I’m curious as to whether there are any people who can prove descent from Anglo-Saxon royalty. Not just the national royalty, but of any royalty of any once independent part of it. In the following order of preference:
Descendants of the House of Wessex. Edgar the Aetheling or his sisters, or any earlier king from their line.
Descendants of Cnut or Forkbeard.
Descendants of Harold Godwinsson by either of his baby-mothers.
Descendants of Cospatrick, the last leader of the house descended from the Royal House of Bernice, later of Northumbria, and after the Vikings arrived the kings of North Saxonland, Earls of Northumbria, High-Reeves of Bamburgh and so on.
Descendants of any of the royal houses killed off by the Danes, of East Anglia, Mercia, Lindsey, Essex and so on.
of those who didn’t even make it to the arrival of the Danes, the houses of Sussex, Kent, the Hwicce, the Dere, the Isle of Wight and any others that might be knocking about.
The short-lived Scandinavian monarchies in English territory, in East Anglia and in York.
I have met a person who claimed that his ancestors used to be kings before 1066, but I am not prepared to take his word for it. I can’t decide, though, if he was deliberately trying to pull my leg or if he was a mythomaniac.
Since the British royal family traces their decent back the Cerdic, if you can link yourself to any branch of the royal fam at any point in the last millenia (and there must be tens of thousands of people that can) you can say your descended from Anglo-Saxon nobility. So he wasn’t necessarily full of it.
When I looked up the earldom that he claimed he is heir to there is no trace of him there and his claimed Swedish high nobility background also seems to be somewhat shady.
Edgar the Aethling had two sisters, Margaret and Christina. After the Norman Conquest, Margaret left England and ended up in Scotland, where she married Malcolm II, King of Scots. They had several children.
Through their sons, all subsequent kings and queens of Scotland were descended from the Wessex royal house. That includes James VI, who became James I of England and is the ancestor of all subsequent English and British kings and queens.
In addition, Margaret and Malcolm had a daughter, Matilda, who married Henry I of England. Their daughter, also named Matilda, was the mother of Henry II. All subsequent kings and queens of England and then Britain are descended from Henry II.
So, if a person can trace ancestry back to either the Scottish or English/British royal families, they are descended from the Wessex royal family (subject of course to the usual disclaimer that there can always be slips along the way if a wife has an affair and passes the child off as the child of her husband).
All the ancient monarchs of every country should be dug up and their DNA compared to that of the modern monarchs.
When it’s proven the modern monarch who claims descent couldn’t possibly be, he or she should be ousted and the country/political union be made republics.
That’s what I’d decree when I’m king of the world.
I am allegedly the ancestor of William, he led a successful battle against Harold Godwinson, the heir apparent to the crown after the death of King Edward in 1066. The battle took place exactly 956 years ago today. William assumed the thrown after this battle. The records of this time are pretty sketchy so I have my doubts.
Just about everybody has ancestors who used to be kings before 1066. There were lots of kings, and everyone has millions and millions of ancestors. The only difference between royalty and the rest of us, is that they wrote down a bunch of names.
Also, the nobility tended to marry mostly among themselves, with limited upward social mobility. As a result, from the bits mentioned above, you can see it’s a pretty small and closed society compared to us great unwashed masses. Anyone with ancestral connections to anyone with titles is likely able to connect to much of the crowned heads of Europe.
I disagree. I think it’s likely that a high percentage of people of European descent are descended from European royalty. Population figures were low in the Middle Ages, but in each individual’s family tree the number of ancestors doubles with each generation you go back. A thousand years is about forty generations, and that far back your theoretical number of ancestors (2^40) exceeds a trillion. Of course this works mathematically only because the same ancestors show up multiple times in your family tree, but it also implies that for people of European descent, a fair percentage of people alive at that time in the past in the country of origin will likely be in the family tree. As for barriers between the social classes: All it takes for a British commoner of today to have lineage to royalty is (to make up an invented but not far-fetched example) for some prince in the past to have had a fling with a peasant girl, fathering an out-of-wedlock baby. Or for some nephew of a king to fall out of favour and be expulsed from the court, causing a decline into the lower classes. Of conversely, for someone from the lower classes working his way up to court. Such things happened, even in the middle ages.
The TV programme *Who Do You Think You Are * had a high old time with the ultimate “Cockney geezer” actor Danny Dyer, as they traced a line back to Edward III. All it takes is enough generations of younger children marrying down and/or by-blows on the wrong side of the blanket.
On a similar note, Patton Oswalt has a bit in one of his standup specials about taking a home DNA test and finding out he’s a descendent of Genghis Khan.
Did we mean ancestral ties that can be traced, or simply genetic connection? There’s no doubt that a fling with the upstairs maid was a thing; or even that the nobility and especially royalty had something going on with the wives or daughters of other nobles and it was pretty much acknowledged that there were illegitimate offspring. (IIRC Henry VIII had at least one son that everyone knew was his, but his whole divorce and head chop thing was trying to get a son born in wedlock.) Also there are likely “pedigree errors” for the children of noble ladies, but unless the lord wants to make a public spectacle of his cheating wife, they remain under wraps. So no doubt there are plenty of cross-connections, but the documentation may be lacking.
The lesser sons of lesser sons might have descended through the ranks of knights then squires until they became essentially servants. I think we see with those like Charles II, or even James II and his offspring (the first Charles III?) that rarely were the high and mighty simply booted into tradesman status - they got to hang around the courts of other countries living off the charity of those still in power. The nobility took care of each other; the great courts and even the lesser houses were full of unfortunate relatives and friends. Worst case they got relegated to clergy or nunneries so they didn’t propagate.
(Henry VIII’s fifth wife, during her trial for infidelity, it was mentioned that she was raised in a rich relative’s house, where she lived in a attic dormer room with several other girls in similar circumstances; the boys were living in the other wing attic. One of her “transgressions” was being molested at that time by the music teacher.)
I suppose another way t look at it. (And I say this simply to illustrate closed communities). How many people can trace themselves to a Jewish ancestor? Or a Romany/gypsy one? These are examples of closed communities which married almost exclusively within themselves. But as the story of Merchant of Venice shows, mixing with the greater population was not impossible or unheard of or something of great shame (unless like Nan from Nantucket, she took your bucket of ducats).
So I guess a reciprocal question is - what are the odds that there is someone that lived in the same country 1000 years ago that you are not related to?
A couple of branches of my ancestors have done some pretty extensive genealogy. It has been a while since I looked at it and don’t remember exact names, but one chain reaches back to British royalty. I once drilled back several generations from the listed names, and if everything is accurate I am a direct descent of a Crusader king ofJerusalem, which I thought was pretty cool.