subs. (parliamentary).—The three senior earls in the House of Lords, viz., the Earls of Shrewsbury, Derby, and Huntingdon, the only three earldoms before the seventeenth century now existing, save those that (like Arundel, Rutland, etc.), are merged in higher titles, and the anomalous earldom of Devon (1553), resuscitated in 1831. [A correspondent of Notes and Queries (7 S. ix., p. 314) suggests that the reason of the application may be that in the seventeenth or late in the sixteenth century an order was issued for the use of ermine instead of the skin of cats—(but were such skins then used?)—for the robes of a peer. If so, however, it is curious that there are not ‘catskin dukes’ and ‘catskin barons’ as well. There is yet another theory: an earl’s robes consist (now) of but three rows of ermine; but in some early representations they are shown with four, the same as (now) a duke; and it has been suggested that these four rows (quatre-skins) may have given the name of catskin.]
1861–75. DEAN HOOK, Life of Cardinal Pole, vide note, p. 264. The Earl of Huntingdon is one of the three CATSKIN EARLS of the present day.
