In the past two decades, the decline of the British aristocracy and its apotheosis, the hereditary peerage, have received scant scholarly attention. Major historical works in the 1960s to the 1990s laid much responsibility for the decline on features of the British aristocracy that are anachronistic in modern capitalist societies, such as their landed, rentier status, conspicuously sumptuous lifestyles, and disdain for commerce, helped on by reductions in the value of agricultural land from the 1870s. This article reappraises these arguments by examining the decline of the hereditary peerage's wealth using a newly created data set that includes all available probate grants for peers from 1858 to 2018. The article challenges established research by finding that peers’ absolute wealth but also relative mean wealth did not decline during the agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century, and that serious decline only began and accelerated from World War II. Signs of resurgence appeared in the 1980s, with the value of peers’ grants reaching Victorian levels in real but not relative terms. The comprehensive character of the data and the distinction between real and relative wealth allow for multiple conceptual and analytic additions to the existing debates. We find that new peerages created for businessmen who were much wealthier than the older, landed peers masked decline in the interwar years. Significantly, however, the differences in wealth between old and new peerages disappeared over time, suggesting that the wider aristocracy's decline was due less to characteristics particular to it than to external forces allied to the broader postwar political and fiscal environment.

近二十年来，英国贵族的没落及其神化世袭贵族，很少受到学术界的关注。1960 年代至 1990 年代的主要历史著作对英国贵族在现代资本主义社会中不合时宜的特征的衰落负有很大责任，例如他们的土地、食利者身份、显着奢华的生活方式以及对商业的蔑视，这得益于减少。 1870 年代农业用地的价值。本文通过使用一个新创建的数据集来检查世袭贵族财富的下降，重新评估了这些论点，该数据集包括 1858 年至 2018 年对同龄人的所有可用遗嘱认证赠款。这篇文章通过发现，在 19 世纪后期的农业萧条期间，同龄人的绝对财富和相对平均财富并没有下降，而且这种严重的下降只是从第二次世界大战开始并加速了，从而对现有研究提出了挑战。复苏的迹象出现在 1980 年代，同行赠款的价值达到了维多利亚时代的实际水平，但不是相对水平。数据的综合特征以及真实财富和相对财富之间的区别允许对现有辩论进行多种概念和分析补充。我们发现，为比年长的、有土地的同龄人更富有的商人创造的新贵族掩盖了两次世界大战期间的衰落。然而，值得注意的是，新旧贵族之间的财富差异随着时间的推移而消失，这表明更广泛的贵族阶层的衰落与其说是由于其特有的特征，不如说是由于与更广泛的战后政治和财政环境相关的外部力量。