Obviously my post was not as clear as I had intended and has been misinterpreted.
When I referred to elitism, it was in response to an earlier post making the point that “making a big deal of [royal ancestry] is … considered elitist.” So I was trying to say that it’s a shame people who mention their royal ancestry are perceived as elitist or snobbish (though they may well genuinely be so) because sometimes people are just genuinely excited about discovering their history. And it doesn’t make them better than anyone else, because we all have the same ancestry. So just because you haven’t found your paper trail to a well-documented royal or famous person doesn’t mean you don’t have it. You just haven’t found it yet. I’ve learned not to mention my research to non-genealogists, because it seems to immediately raise hackles, and it’s hard to explain how commonplace these descents really are. But in a forum like this, snobbery, real or perceived (prompting the reverse snobbery of “who cares?”), should not cast a shadow on what should be a free and open discussion of genealogy.
And Andrew, given that you are familiar with Mortimer’s book, and are aware that every generation back exponentially widens the number of ancestors one has while at the same time narrowing the pool of available people in the gene pool, it makes no sense to say that lower class people are not normally descended from medieval royalty. Mortimer clearly points out that they are and explains the mathematics behind it. It may be harder to prove other than by using mathematics. But the premise is still valid. Granted, you do need to dig harder to get the paper trails. Still, I find that if you can take even one thread reliably back to the 16th century, you are almost certain to discover royal lines. Fortunately, every year, more information is available to push those dead ends back further.
As a thought experiment, consider the reverse scenario. Try to imagine, let’s say, a modern bin man with English ancestry going back 6 or 7 centuries with no Norman ancestry (Norman being a shortcut for the bulk of royal links after 1066). You will soon see how improbable a scenario that would be. It would mean that nobody in his immediate ancestry had ever married the distant cousin of a distant cousin of a distant cousin with a shared Norman ancestor. In just 20 generations back you would be looking at over 4 million slots, many of them overlapping because (see the diamond theory of ancestors) overlaps would start occurring with regularity as the gene pool becomes smaller, starting about 10 generations back and shrinking thereafter. By 26 generations back, or approximately the 12th century, you would be looking at 268,435,456 ancestors, most overlapping, so that 80% of the population of England at that time would be on his family tree. And none of them Normans? That would be freakish indeed. So I hope this makes it clearer what I mean about our common roots and the ubiquitous nature of royal descents.