Booked under your title
Many restaurants, hotels and airlines will add a title to a booking if you ask when you make it. It costs them nothing, it suits the occasion, and “a table for Lord Ellison” read across a room has a certain effect.
It is an honorific, not a peerage — and that is exactly why it works. A courtesy title, carried with a straight face and a certificate to back it, opens more doors than you would expect. Every one of them is optional, and every one of them is fun.
A style proclaimed under the arms of the House of Pierpont-Archer and entered in its register. Under English common law you may be known by any name or style you choose, provided there is no intent to deceive. It is not legal, noble, official or hereditary; it confers no rights; it belongs on no official document. Everything below works precisely because a title is a courtesy — and courtesies are freely given.
Many restaurants, hotels and airlines will add a title to a booking if you ask when you make it. It costs them nothing, it suits the occasion, and “a table for Lord Ellison” read across a room has a certain effect.
Airline and hotel loyalty schemes, and plenty of everyday online accounts, let you pick a title when you set one up. Honorifics are usually already in the list.
Nothing stops you signing a personal letter or an email as Lord or Lady, or having it set on a run of calling cards, a bookplate, or the return address of your Christmas post.
Place cards. The toast. The seating plan at a wedding. A prop that keeps giving, and one that photographs well next to a glass of something.
Choose to have your proclamation listed in the public Register of the House — a page in your name on lord-title.uk, searchable by anyone, removable whenever you like.
“So how did you become a Lord?” is a better anecdote than most people have ready — and the honest answer, a House and a certificate and a square metre of Scotland, is the most charming version of it.
It is the kind of gift a family keeps referring to for years — at every birthday, every booking, every time the certificate catches someone’s eye on the wall.
It works just as well given as received. Watching the recipient work out what it is, and then decide to enjoy it, may be the best perk of the lot.
Every certificate prints the coordinates of the square metre dedicated in your name, inside a real patch of Scottish woodland in the Cheviot Hills. Scotland grants a right of responsible access to open country, so nothing stops you walking up to it, standing on it, and having your photograph taken with a slightly ridiculous sense of occasion.
Most gifts do not come with somewhere to go. This one does — and part of what you pay goes toward keeping that ground standing.
A proclaimed title is a courtesy, not a credential. It has no standing with any government, bank, court or public body, and it is not recognised by anyone who has not chosen to play along.
Keep it off your passport, your driving licence, a mortgage, a legal contract, and any form that asks for your legal name. That is not cheeky — it is fraud, and it is the one reliable way to turn a good gift into a bad afternoon.
Everywhere a title is offered freely and taken in good humour, though, it is yours to enjoy. That covers rather a lot of dinners.
Each package includes the certificate, the woodland dedication, and — if you ask for it — a listing in the Register of the House.