Quoting marg o'leary via <[email protected]>: > It is a really interesting article. > > I seem to have seen a few movies lately where the lord of the manor had > first night with the new brides in their area. How common was that? Did it > help or hinder the gene pool? > It makes a good line for a movie but Wikipedia says: "There is no evidence, however, that the alleged rights ever actually existed in medieval Europe, much less that they were ever exercised, although there is evidence of the practice in certain other regions and time periods." But doubtless the rape of servants or similar by their feudal lords took place 'informally' and there wasn't any redress. > I suppose there are, and were, a lot of children born due to incest and > other forms of assault which were never recorded. > Yes, doubtless that is the case. But it is difficult enough to prove that in the modern day let alone hundreds of years ago. > Future DNA testing will probably match all of us in quite interesting ways. > It might, but I'm not sure that the information is always there to be retrieved. Remember that half of our DNA is 'lost' in each successive generation (barring mtDNA and Y-chromosome, which only tell us about one line. Regards Steve