A successor to the 1898 work "The Magna Charta Barons and Their American Descendants," the pedigrees herein are of the members of the Order of Runnemede in 1915--in effect, a second "yearbook" of the Order. Since pedigrees were dropped and added as the membership of the Order changed, this work stands by itself and does not supersede the 1898 volume. Nearly 200 pages are devoted to pedigrees of the members, which are grouped under the following names: Abbott, Allyn, Aston, Bernard, Bevan, Booth, Brooke, Bruen, Bulkeley, Byrd, Cadwalader, Calvert, Carter, Chauncey, Chichester, Claiborne, Claypool, Clayton, Daubeney, Digges, Drake, Dundas, Evans, Fauntleroy, Fenwick, Fleete, Foulke, Gordon, Gorsuch, Haynes, Henry, Humfrey, Irvine, Lambert, Lawrence, Leete, Lindsay, Lloyd, Lyman, Lynde, MacGehee, McIntosh, Montgomery, Norton, O'Carroll, Owen, Reade, Rose, Saltonstall, Scott, Sherman, Skipwith, Spotswood, Stewart, Sullivan, Throckmorton, Warren, Washington, West, Wetherill, Whiting, Wilkinson, Williams, Willis, Willoughby, Winthrop, Witherspoon, Woodhull, and Wyatt.

This is a standard work on Americans claiming lineal descent from the Magna Charta Barons. The pedigrees referred to in the sub-title of the book pertain to the founders and members of the Order of Runnemede at the time the book was originally published (1898). The main body of the work, the pedigrees of the founders, is preceded by a history of the Magna Charta of 1215; by lists of the Magna Charta Barons; and by biographies of the Sureties (the twenty-five barons designated to enforce the Magna Charta).

As the author emphasizes at the beginning of this work, "this is a book of the genealogies of the most prominent of the English Barons who procured the great Charter of Liberty from King John rather than an essay on the Magna Charta itself, ... "

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

At the signing of the Magna Charta, twenty-five men, representing the barons, signed as sureties of the baronial performance, in effect pledging the barons to fulfill their obligations to the Crown in accordance with the terms of the Great Charter. Of these twenty-five sureties only seventeen have identified descendants. Each of the seventeen is represented in the celebrated "Magna Charta Sureties," which traces their connections--line by line and generation by generation--to approximately 160 American colonists. Eight years have passed since the publication of the last edition of this work, however, and in the interval a great many additions, corrections, and revisions have accumulated. Brought to a very high standard by the unremitting efforts of its editor, Walter Lee Sheppard, Jr., this fifth edition incorporates new lines, corrects errors in existing lines, adds recently discovered material, and supplies references where they had previously been omitted. The result is a reliable and authoritative collection of interlocking pedigrees which carry the ancestry of some 160 American colonists back to the thirteenth century. With the possible exception of Weis's "Ancestral Roots" (also published by Genealogical Publishing Co.), this is probably the very best work ever written on the pre-colonial ancestry of American colonists.