Reading more family genealogy, I find that I am related by marriage to Henry the Fourth of England. I am descended from his first wife, Mary de Bohun, whom he married when she was 11, five years before he became king. She gave him six children, dying giving birth to the sixth, at the age of 25 on June 4, 1394.
That sort of thing was common in those days. Life for a woman was difficult and short.
One of her children, born when she was 18, became Henry V, the hero, shall we say, of the 100 Years War and especially Agincourt.
Mary was the younger daughter of Humphrey de Bohun, 7th Earl of Hereford, Essex, and Northampton. When he died, she, along with her sister, inherited his estate.
The Bohun family originally came from the Cotentin Peninsula in western Normandy in the department of Manche. That's near the arrondissement of Saint-Lô by what today are the communes of Saint-André-de-Bohon and Saint-Georges-de-Bohon. Apparently, ruins of their castle are still visible near Saint-André. I should go take a look next time I am in France, assuming there still will be a France safe for a white woman to travel in.
The founder of the line was Humphrey de Bohun, godfather of William the Conqueror. He sailed with him to England and fought at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, for which he was awarded the manor of Tatterford in Norfolk as recorded in the 1086 Domesday Book. Otherwise he stayed in Normandy.
Humphrey founded a Benedictine Priory at Saint-Georges-de-Bohon (that's the way the French spelled the surname) in 1092, donating the local church to the Abbey of Marmoutier. The charter for this priory was witnessed by members of William the Conqueror’s immediate family.
Humphrey died in 1113 and while most of the rest of his descendants continued on in Normandy and France, his youngest son, Humphrey I de Bohun, focused his family’s future in England. He married Maud of Salisbury, thus acquiring the Barony of Trowbridge. From then on for the next 350 years his family kept adding land holdings until his descendants became the Earls of Hereford and Essex, and hereditary Constables of England.
Another line of his descendants established the Bohuns of Midhurst in West Sussex. This branch gave birth to Richard de Bohun (Bishop of Coutances) and Josceline de Bohon (Bishop of Salisbury).
Mary de Bohun's great-great-great-grandfather, another Humphrey, was one of the 25 barons elected to compel King John to observe the Magna Carta in 1215. He joined the Fifth Crusade in July, 1217, going to Egypt where he fought at the Siege of Damietta. He died in the Holy Land on June 1, 1220. Mary’s great-great-grandfather, Humphrey, took the cross, as they called it, and joined the Seventh Crusade in 1250. Gilbert de Bohun joined the Ninth Crusade.
Honestly, I think it is kind of -- no very -- cool that I am descended from both an enforcer of the Magna Carta and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Oh, and the Crusades thing, too.
(I have to say, though, reading about all this, I got sort of a Tess of the d'Urbervilles vibe. *Looks left and right, up at the sky, whistles tunelessly, twiddles thumbs behind back....*)
Thinking about these ancestors, I remembered some British guy dismissively saying to me that all Americans claim they are descended from the Duke of York or some nonsense like that and I responding no, more likely an American would claim to be descended from Jesse James.
He didn't get that at all. First, he didn't know who Jesse James was, and when I explained he was baffled: why would anyone want to claim an outlaw as an ancestor? Well, Americans do, and look down on snooty pants types who claim to be descended from some limp-wristed limey poof with a posh title. They'd rather claim descent from horse thieves and bank robbers, the Order of the Bandana and Crossed Colts, shall we say, than any foreign royalty. Why? That's just the way we are. Ya know? I'm talking about real Americans, of course, not all these Johnny-come-latelies and assorted glomers-on and parasites.
Old-stock Americans, as they are called nowadays rather than just actual Americans, take pride in claiming descent from the earliest arrivals to these shores that they can. Thus one will cite his ancestors aboard the Mayflower while another will top that with descent from the Jamestown colonists. But their ancestors before those...eh, who cares?
In the 1939 movie Midnight, starring Don Ameche and Claudette Colbert, Colbert plays an American chorus girl stranded in Paris posing as a European princess. Getting tired of the gig, when asked who her ancestors were, she snaps "Choctaw and Scotch-Irish!"
Mark Twain when on one of his European trips was queried as to his ancestors stated with some pride that he was a direct descendant of Adam and Eve. That's your American for you. Nuts to rank and privilege.
I had a thought about Henry IV, too. He was the first king of England to speak English since the Norman conquest, which is an aide-mémoire as we might put it that the English were a defeated and conquered people who were reminded of that fact every day for centuries, but in the end they overcame that and recovered. We should always keep such lessons from history in mind, especially in these troubled times.
Henry also gave the order to burn the Lollards alive for heresy. Lollards were what is called proto-Protestants. They translated the Bible into English and believed ordinary people should be able to read it for themselves, among other things. So they were pronounced anathema and persecuted unto death. Very Muslim-like of the Catholics, if you ask me. But they don't do that sort of thing anymore. Hint to the Muzzies.
Another thought I had, or where my thoughts strayed, was about Gregory Clark's book, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. The Amazon blurb:
"How much of our fate is tied to the status of our parents and grandparents? How much does it influence our children? More than we wish to believe. While it has been argued that rigid class structures have eroded in favor of greater social equality, The Son Also Rises proves that movement on the social ladder has changed little over eight centuries. Using a novel technique―tracking family names over generations to measure social mobility across countries and periods―renowned economic historian Gregory Clark reveals that mobility rates are lower than conventionally estimated, do not vary across societies, and are resistant to social policies.
"Clark examines and compares surnames in such diverse cases as modern Sweden and Qing Dynasty China. He demonstrates how fate is determined by ancestry and that almost all societies have similarly low social mobility rates. [The book reveals] the deeply entrenched force of inherited advantage,"
In other words, nepo babies rule. Who would have guessed?
Clark's latest book, originally titled For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls, but renamed To Have and Have Not, could not find a publisher, so he has made it available free to download. Click the link to get it.