NO NORMAN BLOOO

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 3, Issue 671, 25 October 1933, Page 7

NO NORMAN BLOOO

FAMILY TREB PRUNED SIMPLE FAITH AND THE ANCESTRY OF OLD FAMILIES. "WORK OF PEDIGREE FAEERS;" London, Sept. 12. Over 2000 iof Britain's leading scien•tists who are attending the annual meeting of the British Association divided their interests among thirteen halls in Leicester yesterday, whei*e alrnost every topic in the realmjs 01 science, economics, agriculture and ■education was considered. 'The meeting-places for eaeh' section were scatttred all over the Midland eity, and a busy daj, during which over one hundred papers were read, was not finished until the Lord Mayor had given a reception last night. One of the aniost interesting of the. sectional presidential addresses was that delivered by Lord Raglan before the Anthropology Section, in which he dealt drastically with those old English families who cherish the belief that they have Norman blood in their veins. "There are in this country," said Lord Raglan, "many families whose 'traditions' take them back to the time of the Norman conquest, when their ancestors are alleged to. have distinguished themselves either on the side of the Normans or of the Saxons. "It can he said with out fear of contradiction from those who have studi■ed the subject that not one of these is a genuine tradition. All are the work of pedigree fakers, who. have fluorished from, very early times, and there is not a word of truth in any iof them. "No English family can trace a genuine descent to the Saxons, and though there are a few families with a genuine Norman descent, this in no ■case goes as far back as the eleventh century." Hereward the Wake. As an example of how "tradition" is huilib up, Lord Raglan insbanced

the following: — "One of our oldest families is that of Wiake, of which the present head ds S-ir Hereward Wake, thirteenth' baronet. The family 'tradition' is that it is descended in the direct male, line from! the famous Saxon hero, Hereward the Wake. The facts," said Lord Raglan, "appeared to he th'ait in 1166 a Norman. called Hugh Wac came over from Normandy and marx-ied the heiress of the Norman FitzGilhert, lord of Bourne, in Lin- j colnshire. Ahout 200 years later the family of Wake though't itself entitled to a more high-sounding pedigree, and having diseovered that a Saxon called Hereward had once owned a small part of the lordship of Bourne, decided t0 adopt the great Saxon hero. , as ancestor. "For this purpose a pedigree was forged, eonferring titles, ancestors, and descendants .jipon the Hereward who lived at Boume, aud to make this pedigree more convincing there wasconferred upon the Saxon h'ero the hitherto unheard-of cognomen of 'the Wake.' "The followinigi facts seem certain: that Hereward was never called 'the Wake' till he was adopted as ancestor ; by the Wake family ahout the mdidle . ■of the fourteenth century; that the Wake family has no Itraceable connec--tion with! Hereward or any other' Saxon; and that the first Wake to be

■ ! christened Hereward was born in 1851. • 'Ae regards Hereward the Saxon hero, he may have been a real person, I but the fact that among his exploits are narrated the slaughter of a gigan- . tic bear in Scotland, and the rescue of a Gornish princess, suggests that he was a mythical hero after whom Hereward of Bourne and other Saxons were named." Urging that local tradition is almost invariably false history, Lord Raglan went on to quote the well-known story of the faithful hoimd, variaaits ! of which are found in many parts of j Europe, Asia, and Africa. , -The popularity of this story in ! Walcs, and the fact that in an English I version the dog is called Kill-h'art, ap- | parcnltly led, in the late eighteenth 1 century, to the localisation of the ' story at Beddgelert, near Snowdon, the name of which is thought to rnean i th© gra,ve of Kelert, an early saint. I The fact that Llewellyn is a popular j North Welsh hero, and the enterprise j of a local innkeeper, who about 1830 i set up a tomihstone at a suitable spot, ' were sufficient to establish a "tradi- | tion" which was accepted by thousands not rnerely of the ignorant but of the i learned. ! Youth's Intolerance of Age. 1 • "Why should any one wish' to know what happened before he was born?" Lord Raglan asked. "There is uo obvious reason, and as a fact very few people do. "If we wish to know who lived in a certain house 100 years ago, it is of little use to ask the local inhabitants; we may find some elder whcse father worked there, hut the odds are against it. Do we find, in any part of the world, young- people sitting at the feet of the aged, and eaigerly drinking in all that they can tell them of the events of their youth? Nowhere that I have heard of; the old man in his anecdotage is universally regarded as a bore." "Social anthropology has been allotted, very properly, a low place among- the sciences," Lord Raglaa coneluded. "It will never occupy 1 what should he its proper place until a vast quantity of pre-scientific ■and pseudo-scientific rubbish has been . eleared from its path."