The fall of Brutus and the rise of modern genealogy

Once rich people claimed descent from gods. Then they had to prove these claims.

The 2nd Earl of Chesterfield, Philip Stanhope to his friends, was known for his satire. In his London house he hung two portraits, one was labelled ‘Adam de Stanhope’ and the other ‘Eve de Stanhope.’ Their purpose was to lampoon a common trait among Stuart era aristocrats: claiming descent from mythic characters and/or God himself.

Nowadays genealogical forums are filled with complaints that algorithms on family history websites are leading to the proliferation of entirely false lines of descent. Some of these lines can stretch back deep into human history. It is not uncommon for some researchers to produce trees back to Mary, the mother of Jesus, or Darius the Great. Invariably someone will pop up in the comments to tell them their trees are fabulously wrong. In fact, there are some 4,483 public trees on Ancestry.com that cite Adam and Eve as ancestors (there are probably far more, under various different monikers). Below is a copy of one claiming Adam to be their great-grandfather, 113 times removed. It is easy for some to scorn these claims, but the belief that people are descended from God is not new. They were once the basis of family history and it is likely that the researchers are copying some of the earliest family trees ever written.

In the 12th century there lived a man called Geoffrey of Monmouth. He was a cleric and an early British historian. While the Greeks had Herodotus and Thucydides, both of whom, despite their faults, produced enlightening historic works, the British have Geoffrey. His best known work, “The History of the Kings of Britain”, published in 1135, chronicles the lives of British kings over a two thousand year period. Among those documented by Geoffrey include the Kings Leir and Cymbeline, and probably the earliest structured narrative of King Arthur. He didn’t invent these stories anew but he embellished them greatly and was one of the first to shape them as history. Indeed his works ensured that they were treated as historical fact until well into the sixteenth century. Some tales, like those of King Arthur, have stuck in our national consciousness but others have faded. The most important being Brutus of Troy.

Brutus of Troy was born in Italy. His grandfather (or great-grandfather) was said to be Aeneas, of Trojan War fame, who had settled in Italy and founded the Alba Longa. But Brutus killed his father with an arrow and was exiled from Italy. He travelled through north Africa for a few years before meeting another group of exiled Trojans on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Together they went to Gaul, fought against the king of Acquitaine and founded the city of Tours. Eventually they came to Albion, defeated a band of giants, renamed the country after Brutus and filled it with their descendants. Brutus founded a city beside the River Thames, called Troia Nova (New Troy), which later became London. Following his death Britain was divided into three kingdoms ruled by his sons: Locrinus (England), Albanactus (Scotland) and Kamber (Wales).

Geoffrey’s work helped Britons believe that they all shared a common ancestor. Yet Brutus’s own ancestry was much debated. The classical Trojan genealogies related Brutus back to the Greek gods: Aeneas’s mother had been the goddess Aphrodite, whose own father (according to “The Iliad”) was Zeus. Christians, however, swapped this divine Greek descent for their own biblical family trees. Brutus was made to be a descendant of Ham, the son of Noah and the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Adam and Eve. These family trees were popular among British kings and aristocrats, who used them to connect their own families to divine origins. Thomas Lyte (1568–1638), a family historian, produced a monumental pedigree of James I, showing he was a descendant of Bladud, a legendary king first mentioned by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Bladud was a descendant of both Brutus and Adam and Eve.

Geoffrey of Monmouth wasn’t alone in creating these pedigrees. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was produced a few centuries earlier, probably during the reign of King Alfred the Great and the Chronicle traced his ancestry back to Wōden. This work remained relevant for centuries. In 2007 Matthew Pinsent, the Olympic rower, traced his family history in an episode of the BBC’s “Who Do You Think You Are?”, and saw a similar pedigree that connected him to William the Conqueror, then to Wōden, then to King David and finally to Adam and Eve. The scroll did eventually end, with God.

Why did proving descent matter so much to kings? Because it helped them prove that they had a divine right to rule. Mary Helms, an anthropologist, has argued that in non-Western societies, power is closely connected to the extent an individual can prove a direct link to the supernatural realm. These links are designed to make their people treat them like almost magical beings, capable of wielding their ancestral connections to improve the success of their tribes in war and commerce. Medieval Britain wasn’t so different. Arguably the traces of this deeply psychological reverence to those with links to great ancestors has lasted right up to the present in Western societies as well.

But the royal family and politicians aren’t walking around claiming to be descended from Brutus anymore. Why? The Renaissance ruined everything. In 1534 the Italian scholar Polydore Vergil started to claim that Geoffrey of Monmouth had merely made up the story of Brutus. Many English academics were horrified. John Leland and John Price attacked him. They argued that Vergil was a foreigner who could not possibly know anything about British history. Some scholars, including John Foxe, even burnt Vergil’s books. Virgel’s claims, at the time of the Reformation, helped many to argue that the Roman Church was a foreign enemy of England and needed to be removed.

Yet the damage was done. There was no way back for Brutus, who once represented the nucleus of national identity. Subsequent scholars began to study the gaping holes in the given histories and his departure created a new historical methodology. Family history was marginalised. However, it also led to the rise of modern genealogical methods. English antiquarians were also forced to reassess their sources, leading to genealogists who were far more faithful to actual facts and diligent about collecting accurate sources. Geoffrey and the Anglo Saxon Chronicle might have been forgotten by most modern Britons, but on the fringes of family tree websites their work lives on.