I demand reparations for my ancestors’ fall from grace

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.

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’. Maud now lies in the chancel of the monastery she founded in Hatfield Peverel, Essex.

If William Peverel the Elder was not the bastard son of William the Bastard, he was the son of Norman Knight Ranulph Peverel, but as the Peverels are likely descended from Welsh kings, various Viking earls of the Orkneys and possibly the Nordic God of Snow and Ice (this last is disputed by pedants), it is clear that, either way, I am the direct if distant progeny of seriously posh dudes.

Trouble is, it all went downhill from there. For a couple of centuries the Peverels peacefully taxed and brutalised their English serfs, but then they chose the wrong side in the odd war, various castles got taken away, and ‘my side’ of the family moved west, marrying into the lordly Tremaynes of St Martin-in-Meneage, west Cornwall. The Tremaynes were not royal favourites but they were still doing OK – to this day there is an exquisite Tremayne Manor by Frenchman’s Creek, Helford (a Regency job now, as the original medieval seat got torched).