In Britain, there is still a small but measurable difference in social metrics between people on different sides of the Ivanhoe gap after nearly a millennium. From The Telegraph in 2011:
People with Norman names wealthier than other Britons
People with "Norman" surnames like Darcy and Mandeville are still wealthier than the general population 1,000 years after their descendants conquered Britain, according to a study into social progress.
Research shows that the descendants of people who in 1858 had "rich" surnames such as Percy and Glanville, indicating they were descended from the French nobility, are still substantially wealthier in 2011 than those with traditionally "poor" or artisanal surnames. Artisans are defined as skilled manual workers.
Drawing on data culled from official records that go back as far as the Domesday Book as well as university admissions and probate archives, Gregory Clark, a professor of economics at the University of California [at Davis], has tracked what became of people whose surnames indicated their ancestors had come from either the aristocratic or artisanal classes.
By studying the probate records of those with “rich” and “poor” surnames every decade since the 1850s, he found that the extreme differences in accumulated wealth narrowed over time.
But the value of the estates left by those belonging to the “rich” surname group, immortalised in the character of Fitzwilliam Darcy, in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, were above the national average by at least 10 per cent.
In addition, today the holders of "rich" surnames live three years longer than average. Life expectancy is a strong indicator of socio-economic status.
Popular names of the medieval elite who were descended from Norman families include Balliol, Baskerville, Bruce, Darcy, Glanville, Lacy, Mandeville, and Venables.
Popular artisanal names that emerged in the 14th century include Smith, Carpenter, Mason, Shepherd, Cooper and Baker.
So, keep in mind that surnames typically didn't get chosen until about a quarter of a millennium after 1066.
By the way, the kind of British surnames that show up on characters in a P.G. Wodehouse novel tend to be rare in America. The more upper crust sort of Brits didn't emigrate to America much, except in the case of some younger sons. Here's a list of Anglo-Norman names. Some are common here, such as Martin, but many are close to unknown in America, such as Curzon.
For example, here is a list of British Prime Ministers. Until the last century or so, there are lots of names like "Gascoyne-Cecil" (a.k.a., Salisbury) that you really wouldn't expect to see on a U.S. President. Not many artisanal names like Thatcher. (Lately, though, it seems like an awful lot of Prime Ministers have Scottish names: David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Alec Douglas-Home, and Harold Macmillan over the last half century.)
P.S.:
The Norman invasion is the reason we have pairs of words for living versus cooked animals -- the commoners who raised animals spoke English, and the nobles who ate meat spoke Norman French. Thus we have cow/beef, calf/veal, sheep/mutton, swine/pork, deer/venison. (Wamba, the jester in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, catalogues these pairs.)
They grabbed the swag and held on for dear life.
ReplyDeleteIt's an interestingly pro-Lefist and resentment-fuelled micro-slice of Greg Clark's work; which overall has the opposite implications.
ReplyDeleteOne of his findings from the surname work is that people with poor surnames from about 1800 have more descendants than people with rich surnames - so the poor were out-reproducing the rich even in the era of 'Dickensian' poverty.
In terms of *biology*, the poor have, for 200 plus years (in England) had greater reproductive success than the rich - the poor are 'fitter' and better adapted to the environment.
This marked the point at which demographics became driven by fertility rather than mortality.
Roughly, up to 1800, reproductive success was a matter of having lower mortality (all classes had high fertility but among the poor nearly all children died); since 1800 reproductive success is a matter of having more babies since nearly all children will survive, even among the very poorest.
What about the many "man" names norman, newman, longman, strongman etc
ReplyDeleteAre these actually norman or post norman invasion anglo saxon names?
A direct consequence of the invasion was the near-total elimination of the old English aristocracy and the loss of English control over the Catholic Church in England. William systematically dispossessed English landowners and conferred their property on his continental followers. The Domesday Book meticulously documents the impact of this colossal programme of expropriation, revealing that by 1086 only about 5% of land in England south of the Tees was left in English hands. Even this tiny residue was further diminished in the decades that followed, the elimination of native landholding being most complete in southern parts of the country.[53][54]
ReplyDeleteNatives were also removed from high governmental and ecclesiastical office. After 1075 all earldoms were held by Normans, while Englishmen were only occasionally appointed as sheriffs. Likewise in the Church senior English office-holders were either expelled from their positions or kept in place for their lifetimes but replaced by foreigners when they died. By 1096 no bishopric was held by any Englishman, while English abbots became uncommon, especially in the larger monasteries.
_Wikipedia on the Norman Conquest
Norman French still is spoken in the Channel Islands.
ReplyDelete946 years is nothing. The Aryan invasion of India happened roughly 4,000 years ago. The amount of European (or "west Eurasian") ancestry there still positively correlates with caste rank:
ReplyDelete"For maternally inherited mtDNA, each caste is most similar to Asians. However, 20%–30% of Indian mtDNA haplotypes belong to West Eurasian haplogroups, and the frequency of these haplotypes is proportional to caste rank, the highest frequency of West Eurasian haplotypes being found in the upper castes. In contrast, for paternally inherited Y-chromosome variation each caste is more similar to Europeans than to Asians. Moreover, the affinity to Europeans is proportionate to caste rank, the upper castes being most similar to Europeans, particularly East Europeans. These findings are consistent with greater West Eurasian male admixture with castes of higher rank."
WASPs are such an object of ethno-class envy in America that it's funny to think of them as taking a second place in prestige to another group, however amorphous, at home.
I bet that Jack Aubrey's very Norman name isn't an accident in Patrick O'Brien's novels. He was meant to embody martial, aristocratic values and he came from an old land-owning family.
Popular names of the medieval elite who were descended from Norman families include Balliol, Baskerville, Bruce, Darcy, Glanville, Lacy, Mandeville, and Venables.
ReplyDeleteWhat about the many "man" names norman, newman, longman, strongman etc
French-sounding English names are likely Norman. Names that end in "-ville" are Norman; that means city in French, and also points to Normans settling in cities as well as country estates.
The "man" names are Anglo-Saxon / Germanic. "Norman" is what the Anglo-Saxons called them. Perhaps someone can enlighten me on what the Normans called themselves.
Another example of a Norman, anglicized French name, is Prudham. It sounds English, ending in "-ham", but it actually derives from "Prud'homme", meaning "wise man".
CLOSE THE GAP!
ReplyDeleteClearly England just needs to pay teachers more and stop all the anti-Saxon racism, which results in stereotype threat.
Names starting with Fitz- are Norman. Fitz corresponds to standard modern French fils (son), so a Fitzwilliam was a son of William (originally Guillaume), Fitzstephen was a son of Stephen, etc. The illegitimate children of the kings of England were given the surname Fitzroy (roi means king in standard French).
ReplyDeleteI know that Walt Disney's surname is Norman (D'Isigny means "from Isigny", a small town in Normany).
I don't have much background on this topic but I have noticed that I've developed a sense for "English" names that I don't think are American.
ReplyDeleteOn another note, it's kind of interesting that English people look different than Americans with WASPy names. British parliament has many more "gingers" than the American Congress, even if we restrict the sample to those without obvious ethnic heritage.
What made the Normans so successful was the way they were politically organized. The Anglo Saxons, like most tribal based cultures, relied on fealty to muster an army while the Normans levied taxes and paid their troops directly. This meant they could always count on the loyalty of their troops to show up on time and fight. The King now commanded his troops directly instead of relying on a pledge from his lords in time of war. In that sense, they were the forerunner of the modern Federal Government and Nation State.
ReplyDeleteI've read that the number of people who came to England with William the Conqueror was about 5,000. The total population of England was about 1.5 million.
ReplyDeleteThe unfortunate Mitchell Heisman did a scholarly 600+ page study of the Norman Conquest and its long-term consequences. It forms part of his monumental "suicide note":
ReplyDeletePart II: A Vendetta Called Revolution -- How Ethnic Hostility between Anglo-Saxons and the Normans Who Conquered Them Evolved into Liberal Democracy
download the book at suicidenote.info -- it's well worth reading.
I made this claim in an Internet discussion recently; that the people who migrated to America and became upper-class WASPs were not from the highest classes in England. So, I am pleased to see Steve tends to agree, based on their surnames. Another point is that their religious affiliation, their Puritanism, also suggests relatively low class origins, and origin in the unfashionable East Anglian region. A large number of WASPs seem not to even be Episcopalians, instead belonging to low church Protestant denominations which would label you as rather low class back in England. Unitarians, Congregationalists, and the like. It was socially adept of TS Eliot to convert from Unitarianism to Anglo-Catholicism.
ReplyDeleteI bet if you drew a comparison with Norway or Denmark, the ones with a farm name or an estate name, is most likely richer than the ones with a patronym like Hansen, Andersen etc.
ReplyDeleteAt first you identified yourself as say Hans Anderson, and then where you lived were added, for instance a farm named Berg. Your identity thus became Hans Anderson Berg in church books and other official papers.
When the practice with patronymes stopped, our example became Hans Berg.
For somebody who did not live on a farm, the patronyme usually became the surname.
Something similar could be going on with the Normans v. the Saxons, where a lot of the best farms got Norman names. If the British also took the name of the farm they lived on, then successful families would over time end up on the best farms, and thus also get a Norman name.
What also makes the Normans v. Saxons even harder to analyze, is that people with Saxon surnames might as well be Celts, so that one might be measuring Normans v.combined Saxons and Celts.
"Another point is that their religious affiliation, their Puritanism, also suggests relatively low class origins, and origin in the unfashionable East Anglian region."
ReplyDeleteOkay, but the smartest guy in the history of the world (according to Keynes -- granted, he's biased, but still ...) was a Puritan from the East Anglia region: Isaac Newton. The Puritans tended to be self-selected for middle class smarts: the kind of people who looked forward all week to a really long, closely argued sermon or two on Sunday. Neal Stephenson's Baroque series makes a point of the ethnic connections between East Anglian Puritans like Newton and New England Puritans like Benjamin Franklin.
"A large number of WASPs seem not to even be Episcopalians,"
ReplyDeleteAnd a large number of American WASPs who are Episcopalians are descended from Puritan lines who converted to Anglicanism for social climbing reasons in the 19th or 20th Centuries. It was typical of the more ambitious Congregationalist or Methodist farm boys who moved to New York to seek their fortunes to join the Episcopalian church.
And also we have the word 'humble' meaning poor.
ReplyDeleteHumble derives from 'umbles' meaning intestines. Apparently after the toffs got all the meaty cuts of a slain beast the proles were left (along with the toff's dogs)to clean up the beast's innards as a 'gratis' gift. Hence 'humble pie' and 'to eat humble pie'.
So, 5000 odd conquering Normans accompanied William in the last succesful invasion of England.
ReplyDeleteEvery year - at least since the advent of the disaterous New Labour regime - at least 500,000 immigrants enter Britain (vast majority come to England, not Scotland or Wales). So basically - every single week - twice the entire Norman conquering population enters - and this has been going on for over a decade now (the Tories have done f*ck-all to stop it).
Historically new Labour's mass immigration open boders policy (TM 'The Economist') will be seen as te biggest and most decisive event in England's destiny.
"The "man" names are Anglo-Saxon / Germanic. "
ReplyDeleteI really doubt this is the whole truth, as the something-man is often kind of a pidgin Germanic.
Firefighter v. Fireman is one example. If we go to Jewish surnames, you have Germanics called Golden, Silversmith or Shipwright while Jews chose Goldman, Silverman or Shipman.
Another difference between Germanics and Jews, is that we tend to use ethnic names as first names, Frank, Scott, Flemming, Norman, Jude, Heine, where Jews tend to use them as surnames.
The Normans also created the 'New Forest' (hence its name, 'new' it is actually a thousand years old - shows you what long memories the English have) in Hampshire, in order that the Norman kings could indulge their passion for hunting. Basically hundreds of English peasants were thrown out of farm land which was allowed to run wild to create a 'deer park', the peasnts were left landless and destitute.
ReplyDeleteIn English deer meat is called 'venison' - which literally means 'hunted meat'.
There was a lengthy spell when it was common to change your surname if a "line" died out and you inherited its wealth - as a son-in-law, say, or a distant cousin. Sometimes the name change was demanded of you in the will.
ReplyDeleteSo there are cases where the name was determined by the wealth, not vice versa. How did Clark make allowance for this well-known phenomenon?
"the smartest guy in the history of the world (according to Keynes ...": there's no other plausible contender in history, except perhaps Archimedes. Of pre-history we cannot speak.
ReplyDeletetwo years ago, a scots-irish lad named mitchell heisman blew his brains out at harvard. his humongous suicide note was posted on the net; besides his belief in singularlity, technology as the new god and other things, he wrote of the norman conquest of england, how liberal democracy and individualism were a result, the undercurrent of race relations in the new government of america(if my memory serves me right), and some interesting anecdotes about normans and their descendants.
ReplyDelete"On another note, it's kind of interesting that English people look different than Americans with WASPy names."
ReplyDeleteThe modern English are an odd looking people. All teeth(sorry) and extreme facial expressions.
I've spent a lot of time in Northern Europe, and well, the English tend to look different to other northerners(outside the British Isles). More Iberian, more syndromal. In the sunnier colonies their offspring can develop into fine looking creatures.
Mitchell Heisman was Jewish, not 'scots-irish' as a commenter stated above, and the sociobiological history of the Jews forms another huge portion of his work "suicide note."
ReplyDeleteFirstly, I am pleased that I got most of that right. It is not easy for an Australian to get these nuances.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, yes, Newton was probably the cleverest man ever, or certainly in the running. I know nothing of his antecedents. However the general point about the cleverness of the Nonconformists in England is a fair one. The men who made the industrial revolution, such as the Lunar Society of Birmingham, were pretty much middle class Nonconformists, if they were religious at all, and certainly not Tory Grandees.
(I sometimes attend Traditional Latin Masses, and the congregation is unusually clever. I put this down to the tendency for people who are interested in fine religious distinctions to be intellectuals. The same probably applied to Englishmen who thought a lot about religion - they probably became dissatisfied with the Established Church.)
The only really upper class scientist I can think of right now from England was Lord Cavendish. No doubt there were others. But being clever has never been important to the English Upper Classes.
What I am amused by is that knowledgeable people can see, without too much trouble, that the ancestors of American WASPs were pretty much riff-raff. But Americans do not do nuance about the English, and any kind of Englishman seems to pass muster in America as a toff.
bgc wrote:
ReplyDelete"Roughly, up to 1800, reproductive success was a matter of having lower mortality (all classes had high fertility but among the poor nearly all children died); since 1800 reproductive success is a matter of having more babies since nearly all children will survive, even among the very poorest."
You're wrong. Public health initiatives like compulsory vaccinations only began to take off in the 1870s, and the infant mortality rate for England and Wales peaked in the 1890s.
The problem, well, one of the problems, with this surname analysis is that it just assumes that:
ReplyDelete"French-sounding" = "Norman":.
Five minutes talking to a professional (or even gifted amateur) genealogist in England or the States would have shown them this is usually wrong. Far more often, it means someone who is a descendant of a French Huguenot refugee who fled to England (there were many of these) in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Now, use Occam's butterknife, and ask which is more likely: that habits of sobriety and industry (the Huguenots were Calvinists) would persist for ~400 years, or that criminal gains would last for ~1000?
"Basically hundreds of English peasants were thrown out of farm land which was allowed to run wild to create a 'deer park', the peasnts were left landless and destitute." Complete tripe - why don't you read a historian who knows what he's talking about?
ReplyDeleteThe Norman invasion was small in demographic terms. A lot of Norman lords and soldiers arrived but who did they marry? Seems to me a lot of them must have married the English girls of the now second rank aristocracy. So while the land and wealth and tile still attaches to the Norman name the genes might well be very similar to the general population by this time. After all they arrived speaking French but we dont speak anything like that now.
ReplyDeleteProfessor Woland was wrong about the relative military ability of Anglo-Saxon versus Norman. Harald Godwinson's army very nearly beat William Rufus's at Hastings. The shield wall held until Harald was killed by a chance arrow strike. Prior to this the Anglo-Saxon army had been seriously weakened by a prior conflict with another pretender to the Englis throne -- see the Icelandic saga Harald's Saga for details -- and a forced march to Hastings. The Anglo-Saxon defeat had nothing to do with social or political organization or even military technology and tactics and everything to do with one army having to fight multiple battles combined with the chances of war. It's a good idea to be familiar with history before pontificating on it.
ReplyDeleteJesus H. Christ.
ReplyDeleteEpiscopalians aren't even Christians - THEY'RE ANGLICAN PAPISTS!!!
God in Heaven, I'm ashamed for the iSteve-o-sphere right now.
dearieme, mathematicians have a pretty strong consensus that Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss are in the "zeroth rank" and were just smarter than all the other people who ever did math.
ReplyDeleteThere have been universal geniuses who weren't particularly interested in math but who could also be said to be as smart as anyone else who ever lived; Franklin and Goethe come to mind. In the last century I'd pick Turing and maybe Feynman and Von Neumann as tops in sheer brainpower.
except perhaps Archimedes
ReplyDeleteIn fairness, Keynes hadn't seen the Palimpsest.
That illustration in the Palimpsest really does change the balance of power.
But is some of this due to the genetic effects of social climbers who Frenchified their surnames?
ReplyDeleteI'm recalling Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Tess Durbyfield was a real D'Urberville, although of a decadent branch. She was fooled into thinking that the social climbing industrialist Stokes family, who changed their name to D'Urberville, are her kin.
It is an interesting question, like attracting like. A perceived dominant top group through assimilation and falsification of ancestry receives the most dynamic of the lower classes, further solidifying its gains.
I made this claim in an Internet discussion recently; that the people who migrated to America and became upper-class WASPs were not from the highest classes in England. So, I am pleased to see Steve tends to agree, based on their surnames.
ReplyDeleteI've made this point before on this very site. The ruling class in England were Church Of England. The "WASPS" who came to America were persecuted by the CoE, which is not really Protestant at all. The Quakers, Presbyterians etc who left Britain for America did not do so because they longed for wide open spaces. They wanted religious freedom, which the CoE did not allow them.
The First Amendment prohibition of an establishment of religion translates to "No Church of England here!"
However, it's not the case that the Anglican Church is the preserve of "Normans".
"The Norman invasion is the reason we have pairs of words for living versus cooked animals -- the commoners who raised animals spoke English, and the nobles who ate meat spoke Norman French. "
ReplyDeleteActually, this part may not be entirely correct- the fact that we have two words in and of itself may not be due to the fact that there were two root languages involved. In French, whose language was not corrupted by the invasion, you still have two words for animal/meat--
cow= vache
beef= boeuf
pig= cochon
pork= porc
etc.
So it seems that French may already have been set up for two words for the living/cooked. However, it does seem that, at least in Modern English, the duality in roots of the two words occurs-
living- derived from Old English (Germanic roots)
dead- derived from French roots
But whether or not there was a French-like system of two words before the 1066 invasion, speaking in Old English, I have no idea.
Some will argue "French roots" are actually Germanic (i.e. - The Normans were originally vikings), but the language that the invaders of 1066 spoke was French despite the bloodlines to Scandanavia.
I find it interesting that 5000 Normans were so able to so thoroughly conquer the Anglo-Saxons that they changed the English language to a great extent. A common misconception is that the Latin-based words in English come from the much earlier Roman occupation. They come from the Norman conquest. Which brings up an even more remarkable point: centuries earlier the Anglo-Saxons had wiped out almost all trace of Latin, which had undoubtedly been spoken by a large number of Britons.
ReplyDeleteRoughly, up to 1800, reproductive success was a matter of having lower mortality (all classes had high fertility but among the poor nearly all children died); since 1800 reproductive success is a matter of having more babies since nearly all children will survive, even among the very poorest.
ReplyDeleteIn the big scheme of things, this is all that matters.
Either you can get busy making babies, or else you can get busy going extinct.
Archimedes & his peeps* never got around to the baby-making, and now we only know of them from the history books [to include the occasional palimpsest].
The question for our era is whether Newton & his peeps will meet the same fate.
*Although there is a school of though which holds that some of the ancient Greek blood might have persisted in the Levantine and Egyptian Christians.
So that, for instance, Atiyah might have just a tiny smidgen of Archimedes in him.
Or Professor Wiles's wife [and ergo his children by her].
"I've spent a lot of time in Northern Europe, and well, the English tend to look different to other northerners(outside the British Isles). More Iberian, more syndromal. In the sunnier colonies their offspring can develop into fine looking creatures."
ReplyDeleteYes, Lucy Pinder, Alice Goodwin and Keely Hazell are absolute eyesores...
Bryan Sykes says that neither the Anglo Saxon invasion nor the Norman invasion overwhelmed the genetic makeup of the British Isles, which remains predominantly Western Celt. Norman genetic contribution is less than 2% and Saxon contribution is less than 20% and concentrated mostly in Southern England. There's also a strong concentration of Norse genetic contribution in northern England and southern Scotland, the historical Danelaw region of Britain.
ReplyDeleteThis might explain why the typical Englishman might look less Northern European and why American WASPs aren't all teethy and facial expression since British colonists typically came from Central and Northern England and Southern Scotland.
Given British genetic makeup, the whole Whig position that the Norman Conquest was a catastrophe and delayed for centuries the emergence of democracy is pretty meaningless. The Normans in a much more concentrated form merely replaced an earlier conquering elite (the Saxons), but the main of the population remained the same.
The explanation for the persistence of disparity of wealth between the descendents of the Normans and everyone else is very simple: the Normans were the strongest adherence of property rights in European history, have been so since the Domesday Book, and created the Great Charter to make sure that everyone understood property rights were more important even than royal authority.
anonymous @ 7/20/12 10:58 PM
ReplyDelete946 years is nothing. The Aryan invasion of India happened roughly 4,000 years ago.
A friend once took a vacation in India. She told me that in southern India one of the locals informed her, "We do not speak the conqueror's tongue." As he was speaking in English, he was obviously not referring to the English. He was a native Dravidian speaker: Hindi was the conqueror's tongue, from a conquest that occurred thousands of years ago.
There's a black trend of naming kids with French names in the hopes that some of the prestige will rub off on them, but that seems to be distinguished from this in that those are first names not family names.
ReplyDeleteSteve Sailer @7/21/12 1:04 AM [responding to comment about the non-aristocratic origins of the Puritans]
ReplyDeleteOkay, but the smartest guy in the history of the world (according to Keynes -- granted, he's biased, but still ...) was a Puritan from the East Anglia region: Isaac Newton. The Puritans tended to be self-selected for middle class smarts: the kind of people who looked forward all week to a really long, closely argued sermon or two on Sunday
C.D. Darlington, in The Evolution of Man and Society, points out that the advancements in science and technology in Great Britain from 1600-1900 came almost exclusively from religious Dissenters, who were decidedly from class tiers below the landed aristocracy. Newton is the most prominent example.
Two notable exceptions, where we find aristocrats contributing to the advancement of knowledge, come from the Elizabethan Age. Napier discovered logarithms and Francis Bacon contributed to the scientific method and to the philosophy of science. During the Elizabethan Age, aristocrats were also prominent in literature: Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser come to mind. It appears that after the Elizabethan Age, aristocrats faded away from contributing to knowledge, perhaps until Bertrand Russell in the 20th century.
Are Spenser and Sidney surnames of Norman origin? Napier- sounds Norman to me- even in Scotland.
The Normans of course were only slightly French. The term means North Men. They were vikings who had recently settled in France. So the battle in 1066 was between one set of Germans - the Saxons - and another rather more northerly Germanic people - the Normans.
ReplyDeleteThere is a lot of speculation recently about why the further north you come from, the smarter you seem to be. Maybe it's wise the bet on the more northerly Germans.
Of course history only looks inevitable from a distance. Up close William was lucky. Harold was holding the high ground and beating the invaders when an arrow hit him in the eye. His troops now leaderless fell for the Norman ruse of the false retreat. They followed the Normans down onto the plains where the mounted Normans turned and slaughtered them.
Had the arrow flown an inch to the side, William might have been thrown back into the sea. If you believe in the multiple world interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are worlds where William did not conquer and is known only as William the Bastard.
Albertosaurus
I wonder if Curzon could pass for Hispanic based on name alone.
ReplyDelete"The Norman invasion is the reason we have pairs of words for living versus cooked animals "
ReplyDeleteTo say nothing about pairs like:
defecate/shit
copulate/fuck
urinate/piss
etc.
Whoa, How can this be?
ReplyDeleteSteve, this is nurture; the French and the English score about the same in IQ tests.
I other words, they're all whitefolks, why would there be any difference 1000 years later?
Mr Sailer on/off topic i dont know.You read the Daily Mail,but do you also read the Daily Telegraph? From the web editon: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9416535/Problem-families-have-too-many-children.html This must be a first..
ReplyDelete"One of his findings from the surname work is that people with poor surnames from about 1800 have more descendants than people with rich surnames - so the poor were out-reproducing the rich even in the era of 'Dickensian' poverty."
ReplyDeleteI thought Clark's findings was that a proto middle class developed and it was this group which outbred the rest.
This group was later inclined to religious non-conformism hence the people like Washington, Jefferson, Adams etc coming from that middle class.
#
"I've read that the number of people who came to England with William the Conqueror was about 5,000. The total population of England was about 1.5 million."
The number of knights and soldiers may have been small but they would have had families and retainers back home who would have come over after the fighting was over.
#
"I've spent a lot of time in Northern Europe, and well, the English tend to look different to other northerners(outside the British Isles). More Iberian, more syndromal."
I think DNA will eventually show there's a coastal link with Iberia along the south and west coasts of Britain and Ireland which ultimately goes back to meditteranean island hoppers and gold and silver mining.
The Welsh are refugee Trojans
(only half serious)
#
"In the sunnier colonies their offspring can develop into fine looking creatures."
English descended people in sunnier and more spacious environments are definitely taller and much healthier looking. I wonder if that's climate / space thing or the founder effect of an expanding intelligent and energetic middle class being held back by aristocratic limits in England so the bulk of emigrants came from the best demographics?
O.T. but perhaps it's worth noting that James Holmes was widely reported, at least in the early articles I read about him, as being white.
ReplyDeleteA Hood, a Hood to the rescue! Robin Hood forever - death to our Norman tyrants!
ReplyDeleteOn another note, it's kind of interesting that English people look different than Americans with WASPy names. British parliament has many more "gingers" than the American Congress, even if we restrict the sample to those without obvious ethnic heritage.
ReplyDeleteAt this point, most Americans with " WASPy" names are not of purely English extraction. There's always been a strong Scottish element, for example. And the elite from around NY were at least partly Dutch, along with some Huguenot. By now, even among those of entirely northern European heritage, there's usually at least a bit of Irish or German as well.
I've spent a lot of time in Northern Europe, and well, the English tend to look different to other northerners(outside the British Isles). More Iberian, more syndromal. In the sunnier colonies their offspring can develop into fine looking creatures.
If by "sunnier climates" you mean South Africa and Australia, along with the US, then, again, you have to consider that most people with English surnames in these places are not 100% English. In Australia, they are often part-Irish, in South Africa, often part Scottish and part Dutch.
Meaning of "Norman" : from Norse, "north man". The coast of northern France had many Viking descendants and they spoke a French-Norse mix.
ReplyDeleteAnother source of French surnames in England and America: French Protestants leaving France after Edict of Nantes revoked.
So, keep in mind that surnames typically didn't get chosen until about a quarter of a century after 1066.
ReplyDeleteWhere did you get that figure from? That font of all human knowledge Wikipedia says: "In Britain, hereditary surnames were adopted in the 13th and 14th centuries, initially by the aristocracy but eventually by everyone. By 1400, most English and Scottish people had acquired surnames, but many Scottish and Welsh people did not adopt surnames until the 17th century, or even later."
That sounds about right to me on the basis of previous readings on the history of surnames. So surnames arise two to three centuries after the Conquest. Do you think that after the elapse of so much time there was still an absolute Norman/"English" distinction? (Maybe 1066-1366 doesn't seem "long" to us, but that's the same distance separating us from the War of Spanish Succession!)
Furthermore, is there a direct patrilineal descent of present holders of a given name from whoever adopted it in the first place centuries ago? No adoptions? No assumption of new names by people who chose to change their name? And no changes in wealth holding as a result of, say, the Wars of the Roses or the Civil War (won by that great Norman Oliver Cromwell)?
It may be that you can make statistically valid claims about how wealth has been retained (or not) by rich people since 1800 and it may also be possible to reach conclusions about the "Normanness" of the names of those rich people.
But tracing those rich people back to William the Conqueror on the basis of their surnames? Uh, not so much.
Dearieme is right, in the many English bios I've read it is common to see people adopt non-patrilineal names, and this is usually in the form of rising men adopting the aristocratic name of their wife, or keeping his name but having his children take his wife's name.
ReplyDeleteAnother source of French names are the Protestants who fled the French religious wars. For a while French Protestants were economically dominant minorities in most of the second tier cities in France, though never Paris. They were welcomed into England when they were finally defeated by the Catholics. Yet another wave of upper class Frenchmen came during the French Revolution, and these too were mostly upper caste.
"since 1800 reproductive success is a matter of having more babies since nearly all children will survive"
ReplyDeleteNot so. My mother's grandmother, born around 1840, died after giving birth to child 13 or 14, I forget which. Seven died in childhood or infancy, including three successive boys named after her Irish grandfather (she gave up on that name after #3 died).
On surnames, I've read that a lot of the "son" surnames - Johnson, Wilson etc - were created at the time serfdom was abolished and peasants became free to move. Prior to that they were tied to their owners land and didn't need surnames.
I've noticed in the British Isles that the Celtic nations tend to have patronymic surnames (McDonald, O'Donnell, Donaldson), whereas the English are named after placenames or professions. A likely explanation is the later survival in the Celtic countries of a clan/tribal system where people were known as "X son of Y".
ReplyDeleteI think the same may be true among Puerto Ricans with French surnames. Many of them are descended from the French Haitian elite who fled Haiti after the slave revolt. I'm willing to bet they are wealthier than the average Puerto Rican.
ReplyDeleteThis is also true in some other former Spanish colonies. The name Betancourt is particularly common among Puerto Ricans and indicates ancestry from the Canary Islands, where a large percentage of the white population of Puerto Rico comes from. The original Bethencourt was a Franco-Norman who conquered the Canary Islands for Spain.
It seems the Puerto Rican elite disproportionately has French surnames(although in total, 16% of Puerto Ricans have French surnames), including many Miss Puerto Ricos who became Miss Universe.
In regards to the appearance of saxon family names, I think they appeared a quarter of a millenium after the norman invasion instead of a quarter of a century.
ReplyDeleteinteresting.
ReplyDeleteHey, why hasn't Truth - iSteve's resident race man - weighed in on this thread? He always seems to be up for a good discussion of ethnicity.
ReplyDelete"British parliament has many more 'gingers' than the American Congress, even if we restrict the sample to those without obvious ethnic heritage."
ReplyDeleteah, an occassional topic of disagreement between me and steve. i take the position that contrary to american stereotype, the irish are not very redheaded at all, and actually, it's the english and the scottish who have most of the red hair.
i noted during EURO 2012 that not a single player on the irish team had red hair. not one. in fact, not only did no players have red hair but to a man they all had dark brown or black hair hair, except for one guy who had dark yellow hair. by comparison, even one of the spanish starters had a red beard. it made me think of conquistadors from centuries long past.
related to a post i made earlier this week about europeans being good jumpers, contrary yet again to american stereotype, i note that the best long jumper in the world this year, greg rutherford, is a british ginger. rutherford is a scottish name, i think. his leap of 8.35 meters is also the british national record, so he's jumped further than any african who has ever competed for the UK.
current long jump world rankings, from IAAF:
http://tinyurl.com/cv3wjs4
photo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Rutherford
i take the position that contrary to american stereotype, the irish are not very redheaded at all, and actually, it's the english and the scottish who have most of the red hair.
ReplyDeletei noted during EURO 2012 that not a single player on the irish team had red hair. not one.
Then I have to point out that not a single player on the English team had red hair. Not one.
I've noticed in the British Isles that the Celtic nations tend to have patronymic surnames (McDonald, O'Donnell, Donaldson), whereas the English are named after placenames or professions. A likely explanation is the later survival in the Celtic countries of a clan/tribal system where people were known as "X son of Y".
ReplyDeleteNope. The rise of surnames in England took place at about the same time as the development of the clan names in Ireland and Scotland. There is no known record of such a system in Anglo-Saxon England. But yes, "Mac", "Mc" and "O" mean "son of" or "grandson of".
"There is a lot of speculation recently about why the further north you come from, the smarter you seem to be. Maybe it's wise the bet on the more northerly Germans."
ReplyDeleteThe more southerly Germans in Bavaria and Baden-Wurttemberg are doing better economically than the northern Germans. The Swiss-Germans do awfully well as well.
I've read that the number of people who came to England with William the Conqueror was about 5,000. The total population of England was about 1.5 million.
ReplyDeleteThe number of people who came to England with William the Conqueror in his invasion force was probably in the 5,000 to 30,000 range. It certainly does not follow that only that many Normans ever came to England.
Whoa, it looks like I poke too soon. Right after I asked where Truth was, his comment popped up. I'll be damned. Maybe he's more than just a 1 issue guy after all ... well, except for the fact that his comment to Steve on nature vs. nurture is still really about that issue.
ReplyDeleteAs an American of British and German ancestry, I was surprised by how dark the coloring was of the indigenous folk in both London and Frankfurt. Lots more brunettes with brown eyes compared to Anglo and German Americans. Germany gets lighter as you go north, and London would have a lot of people of Irish descent, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteGiven British genetic makeup, the whole Whig position that the Norman Conquest was a catastrophe and delayed for centuries the emergence of democracy is pretty meaningless. The Normans in a much more concentrated form merely replaced an earlier conquering elite (the Saxons), but the main of the population remained the same.
ReplyDeleteThe Whig position was that the Anglo-Saxons (and Germanic tribes in general) were the original source of democratic ideals in northern Europe. And, later, in the US. This position does not stand or fall based on the genetic make-up of Britain or America. It's based on ideas, not genes.
This notion was very widespread and popular in pre-Revoluton America.
I think I saw a painting by Norman V. Saxon once; given the rich textures and realistic details, I didn't think he lived so long ago!
ReplyDeleteAs an American of British and German ancestry, I was surprised by how dark the coloring was of the indigenous folk in both London and Frankfurt.
ReplyDeleteIf you've really been to London then you must know that the "dark coloring" of its inhabitants has nothing to with the color of any group of white people. It's about as "white" a city as NYC.
"I other words, they're all whitefolks, why would there be any difference 1000 years later?"
ReplyDeleteThe Normans who came to England were a military elite. Norman peasants stayed behind on the continent. In the European Middle Ages wealth was mostly tied to land and land ownership was tied to military service. If the king for whom you fought won anything on the battlefield, he rewarded you with some of the conquered land. Your wealth increased. But you still owed military allegiance to the king - if he called for a war, you had to march with him. Armor was expensive and everyone was expected to bring his own. Peasants wouldn't have had any armor, wouldn't have had any military training and they had work to do in the fields. War was a rich man's game. People of average and below average intelligence rarely become rich.
OlioOx said...Mitchell Heisman was Jewish, not 'scots-irish' as a commenter stated above
ReplyDeleteYou must be new here. ;-)
Names starting with Fitz- are Norman. Fitz corresponds to standard modern French fils (son), so a Fitzwilliam was a son of William (originally Guillaume), Fitzstephen was a son of Stephen, etc. The illegitimate children of the kings of England were given the surname Fitzroy (roi means king in standard French).
ReplyDeleteThe Fitz- prefix is also associated with Irishmen. I saw some comedy routine on a British show featuring two Irishmen named "William Fitzpatrick and Patrick Fitzwilliam". In the case of Ireland, the Norman aristocrats seemed to more readily mix in with the native Irish, especially when the Protestant Ascendancy took away the wealth of the Irish Normans.
Episcopalians aren't even Christians - THEY'RE ANGLICAN PAPISTS!!!
I've made this point before on this very site. The ruling class in England were Church Of England. The "WASPS" who came to America were persecuted by the CoE, which is not really Protestant at all
I understand that argument. But Catholics considered the Anglicans to be Protestants and were persecuted by them too.
In religious terms, the Protestants were left-wing and the Catholics right-wing, with the Anglicans in the center persecuting and tolerating both at various points in history.
(I sometimes attend Traditional Latin Masses, and the congregation is unusually clever. I put this down to the tendency for people who are interested in fine religious distinctions to be intellectuals. The same probably applied to Englishmen who thought a lot about religion - they probably became dissatisfied with the Established Church.)
Possibly. It'd be interesting to see the situation of traditional Catholics in a couple generations, what kind of people they'll be. Or, for that matter, what name they'll take to distinguish themselves from the mainstream church. ("Traditional Catholic" is far too long and clunky IMO, and they also have to spend a lot of time explaining to people that they can't just go to the Catholic church down the street.)
As an American of British and German ancestry, I was surprised by how dark the coloring was of the indigenous folk in both London and Frankfurt. Lots more brunettes with brown eyes compared to Anglo and German Americans. Germany gets lighter as you go north, and London would have a lot of people of Irish descent, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteThere's a reason American colonists talked about "swarthy races, such as the Germans", and the English say things like "wogs begin at Calais". American whites are often stereotyped in Latin countries like Italy as being blond (and fat, unfortunately). The standard "white American" is of British Isles descent, with some German and Scandinavian. Italians are a large group, but they seem pretty well concentrated in the Northeast.
Meaning of "Norman" : from Norse, "north man". The coast of northern France had many Viking descendants and they spoke a French-Norse mix.
Not only that, but in modern Scandinavian languages, their cognates for "Norman" simply mean "Norwegian", and they have to use contrived spellings to refer to the Normans.
Catholics considered the Anglicans to be Protestants and were persecuted by them too.
ReplyDeleteThat does not make Anglicans Protestants.
Any more than some people "believing" Southerners to be Normans or Cavaliers made them so.
"Hey, why hasn't Truth - iSteve's resident race man - weighed in on this thread? He always seems to be up for a good discussion of ethnicity."
ReplyDeleteYou're late, Champ; but a bruva still like to know he missed!
"So while the land and wealth and tile still attaches to the Norman name the genes might well be very similar to the general population by this time."
ReplyDeleteI think they were pretty similar at the time as well but yes, even if not i doubt there's much difference now.
#
"The Anglo-Saxon defeat had nothing to do with social or political organization or even military technology and tactics"
Knights and castles. The invasion itself may have been lucky but the conquest wasn't.
#
"The rise of surnames in England took place at about the same time as the development of the clan names in Ireland and Scotland."
But the point is their surnames were clan names.
The "ing" ending in Saxon is the equivalent of the "Mac." Edingburgh means the fort of Edda's clan but by the time surnames were starting to be used the English were using non clan names.
We also musn't forget that Normans were but French-speaking Vikings.
ReplyDeleteRe Saxons supplanting Latin in the British Isles. The Romans came late to Britain, about two centuries behind France and Spain. They never got to Ireland, did not rule Wales, and built a wall, Hadrian's, to keep out the Picts from present day Scotland. They faced one rebellion that nearly succeeded and a bunch of little ones that we know about. Other than a few big settlements, Bath, and Londoninium, Roman presence was pretty thin and easily wiped out by the Saxon invaders who would have preferred those nice Roman things but had no idea how to keep them up. Any more than the present inhabitants of Detroit can keep up the infrastructure that they inherited from the population they displaced.
ReplyDeleteAs for the Celts, we used to be spread from Austria eastward all the way to Iberia. However Roman, Carthaginian, Germanic, and other peoples have pushed Celts to Galicia, Brittany, and the British Isles. Celtic disunity is legendary, Steve's citation of the writer earlier on the Highland Scots is dead on. However, whatever the Celtic faults are, for the most part (Tom Hayden excepted damn his eyes) we don't hate ourselves. Self-loathing is something absent in Irish, Welsh, and Scottish literature, ballads, songs, and so forth.
"The Whig position was that the Anglo-Saxons (and Germanic tribes in general) were the original source of democratic ideals in northern Europe. And, later, in the US. This position does not stand or fall based on the genetic make-up of Britain or America. It's based on ideas, not genes."
ReplyDeleteAnd my point is that the Whigs (and the Colonial Forefathers such as Jefferson) romanticized Harold and the thegns beyond any connection to historical reality. The replacement of the Saxon ruling elite by the Norman ruling elite neither helped nor hurt the development of democracy in England if by democracy we mean the liberation of serfs, slaves, peasants and villains from legal servitude, to say nothing of mass participation in government. If Sykes is right and 3/4s of British genetics is Western Celt in origin (and let's assume it was even higher in 1066), then why it mattered to the masses who their overlords were is beyond me. The Whigs seemed to think it matters--I don't. For the Saxons, the Norman conquest simply shoved them down the scale to slightly above or at the level of the Western Celts whom the Saxons had exploited and enslaved for several centuries.
Why Sykes (and genes) are important in the debate is that he shows that the Saxons themselves were a small, minority elite and they were hardly liberal in expanding whatever freedoms and privileges they enjoyed among themselves to the mass of (Western Celt) people. This genetic clarification is quite different from the prevailing historical understanding of the Saxon invasion by the Whigs--that there was a wholesale eradication of the native Celtic people in England with most of the survivors taking refuge in Wales and Cornwall. That doesn't appear to be what happened. Instead of a society of mostly freeman (Saxons) with smattering of Celt here and there, it seems that the Saxons themselves were a very much in the minority, and ruled, as the Normans would rule after them, as a small elite.
"On another note, it's kind of interesting that English people look different than Americans with WASPy names."
ReplyDeleteThe modern English are an odd looking people. All teeth(sorry) and extreme facial expressions.
I've spent a lot of time in Northern Europe, and well, the English tend to look different to other northerners(outside the British Isles). More Iberian, more syndromal.
I suspect that the ugliness of the English is one reason Labour was able to get away with flooding the country with immigrants for so long. When your women are butt-ugly, "immigration" to the local men means "hotter women". (An extreme example would be the oil-rich Arab sultanates, which in some cases have a majority of foreigners. True, most of the foreigners are men, but the higher status of the local men means they still have lots of foreign tail to go after.)
The flip-side of this, of course, is East Asian countries like Japan, where "immigration" means "no hotter women, but a bunch of men trying to steal YOUR women".
In the sunnier colonies their offspring can develop into fine looking creatures.
Outbreeding just might help explain why Australians look more comely than Englishwomen.
You must be new here. ;-)
ReplyDeleteLOL'ed [literally].
And my point is that the Whigs (and the Colonial Forefathers such as Jefferson) romanticized Harold and the thegns beyond any connection to historical reality.
ReplyDeleteThat's probably correct. But irrelevant. What matters is what the Whigs/American Founders believed to be true. Those ideas led to the American Revolution and gave it its distinctive shape. From the standpoint of history it matters not a bit that Washington, Jefferson and the rest were not genetically pure Anglo-Saxon, or that the Anglo-Saxons of the seventh century were not exactly the sort of people the Whigs thought them to be.
Myth is an important part of any national foundation. The Romans liked to think of themselves as the desendents of the Trojans.
'... a list of British Prime Ministers. Until the last century or so, there are lots of names like "Gascoyne-Cecil"': Cecil is the famous bit - the first distinguished Cecil was chief advisor to Elizabeth I. He, like his Tudor monarch, was of Welsh descent. So much for Anglo-Saxons and Normans.
ReplyDeleteWe also musn't forget that Normans were but French-speaking Vikings.
ReplyDeleteIf I happen to hear either Swedish or Danish, and am not paying attention, the most common language I mistake it for is French. Sometimes German (especially for Danish). I wonder if French is the local Vulgar Latin spoken with a Norman accent. It definitely doesn't sound anything like Italian or Spanish.
The replacement of the Saxon ruling elite by the Norman ruling elite neither helped nor hurt the development of democracy in England if by democracy we mean the liberation of serfs, slaves, peasants and villains from legal servitude, to say nothing of mass participation in government.
ReplyDeleteUltimately that's unknowable. But the immediate consequence of the Norman conquest was centralized power and the rise of the absolute monarch in England, a place where such things had not existed previously.
Democracy, the liberation of serfs, slaves, peasants and villains from legal servitude, and mass participation in government all came about as a direct result of those Anglo-Saxon-worshiping Whigs. They could never have resulted from Norman-style centralized and autocratic rule.
The Norman invasion is the reason we have English as we know it.
ReplyDelete"However Roman, Carthaginian, Germanic, and other peoples have pushed Celts to Galicia, Brittany, and the British Isles."
ReplyDeleteAs always Whiskey is wrong. The French have always thought of themselves as primarily Romanized Gauls (Celts). I'm not aware of any reasons to doubt this. The Frankish contribution wouldn't have been strong and must have been contained to the north. Southern Germans and Austrians are Germanized Celts, northern Italians are Romanized Celts, roughly half of Spain was Celtic before the Roman conquest.
The Celts weren't pushed from the bulk of Europe. Most were Romanized, some Germanized. They remained in place. The Celtic languages were closer to Latin than to any other type of Indo-European. In Roman times it was easy for Celts to pick up Latin, Latin had prestige, so most of them ended up speaking Latin. Most of their descendants now speak Romance languages.
Initially Germanics called only Celts Welsh (Wallons, Vlachs, Walha, etc.) But as the Celts Romanized, they started using the same term for Romance speakers. That's why Belgium's French speakers are called Walloons, that's why Welschland was the German name for Italy into the 19th century.
That list of "Anglo-Norman surnames" seems like a pretty random grab bag. One could list many more, most of which are more common as surnames of non-noble people than the ones listed are: Beaumont, Dillon, Goddard, Gorham, Grace, Howard, Lovell/Lowell, Montgomery, Quincy, Spencer, and Tracy, to name few.
ReplyDeleteMany names are heavily anglicized - Robert the Bruce= Robert De'Bris.
ReplyDeletemy family name is lowland scottish - but according to clan history the name which is descriptive (eg like big-head) was also referred to in french (eg grand-tete)
ReplyDeleteThe point about Britain's industrial and Scientific Revolution-driven wealth arising almost exclusively from the Dissenters/Non-conformists reinforces the notion that a lot of the French-surnamed Englishmen are in fact Huguenot descendants, not from the Normans.
ReplyDeleteWikipedia's article on the Huguenots says: "An estimated 50,000 Protestant Walloons and Huguenots fled to England, about 10,000 of whom moved on to Ireland around the 1690s. In relative terms, this could be the largest wave of immigration of a single community into Britain ever." (emphasis added).
So who would these refugees marry when they washed up in Blighty? Other Calvinists!
"If Sykes is right and 3/4s of British genetics is Western Celt in origin"
ReplyDeletehttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/07/the-genetic-map-of-britain/
Either Sykes is wrong or - drum roll - the Celts and Saxons were genetically very similar and the differences on the "Celtic" fringe are actually pre-Celtic.
I think the waves of Celt, Saxon, Viking, Norman etc invasions are like an island being invaded by the Japanese every few hundred years.
Each invasion may have a different label and there's been some drift in the meantime but they're basically the same people. The big differences will be between the Japanese and the original base population(s).
Anonymous @ 5:26
ReplyDeleteYou are right about some of the tactical aspects of the Battle of Hastings but I am still trying to figure out what it has to do with my bigger point which you obviously missed. The Normans were clever in that they were more likely to levy taxes from their Lords to raise troops rather than relying on their pledge of support in time of war like the Anglo Saxons. This is particularly true when conducting an invasion where the motivation is not as strong as repelling invaders from the homeland. It is also a big reason why they held on to power for so long after conquering. It became much harder for a faction of Lords to oppose the King because he could staff regional strong points with loyal troops rather than rely on the locals. This political consolidation combined with a homogenous island culture were some of the major factors that led to England becoming one of the first Nation States centuries later. The fact that the Normans chose to attack after the Anglo Saxons fought the Vikings was not a random accident. They got their opponents to march 300 miles after a bruising battle and then fight on terrain of their choosing which made the difference. The Normans had the organizational skills to show up with enough troops at the right time in the right place, something the Anglo Saxons were unable to do. The rest is history.
"If Sykes is right and 3/4s of British genetics is Western Celt in origin"
ReplyDeletehttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/07/the-genetic-map-of-britain/
Personally i think the Celts, Saxons, Vikings and Normans were mostly the same people with different labels - like an island being invaded by tribes from Japan every few hundred years but each time with a different name.
I think the differences on the "Celtic fringe" will turn out to be pre-celtic.
I understand that some French-sounding surnames in England also derived from the Channel Islands. Le Mesurier, for example.
ReplyDeleteTraditional Catholic means a variety of things. A general preference for the Missal of 1962 as approved by Blessed John XXIII is typical. This was the last version of the older Latin rite. But there is nothing stopping such Catholics from attending masses in English, other than personal preference. I attend both.
There seems to be some confusion here.
ReplyDeleteNo other Germanic folk were called just "William" or "Edward" before surnames became common, so I doubt this to be true of the Saxons.
They had a patronyme, and was further identified by dwelling place and or occupation.
If Williams father was named Steven, and William worked as a sergeant and lived at the farm Rutherford, he could use the whole Sergeant William Stevenson Rutherford, to be identified by others.
As long as people lived on the countryside, this worked,but as they started to live in towns, they no longer had a dwelling place they shared with few others. Adding complications was that people changed occupations, and that more people started to move around in order to get work.
The Church and the State, already had the fathers and the mothers name,so there were no need for a patronyme from a bureaucratic POV any longer.
What probably killed the old system, is that some started to use surnames, and that both systems in use at the same time, made so many problems for the ones keeping the books, that everybody was forced over at the present scheme.
So:
ReplyDeletethe WASP elite of America is descended from a british underclass
the jewish elite of America is descended from the ghetto and shtetl dwellers of Europe
Interesting. Think about that HBDers, when you denigrate the current losers in America.....
when the Protestant Ascendancy took away the wealth of the Irish Normans.
ReplyDeleteBecause they (mostly) stayed Catholic, unlike the mainland aristocrats.
"As an American of British and German ancestry, I was surprised by how dark the coloring was of the indigenous folk in both London and Frankfurt. Lots more brunettes with brown eyes compared to Anglo and German Americans. Germany gets lighter as you go north, and London would have a lot of people of Irish descent, I suppose."
ReplyDeleteIt probably has something to do with American women using larger amounts of hair dye.
"the English tend to look different to other northerners(outside the British Isles). More Iberian, more syndromal. "
ReplyDeleteA pregnant work colleague's- middle-class English mother-in-law- suggested she have a pint of stout each day for morning sickness.
Rickety legs can still be seen in elderly Scandinavians. Those long northern legs bowed in the absence of sunlight. The kiddies these days are given vitamin D drops each day and summers are spent in the tropics, so a thing of the past for the natives, not so for the immigrants(cruel).
wholesale eradication of the native Celtic people in England with most of the survivors taking refuge in Wales and Cornwall. That doesn't appear to be what happened. Instead of a society of mostly freeman (Saxons) with smattering of Celt here and there, it seems that the Saxons themselves were a very much in the minority, and ruled, as the Normans would rule after them, as a small elite.
ReplyDeleteThe remains of an ancient Briton from just after the ice age were found in Cheddar, Somerset. DNA testing has shown he has direct descendants living nearby, even today. 9000 years later. Thats amazing.
If you spend anytime around that area you would think that the local population was pretty standard British/English ie Anglo-Saxon. Thats what they look like. But unless these DNA findings are a real fluke these people have significant ancestry that long predates the Celts, Romans, Saxons and Normans.
Implies to me that all these invasions were largely changes at the top, a shift in the elite and not a demographic shift. I know thats the standard view of the Romans and Normans but it seems to point to a similar thing for the Celts & Saxons.
If I am still alive "1000 years after my descendants" do anything (let alone conquer England) I expect I will be filthy rich ... by selling my longevity formula if nothing else.
ReplyDeleteAnd a large number of American WASPs who are Episcopalians are descended from Puritan lines who converted to Anglicanism for social climbing reasons in the 19th or 20th Centuries
ReplyDeletea little disingenuous here Steve. Is it just possibly possible that they found something in it?
Peter Hitchens is the only paleo who seems to find some worth in the Anglican Commmunion. But think for a moment, it brought us CS Lewis, some of the best theology of the 20th century, beautiful liturgy, and I would argue, among the best american architecture art and music. The episcopal churches of new york are among the best kept artistic secrets
THEY'RE ANGLICAN PAPISTS!!!
whoops, someone doesn't get it, no, sweetheart, we're closer to Eastern Orthodox - we have the ritual, believe, but we reject papal authority.
"Mitchell Heisman was Jewish, not 'scots-irish' as a commenter stated above'
ReplyDeleteYou're new here, right?
Around here, Scots-Irish means Jewish.
Anonymous:"The ruling class in England were Church Of England. The "WASPS" who came to America were persecuted by the CoE,"
ReplyDeleteSome were Dissenters, but others were not. For example the Virginia colonial elite were heavily Anglican.
Anonymous:"which is not really Protestant at all."
Although you are certainly free to argue that the C of E is not Protestant, one must bear in mind that many of its adherents understood it to be a Protestant body in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Interesting topic.
ReplyDeleteMy maternal grandfather was a direct line descendant of Tancred, one of Rollo the Magnificent's retainers during the invasion of Normandy. Our family took up residence and Tancarville on the Seine, the better to extract booty ... err ... taxes from the traffic heading to Le Havre.
When William decided it was a good day to conquer England, my ancestor Urse d'Abitot went along and received glory on the battlefield, resulting in His being granted the rule of the county of Worcestershire as sheriff. Urse then went about converting as much of the property in that county and the neighborng ones as he could grasp. In the ensuing centuries, the vast fortune thus acquired was gradually dissipated, so that by the 1200's we only had two measly shires to our name, and eventually a time came in the 1600's when one of the younger sons decided now was a great time to set out of Long Island rather than move to London like previous generatiins younger brother's did. Still, this was quite a better position to be in to start life in America than an evicted sheepherder from Scotland or a destitute mechanic from Yorkshire.
Our family eventually settled in upstate NY to live out a number of uneventful generations of being upper middle class gentleman farmers with a side life of being businessmen or lawyers. The family has always been Episcopalian/Anglican since the time of Elizabeth. We have avoided subdividing the estate in upstate NY by disinheriting younger sons as per English tradition. We are well away of the phoniness of the WASP elite in NYC, Boston, and Philadelphia and their very humble origins in England. My uncle recently had a genetic test done, and it confirmed a I haplotype Y chromosome, which is typically a Scandanavian marker, and fits with the known facts of the family origin ultimately from the Danish islands off Jutland between the North Sea and Baltic Sea.
One commenter asked about the name Spencer. Spencer comes from Robert Despenser, William the Conqueror's Treasurer, but as he left no heirs,the actual Spencer family comes from far more humble origins of a family of sheepherders who were aristocratic upstarts.
Others have commented on red hair. Red hair is most prevalent in Scotland, not Ireland, and is extremely common in Edinburgh. It is common enough throughout England as well, with a greater frequency found in the border counties. Blonde hair is most prevelant around the Baltic Sea on all coasts and trails off the further one goes. The Germans outside of the Baltic and North sea littorals are mostly brown haired, generally lighter colored than the French, but certainly darker than the English. Its easy enough to posit that blondes originated around the Baltic, and redheads around the North and Irish seas. It surprises me as a redhead that we have never been posited as our own seperate race, as we certainly have enough genetic characteristics to look quite different from others - red hair, freckles, pale skin, different pain sensitivities. Its certainly as distinctive looking to most run of the mill whites as being black is.
So many opinions.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that just about everyone here has some notion of who are the 'good guys' vs. the bad guys. Evidently the Normans are even higher than the Anglo-Saxons in the hierarchy of bad guys.
As for Norman surnames in England (and in America) being readily identifiable as such, they are not always. They were transmuted in England and the spellings Anglicized in some cases.
Having done a great deal of genealogy, I can say that there are many Norman descendants in the U.S. The South has many people of Norman descent. Some of the ''First Families of Virginia'' had Norman roots, and were aware of it, making reference to their 'Anglo-Norman' heritage.
A few examples the name Dabney - which was originally D'Aubigny. Or the name Butler, which was Le Boutillier, or some variant thereof.
Things are rarely as simple as they are made out to be.
The remains of an ancient Briton from just after the ice age were found in Cheddar, Somerset. DNA testing has shown he has direct descendants living nearby, even today. 9000 years later. Thats amazing.
ReplyDeleteThat would be amazing if it were true. But it's not. There is no way to tell if those people "living nearby" are "direct descendants". Sharing some genetic markers does not make them direct descendants. (Unless he was the first person in history to have those genetic markers - but that's not the case here)
Although you are certainly free to argue that the C of E is not Protestant, one must bear in mind that many of its adherents understood it to be a Protestant body in the 17th and 18th centuries.
ReplyDeleteIt is really remarkable how frequently this particular error pops up on this site.
When Southerners "understood it" that they were "Cavaliers" or "Normans" it did not mean that they actually were those things.
When the Whigs "understood it" that they were Anglo-Saxons, it did not mean that they actually were.
When certain Afro-centerists "understand" that they are the descendents of a mighty Egyptian civilization, it does not follow that they are correct.
Reality has a reality all its own. It is not subject to whatever lies people like to tell themselves.
The C of E is its own thing, neither Catholic nor Protestant. It has followed it's own unique path through time. That path has led us to where we stand today, where many parts of it can no longer even be described as Christian. Whatever your opinion of Catholics and Protestants, they are still Christian. and these days they make common cause in the US against the left-wing nuttery esposed, in part, by Episcopalians and other athiest sections of the Anglican Church.
RE: Normans
ReplyDeleteThankfully, they came to Sicily...
- Sal
For example the Virginia colonial elite were heavily Anglican.
ReplyDeleteWell, yeah. Virgina had British laws in place which penalized everyone who was not Anglican. "Everyone" included Protestants, who were arrested for preaching without a license from the Anglican Church. In other words, the Anglican church was the officially established state church of Virginia right up to 1786, when a certain James Madison was able to disestablish it.
Not very surprisingly, the elite in Virgina tended to be Anglican.
Mitchell Heisman was Jewish, not 'scots-irish' as a commenter stated above
ReplyDeleteFew of us will confuse "Heisman" with a genuine Scots-Irish name. The "Scots-Irish" reference has to do with an inside joke.
in my mind the name "Heisman" is indelibly linked to the great John Heisman, who played football at Brown before serving as head coach at Clemson and Rice. He was not Jewish. But I suppose it should not be too surprising that a guy named Mitchell Heisman was Jewish.
The only really upper class scientist I can think of right now from England was Lord Cavendish. No doubt there were others. But being clever has never been important to the English Upper Classes.
ReplyDeleteWasn't Darwin upper class?
And Matt Ridley calls himself a science journalist, but he's just being modest. He's an outstanding scientist. And he's the 5th Viscount Ridley.
Five minutes talking to a professional (or even gifted amateur) genealogist in England or the States would have shown them this is usually wrong. Far more often, it means someone who is a descendant of a French Huguenot refugee who fled to England (there were many of these) in the 16th and 17th centuries.
ReplyDeleteNow, use Occam's butterknife....
In this context, shouldn't you write "Ockham", since he was an Englishman from Ockham?
Darwin was from the very respectable professional upper middle class, but not upper class. Wallace was much less socially acceptable, and Huxley was of a lower class as well.
ReplyDeleteAs I recall, Darwin's people were doctors and of similar status, and they were related to successful business families, like the Wedgwoods. But no Englishman would have mistaken them for upper class.
Apart from Ridley, who has been mentioned, I am having trouble thinking of any more real upper class scientists. Peter Mitchell had a lot of money but I don't think he was really a toff.
When toffs take to science, they tend to do things like birdwatching and nature conservation.
In the words of Peter Fussell, "whatever the Honourable Sebastian Flyte was studying at Oxford, it wasn't chemistry."
Having done a great deal of genealogy, I can say that there are many Norman descendants in the U.S. The South has many people of Norman descent. Some of the ''First Families of Virginia'' had Norman roots, and were aware of it, making reference to their 'Anglo-Norman' heritage.
ReplyDeleteA few examples the name Dabney - which was originally D'Aubigny. Or the name Butler, which was Le Boutillier, or some variant thereof.
What an amazing couple of examples! As it happens, I went to college with a beautiful and very nice girl named ______ d'Aubigny _____, who married a _______ ______ Butler.
Are we sure Goddard is a Norman name? I understood it was simply a shortened form of "Goatherd". Cf. Shephard and Coward ("Cowherd").
ReplyDeleteAnonymous:
ReplyDelete"The C of E is its own thing, neither Catholic nor Protestant. It has followed it's own unique path through time. That path has led us to where we stand today, where many parts of it can no longer even be described as Christian. Whatever your opinion of Catholics and Protestants, they are still Christian. and these days they make common cause in the US against the left-wing nuttery esposed, in part, by Episcopalians and other athiest sections of the Anglican Church."
Gotcha. The Church of England is not Protestant because you say it isn't. That certainly makes things easier.
Syon
The Norman invasion is the reason we have pairs of words for living versus cooked animals -- the commoners who raised animals spoke English, and the nobles who ate meat spoke Norman French. Thus we have cow/beef, calf/veal, sheep/mutton, swine/pork, deer/venison. (Wamba, the jester in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, catalogues these pairs.)"
ReplyDeleteBill Bryson dwells on this in Mother Tongue.
He also mentions how English speaking people are more at ease with pure Anglo Saxon terms than their Francofied counterparts
We instinctively prefer a "hearty welcome" than "cordial reception" though both mean pretty much the same thing.
What many Americans don't realize is that many upper crust Englishmen tend to be Francophiles even those not descended from the Normans such as Winston churchill.
But then anti French feeling among Americans is of relatively recent vintage.
Whats funny about the 100 year war between "England" and "France" is that the kings and aristocracy in both sides were of Norman origin using the blood of English and French peasants to further their interests.
RE: Anglicans/Episcopalians:
ReplyDelete"Anglicans and Episcopalians
The original separation of the Church of England (then including the Church in Wales) and the Church of Ireland from Rome under King Henry VIII largely took a Catholic form. Through the efforts of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Thomas Cromwell, both with Lutheran sympathies,[13] the churches later assumed a reformed character.
In the 19th century some of the Tractarians proposed that the Church of England and the other Anglican churches were not Protestant but a "Reformed Catholic" or middle path (via media) between Rome and Protestantism. This assertion was attacked by, among others, the Church Association.[14] Today, the Anglican Communion continues to be composed of theologically diverse traditions, from Reformed Sydney Anglicanism to High-Church Anglo-Catholicism." WIKIPEDIA
Interesting. Think about that HBDers, when you denigrate the current losers in America....."
ReplyDeleteSomewhat OT: but then again when it comes to Jews I suppose its never OT LOL
The ancient Israelites were really the NAMs of the middle east.they only seemed to have one accomplishment their temple and that was built by a Phoenician.there is no evidence of their neighbors Egyptian or Syrian being impressed by it.
In arithmetic,astronomy,architechture,engineering,economy,warfare,painting,sculpture and everything that defines a civilization they were pretty much zero.
Their genius was in theology ,poetry and philosophy.
In other words, they were the liberal arts graduates among other guys such as Egyptians and Babylonians who had taken STEM....and yet.....?
Whats interesting is that 1066 ,the Normans had succeeded into turning England into annex of France and about the 900 years their descendants had been thwarting in their attempt of turning another land across the water ,in the opposite direction, as an appendage of France.
ReplyDeletei take the position that contrary to american stereotype, the irish are not very redheaded at all, and actually, it's the english and the scottish who have most of the red hair.
ReplyDeleteYou're wrong. The Irish are very redheaded. They're the second most redheaded, after the Scottish, and very close.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hair#Modern
"Redheads constitute approximately 4 percent of the European population.[11] Scotland has the highest proportion of redheads; 13 per cent of the population has red hair and approximately 40 per cent carries the recessive redhead gene.[12] Ireland has the second highest percentage; as many as 10 per cent of the Irish population has red, auburn, or strawberry blond hair.[13] It is thought that up to 46 percent of the Irish population carries the recessive redhead gene."
"my ancestor Urse d'Abitot went along and received glory on the battlefield, resulting in His being granted the rule of the county of Worcestershire as sheriff. Urse then went about converting as much of the property in that county and the neighborng ones as he could grasp."
ReplyDeleteNot to mention building his castle at Worcester over the monastic cemetery.
"Hightest thou (call yourself) Urs ?
Have thou God's curse!"
"I was surprised by how dark the coloring was of the indigenous folk in both London and Frankfurt"
ReplyDeleteSurprised you could find any in London. My wife's family raised their four children (none of whom live in London now) in a leafy and middle-class part of South West London. When her mother sold the house a few years back, not one out of about 15 potential buyers was a native.
"I suspect that the ugliness of the English is one reason Labour was able to get away with flooding the country with immigrants for so long."
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't have said that South Asian and Jamaican girls were stunners, though there are a lot of pretty Sikh girls. Eastern European women likewise, although the prettiest are very attractive.
Don't think this thesis holds up.
(Somali women are also very slender and pretty, but can be violent when drunk, and the men can be violent full stop.)
Sorry, Paul Fussell, not Peter Fussell. He wrote, "Class: A Guide Through the American Status System" (1983). Very funny book.
ReplyDelete"Mitchell Heisman did a scholarly 600+ page study of the Norman Conquest and its long-term consequences. "
ReplyDelete"Mitchell Heisman was scots-irish, not 'scots-irish' as a commenter stated above, and the sociobiological history of the scots-irish forms another huge portion of his work "suicide note."
Yeah, and their inversion of morality was the starting point of his magnum opus(that and the explication of the Socrates quote that started off the whole shebang). Never got around to finishing the whole thing; the scots-irish question being done to death, singularity being hyped without much on ground, however the Norman conquest and its far-reaching effects were a novel read.
Googling around, people on discussion boards pointed out mistakes in his historical narrative, besides his over-reaching imagination.
Though one would think that such a work would find much appreciation in HBD/isteve-o-sphere. (in fact his name does show up if you search this site, perhaps steve is going through his work, belatedly, as we speak)
It's worth checking things, and easy nowadays: 'umbles' comes from Latin 'lumbus' loin; 'humble' comes from Latin 'humilis, low, base.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous said...
ReplyDelete"I suspect that the ugliness of the English is one reason Labour was able to get away with flooding the country with immigrants for so long."
Emilia Clarke, Keira Knightley, Carrey Mulligan, Elizabeth Hurley, Joanne Whalley, Michelle Dockey, any of these ring a bell?
I find English women to be underrated, and love the accent. And South Asian women rarely do it for me.
"The remains of an ancient Briton from just after the ice age were found in Cheddar, Somerset. DNA testing has shown he has direct descendants living nearby, even today. 9000 years later. Thats amazing. "
ReplyDeleteNot really, they can still make it following the same recipe, as long as there is a supply of milk, salt, etc. There's probably some even at your local grocery store.
whoops, someone doesn't get it, no, sweetheart, we're closer to Eastern Orthodox - we have the ritual, believe, but we reject papal authority
ReplyDeleteLike hell you do - it's been half a millenium, and you're STILL scared to upgrade the Archbishop of Canterbury to the status of a "Pope".
Plus you believe that there's salvation to be found in fermented grape juice & crackers [administered by a, ah, typically very effeminate man, dressed up in a funny costume] which renders your gnostic outlook simply hopeless.
Purposeless, really.
Hey, why hasn't Truth - iSteve's resident race man - weighed in on this thread?
ReplyDeleteWhoa, it looks like I poke too soon. Right after I asked where Truth was, his comment popped up. I'll be damned.
Apparently, if you're a blogger at blogspot.com, and if you've set your blog to be moderated, then you have to approve the comments off the top of a "LIFO" stack [Last In, First Out].
Which, in turn, means that if a reader is visiting the site at random times [or, God forbid, refreshing a browser window while Komment Kontrol is in the process of approving comments], then the reader will get the impression of comments appearing completely out of [the correct, or "temporal"] order.
Yes, it's absolutely maddening - and, when combined with the fact that iSteve now takes about 10 seconds to open on a high speed connection, and requires about 100MB of memory to load into a browser - makes you wonder how in Hades this software package could ever have emerged as a "market leader".
Frankly, I'm starting to wonder about the whole question of "market leadership" - why Google suddenly supplanted AltaVista, or why Microsoft was able to put away WordStar and WordPerfect and Lotus with garbage like Word and Excel - either "market leadership" is, over the long haul, some sort of a stochastic phenomenon [unrelated to the underlying quality of the product in question], or else [tinfoil hat here] maybe something is going on behind the scenes [in determining "market leadership"] to which we proles simply aren't privy.
But the very idea that such a colossally hideous software package as "blogspot.com" could ever become a market leader [of anything] is the intellectual equivalent of pissing all over half-a-century's worth of computer science theory and "best practices" canon.
The point about Britain's industrial and Scientific Revolution-driven wealth arising almost exclusively from the Dissenters/Non-conformists reinforces the notion that a lot of the French-surnamed Englishmen are in fact Huguenot descendants, not from the Normans.
ReplyDeleteWhoa, slow down there, horsie!
From an HBD perspective, you have to ask yourself: Where did Christianity [i.e. Huguenot-ism] flourish in France, and by whom was it persecuted?
Did Christianity flourish amongst the Frankish people of Burgundy and the Alsace?
Did Christianity flourish amongst the Celtic people of Bretagne [Brittany]?
Or did Christianity flourish amongst the NORMAN people of Normandie?
My hunch [having over the past decade become something of an HBD convert, which is to say, having become something of a cynic] is that you will find that Christianity flourished in France amongst precisely the same kinds of people who were Hussites in Bavaria & Czechoslovakia, who were Calvinists in Switzerland, who were Orange in Holland, and who were Puritans [or Presbyterians] in the British Isles.
Which is to say: If you're sampling for Christianity [Huguenot-ism] in France, then [I suspect that] you're likely to find that the Christians were overwhelmingly Norman.
Or, conversely [or contrapositively or whatever], if not, then you'd be overwhelmingly likely to discover that Anglican Popery and [outright] Roman Popery are being kept alive in England by the descendants of the Normans.
The Church of England is not Protestant because you say it isn't.
ReplyDeleteThe Church of England is not Protestant because it says it isn't.
There's been a marked increase in the number of morons commenting here lately.
If the Anglican Church were Protestant, it would be curious that it persecuted Protestants for so long. It used to throw Protestants in jail for preaching without a license.
The Church of England is not Protestant because you say it isn't.
ReplyDeleteThe Church of England is not Protestant because it's not Christian.
"You know, we saxons aren't going to put with these oppressions much longer"
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Evof-iVDOwQ
errol flynn, greatest robin hood ever.
What is the significance of Gascoyne vs Gascoigne?
ReplyDeleteAre they both Norman, but one reflects a longer history of literacy? Or does the anglicized one indicate illiterate Normans, while the French one indicates much more recent immigration?
"the WASP elite of America is descended from a british underclass
ReplyDeletethe jewish elite of America is descended from the ghetto and shtetl dwellers of Europe
Interesting. Think about that HBDers, when you denigrate the current losers in America...."
Presumably when you refer to "current losers in America", you mean the current crop of Hispanic and SSA immigrants.
Right. Because there's no appreciable difference between today's current crops of losers in America coming from, say, a Mexican or Somalian village and immigrants from the British underclass and ghettos and shtetls of Europe.
You need to take your snark somewhere else. We all* know the difference between apples and oranges around here.*
*Resident race man excluded, sorry about that, T.
"Humble derives from 'umbles' meaning intestines. Apparently after the toffs got all the meaty cuts of a slain beast the proles were left (along with the toff's dogs)to clean up the beast's innards as a 'gratis' gift. Hence 'humble pie' and 'to eat humble pie'."
ReplyDeleteNah, two different words. "Humble" is from Latin "humilis", root of "humility". "Umbles" has a different ancestry (< "numbles" < "nombles" < "lumulus"). But you're right that the humble would get the umbles, and so folk etymology connected the words.
I see "Professor" Woland has written a second post on the Norman conquest of England as replete with errors as his first. In order then, the Normans did not choose the place of battle at Hastings; the English army under the command of Harold Godwinson did. They arrived first at an obvious place for a battle, blocking William's route to London. The English army picked a favorable position at the top of Senlac Hill forcing the Norman army to attack the English shield wall up a slope. The historical record is utterly clear that the English Army not, as "Professor" Woland would have it, the Norman, chose the field of Battle at Hastings/Senlac Hill.
ReplyDeleteThe "Professor's" second point, that the Norman political, ecoinomic, and military systems were somehow superior to the Norman is equally absurd to anyone with the least familiarity with the history of this period. England at this time was no more "tribal" than Normandy. England was uniified into a feudal state in a process that began under Alfred the Great and was completed well before Godwinson sought the throne. Godwinson's army was a feudal levy with a core cadre of professional troops reporting directly to the king. By comparison, William's army was a congeries of soldiers owing him feudal dues, mercenaries drawn from across Europe, and freebooters seeking booty, including small estates carved from conquered land. The Normans relied on feudal levies of heavy cavalry supplemented with infantry and various mercenary auxiliaries. The English on the traditional shield wall formed of feudal levies of infantry. That one was not superior to the other is shown by the fact that the English were more than holding their own against the Normans until Harold and his brothers died, destroying discipline and morale. Finally, as to the relative political and economic development of England versus the Normandy: Both were feudal states. That the Normans had some superior political or economic system is a figment of the "Professor's" imagination arising ultimately from his ignorance. This is implicit in Steve Sailer's original post which rightly points out thatr William did not impose a new political or economic order on England. He just replaced the Anglo-Saxon thegns with Norman nobles and divvied up the land a little bit finer to give some of the freebooters who sailed with him a piece of the action. I am only posting this for the benefit of those who may have been misled by the "Professor".
It's not exactly relevant to this particular discussion because they are are not specifically about the events around William and Harold, but there are several wonderfull historical novels by Bernard Cornwell that touch on Celts in England being threatened by Germanic invaders or early Germans being threatened by later Germans.
ReplyDeleteThe first series are stories of Alfred the Great resisting the Danes and the second series are stories about Arthur resisting the Saxons. There are eight full length novels in all. Highly recommended.
Cornwell does battle scenes better than anyone else and he always has something nasty to say about organized religion. Wonderful stuff.
Albertosaurus
The ancient Israelites were really the NAMs of the middle east.they only seemed to have one accomplishment their temple and that was built by a Phoenician.
ReplyDeleteThey were less accomplished than the Egyptians, Assyrians and Babylonians for certain. However, they left a monument of literature (the Bible), which is a lot more than the real NAMs of the ancient Middle East, the wandering bedouins of the Arabian peninsula. The Israelites show up a lot more in discussion because they were literate and located in between the great empires of the time. The ancient inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula were largely illiterate and counted for so little that they were barely even written about by others.
Which brings up an even more remarkable point: centuries earlier the Anglo-Saxons had wiped out almost all trace of Latin, which had undoubtedly been spoken by a large number of Britons.
ReplyDeleteWelsh has some Latin loanwords from the Roman period but is a solidly Celtic language. It seems that Latin never really took in Britain outside the elite, in contrast to Gaul where Celtic effectively disappeared. (Breton was brought over from Britain by refugees in the Dark Ages.)
Anonymous:"If the Anglican Church were Protestant, it would be curious that it persecuted Protestants for so long. It used to throw Protestants in jail for preaching without a license."
ReplyDelete...and the Anglicans also persecuted Roman Catholics as well.For that matter, the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were pretty damn keen on persecuting Quakers.Maybe, following your logic, the Puritans weren't Protestants?
You have a rather...eccentric definition of Protestantism.
Anonymous:"The Church of England is not Protestant because it's not Christian."
ReplyDeleteFunny, I now some zealous Roman Catholics who would say the same thing about Baptists.
"the WASP elite of America is descended from a british underclass"
ReplyDeleteUntrue. Read ALBION'S SEED. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example, was largely settled by the "middling" stratum of English society.
Syon
.{Red hair] is certainly as distinctive looking to most run of the mill whites as being black is."
ReplyDeleteYes. Fergie looked as different from Prince Andrew as Michelle Obama is from Laura Bush. I get it.
God, the mental contortions the race-denyers put us all through.
Anonymous;"Like hell you do - it's been half a millenium, and you're STILL scared to upgrade the Archbishop of Canterbury to the status of a "Pope".
ReplyDeletePlus you believe that there's salvation to be found in fermented grape juice & crackers [administered by a, ah, typically very effeminate man, dressed up in a funny costume] which renders your gnostic outlook simply hopeless.
Purposeless, really."
Oh, I don't know. The Anglican tradition has given us some masterpieces of English literature: THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, Donne's poetry, Hooker's OF THE LAWS of ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY, etc.Those seem rather worthwhile.
Syon
Dr van Nostrand:"The ancient Israelites were really the NAMs of the middle east.they only seemed to have one accomplishment their temple and that was built by a Phoenician.there is no evidence of their neighbors Egyptian or Syrian being impressed by it."
ReplyDelete...and everybody in the Middle East was a NAM relative to the accomplishments of the Ancient Greeks.Of course, the Greeks have been in something of a slump for the last 1500 years.
Syon
But the very idea that such a colossally hideous software package as "blogspot.com" could evYOung maner become a market leader [of anything] is the intellectual equivalent of pissing all over half-a-century's worth of computer science theory and "best practices" canon.
ReplyDeleteBlogspot? One shouldn't complain too much about freeware.
Momma, those mean Internet people expect us to pay for stuff! it's not fair! Their free stuff isn't even the best product!
I've advised Mr. Sailer the Ludd that he ought to revise his web site and move up to better software and Web hosting. Unfortunately, for poor but honest Steve, better software and Web hosting ain't free, unlike Blogspot.
In particular, Steve needs to change to a magazine format similar to Taki's mag., so that Isteve stories and comments can persist longer, instead of all being laid out in a series that rapidly passes by.
"From an HBD perspective, you have to ask yourself: Where did Christianity [i.e. Huguenot-ism] flourish in France, and by whom was it persecuted?"
ReplyDeleteThere are more forms of Christianity than Calvinism, first off. That's just a goofy comment.
And secondly, I can answer your question, as someone with substantial Huguenot ancestry. They were lots of Huguenots in Western France, around Poitiers and LaRochelle specifically. Also concentrations in Alsace-Lorraine and believe it or not parts of the southwestern France.
The [ancient] Celtic languages were closer to Latin than to any other type of Indo-European.
ReplyDeleteYes. Read the Wikipedia article on "Gaulish language". It was far more like Classical Latin or Greek than the Celtic languages we think of today.
In the 19th century some of the Tractarians proposed that the Church of England and the other Anglican churches were not Protestant but a "Reformed Catholic" or middle path (via media) between Rome and Protestantism.
Okay. So, from the Protestant view, Anglicans are "Catholic", while from the Catholic view, they're "Protestant".
Where would this put Lutherans? IIRC, the national churches of the Scandinavian countries are very similar to the C of E in many respects. Heck, they're all in the Porvoo Communion.
In my view, not considering Anglicans (or Lutherans) "Protestant" is stretching it.
But on the other hand, oddly enough, traditional Catholics (here I mean the Old Believer types who refuse to have anything to do with the modern mass) even consider the post-Vatican II Catholic Church to be "Protestant" because they can't tell the difference between the Mass of Paul VI and an Episcopalian or Lutheran service.
Funny, I now some zealous Roman Catholics who would say the same thing about Baptists.
The usual term used by Catholics for non-Catholic Christians is "heretics". Or "schismatics" if they're Catholic but refuse to recognize the Roman Pope.
Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteYes, had the Normans not killed the Anglo Saxon King their army would not have been scattered. And if they had not been scattered then they would not have been easily slaughtered. And if they had not all been killed they would not have lost. You are brilliant.
"The C of E is its own thing, neither Catholic nor Protestant"
ReplyDeleteThe C of E was a *national* compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism for the sake of *national* cohesion during the time of the religious wars - and a very adaptive institution it proved to be for 300 years or so.
The key point for a *national* compromise religion is rejecting external authority. The details of the religion itself...well.
.
"the Norman political, ecoinomic, and military systems were somehow superior to the Saxon is equally absurd"
How many knights did Harold have at Hastings and how many stone castles did the Saxons have?
http://s1.hubimg.com/u/5568572_f520.jpg
From a democratic and egalitarian point of view the feudalism brought by the Normans may have been (relatively) worse than what it replaced but *militarily* it was superior hence why they won.
Once those castles were built it was all over.
Sykes based his estimates on the frequency of I1 y-DNA(common in Scandinavia/Northern Germany) and R1a y-DNA (common in Scandinavia/Eastern Europe) in the British population (he calls them invader type y-DNA). The native British y-DNA type is largely R1b.
ReplyDelete"And secondly, I can answer your question, as someone with substantial Huguenot ancestry. They were lots of Huguenots in Western France, around Poitiers and LaRochelle specifically. Also concentrations in Alsace-Lorraine and believe it or not parts of the southwestern France."
ReplyDeleteYour claim to "substantial" Huguenot descent may not be spurious but your assertions are flagrantly incorrect.
Protestantism in France, as the earlier passionate and devout heretical innovations such as the Cathars, originated and prospered almost exclusively in southern France where orthodox Catholicism lacked deep popular favour and its ordinary supports of a pious and supreme landowning aristocracy cemented to the Church through the ecclesiastical nepotism of the haute noblesse. Even French Protestantism's success in the west of the country occurred south of the Loire, i.e. in the southern half of the country.
The gallantry, zeal, learning and sanctity of morals of the southern, Mediterranean French who formed the country's Protestant Church was widely known and revered among the nations of Christendom (Germanic Protestant potentates sought them out as migrant traders, Thilo Sarrazin exemplifies this in his lineage as Sarrazin is southern French signifying the brave Mediterranean French Christians who undertook crusade against the Saracens, much later became Protestant often and were invited into Germany by Frederick the Great of Prussia who valued their industry and cleverness), belies the silly American lowest-common-denominator racist boast that only Nordics turned Protestant (although it was predominantly so) and that the south of Western Europe after the Reformation was deserted of all manly spirit and revolutionary energy.
The count of Montgomery in Normandy, nearly purely Catholic as a region, professed Protestantism (as you can see he was not a Swede in appearance), as captain of the King's Scots bodyguard accidentally killed King Henry II with a lance blow in a tournament, and led the Protestants in their southern homeland to several victories in battle, displaying the nice manners and courage for which they were famed. Similarly the Bourbons, the preeminent noble Huguenot family were southern (Bourbonnais geographically lies in the south) and the Huguenots greatest champion Henry of Navarre, later Henry IV, France's best king since Charlemagne historians proclaim. (The Armagnac warriors who with stupid yet magnificent fearlessness charged the English at Crecy and Poitiers were also - gasp!- southern French, perpetuating the reputation for bravery Raymond of Toulouse and his men earned in the First Crusade).
The French Catholics were commanded by the generalissimo of the Catholic League, Francois of Lorraine, of the illustrious Guise family (which produced a renowned diplomat and cardinal also). Nordic France was entirely Papist and Germanic Alsace-Lorraine the stronghold of French Roman Catholicism, Protestants almost unknown.
Map of French Religious divisions geographically distributed.
Sorry for this comment's length but rebutting the ignorance of complacent lollygaggers makes me loquacious.
...and everybody in the Middle East was a NAM relative to the accomplishments of the Ancient Greeks.Of course, the Greeks have been in something of a slump for the last 1500 years.
ReplyDeleteSyon
That should serve as a warning for the rest of Europe and North America about miscegenation.
The Anglican tradition has given us some masterpieces of English literature
ReplyDeleteNo doubt. But as a religion it has left much to be desired.
"The Church of England is not Protestant because it's not Christian."
ReplyDeleteFunny, I now some zealous Roman Catholics who would say the same thing about Baptists.
Baptists believe that Jesus Chris is the Son of God. So do Catholics.
The day is long past when you could say the same thing about Anglicans.
Here's the problem - the typical isteve reader is an atheist or agnostic who only has time for religion to the extent they think it signifies ethnicity. Discussion of religion around here is a bit like listening to some high-school graduates trying to debate string theory.
the jewish elite of America is descended from the ghetto and shtetl dwellers of Europe
ReplyDeleteThe Jewish elite would like you to think so, wouldn't they? But in fact Jews seem to be even more prone to fabricating their past than most other people.
I wonder how people with Irish surnames fare in comparison to Saxon and Norman names. I remember some website that listed the average socioeconomic percentile for various surnames, and Gallagher and O'neill were right at the bottom.
ReplyDeleteThe remains of an ancient Briton from just after the ice age were found in Cheddar, Somerset. DNA testing has shown he has direct descendants living nearby, even today. 9000 years later. Thats amazing.
ReplyDeleteThat would be amazing if it were true. But it's not. There is no way to tell if those people "living nearby" are "direct descendants". Sharing some genetic markers does not make them direct descendants. (Unless he was the first person in history to have those genetic markers - but that's not the case here)
Ive been looking into it, OK I only got as far as Wikipedia:
Cheddar Man
I dont know enough to see whether that backs up your interpretation or not.
Great discussion, where else would you go to debate the consequences of 1066 from an HBD point of view?
ReplyDeleteI thought the work of Prof. Cavalli-Sforza had established beyond question that modern Germans and English are racially identical. Steve, you brought his work to everyone's attention back in 2005, I believe.
The racial footprint of the Normans on the Anglo-Saxons was minimal, but the cultural effect was and remains large. The Danes under King Cnut conquered England in 1016, ending the rule of the royal house of Wessex. Had the Normans not intervened, England may have been integrated into the Scandinavian/North Germanic world centered on the Holy Roman Empire. Instead, she was enmeshed in the politics and culture of Latin Christendom and France. It's worth noting in this connection that the "English" King Richard I (Lionheart) couldn't speak the language over a century after Hastings.
Albertosaurus: those Cornwell novels (beginning with "The Last Kingdom") about King Alfred are outstanding, everyone who posts here should read them.
Intelligent Non-American: "Nordic France was entirely Papist and Germanic Alsace-Lorraine the stronghold of French Roman Catholicism..." Interesting observation, with a modern echo: Alsace is a stronghold of French conservatism today, solidly UMP/Sarkozy in the last election.
As for the effect on religion in Anglo-Saxon England, nineteenth century historical opinion was that the pre-Conquest English were pious to a fault, and valuable and necessary resources were diverted to the churches and monasteries and away from the Crown, to the detriment of military preparedness and the requirements of fending off the Danes, who had preoccupied English arms for over two centuries by 1016.
Norman, Saxon, Celt. All I know is I that a few years ago I met Scottish singer Shirley Manson at a party, and one look at those green eyes and fire engine red hair, and I was ready to fight my way through the British Isles swinging a claymore for her....
ReplyDeletehttp://i.ytimg.com/vi/9nGn02fOytE/0.jpg
The Anglican tradition has given us some masterpieces of English literature
ReplyDeleteNo doubt. But as a religion it has left much to be desired.
Oddly enough, much of the best 20th-century English literature was written by Catholics (G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, and of course Tolkien, among others). Catholics also seemed to historically have a lock on English musical composing.
A great sentence from Clark's draft of the book:
ReplyDeleteConsider, for example, this list of English barristers in 2011: Franklin St Clair Melville Evans
Durand David Grenville Malet
Michael John Davy Vere-Hodge
Michael David Melville-Shreeve
Matthew Sean de la Hay Browne Brotherton
Jeremy Gaywood Grout-Smith
Alexandra Marika Niki Smith-Hughes
Mungo William Wenban-Smith
Alexander George Lavander Hill-Smith.
These are not people you expect to meet at your local chip shop.
Oddly enough, much of the best 20th-century English literature was written by Catholics (G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, and of course Tolkien, among others).
ReplyDeleteAnd Belloc!
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/07/thiel-v-schmidt.html
ReplyDeleteDutch Boy
ReplyDelete"Sykes based his estimates on the frequency of I1 y-DNA...in the British population (he calls them invader type y-DNA). The native British y-DNA type is largely R1b."
Yes but Denmark and the surrounding areas, where the Saxons came from, has 40-50% R1b
too.
http://robertlindsay.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/r1b-dna-distribution.jpg
So if the Saxon, Viking, Norman etc invasions were split 50% R1b and 50% R1a and I then the R1b component as a marker would be lost inside the original R1b population.
Now there are different clades of R1b so it might still be true but all the known invader groups - Celt, Saxon, Viking, Norman - had at least 40% R1b.
Anonymous:"Baptists believe that Jesus Chris is the Son of God. So do Catholics.
ReplyDeleteThe day is long past when you could say the same thing about Anglicans."
Dear boy, do you really think that believing Jesus is the son of God is enough to make a Baptist a Christian?You really need to study your Catholic doctrine.
Anonymous:"Baptists believe that Jesus Chris is the Son of God. So do Catholics.
ReplyDeleteThe day is long past when you could say the same thing about Anglicans."
Funny,I know many Anglicans who believe that Jesus is the Son of God.On the other hand, there are many atheist Frenchmen of my acquaintance who embrace the Roman Catholic Church as a bulwark of French identity.
Syon
Anonymous:"The Anglican tradition has given us some masterpieces of English literature"
ReplyDelete"No doubt. But as a religion it has left much to be desired."
Really? How are we supposed to judge religions?By economic performance? Organizational efficiency? At the very least, one can say that Anglicans have produced an aesthetic legacy that puts the Baptists in the shade.
Syon
http://robertlindsay.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/r1b-dna-distribution.jpg
ReplyDeleteThe weird thing about that map of R1b distribution is if you didn't know about clades and diversity etc - which i don't but have read about - then on the face of it you might think R1b expanded west to east from the atlantic coast with an offshoot along the Danube which overflowed into Anatolia.
"Oddly enough, much of the best 20th-century English literature was written by Catholics (G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, and of course Tolkien, among others)."
ReplyDeleteOne can just as easily point to the great many important non-Catholic 20th century British writers: W.H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, D.H. Lawrence, etc.
Graham Greene, too.
ReplyDeleteAs I said earlier, people who think hard about religion are likely to be clever. There was a trend for intellectual conversions to Catholicism in England in the mid-20th century. Belloc and Tolkien were cradle Catholics, but Greene, Chesterton and Waugh were converts.
ReplyDeleteSomeone touched on the Greeks. What is the consensus on the genetics of Modern Greeks? Are they Turks who speak Greek, as some people assert, or genuine descendants of the Ancient Greeks?
There does seem to be a Catholic strain in English music. Byrd, and I think Tallis, were Catholics. I believe Elizabeth the First tolerated Byrd's Catholicism. Moving to modern times, it is a curious fact that the composer of Land of Hope and Glory was a Catholic.
"Oddly enough, much of the best 20th-century English literature was written by Catholics (G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, and of course Tolkien, among others)."
ReplyDeleteOne can just as easily point to the great many important non-Catholic 20th century British writers: W.H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, D.H. Lawrence, etc.
"Much". Not "most".
That would be amazing if it were true. But it's not. There is no way to tell if those people "living nearby" are "direct descendants". Sharing some genetic markers does not make them direct descendants. (Unless he was the first person in history to have those genetic markers - but that's not the case here)
They could be direct descendants. The waves of Indo-European invaders of various stripes would have reduced the portion of Cheddar Man's people in the modern population to maybe something like 10%, but they're still direct descendants.
"That would be amazing if it were true. But it's not. There is no way to tell if those people "living nearby" are "direct descendants". Sharing some genetic markers does not make them direct descendants. (Unless he was the first person in history to have those genetic markers - but that's not the case here)"
ReplyDeleteThey could be direct descendants. The waves of Indo-European invaders of various stripes would have reduced the portion of Cheddar Man's people in the modern population to maybe something like 10%, but they're still direct descendants.
"Could be" means something rather different from "are".
It "could be" that the people living in Cheddar today with the same genetic markers as "Cheddar Man" are his direct descendants. It's equally possible that they are not. There is no way to tell.
The claim was made that they are his direct descendants, hence: "There is no way to tell if those people "living nearby" are "direct descendants".
How are we supposed to judge religions?By economic performance? Organizational efficiency? At the very least, one can say that Anglicans have produced an aesthetic legacy that puts the Baptists in the shade.
ReplyDeleteDear God! (Pun half intended)
As I said above, the typical isteve reader is an atheist or agnostic who only has time for religion to the extent they think it signifies ethnicity. Discussion of religion around here is a bit like listening to some high-school graduates trying to debate string theory.
And you come along to prove the point. Thanks, mate!
Dear boy, do you really think that believing Jesus is the son of God is enough to make a Baptist a Christian?You really need to study your Catholic doctrine.
ReplyDeleteAnother person who knows jack about religion wanders in to offer his opinion.
If you recite and believe in the Apostles Creed - and even the Anglican Church still does that - then, yes, you are a Christian.
Feel free to expose your vast and encyclopedic knowledge of "Catholic doctrine" to all the world.
Apropos of nothing in particular:
ReplyDeleteBEST. iSTEVE. THREAD. EVAH.
That's all.
"Someone touched on the Greeks. What is the consensus on the genetics of Modern Greeks? Are they Turks who speak Greek, as some people assert, or genuine descendants of the Ancient Greeks?"
ReplyDeleteI think they're probably similar. One of the things about invasions based on a military elite is they tend to congregate in the places where the plagues happen and the population refills from the countryside.
.
"There does seem to be a Catholic strain...it is a curious fact that the composer of Land of Hope and Glory was a Catholic."
I think being an ethnic, religious or sexual minority creates internal conflict and calming internal conflict is one factor in the desire to produce art.
"Best. iSteve. Thread. Evah!"
ReplyDelete(With apologies to Steve Goodman and David Alan Coe...)
NOT the best iSteve thread evah......cuz there is nothing about Obama, Nazis, AIPAC, JFK, McMansions,Manute Bol or Occam's butterknife...
it is a curious fact that the composer of Land of Hope and Glory was a Catholic.
ReplyDeleteThe composer of "God Bless America" and "White Christmas" was Jewish.
Back in the early seventies I had a daylong outing with the locals in a small southern french town. The conversation turned to the Viking influence in Normandy. One of the french wags commented: "Eh oui, la-bas on dit "Voulez-vous passer le viking chez moi?"". We all thought that was pretty funny.
ReplyDeleteThis post has generated more bad pseudo-history than any of Sailer's that I can remember.
ReplyDeleteWhew. My surname originates from one of the Polish Szlachta. Guess I dodged a genetic bullet.
ReplyDeleteSeriously though, I wonder if the IQ advantage dissipates when you have more ancestors outside of the elite gene pool. A person can have a surname of Darcy, but in the 14th century the ancestor married a baker, who in turned married a farmer, etc. I doubt the IQ advantage would be sustained, even though one would still carry the name.
"Seems to me a lot of them must have married the English girls of the now second rank aristocracy. So while the land and wealth and tile still attaches to the Norman name the genes might well be very similar to the general population by this time. "
ReplyDeleteThe Normans tended to marry English noblewoman, whose descendants married other nobles. This practice was done for hundreds of years. This would explain why those with Norman surnames are far more likely to attend Oxford. They married English women, but they were the cream of the crop.
^^^
ReplyDeleteI hate to double post, but to spell it out, you seem to be under the assumption that people within ethnic groups seem to be identical in genes and thus talent, when it doesn't quite work that way.
Your family history can determine your blood pressure, proneness to anxiety or depression, your risk of a heart attack, etc. You think doctors chart your family history for giggles? In addition, your personality and IQ will be moderately correlated with your other siblings, which suggest a within-family hereditary component. In the grand scheme of things, on the stuff that matters, you will be far closer to your parents then your ethnicity as a whole.
To be in the elite, not only do you have to have a high IQ, but also high conscientiousness, high openness, and high emotional stability, a sprinkle of the dark triad, all of which are highly hereditary, and rare to find together.
This may come as a shock to many that comment here, but simply being white doesn't grant you equal genetic talent as the next Issac Newton. The Norman's knew this, which was why they didn't just breed with any random englishwomen they saw.
Arguably the Normans were primarily successful from a military perspective, because they had much more tightly defined hierarchical power systems. My understanding is that Anglo-Saxons and Celts rulers relied much more on an allegiance of heart and mind, there was less absolute primogeniture in their society also. The Normans weren't choosing wives on the basis of their brains or looks particularly, dowry and useful family connections were the important considerations. The Butt ugly comment above seems bizarrely gender biased to me, English men aren't top of the lists for good looks either but modern French men are slightly less good looking as rule. Subjective territory, but one fact that is absolutely true is that British stock dramatically increased in size in Australia and NZ, largely due to diet. This was particularly noticeable in the Great war, when the Anzacs often towered over the Tommies.(Let us not forget that 1 in 4 Australians has Irish ancestors also). Almost all down to increased meat consumption; sadly in my lifetime the general population is increasingly obese. When I first went to the US over 30 years ago I was amazed at the number of gone-to-seed fat Californians. Since then this has become a global phenomenon. It is hardly surprising that the wealth often has stayed in the hands of people from Norman backgrounds, there were a great deal fewer of them to start with after all. Conversely forming any analysis of wealth distribution for the millions of people with artisonal or A/S surnames would be extremely difficult to calculate and relatively meaningless even with understanding the interplay between inherited and created wealth at different times in British history.
ReplyDeleteWeird point of view.
ReplyDelete"Seriously though, I wonder if the IQ advantage dissipates when you have more ancestors outside of the elite gene pool. A person can have a surname of Darcy, but in the 14th century the ancestor married a baker, who in turned married a farmer, etc. I doubt the IQ advantage would be sustained, even though one would still carry the name"
Elite gene pool? Some sad confusion here between military success and brains. Military success depends on a large numbers of factors, loyalty of troops, communication, effective chains of command, lines of supply etc. Strange and ludicrous retrospective conclusion to imagine that conquerors are always successful because of greater intelligence. The Normans were not considered to be even more civilised by many at the time. This is a version of the American colloquial thought " If you're so smart why aren't you rich". Sorry mate but there were genius bakers and very clever farmers in history as well, don't assume that people with brains rise to the top or even become rich, that is a product of a narrow quite specified focus and intelligence. People who have a latent ability for eg logic or languages, don't always have any opportunity to develop or use these skills, it doesn't mean that the mental capacity wasnt there in your ancestors or mine. This to my mind is proven by the enormous leaps made by ordinary people given the opportunity for education in the last century. Improved life circumstances where not all their energy is directed towards subsistence is a major factor.
.
Weird point of view.
ReplyDelete"Seriously though, I wonder if the IQ advantage dissipates when you have more ancestors outside of the elite gene pool. A person can have a surname of Darcy, but in the 14th century the ancestor married a baker, who in turned married a farmer, etc. I doubt the IQ advantage would be sustained, even though one would still carry the name"
Elite gene pool? Some sad confusion here between military success and brains. Military success depends on a large numbers of factors, loyalty of troops, communication, effective chains of command, lines of supply etc. Strange and ludicrous retrospective conclusion to imagine that conquerors are always successful because of greater intelligence. The Normans were not considered to be even more civilised by many at the time. This is a version of the American colloquial thought " If you're so smart why aren't you rich". Sorry mate but there were genius bakers and very clever farmers in history as well, don't assume that people with brains rise to the top or even become rich, that is a product of a narrow quite specified focus and intelligence. People who have a latent ability for eg logic or languages, don't always have any opportunity to develop or use these skills, it doesn't mean that the mental capacity wasnt there in your ancestors or mine. This to my mind is proven by the enormous leaps made by ordinary people given the opportunity for education in the last century. Improved life circumstances where not all their energy is directed towards subsistence is a major factor.
.