limit to my investigations of investment in time in order that my labours may bear fruit, however imperfect, to bring them to a close before Death intervenes. The end product is, indeed, a "tattered tapestry", some parts of which hang precariously together leaving fragments which find no present place; while two substantial ramifications remain unattached, though there is little doubt that they, too, form part of the same picture. That my own branch of the family appears in somewhat fuller detail needs neither explanation nor excuse; alternate pages I leave blank for others to fill.

LANCELOT PEROWNE. Benfleet Hall Cobham, Surrey.

October, 1973.