If you know your ancestors back to 1415, then one of them was in Agincourt

Question

At least this is an hypothesis I've made based on what I call the early 1400's bottleneck (more to come on this).

To confirm of propose a counter-example to this rule, please check : you have ancestors living in 1415, at least one of them is listed (or should be) in https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Battle_of_Agincourt.

Comments

Interesting .. I have possibilities .. Bar, Barbeau, Barbeaux, Barbu, Barbaud ... I haven't discovered a connection yet .. 

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What are the dates of your most ancient ancestors? Do you go back to 1415?

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We only have a tiny number of the soldiers who took part at the battle of Agincourt. There's some guidance here (open learn course) about how to search the soldier in medieval England   data base for those who fought for Henry V in 1415. The data base also includes some 3000 French soldiers.

( of course the problem is getting back to 1415.In England many lines become impossible to follow in the 17th and 18th centuries If you get back to 1538 when registers started   you still have 3 or 4 generations to 1415 and your discovered ancestor might not be the ancestor that went) 

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Helen, that's exactly my point. Note the "if" in my question. If you can trace your ancestors back to 1415 ... Not everyone can. My brick wall is standing fast somewhere around 1630. France is not different from England for that matter.

The underlying assumption of this "Azincourt's theorem" is that you can't go back to 1415 unless you have some no(ta)ble ascendants, hence a high probability to find some of  them in Azincourt battlefield, because just about every euro aristo family was there, from either side.

The "strong" form of the theorem conjecture is "If you can trace your ancestors back to 1415, one of them was killed at Azincourt." 

Sorry to use the French spelling, but Agincourt sounds really weird to my ears.

And BTW Helen do you have known ancestors in 1415?

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No time to go through the list at the moment, but at least one alleged attender is undocumented fantasy. This is [[Fortescue-5|John Fortescue]], a minor Devon landholder whose descendants promoted him into a knight and a mighty warrior.

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Chas, thanks, I had a look at the profile https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Fortescue-5 and saw your comments. Did you send a direct message to the PM? 

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ancestors traced back to 1415 and before are .. Barbeau , Barbeaux, Barbu .. ( French Netherlands ) (Bretagne ) ( Paris)

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Gerald, can you provide pointers to WT profiles?

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lol .. Bernard .. I haven't added them yet .. I haven't finished the pre 1500 requirements .. The data that I've researched hasn't listed any of those surnames for Agincourt.

There are "Bar" surnames. I haven't discovered a connection to the "Bar" nobles.

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 Good luck with pre-1500 requirements, then! If you find something, sooner or later, feel free to re-open this thread!

Answer 1

Interesting idea.

Now, I cannot trace my ancestors back to 1415 at all - but I should think that people in Sweden with a streak of aristocracy in their tree should be able to do so. I just suspect that Scandinavia and northern Europ in general had their own wars and contentions and did not participate at Azincourt, which is a limitation to your conjecture.

Comments

Nice try, Eva. The conjecture is there to be challenged.

Maybe the Scandinavian aristocracy was not directly involved at Azincourt. But the descendants of Azincourt fighters, (whether they came out of the field dead or alive), had certainly descendants who interbred with Scandinavian aristocracy. Remember your good king https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Bernadotte-13 ?

A descendant of a good old Frenchie aristo family, and among his ancestors killed at Azincourt is ... ... https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Croy-11. (edit : if I believe Roglo - this is not yet in Wikitree, though) 

... https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Lorraine-298 

via https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Lorraine-201 and https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Pfalz-Neuburg-1

etc

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Of course, if Pontus De la Gardie had any ancestors at Azincourt that would be a major gateway for the Scandinavian aristocracy . . . .

Answer 2

I know of two male ancestors ( Battiscombe-12 and Beauchin-2 ) who were alive in 1415, but neither of them seem to have fought at Agincourt.  But I have  a 16th cousin once removed (in the same line) who DID fight at Agincourt, with Walter Hungerford (Rous-56).

Comments

Thanks Janet for this example. Of course Rous-56 cannot be your ancestor, since he had no acknowledged descendants.

But you have reached only 2 ancestors, who are only a very small sample of your thousands of ancestors by that time. 

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Yes.  That is kind of the point.  Even though I could only TRACE 2 male ancestors to 1415, they had a close relative who fought at Agincourt.  If I could trace ALL my male ancestors alive in 1415, I am sure there would  be more who fought at Agincourt.

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Sure, Janet. You got the point. If over 40,000 men were engaged in this battle (6,000 English and 36,000 French, as some sources suggest), that represents about 1/1000 of the European population (about 40 millions at the time).

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Wikipedia citing figures estimated in 1941 puts the European population at almost double that. (78.1million  in 1400 rising to 83 million in 1450)

Unsurprisingly, It also says that the nature of the data is such that there are considerable diagreements between medieval demographers.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_demography

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Helen, indeed figures vary. 40 million in 1440 is from here:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9mographie_m%C3%A9di%C3%A9vale#D%C3%A9mographie

Note that this is the French "equivalent" of the English Wikipedia article you quote, with really different figures.

Answer 3

Hypothesis disproved in my tree. My ancestor was too busy in Wiltshire for involvement in wars. He was the coroner, and elected mayor of Salisbury in 1417.

John Judde

Comments

Hi Rob

Good counter-example. But, as answered to Janet above, this is only one ancestor of yours, among thousands by that time. Did you explore other branches thus far?

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He's the only ancestor of that era notable enough to have shown up in records. I'm sure there must be some who fought at Agincourt but if so I have no knowledge of their names. The best bet might be my mother's (Spaulding) side of the family, but since I have no full list of these soldiers it's a struggle to connect them.

In any case it's a hard proposition to disprove, since most people around that time didn't even have proper surnames.

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Rob, I can happily live with this conjecture being undecidable. 

Answer 4

Ever wondered how many Polish, Lithuanian, Russian, Czech, or for that matter Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Indian ancestors fought in that battle?

Comments

Helmut I see your point. OTOH ever wondered how many ancestors you have in 1415? Even if your direct ascendants are Polish, Lithuanian, Russian, Czech, some of your ancestors in 1415 might have been French or English. For Chinese and Indians, I would not say, of course the probability is faint. 

But as far as I can tell, all the people I have interacted with so far in this forum, and most WikiTreers seem to have mixed European origins. So, I should certainly rewrite the conjecture with another premice : If you have European origins.

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I cannot trace my ancestors back to 1415 but 150 years later they were mostly peasants in the Bohemian back country. Hard to imagine a Frenchman or Englishman having had the time to make it there and acquire a thoroughly Czech or German family name and become a serf to a local nobleman or monastery. Needless to say I also do not subscribe to the theory that every European must be a descendant of Charlemagne. As to the numbers the pedigree collapse rate in the first 10 generations of my direct ancestors is 25%, a number bound to get higher as we go back farther.

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Helmut, I can't trace my ancestors to 1415 either, and (or because) they were, as yours, mostly peasants, not in Bohemia, but Brittany, also a quite remote and endogamic region. Hence, beyond the church records mandatory in France since 1539, but often difficult to find and decipher before 1650, almost no way to break the brick walls. And maybe none of my ancestors and none of yours were at Azincourt. But we can't trace our ancestors to 1415, so neither you nor I break the rule, since we don't satisfy the premise.

Answer 5

I have numerous ancestors alive in 1415 who were indeed at that battle.

I do however have a few who were not actually nobles. One line is the Lathams, who were mostly but not all, knights. These were English.

The second set comes from the Clan Donald, in three lines. Those ancestors who were alive in 1415 were Clan leaders or their sons, daughters, or granddaughters. None were actual nobles. These were Scottish.

Comments

Thanks James for this contribution. Any pointer(s) to some of those brave ancestors of yours?

Answer 6

I have an funny line in relation to 1415. It traces back directly to about 1460, and then jumps to the 1300's by references in the peerages, to such and such is descended from so and so, thus almost only skipping the period of that war. For that reason, I'd love to see if the Molesworth name comes up in any lists or records. I am collecting sources under Molesworth-121, for when I finally get pre-1500 approval.

Answer 7

It would not surprise me if half the Earth's population had at least one ancestor who fought in the wars of Alexander the Great. The Persian army at the battle of Gaugamela, even at the low end for modern estimates, numbered about 90,000 men, with about half that number fighting for Alexander. The world's population was only about 150 million.

It would of course be impossible to document a paper trail from that time period (even kings and queens don't have official genealogies back that far) but still.

Comments

Indeed. I stumbled today on this blog post who makes a nice sum-up of the pedigree collapse issue, and links to a couple of very interesting papers, including that one. 

At the epoch of Alexander, we can be quite sure of more than that. Any member of this army either has no descendance today, or is an ancestor of about every one living today.