"Who Do You Think You Are" Series 13, Episode #1: Danny Dyer

[andrewalston]

I'm going to guess that that calculation will be based on an assumption that anyone of the 1500 population is equally likely to be our ancestor.

The point is that even then, not all the 20,000 descendants would be considered royal, or even noble. There certainly wasn't a castle or a fancy house for each of those 20,000.

Some of them may have had a few quid more than the average, but their line may have fallen from favour, gone broke, or worse. Each generation, the "royal" blood would be diluted.

The majority of those 20,000 would have to be earning a living like the rest of the population, and would be looking to the same pool of possible spouses. In the programme, we saw mention of Ann Gosnold marrying James Buttivant, a weaver.

[coombs]

I'm going to guess that that calculation will be based on an assumption that anyone of the 1500 population is equally likely to be our ancestor.

The point is that even then, not all the 20,000 descendants would be considered royal, or even noble. There certainly wasn't a castle or a fancy house for each of those 20,000.

Some of them may have had a few quid more than the average, but their line may have fallen from favour, gone broke, or worse. Each generation, the "royal" blood would be diluted.

The majority of those 20,000 would have to be earning a living like the rest of the population, and would be looking to the same pool of possible spouses. In the programme, we saw mention of Ann Gosnold marrying James Buttivant, a weaver.

Exactly. Allegedly my Titshall line harks back to a Lord of the manor of Herringfleet in Suffolk. Someone with the surname was Lord of the manor. Titshall is a rare surname as well. My Titshall's were millers in the 1700s, one was a churchwarden. So if they do descend from a lord then they would have slipped down the scale. I have ancestors who were landowners whose children ended up as yeomen or tenant farmers and whose grandchildren ended up as labourers.

Most Brits will descend from royalty whether we can prove it or not. And Danny Dyer is no less the working class person he is just because a very distant ancestor 22 generations back was King Edward III.

[Skoosh]

This so-called "Royalty" was descended from the bastard of a brigand & a tanner's daughter!

Skoosh.

[smudwhisk]

This so-called "Royalty" was descended from the bastard of a brigand & a tanner's daughter!

Skoosh.

My Aunt's line back to royalty descends from a somewhat randy CofE vicar and his teenage mistress.   They had seven children together while he was still married, albeit eventually officially separated.  She appears to have been about 15 when the first child was born but the parish registers for the particular parish were stolen from the church in the 1950s.   The vicar came from a somewhat infamous and dysfunctional family where it wasn't particularly uncommon.

[Suffolk Mawther]

Just a note for Coombs : David Morrissey was the original narrator, followed by Mark Strong and now Cheri Lunghi.

SM ...

[Wred]

, he didn't really seem to grasp some points, and the programme did bop about a lot. Relationships that were indirect seemed to be adopted as direct lines, and at times one cringed a little....

Seems DD had direct descent through the female line. Anne-p message 37 has posted the family tree.

I was once told that if you have a landowning farmer or yeoman you could well have a gateway ancestor. Mine stubbornly remained proud Ag Labs.

[sallyyorks]

The chap on More or Less worked out that by the late 1500s, there would be about 20,000 descendants, so one in every 200 people in England was a descendant of Edward III.

Each of us in the present day would have around 15,000 ancestors who were alive in the late 1500s. That gives odds of about 75-1 on that we are descended from Edward.

I'm going to guess that that calculation will be based on an assumption that anyone of the 1500 population is equally likely to be our ancestor.

What Claire, I think it was, is saying is that assumption is false because the subsets of 1500 nobles and non-nobles produce 3 distinct sets of 2016 population I.e. full noble, full common and hybrid noble-common and that the full common subset will far outweigh the other two

If we completely split, for arguments sake, two distinct social classes.
The peasants/industrial labourers - millions
The royals - thousands
They then grow independently of each other (for arguments sake) and never ever meet. This does not change the population as a whole and we would still end up with the same "numbers to play with" population that we had then and have now.

The calculations suggesting we all have a royal ancestor do not take into account the class divide. They assume that everyone had an equal chance of meeting each other and were constantly marrying outside their own social class.
The calculations are purely a number crunching game that put everyone into one big equal blob. But in reality it was a few toffs intermarrying with each other and then, on the other side, a huge mass of labourers who were all intermarrying with each other too.

This a bit of an extreme example, but look at the Hapsburg tree and then consider who the peasants in small hamlets and villages were marrying into at the time too. This is Pedigree Collapse and none of us really know just how extreme it really was ? We might like to think of our ancestors branching out and marrying lots of unrelated people but how often did they really ?

[smudwhisk]

The calculations suggesting we all have a royal ancestor do not take into account the class divide. They assume that everyone had an equal chance of meeting each other and were constantly marrying outside their own social class.
The calculations are purely a number crunching game that put everyone into one big equal blob. But in reality it was a few toffs intermarrying with each other and then, on the other side, a huge mass of labourers who were all intermarrying with each other too.

But that ignores the fact that over the generations, descendants of royalty/aristocracy didn't always stay at the same level of society.  Where primogeniture applied, the younger children didn't inherit as much so their descendants became less well off.  Even where it didn't apply, money would be split between many children and over a number of generations the descendants often dropped down social classes marrying into slightly less well to do families, and their descendants became even less well off as the money was split more ways.  This is why I think you will find some argue that a lot of people in this country could will be descended from the aristocracy and/or royalty, not because the social classes married well outside their only class. 

That is how I found a proven line back to Edward I which wasn't something there was ever known in the family.  The particular line were well off until the mid 1600s and then dropped down the social classes over a number of generations as the money was split more and more ways becoming shipwrights, grocers and fisherman, among others, and latterly ended up in the east end of London.

Similarly, I'm also distantly related on another side of the family to the Earls of Lichfield and the Earls of Leicester at Holkham, among others, who are descendants of Sir Edward Coke, the Lord Chief Justice under James I.  Sir Edward Coke was the nephew of one of my direct ancestors.  The family were not at that point members of the aristocracy, its debateable whether you could call them landed gentry then either but they did have property and quite a lot of money.  While a number, but not all, of Sir Edward's descendants eventually reached the heights of the aristocracy, in the case of my line the property and money was split in many directions over the generations so that by the time of the mid 1800s they were living in the east end of London working as labourers on the docks.  We have documented with the help of Wills the line back to the Coke family and it just shows how different sides of families faired over the generations.

[StevieSteve]

I'm going to guess that that calculation will be based on an assumption that anyone of the 1500 population is equally likely to be our ancestor.

The point is that even then, not all the 20,000 descendants would be considered royal, or even noble. There certainly wasn't a castle or a fancy house for each of those 20,000.

What I'm saying is that there is a lower probability that someone in 1500 married a non-descendant of Edward III than 20000 / 4million