The Descents
The ancestry, by the numbers
Regenerated 14 September 2026, evening, from the master GEDCOM — after the Powys Fadog ascent and the Longespée ring. Every figure below is counted afresh from the file, not carried over.
Who they were
The full social breakdown of all 1,471 direct ancestors, each counted once, in the highest category that matches his or her own recorded title, style or occupation.
| Category | Count | Share | 9 Aug | 30 Jul |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monarchs and consorts | 289 | 19.6% | 257 | 216 |
| Titled nobility — earls, counts, barons, lords | 467 | 31.7% | 426 | 222 |
| Knights and baronets | 40 | 2.7% | 40 | 29 |
| Gentry, clergy, officers | 68 | 4.6% | 63 | 36 |
| Named trades and labourers | 33 | 2.2% | 33 | 41 |
| Too little detail to classify | 574 | 39.0% | 543 | 289 |
| All direct ancestors | 1,471 | 100% | 1,362 | 833 |
Aristocracy proper — monarch, peer or knight — is 796, or 54.1 per cent. Add the gentry and clergy and it is 864, or 58.7 per cent.
What the table has stopped doing
It has stopped moving. Since early August the shape has held almost exactly: about a fifth crowned, about a third titled, a little under a tenth gentry or trade, and the rest too thinly recorded to place. The tree has grown by six hundred and forty ancestors since 30 July and the proportions have barely shifted, which is what happens once a pedigree is deep enough that every new ancestor comes from the same world as the last. The bottom row is the honest one: 574 people whose whole surviving record is a name and a father, most of them women, and it remains the largest single category in the table.
How many ways in
Distinct chains of parent links from Aynsley to each ancestor, counted through the whole tree — not the shortest route, but every route.
| Ancestor | Paths | 9 Aug | 30 Jul |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bleddyn ap Cynfyn | 1 | — | — |
| Brian Boru | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| Edward I | 9 | 9 | 1 |
| Rhys ap Tewdwr | 10 | 8 | 1 |
| Henry II | 20 | — | — |
| Empress Matilda | 20 | 18 | 2 |
| William the Conqueror | 42 | 40 | 6 |
| Alfred the Great | 82 | 78 | — |
| Vladimir the Great | 86 | 80 | 8 |
| Rollo | 442 | 293 | 14 |
| Charlemagne | 467 | 412 | 30 |
Rollo closes on Charlemagne
The column tells me exactly where the summer's work went. Rollo has gone from fourteen roads in July to four hundred and forty-two, and now trails Charlemagne by twenty-five. That is the Norman ducal rings doing it: every loop closed in Normandy this month is a fresh road back to the Viking at the bottom of that house, and not one of them is a road to Aachen.
The counts do not measure how grand an ancestor was. They measure how thoroughly his descendants married each other, and no house in this tree married itself like the Normans.
The narrow gates
Two numbers refuse to move with the rest, and they are the two that matter most. Brian Boru is still reached two ways and no more, exactly as he was in August, while the Norman count multiplied twenty-fold around him. Bleddyn ap Cynfyn, newly wired at the head of Glyndŵr's paternal line, is reached by exactly one road — a single chain of parent links, with no second route anywhere in fifteen hundred ancestors.
Both are single joins, and both can only be widened from their own side: the Irish descent from Irish evidence, the Powys descent from Welsh. Four hundred and sixty-seven roads to Charlemagne and one road to Bleddyn are not the same kind of fact. The single road is the one that would fall if a single link failed, and it is the one worth defending first.