On 03/09/17 19:48, Richard Smith wrote: > It seems frequently to be repeated that "experts say" 80% of the > population (presumably meaning the English or perhaps British > population) are likely to be descended from Edward III. I've never seen > a citation for this figure, and it smacks a little of being an off the > cuff remark by someone who hadn't a statistical model to back it up; > nevertheless I don't intrinsically find it hard to believe. > > Of course, this supposed 80% figure refers to any descents, not a > verifiable descent. All the same, my guess would be the that the > majority of verifiable descendants of Edward III were either working > class or descended through a working class ancestor. During the last, > say, 300 years, during which period it is relatively straightforward to > trace descents regardless of social class, there have been vastly more > working class people than in the gentry. The big problem with general statements along the lines that 80%, 100% or whatever are so descended, and the converse (except for the 100% case) that they aren't, is that, in practice, they aren't falsifiable. If you can't pick up such a line by the time you get to the beginning of PRs you're unlikely to get further because documentation will be lacking. Prior to that date you're mostly going to depend on property records. Manorial tenants and freeholders might have some documentation, subtenants even less and, where you can get anything at all, lines will be sketchy, uncertain and incomplete. > Let's consider the documented descendants of Edward III living 1700. > Maybe very few were working class, but a small number demonstrably were. > Over the last 300 years, low class mobility means the descendants in > the gentry, which doubtless comprised the majority of the gentry, have > married into each other's families; while the few working class > descendants are so dissipated that are unlikely to have intermarried. > The result is that the number of verifiable working class descendants > will have increased enormously much faster than those in the gentry. So > I would be astonished if it were not now the case that the majority of > verifiable descendants were working class or had descents through a > working class ancestor. The same intermarriage that causes pedigree collapse in the gentry also applied, IME, further down the scale with the same effect. I can certainly find a number of 2nd cousin marriages in my own ancestry and one far more complex set of intermarriages which leaves me with 5 lines back to the same C17th couple. An earlier line has 4 out of 5 successive generations marrying Broadhead brides; I don't have any further information about their ancestry except that the Broadhead family goes back to the late C13th century hereabouts and although they seem to have been one of the more prominent local families they were just manorial tenants. And then most of my brick walls involve one surname with, apparently, a single local ancestor who overlapped Edward III. I think the general theory behind the descents from Edward III/William I/Charlemagne is that they would have an increasing number of descendants in each generation so that after sufficient generations the theoretical number of descendants becomes greater than the actual population whilst the number of theoretical ancestors of each member of the later generation exceeds the English (or whatever) population at the time of the appropriate monarch. In practice cousin marriages of various degrees at all levels of society will have reduced this effect. The extent to which this interfered with the theory is, AFAICS untestable. So we have a bundle of hypotheses which are inherently unfalsifiable and yet we seem condemned to discuss them at fairly frequent intervals. -- Hotmail is my spam bin. Real address is ianng at austonley org uk

I dont think you want to entangle the Edward III question with the charlemagne question. The number of generations since Charlemagne ensures that even a model with the most insanely restrictive parameters imaginable still shows that he is truly the father of practically all of present day Europe. I have a few *trillion* spaces in my ahnentafel to fill for people contemporaneous to Charlemagne, and other than a few hundred people at a time, nobody in Europe knew if their, say, 21x great grandfather was Charlemagne or not, so clearly they did not selectively choose a spouse based on that knowledge. Even in a society with a very strict caste system there would have been enough people who slept with the stable boy or the local hooker to ensure the same result.