The last English earl

Every English family history eventually runs into 1066 from one side or the other. This one, being greedy, has now run into it from both.

Waltheof, Earl of Northumbria, was the last of the great English earls to survive the Conquest, the son of Siward who had marched against Macbeth. He made his peace with the Conqueror, unmade it, remade it, and was finally caught at the edge of a rebellion he had probably only listened to. He was beheaded outside Winchester in 1076, the only English earl William ever executed, and within a generation the monks of Crowland were keeping his tomb as a martyr's shrine and reporting miracles at it. The English never quite agreed that he had deserved it. That ambivalence, a man executed as a traitor and venerated as a saint, is exactly the kind of ancestor this site treasures.

The marriage is the extraordinary part. His wife was Judith of Lens, the Conqueror's own niece, granddaughter of the old Count of Flanders, brought over in the first wave of the new order and married to the last pillar of the old one. Their daughter Maud carried the line onward, in time, to the Kings of Scots, for she married David I, and so Waltheof's English blood and Judith's Norman blood flowed together into half the royal houses this site has spent a month counting.

So the family now descends from the Conqueror's companions, from the Conqueror's niece, and from the last Englishman the Conqueror beheaded. Every side of 1066, at one table. The lines are drawn in The Royal Houses.