Recent births and deaths in my family have got me thinking about the family tree. A few years ago, we pieced together a remarkably discernible lineage that goes right back to William the Conqueror, or at least his alleged Anglo-Saxon concubine, and various Norman knights who used to own much of England. And it is this lineage that has made me realise: the hideous underprivilege and mistreatment of my ancestors entitles me to reparations.
For centuries the Peverels taxed and brutalised their serfs, but then chose the wrong side in the odd war
The story begins with that Anglo-Saxon woman Maud Ingelric. Many historians believe she was the mistress of William the Conqueror, and bore him a favoured son, William Peverel the Elder, my great-great-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-(etc)-grandfather. Maud herself was of ‘noble English descent’, an alleged granddaughter of King Aethelred the Unready and the daughter of ‘the Saxon Ingelric, Keeper of the Sacred Grail’.
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