Em domingo, 3 de setembro de 2017 19:48:58 UTC+1, Richard Smith escreveu: > On 03/09/17 15:25, Paulo Canedo wrote: > > > I would like to know did the Marquis de Ruvigny who was contemporany > > of Mary Ann Buttivant and said almost no one in the working classes > > were descendants from Edward III trace this line? If not I would say > > his studies were not as good as many say. Or did Ruvigny find some > > illegitimacy in the line to exclude it from his publications? > > I have no idea whether de Ruvigny knew of this line, but I would be > interested to know exactly what he said about working class descendants > of Edward III. > > 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. > > 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. > > But perhaps that's not what de Ruvigny meant. If what he meant was that > only a small proportion of the working classes had a verifiable descent, > I would agree. And I would absolutely agree if he meant that only a > small proportion were aware that they had a verifiable descent from > Edward III. > > We also need to remember that a century has elapsed since de Ruvigny's > time, during which there has been a further century of social mobility, > of population expansion, and most importantly, interest in genealogy has > really taken off outside the gentry. > > Richard Ruvigny said ´with some few exceptions, [no royally descended families] have descended to or are at least traceable among the trading or labouring classes`.