Kents Cavern
Kents Cavern is a cave system in Torquay, England. It is notable for its geological features; the cave system is open to the public and has been a geological Site of Special Scientific Interest since 1952 and a Scheduled Ancient Monument since 1957. The caverns and passages were formed in the early Pleistocene period by water action, have been occupied by one of at least eight separate, discontinuous native populations to have inhabited the British Isles; the other key paleolithic sites in the UK are Happisburgh, Boxgrove, Pontnewydd, Creswell Crags and Gough's Cave. A prehistoric maxilla fragment was discovered in the cavern during a 1927 excavation by the Torquay Natural History Society, named Kents Cavern 4; the specimen is on display at the Torquay Museum. In 1989 the fragment was radiocarbon dated to 36,400–34,700 years BP, but a 2011 study that dated fossils from neighbouring strata produced an estimate of 44,200–41,500 years BP; the same study analysed the dental structure of the fragment and determined it to be Homo sapiens rather than Homo neanderthalensis, which would have made it the earliest anatomically modern human fossil yet discovered in northwestern Europe.
In a response to this paper in 2012 the authors Mark White and Paul Pettitt wrote "We urge caution over using a small selected sample of fauna from an old and poorly executed excavation in Kent’s Cavern to provide a radiocarbon stratigraphy and age for a human fossil that cannot be dated directly, we suggest that the recent dating should be rejected." Kents Cavern is first recorded as Kents Hole Close on a 1659 deed when the land was leased to John Black. The earliest evidence of exploration of the caves in historic times is two inscriptions, "William Petre 1571" and "Robert Hedges 1688" engraved on stalagmites; the first recorded excavation was that of Thomas Northmore in 1824. Northmore's work attracted the attention of William Buckland, the first Reader in Geology at the University of Oxford, who sent a party including John MacEnery to explore the caves in an attempt to find evidence that Mithras was once worshipped in the area. MacEnery, the Roman Catholic chaplain at Torre Abbey, conducted systematic excavations between 1824 and 1829.
When MacEnery reported to the British Association the discovery of flint tools below the stalagmites on the cave floor, his work was derided as contrary to Bishop James Ussher's Biblical chronology dating the Creation to 4004 BC. In September 1845 the created Torquay Natural History Society requested permission from Sir Lawrence Palk to explore the caves to obtain fossils and artefacts for the planned Torquay Museum, as a result Edward Vivian and William Pengelly were allowed to conduct excavations between 1846 and 1858. Vivian reported to the Geological Society in 1847, but at the time, it was believed that early humans had entered the caves long after the formation of the cave structures examined; this changed when in the Autumn of 1859, following the work of Pengelly at the Brixham Cavern and of Jacques de Perthes in France, the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries, the British Association agreed that the excavations had established the antiquity of humanity. In 1865 the British Association created a committee, led by Pengelly, to explore the cave system over the course of fifteen years.
It was Pengelly's party that discovered Robert Hedges' stalagmite inscription, from the stalagmite's growth since that time deduced that human-created artefacts found under the formation could be half a million years old. Pengelly plotted the position of every bone and other artefact he discovered during the excavations, afterward continued working with the Torquay Natural History Society until his death in 1892 at his home less than 2 km from the caves. In 1903 Kents Cavern part of Lord Haldon's estate, was sold to Francis Powe, a carpenter who used the caves as a workshop while making beach huts for the Torquay sea front. Powe's son, Leslie Powe, turned the caves into a tourist attraction by laying concrete paths, installing electric lighting, building visitor facilities that were improved, in turn, by his son John Powe; the caves, now owned by Nick Powe, celebrated 100 years of Powe family ownership on 23 August 2003 with special events including an archæological dig for children and a display by a cave rescue team.
A year a new £500,000 visitor centre was opened, including a restaurant and gift shop. Attracting 80,000 tourists a year, Kents Cavern is an important tourist attraction and this was recognised in 2000 when it was awarded Showcave of the Year award and in November 2005 when it was awarded a prize for being Torquay's Visitor Attraction of the year. "Hampsley Cavern" in Agatha Christie's 1924 novel The Man in the Brown Suit, is based on Kents Cavern. The 2011 science fiction romance Time Watchers: The Greatest of These, by Julie Reilly, uses Kents Cavern as a principal setting in three different time periods. Boxgrove Gough's Cave Genetic history of the British Isles Happisburgh List of human evolution fossils List of prehistoric structures in Great Britain Pakefield Prehistoric Britain Paviland Pontnewydd Swanscombe Kents Cavern homepage Geochronology of Kents Cavern
Seaside resort
A seaside resort is a resort town or resort village, or resort hotel, located on the coast. Sometimes it is an accredited title, only awarded to a town when the requirements are met. Where a beach is the primary focus for tourists, it may be called a beach resort. In Roman times, the town of Baiae, by the Tyrrhenian Sea in Italy, was a resort for those who were sufficiently prosperous. Mersea Island, in Essex, England was a seaside holiday destination for wealthy Romans living in Colchester; the development of the beach as a popular leisure resort from the mid-19th century was the first manifestation of what is now the global tourist industry. The first seaside resorts were opened in the 18th century for the aristocracy, who began to frequent the seaside as well as the fashionable spa towns, for recreation and health. One of the earliest such seaside resorts was Scarborough in Yorkshire during the 1720s; the first rolling bathing machines were introduced by 1735. In 1793, Heiligendamm in Mecklenburg, Germany was founded as the first seaside resort of the European continent, which attracted Europe's aristocracy to the Baltic Sea.
The opening of the resort in Brighton and its reception of royal patronage from King George IV extended the seaside as a resort for health and pleasure to the much larger London market, the beach became a centre for upper-class pleasure and frivolity. This trend was praised and artistically elevated by the new romantic ideal of the picturesque landscape. Queen Victoria's long-standing patronage of the Isle of Wight and Ramsgate in Kent ensured that a seaside residence was considered as a fashionable possession for those wealthy enough to afford more than one home; the extension of this form of leisure to the middle and working class began with the development of the railways in the 1840s, which offered cheap and affordable fares to fast growing resort towns. In particular, the completion of a branch line to the small seaside town Blackpool from Poulton led to a sustained economic and demographic boom. A sudden influx of visitors arriving by rail provided the motivation for entrepreneurs to build accommodation and create new attractions, leading to more visitors and a rapid cycle of growth throughout the 1850s and 1860s.
The growth was intensified by the practice among the Lancashire cotton mill owners of closing the factories for a week every year to service and repair machinery. These became known as wakes weeks; each town's mills would close for a different week, allowing Blackpool to manage a steady and reliable stream of visitors over a prolonged period in the summer. A prominent feature of the resort was the promenade and the pleasure piers, where an eclectic variety of performances vied for the people's attention. In 1863, the North Pier in Blackpool was completed becoming a centre of attraction for elite visitors. Central Pier was completed with a theatre and a large open-air dance floor. Many popular beach resorts were equipped with bathing machines because the all-covering beachwear of the period was considered immodest. By the end of the century the English coastline had over 100 large resort towns, some with populations exceeding 50,000; the development of the seaside resort abroad was stimulated by the well developed English love of the beach.
The French Riviera alongside the Mediterranean had become a popular destination for the British upper class by the end of the 18th century. In 1864, the first railway to Nice was completed, making the Riviera accessible to visitors from all over Europe. By 1874, residents of foreign enclaves in Nice, most of whom were British, numbered 25,000; the coastline became renowned for attracting the royalty of Europe, including Queen Victoria and King Edward VII. In the United States, early seaside resorts in the late 1800s catered to the wealthy class and city businessmen. Cape May, New Jersey became one of the first coastal resorts in the United States, when regular steamboat traffic on the Delaware River began after the War of 1812. Early visitors to Cape May included Henry Clay in 1847, Abraham Lincoln in 1849. By 1880, Henry Flagler extended several rail lines southward down the Atlantic coastline of the United States, enticing the northern upper-class families south to subtropical Florida; the Florida East Coast Railway brought northern tourists to St. Augustine in greater numbers, by 1887 Flagler began construction of two large ornate hotels in St. Augustine, the 540-room Ponce de Leon Hotel and the Hotel Alcazar, bought the Casa Monica Hotel the next year.
Continental European attitudes towards gambling and nudity tended to be more lax than in Britain, British and French entrepreneurs were quick to exploit the possibilities. In 1863, the Prince of Monaco, Charles III and François Blanc, a French businessman, arranged for steamships and carriages to take visitors from Nice to Monaco, where large luxury hotels and casinos were built; the place was renamed Monte Carlo. Commercial seabathing spread to other areas of the United States and parts of the British Empire such as Australia, where surfing became popular in the early 20th century. By the 1970s cheap and affordable air travel was the catalyst for the growth of a global tourism market. Recreational fishing and leisure boat pursuits have become lucrative, traditional fishing villages are well positioned to take advantage of this. For example, Destin, on the coast of Florida, has evolved from an artisanal fishing village into a seaside resort dedicated to tourism with
Kirkham House
Kirkham House is a late medieval stone house in Paignton, England. It is believed to be a 15th century building; the house was designated a Grade II* listed building on 13 March 1951. There is no documentary evidence of when; the design suggests that it is of 14th or 15th century origin, it has been called "The Priest's House", suggesting the residence of a church official, or a priest of the Kirkham Chantry. The house may have been built as the residence of a prosperous local merchant. Mrs Ada Frances Jennings bequeathed the house to the nation in 1960, together with a sum of money for its repair; the stone and plasterwork have been extensively renovated, but many of the original oak beams and carvings can still be seen. The building contains reproduction furniture and tapestries in the medieval style; the building is a single depth cottage with three rooms, is made of breccia with a slate roof. The ground floor of the house consists of a parlour and a large vaulted hall that would have been used for entertaining guests, while the first floor has a gallery and three bedchambers.
The kitchen was an outbuilding that exists today only as a few ruined walls, there is a small garden adjacent to the house. It includes a cast-iron pump outside the kitchen area. Kirkham House is managed by English Heritage, it is open to the public at certain times of year; the building is located off Cecil Road at Ordnance Survey map reference SX885610. Oldway Mansion Devon, Buildings of England series. Penguin. 1989. ISBN 0140710507. Devon Building. Devon Books. 1990. ISBN 0861148525. Kirkham House at the English Heritage website
Homo sapiens
In taxonomy, Homo sapiens is the only extant human species. The name was introduced in 1758 by Carl Linnaeus. Extinct species of the genus Homo include Homo erectus, extant during 1.9 to 0.4 million years ago, a number of other species. The age of speciation of H. sapiens out of ancestral H. erectus is estimated to have been 350,000 years ago. Sustained archaic admixture is known to have taken place both in Africa and in Eurasia, between about 100,000 and 30,000 years ago; the term anatomically modern humans is used to distinguish H. sapiens having an anatomy consistent with the range of phenotypes seen in contemporary humans from varieties of extinct archaic humans. This is useful for times and regions where anatomically modern and archaic humans co-existed, for example, in Paleolithic Europe; the binomial name Homo sapiens was coined by Linnaeus, 1758. The Latin noun homō means "human being", while the participle sapiēns means "discerning, sensible"; the species was thought to have emerged from a predecessor within the genus Homo around 300,000 to 200,000 years ago.
A problem with the morphological classification of "anatomically modern" was that it would not have included certain extant populations. For this reason, a lineage-based definition of H. sapiens has been suggested, in which H. sapiens would by definition refer to the modern human lineage following the split from the Neanderthal lineage. Such a cladistic definition would extend the age of H. sapiens to over 500,000 years. Extant human populations have been divided into subspecies, but since around the 1980s all extant groups have tended to be subsumed into a single species, H. sapiens, avoiding division into subspecies altogether. Some sources show Neanderthals as a subspecies; the discovered specimens of the H. rhodesiensis species have been classified by some as a subspecies, although it remains more common to treat these last two as separate species within the genus Homo rather than as subspecies within H. sapiens. The subspecies name H. sapiens sapiens is sometimes used informally instead of "modern humans" or "anatomically modern humans".
It has no formal authority associated with it. By the early 2000s, it had become common to use H. s. sapiens for the ancestral population of all contemporary humans, as such it is equivalent to the binomial H. sapiens in the more restrictive sense. The speciation of H. sapiens out of archaic human varieties derived from H. erectus is estimated as having taken place over 350,000 years ago, as the Khoisan split from other populations is dated between 260,000 and 350,000 years ago. An alternative suggestion defines H. sapiens cladistically as including the lineage of modern humans since the split from the lineage of Neanderthals 500,000 to 800,000 years ago. The time of divergence between archaic H. sapiens and ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans caused by a genetic bottleneck of the latter was dated at 744,000 years ago, combined with repeated early admixture events and Denisovans diverging from Neanderthals 300 generations after their split from H. sapiens, as calculated by Rogers et al..
The derivation of a comparatively homogeneous single species of H. sapiens from more diverse varieties of archaic humans was debated in terms of two competing models during the 1980s: "recent African origin" postulated the emergence of H. sapiens from a single source population in Africa, which expanded and led to the extinction of all other human varieties, while the "multiregional evolution" model postulated the survival of regional forms of archaic humans converging into the modern human varieties by the mechanism of clinal variation, via genetic drift, gene flow and selection throughout the Pleistocene. Since the 2000s, the availability of data from archaeogenetics and population genetics has led to the emergence of a much more detailed picture, intermediate between the two competing scenarios outlined above: The recent Out-of-Africa expansion accounts for the predominant part of modern human ancestry, while there were significant admixture events with regional archaic humans. Since the 1970s, the Omo remains, dated to some 195,000 years ago, have been taken as the conventional cut-off point for the emergence of "anatomically modern humans".
Since the 2000s, the discovery of older remains with comparable characteristics, the discovery of ongoing hybridization between "modern" and "archaic" populations after the time of the Omo remains, have opened up a renewed debate on the "age of H. sapiens", in journalistic publications cast into terms of "H. sapiens may be older than thought". H. s. idaltu, dated to 160,000 years ago, has been postulated as an extinct subspecies of H. sapiens in 2003. H. Neanderthalensis, which became extinct about 40,000 years ago, has been classified as a subspecies, H. s. neanderthalensis. H. heidelbergensis, dated 600,000 to 300,000 years ago, has long been thought to be a candidate for the last common ancestor of the Neanderthal and modern human lineages. However, genetic evidence from the Sima de los Huesos fossils published in 2016 seems to suggest that H. heidelbergensis in its entirety should be included in the Neanderthal lineage, as "pre-Neanderthal" or "early Neanderthal", while the divergence time between the Neanderthal and
Torre Abbey
Torre Abbey is a historic building and art gallery in Torquay, which lies in the South West of England. It was founded in 1196 as a monastery for Premonstratensian canons, is now the best-preserved medieval monastery in Devon and Cornwall. In addition to its medieval and Georgian rooms, Torre Abbey is known for the formal gardens on Abbey Park and Meadows, for the third largest art collection in the county of Devon and for regular exhibitions by contemporary artists. In 1196 six Premonstratensian canons from the Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire founded Torre Abbey when William Brewer, lord of the manor of Torre, gave them land. By 1536 the Abbey's annual income made it the wealthiest of all the Premonstratensian houses in England; the canons surrendered to King Henry's VIII's commissioner in 1539 at the Dissolution of the Monasteries and thereafter in 1539 a 21-year lease of the site and demesne of Torre Abbey was acquired by Sir Hugh I Pollard, lord of the manor of King's Nympton, Sheriff of Devon in 1535/6 and Recorder of Barnstaple in 1545.
In 1543 Pollard acquired the freehold from John St. Leger of Annery, who had himself acquired it in 1543 with other lands from the king in exchange for some lands and payment of a cash balance. Dissolution resulted in a widescale demolition of the church and east range, all items of value, including the lead from the roofs, were taken; the south and west ranges were unscathed and, in 1598, were converted into a house for Thomas Ridgeway. After a succession of various owners, the house became the possession of the Cary family in 1662, it stayed in the family until 1930 when, during worldwide economic crisis, financial difficulties forced Commander Henry Cary to sell it to Torquay Borough Council. It has since been used as a municipal art gallery. Torre Abbey is managed by Torbay Council. After a £6.5 million refurbishment made possible by grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund, English Heritage and the Friends of Torre Abbey, Torre Abbey reopened in July 2008. The main abbey comprises two Grade I listed buildings.
Though the church is little more than a ruin, the west and south sides of the cloisters are still standing. The gatehouse dates from around 1380, the barrel vault above the chapel the guest hall, dates from the 15th century; the tithe barn, built along with the abbey in the early thirteenth century, is known as The Spanish Barn after it was used for fourteen days to hold 397 prisoners of war from the Spanish Armada in 1588. Around 1740 the buildings underwent extensive alterations, giving them a Georgian remodelling, intact today; the Cary family invested in further reconstructions throughout the 19th century, including the construction of a small brewery. The permanent exhibitions focus on paintings of the 19th century including pictures of national standing as William Blake and the Pre-Raphaelite works of Edward Burne-Jones or William Holman Hunt. Torre Abbey houses the contents of the studio of Frederick Thrupp, the largest collection by an individual Victorian sculptor to survive in the UK.
The Abbey provides a programme of contemporary art exhibitions, including Antony Gormley's Field for the British Isles in 2009 and Damien Hirst's Mother and Child, Divided in 2010. The annual Torre Abbey Contemporary Open exhibition provides a showcase for artists from the South West. During his time in command of the Channel Fleet between 1800 and 1801 Admiral John Jervis, 1st Earl of St Vincent lived at the Abbey when he was too ill to remain with the fleet. Ellis, A. C. An Historical Survey of Torquay, Torquay Gasquet, Francis Aidan. "Chapter 12: Torre Abby". The Greater Abbeys of England. P. 283. Retrieved August 27, 2017. Gasquet, Francis Aidan. "Audio reading of "Chapter 12: Torre Abby"". LibriVox. Retrieved August 27, 2017. Seymour, Torre Abbey. An Account of its History, Buildings and Lands, Exeter: printed Seymour, The Exchequer Cartulary of Torre Abbey, Friends of Torre Abbey, Torquay: Friends of Torre AbbeyCS1 maint: Extra text: authors list Rhodes, Michael. A Souvenir Guide, Friends of Torre Abbey, Torbay Council, archived from the original on 16 July 2011 Rhodes, Devon's Torre Abbey: Faith and Grand Designs, 2015 Official website Official Facebook PageOfficial Twitter established in the 1190s]]
Domesday Book
Domesday Book is a manuscript record of the "Great Survey" of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 by order of King William the Conqueror. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states: Then, at the midwinter, was the king in Gloucester with his council.... After this had the king a large meeting, deep consultation with his council, about this land. Sent he his men over all England into each shire, it was written in Medieval Latin, was abbreviated, included some vernacular native terms without Latin equivalents. The survey's main purpose was to determine what taxes had been owed during the reign of King Edward the Confessor, which allowed William to reassert the rights of the Crown and assess where power lay after a wholesale redistribution of land following the Norman conquest; the assessors' reckoning of a man's holdings and their values, as recorded in Domesday Book, was dispositive and without appeal. The name "Domesday Book" came into use in the 12th century; as Richard FitzNeal wrote in the Dialogus de Scaccario: for as the sentence of that strict and terrible last account cannot be evaded by any skilful subterfuge, so when this book is appealed to... its sentence cannot be quashed or set aside with impunity.
That is why we have called the book "the Book of Judgement"... because its decisions, like those of the Last Judgement, are unalterable. The manuscript is held at The National Archives at London. In 2011, the Open Domesday site made the manuscript available online; the book is an invaluable primary source for historical economists. No survey approaching the scope and extent of Domesday Book was attempted again in Britain until the 1873 Return of Owners of Land which presented the first complete, post-Domesday picture of the distribution of landed property in the British Isles. Domesday Book encompasses two independent works; these were "Little Domesday", "Great Domesday" No surveys were made of the City of London, Winchester, or some other towns due to their tax-exempt status. Most of Cumberland and Westmorland are missing. County Durham is missing; the omission of the other counties and towns is not explained, although in particular Cumberland and Westmorland had yet to be conquered. "Little Domesday" – so named because its format is physically smaller than its companion's – is the more detailed survey, down to numbers of livestock.
It may have represented the first attempt, resulting in a decision to avoid such level of detail in "Great Domesday". Both volumes are organised into a series of chapters listing the fees, held by a named tenant-in-chief of the king, namely religious institutions, Norman warrior magnates and a few Saxon thegns who had made peace with the Norman regime; some of the largest such magnates held several hundred fees, in a few cases in more than one county. For example, the chapter of the Domesday Book Devonshire section concerning Baldwin the Sheriff lists 176 holdings held in-chief by him. Only a few of the holdings of the large magnates were held in demesne, most having been subinfeudated to knights military followers of the tenant-in-chief which latter thus became their overlord; the fees listed within the chapter concerning a particular tenant-in-chief were ordered, but not in a systematic or rigorous fashion, by the Hundred Court under the jurisdiction of which they were situated, not by geographic location.
As a review of taxes owed, it was unpopular. Each county's list opened with the king's demesne lands, it should be borne in mind that under the feudal system the king was the only true "owner" of land in England, under his allodial title. He was thus the ultimate overlord and the greatest magnate could do no more than "hold" land from him as a tenant under one of the various contracts of feudal land tenure. Holdings of Bishops followed of the abbeys and religious houses of lay tenants-in-chief and lastly the king's serjeants, Saxon thegns who had survived the Conquest, all in hierarchical order. In some counties, one or more principal towns formed the subject of a separate section: in some the clamores were treated separately; this principle applies more to the larger volume: in the smaller one, the system is more confused, the execution less perfect. Domesday names a total of 13,418 places. Apart from the wholly rural portions, which constitute its bulk, Domesday contains entries of interest concerning most of t
Prince of Orange
Prince of Orange is a title associated with the sovereign Principality of Orange, in what is now southern France. Under the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, Frederick William I of Prussia ceded the Principality of Orange to King Louis XIV of France. After William III of England died without children, a dispute arose between Johan Willem Friso and Frederick I of Prussia, settled in the Treaty of Partition; the title is traditionally borne by the heir apparent of the Dutch monarch. The title descends via absolute primogeniture since 1983, meaning that its holder can be either Prince or Princess of Orange; the Dutch royal dynasty, the House of Orange-Nassau, is not the only family to claim the dynastical title. Rival claims to the title have been made by German emperors and kings of the House of Hohenzollern and by the head of the French noble family of Mailly; the current users of the title are Princess Catharina-Amalia of the Netherlands, Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia, Guy, Marquis de Mailly-Nesle.
The title referred to Orange in the Vaucluse department in the Rhone valley of southern France, a property of the House of Orange of the House of Baux and the House of Châlon-Arlay before passing in 1544 to the House of Orange-Nassau. The Principality originated as the County of Orange, a fief in the Holy Roman Empire, in the Empire's constituent Kingdom of Burgundy, it was awarded to William of Gellone, a grandson of Charles Martel and therefore a cousin of Charlemagne, around the year 800 for his services in the wars against the Moors and in the reconquest of southern France and the Spanish March. His Occitan name is Guilhem. William ruled as count of Toulouse, duke of Aquitaine, marquis of Septimania; the horn that came to symbolize Orange when heraldry came in vogue much in the 12th century represented a pun on William of Gellone's name in French, from the character his deeds inspired in the chanson de geste, the Chanson de Guillaume: "Guillaume au Court-nez" or its homophone "Guillaume au Cornet".
The chanson appears to incorporate material relating to William of Gellone's battle at the Orbieu or Orbiel river near Carcassonne in 793 as well as to his seizure of the town of Orange. As the kingdom of Burgundy fragmented in the early Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa elevated the lordship of Orange to a principality in 1163 to shore up his supporters in Burgundy against the Pope and the King of France; as the Empire's boundaries retreated from those of the principality, the prince acceded to the sovereign rights that the Emperor exercised. As William the Silent wrote in his marriage proposal to the uncle of his second wife, the Elector August of Saxony, he held Orange as "my own free property", not as a fief of any suzerain; that historical position of honor and reputation would drive William the Silent forward, as much as it fueled the opposition of his great grandson William III to Louis XIV, when that king invaded and occupied Orange. The last descendant of the original princes, René of Châlon, left the principality to his cousin William the Silent, not a descendant of the original Orange family but the heir to the principality of Orange by testament, however in violation against the inheritance pattern enacted by the last will of Marie des Baux, the Princess of Orange through kinship to whom Prince René derived his own right thereto.
In 1673, Louis XIV of France annexed all territory of the principality to France and to the royal domain, as part of the war actions against the stadtholder William III of Orange — who became King William III of Great Britain. Orange ceased to exist as a sovereign realm, de facto. In 1673, Louis XIV bestowed the titular princedom on Louis Charles de Mailly, Marquis de Nesle, whose wife was a direct descendant, heiress-general by primogeniture, of the original princes of Orange. After the marquis, the next holder was Louis of Mailly-Nesle, marquis de Nesle. Although no longer descended from Louis-Charles, a branch of the Mailly family still claim the title today. In 1714 Louis XIV bestowed the usufruct of the principality on his kinsman, Louis Armand of Bourbon, Prince de Conti. After his death in 1727 the principality was deemed merged in the Crown by 1731; because William III died without legitimate children, the principality was regarded as having been inherited by his closest cognate relative on the basis of the testament of Frederic-Henry, Frederick I of Prussia, who ceded the principality — at least the lands, but not the formal title — to France in 1713.
France supported his claim. In this way, the territory of the principality lost its feudal and secular privileges and became a part of France; the Treaty of Utrecht allowed the King of Prussia to erect part of the duchy of Gelderland into a new Principality of Orange. The kings of Prussia and the German emperors styled themselves Princes of Orange till 1918. An agnatic relative of William III, John William Friso of Nassau, cognatically desc
