Standing of the ancestors · working paper

A measurement of what rank the 2,603 direct ancestors held, and of the evidence by which each is placed. Kept off the statistics page because the method is still developing and the figures will move; recorded here so the method is on the record.

The rule

Each ancestor is placed by the strongest surviving evidence of standing, taken in this order:

A title the person held themselves, whether in the name as recorded or claimed for them in their own biography.
Failing that, the rank of a parent, a spouse or a sibling. A knight's untitled daughter was of his house, and the period did not think otherwise.
Failing that, the class of record that names them at all. To be traceable through Cokayne, Burke's, the Visitations, Medieval Lands, the Irish annals or the charters, across seven centuries, is itself a fact about rank.

The measurement

Standing	Count	Share	26 Oct
Monarchs and consorts	326	12.5%	320
Titled nobility and their houses Earls, counts, dukes, barons, lords and ealdormen, together with the wives, daughters, coheirs and sisters who were of those houses without a title of their own	1,604	61.6%	1,523
Knights and baronets	106	4.1%	94
In the peerage record, untitled Traceable only because the peerage, annalistic and charter sources name them	227	8.7%	188
Gentry, clergy and officers	141	5.4%	129
Named trades and labourers The masons, weavers, farmers and labourers of Cork and Suffolk	27	1.0%	27
Not placeable An upper bound, not a measure: chiefly wives entered by forename alone and names carried from the old family charts, but including a number of ancestors of plain rank whose entries name lands rather than titles	172	6.6%	169
All direct ancestors	2,603	100%	2,450

The titled and armigerous world, taken as the first four rows, is 2,263 people, or 86.9 per cent. Titled in their own right, 1,354, or 52.0 per cent. Set against that, the ancestors who worked with their hands number twenty-seven, unchanged for a month, and the whole Cork and Suffolk working inheritance comes to perhaps a hundred names.

One hundred and fifty-three ancestors arrived since yesterday. Eighty-one went into the nobility row, thirty-nine into the peerage-record row and twelve into the knights; the residual moved by three and the trades by none. The share titled in their own right has now held between 52.0 and 53.2 per cent across six consecutive measurements while the tree grew by a thousand people.

The rise in the fourth row is worth noting on its own. The Irish work of this week is documented from the annals rather than from the peerage books, and it brings in men and women who held real power without a title a herald would recognise. They are placed by their source rather than their style, which is exactly what the third rule above is for.

One correction on the record

Earlier editions of the statistics page, from July to 9 October 2026, carried a social table built on a different rule which read each biography for title words. It counted a woman entered as "daughter and coheir of Sir William de Braose, Lord of Bramber" as unplaceable, because the only title in her record was her father's, and so reported two fifths of the tree as obscure. That figure was a property of the method and not of the ancestry. Those counts are withdrawn and are not comparable with the table above.

Why this stays off the main page

Only 57 of the 2,603 ancestors, barely two per cent, have no record text at all, so the true floor of obscurity in this tree is around a hundred people rather than the hundreds earlier reported. The number given here as not placeable will fall again as entries are read more closely, and any table whose headline figure can move that far in an afternoon does not belong on a page that a cousin reads once. The structural figures on the statistics page, the generations and the roads to Charlemagne, Rollo, Alfred and the Conqueror, are arithmetic on the file and have never depended on any of this.