You are related to William the Conqueror (apparently) but you didn't know it

I was watching the BBC documentary Secrets of the Bayeux Tapestry: Inside the Museum, following the job of bringing the nearly 1,000-year-old embroidery back across the Channel for its British Museum exhibition. Sir Michael Palin narrates, with historians including Janina Ramirez and David Olusoga helping unpick the story behind those famous stitches.

Then came a statement that made me splutter:

King Charles III can trace his ancestry back to William the Conqueror.

“Hang on,” I thought. “Surely that's bollocks?”

After nearly a thousand years of murdered kings, childless monarchs, civil wars, illegitimate offspring, imported Germans and enough wife-swapping to keep a medieval soap opera going indefinitely, how can that family tree possibly still work?

Annoyingly, it basically does.

It's all relative...

The trick is that royal dynasties ended, but genealogical descent carried on through daughters, sisters and cousins.

William's Norman dynasty gave way to the Plantagenets through Henry I's daughter Empress Matilda. Later came Tudors, Stuarts and eventually the Hanoverians. The surname, nationality and ruling house could change completely while descendants of earlier monarchs remained somewhere in the pedigree.

So Charles really can trace genealogical lines back to William.

Impressive?

Well... here's where I upset the apple cart.

So, quite possibly, can you.

Not necessarily with a lovely illuminated family tree and somebody from the College of Arms pointing at it – but mathematically.

Go back roughly 30 generations and your theoretical family tree contains over a billion ancestral positions.

There weren't a billion different people available.

Your family tree therefore doesn't keep spreading out neatly. It folds back on itself repeatedly. Cousins marry cousins; populations mix; the same individuals appear in your ancestry through multiple routes. Genealogists call this pedigree collapse.

And population genetics makes things even more interesting. Research by Peter Ralph and Graham Coop found extraordinary levels of shared ancestry across Europe. Even Europeans living thousands of miles apart share vast numbers of genealogical ancestors when we look back around a millennium.

That doesn't prove that you personally descend from William. William had to produce a surviving line that eventually entered your particular ancestral network.

But for someone with deep British ancestry, descent from medieval kings and aristocrats becomes far less remarkable than it first sounds.

And here's my favourite bit.

Meet Edwin the Cleckheaton pig farmer

Imagine Edwin, my entirely representative ancestral pig farmer scratching a living around Cleckheaton in 1066.

No crown. No castle. No tapestry.

Just pigs.

If Edwin had children, and his descendants survived and continued having children, exactly the same mathematics applies to him.

In fact, the research suggests that medieval Europeans whose descendant lines survived can become ancestors of enormous proportions of later populations.

So there is a delicious historical irony here.

King Charles has something most of us don't: an extraordinarily well-documented route through kings, queens and European aristocracy back towards 1066.

The rest of us have missing parish registers, illegible gravestones and Great-Aunt Doris insisting her grandmother was related to somebody important.

But biologically and genealogically?

William the Conqueror may not be remotely as exclusive as we've made him sound.

And somewhere behind him stand millions of forgotten farmers, millers, shepherds, craftsmen and mothers whose descendants multiplied just as successfully.

History remembered William because he conquered England.

Edwin just got on with the pigs.

Nearly a thousand years later, there's a fair chance we need both of them to explain who we are.



Sources / thanks to

Thanks to the BBC's Secrets of the Bayeux Tapestry: Inside the Museum, the British Museum's Bayeux Tapestry exhibition material, and Peter Ralph & Graham Coop's research The Geography of Recent Genetic Ancestry across Europe.

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