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A royal descent is a lineal descent from a past or present monarch. Royal descent is sometimes claimed as a mark of distinction and is seen as a desirable goal of genealogy. Pretenders, impostors and those hoping to improve their social status have often claimed royal descent and some have fabricated lineages.〔(Medieval Genealogy and Family History )〕 The importance of royal descent to some genealogists has been criticized.〔Conniff, Richard. "Why Genealogy is Bunk." ''Smithsonian Magazine''. July 2007. p.90.〕 Due to the incompleteness of records, the number of people who claim royal descent is much higher than the number who can actually prove it.〔Transactions of the Royal Historical Society: Sixth Series (Royal Historical Society Transactions) by Royal Historical Society〕 Genealogists and geneticists have attempted to estimate the percentage of various populations that have royal descent. ==Europe== There has been a long tradition for royalty predominantly to marry those of their own class. As a result, the ruling houses of Europe have tended to be closely related to one another, and descent from a particular monarch will be found in many other dynasties – all present European monarchs, and a great many pretenders, are descendants of William I of England, for example.〔Maclagan, Michael, ''Lines of Succession''〕 The practice of restrictive marriages has been noted as increasing over the years until the 20th century: the passage of time strengthened the conviction that royalty only allied with royalty, and from the 16th century marriages between royalty and commoner became rarer and rarer. This is one reason why descent from more recent monarchs is rarer amongst commoners than from monarchs further back.〔 Members of untitled families today may be descended from illegitimate children of royalty. Since illegitimate children of royalty were seldom permitted to marry into other royal families (because their status made them unacceptable), these children tended to marry upper-class or middle-class families from their own country.〔Eleanor Herman. ''Sex with Kings''〕〔Eleanor Herman. ''Sex with Queens''〕 Another reason for the greater number of descendants from chronologically distant monarchs is that likelihood of descent from a monarch increases as a function of the length of time between the monarch's death and the birth of the particular descendant. Thus, it is theoretically true that "statistically, most of the inhabitants of Western Europe are probably descended from William the Conqueror; they are equally likely to be descended from the man who groomed his charger."〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Royal descent」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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