From Newsgroup: soc.genealogy.medieval

Do |athelberht of Kent (d. 616) and his wife Bertha (daughter of
Charibert I, King of Paris) have known modern or late medieval
descendants? If so, what are some of the known pathways?
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From Newsgroup: soc.genealogy.medieval

On Wed, 11 Sep 2024 18:48:41 +0000, Jan Wolfe wrote:

Do |athelberht of Kent (d. 616) and his wife Bertha (daughter of
Charibert I, King of Paris) have known modern or late medieval
descendants? If so, what are some of the known pathways?

I'm no expert but from what I've seen discussed earlier on this forum, I
would say the short answer is no.

However if you take Ealhmund father of Egbert of Wessex [802-38] to be
the same as the earlier Ealhmund King of Kent mentioned in 784, and that
this King Ealhmund was descended in some way from Athelbert I, you have
1 such pathway, but this lies in the realm of speculation not hard fact.
The traceable male royal line of Athelbert I seems to end with Eadbert
II in the 760s. The descent of the later kings is not known for sure,
and those after 798 were sub kings appointed by Mercia or after 825 by
Wessex.

Various Kentish princesses married into the Mercian royal family in the
7th century [Wulfhere, Merewald] but I am not aware whether their
descendants can be traced further than the 8th century. Offa who did a
pretty good job at exterminating the Mercian royal family probably put
paid to them and any left in Kent. The last independant king of Kent
Eadbert Praen was a former priest who had been in exile under
Charlemagnes protection, was blinded and had his hands cut off by
Cenwulf around 798.

Aethelberts daughter married Edwin of Northumbria, and their daughter
married Oswy but their descendants arnt traceable much further than the
8th cent either. These are the only lines I can think of, but others may
be able to add to this list.

Mike
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From Newsgroup: soc.genealogy.medieval

On 12-Sep-24 4:48 AM, Jan Wolfe wrote:

Do |athelberht of Kent (d. 616) and his wife Bertha (daughter of
Charibert I, King of Paris) have known modern or late medieval
descendants? If so, what are some of the known pathways?

There is a lack of certainty about descents from Bertha - |athelberht's
son and successor Eadbald is said to have married his step-mother,
clearly a subsequent wife of his father. However, Bertha may not have
been the first and possibly she was also a step-mother of Eadbald (who
did not adopt her Christian religion until later).

There is also a chronological problem with Bertha as the mother of |athelberht's daughter |athelburh (wife of Eadwine, king of the northern Angles), who appears to have been born too late to have been a child of
the daughter of Charibert (died 567) if Bertha was indeed married in his lifetime as evidence suggests.

David Kirby discussed these questions in *The Earliest English Kings*
(revised edition, 2000). Barbara Yorke in *Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England* (1997) traced male-line descendants of |athelberht
down to the sixth generation, to Eardwulf, king of West Kent in the
mid-8th century, beyond whom she said there is no genealogical
information. She also traced female members of the family through three further generations from Eadbold, but several of them appear to have
been nuns.

Peter Stewart
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From Newsgroup: soc.genealogy.medieval

On 9/12/2024 3:01 AM, Peter Stewart wrote:

On 12-Sep-24 4:48 AM, Jan Wolfe wrote:

Do |athelberht of Kent (d. 616) and his wife Bertha (daughter of
Charibert I, King of Paris) have known modern or late medieval
descendants? If so, what are some of the known pathways?

There is a lack of certainty about descents from Bertha - |athelberht's
son and successor Eadbald is said to have married his step-mother,
clearly a subsequent wife of his father. However, Bertha may not have
been the first and possibly she was also a step-mother of Eadbald (who
did not adopt her Christian religion until later).

There is also a chronological problem with Bertha as the mother of |athelberht's daughter |athelburh (wife of Eadwine, king of the northern Angles), who appears to have been born too late to have been a child of
the daughter of Charibert (died 567) if Bertha was indeed married in his lifetime as evidence suggests.

David Kirby discussed these questions in *The Earliest English Kings* (revised edition, 2000). Barbara Yorke in *Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England* (1997) traced male-line descendants of |athelberht
down to the sixth generation, to Eardwulf, king of West Kent in the
mid-8th century, beyond whom she said there is no genealogical
information. She also traced female members of the family through three further generations from Eadbold, but several of them appear to have
been nuns.

Peter Stewart

Thank you Mike and Peter for your replies. It's interesting that some
people (Charlemagne, for example, and his ancestors who were
contemporaries of Bertha and |athelberht) have a multitude of
well-documented descendants and other don't.
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From Newsgroup: soc.genealogy.medieval

On 9/14/2024 8:10 PM, Jan Wolfe wrote:

On 9/12/2024 3:01 AM, Peter Stewart wrote:

On 12-Sep-24 4:48 AM, Jan Wolfe wrote:

Do |athelberht of Kent (d. 616) and his wife Bertha (daughter of
Charibert I, King of Paris) have known modern or late medieval
descendants? If so, what are some of the known pathways?

There is a lack of certainty about descents from Bertha - |athelberht's
son and successor Eadbald is said to have married his step-mother,
clearly a subsequent wife of his father. However, Bertha may not have
been the first and possibly she was also a step-mother of Eadbald (who
did not adopt her Christian religion until later).

There is also a chronological problem with Bertha as the mother of
|athelberht's daughter |athelburh (wife of Eadwine, king of the northern
Angles), who appears to have been born too late to have been a child
of the daughter of Charibert (died 567) if Bertha was indeed married
in his lifetime as evidence suggests.
an
David Kirby discussed these questions in *The Earliest English Kings*
(revised edition, 2000). Barbara Yorke in *Kings and Kingdoms of Early
Anglo-Saxon England* (1997) traced male-line descendants of |athelberht
down to the sixth generation, to Eardwulf, king of West Kent in the
mid-8th century, beyond whom she said there is no genealogical
information. She also traced female members of the family through
three further generations from Eadbold, but several of them appear to
have been nuns.

Peter Stewart

Thank you Mike and Peter for your replies. It's interesting that some
people (Charlemagne, for example, and his ancestors who were
contemporaries of Bertha and |athelberht) have a multitude of well-documented descendants and other don't.

Are there other European couples who lived c. 600, other than ancestors
of Charlemagne, who have known late medieval or modern descendants? If
so, what are some of the known pathways?
I know there have been discussions of descents from antiquity, but
perhaps the question of documented descents from people born in Europe
about a century after the fall of Rome is also interesting.

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From Newsgroup: soc.genealogy.medieval

On 15-Sep-24 10:10 AM, Jan Wolfe wrote:

On 9/12/2024 3:01 AM, Peter Stewart wrote:

On 12-Sep-24 4:48 AM, Jan Wolfe wrote:

Do |athelberht of Kent (d. 616) and his wife Bertha (daughter of
Charibert I, King of Paris) have known modern or late medieval
descendants? If so, what are some of the known pathways?

There is a lack of certainty about descents from Bertha - |athelberht's
son and successor Eadbald is said to have married his step-mother,
clearly a subsequent wife of his father. However, Bertha may not have
been the first and possibly she was also a step-mother of Eadbald (who
did not adopt her Christian religion until later).

There is also a chronological problem with Bertha as the mother of
|athelberht's daughter |athelburh (wife of Eadwine, king of the northern
Angles), who appears to have been born too late to have been a child
of the daughter of Charibert (died 567) if Bertha was indeed married
in his lifetime as evidence suggests.

David Kirby discussed these questions in *The Earliest English Kings*
(revised edition, 2000). Barbara Yorke in *Kings and Kingdoms of Early
Anglo-Saxon England* (1997) traced male-line descendants of |athelberht
down to the sixth generation, to Eardwulf, king of West Kent in the
mid-8th century, beyond whom she said there is no genealogical
information. She also traced female members of the family through
three further generations from Eadbold, but several of them appear to
have been nuns.

Peter Stewart

Thank you Mike and Peter for your replies. It's interesting that some
people (Charlemagne, for example, and his ancestors who were
contemporaries of Bertha and |athelberht) have a multitude of well- documented descendants and other don't.

Charlemagne himself was allegedly Paul the Deacon's source for tracing
his male-line ancestry to Bertha's and and |athelberht's contemporary St Arnulf of Metz, but this (i.e. the ancestral fact rather than whether or
not Charlemange believed and related it) has been increasingly doubted
by historians sine the 1990s. As Constance Bouchard wrote in 2007,
"There is no way to disprove definitively what could be the lineage's
oral memory, but there is enough evidence suggesting otherwise to
justify the doubt recently cast on accepting Arnulf as CharlemagnerCOs
first male-line ancestor."

Peter Stewart
--
This email has been checked for viruses by AVG antivirus software.
www.avg.com
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From Newsgroup: soc.genealogy.medieval

On 9/14/2024 7:06 PM, Jan Wolfe wrote:

Are there other European couples who lived c. 600, other than ancestors
of Charlemagne, who have known late medieval or modern descendants? If
so, what are some of the known pathways?

Depends what you mean by 'documented'.

There are Irish and Welsh descents that trace that far back, but they
derive from pedigrees recorded 1000 years later, too long to view them
as fully reliable. (The Irish at least have chronicle sources naming
some of the people in the pedigrees, so at least they were historical.)
The DalRiada of Scotland also connect to these Irish pedigrees, but the connections in the earliest Scottish generations have been questioned.

I have seen claims regarding the Asturian royal dynasty, but these
depend on political propaganda from the reign of Alfonso III that
probably made up the link of dynastic founder Pedro of Cantabria to the earlier Visigothic dynasty - plus I am skeptical even of the descent of
Ramiro I from Pedro.

According to some chronologies, Cerdic would have lived that far back,
but some have questioned whether the descent of Ecgberht from Cerdic
wasn't dynastic fiction. Certainly the pedigree before Cerdic is nonsense.

taf
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From Newsgroup: soc.genealogy.medieval

On 15-Sep-24 12:06 PM, Jan Wolfe wrote:

On 9/14/2024 8:10 PM, Jan Wolfe wrote:

On 9/12/2024 3:01 AM, Peter Stewart wrote:

On 12-Sep-24 4:48 AM, Jan Wolfe wrote:

Do |athelberht of Kent (d. 616) and his wife Bertha (daughter of
Charibert I, King of Paris) have known modern or late medieval
descendants? If so, what are some of the known pathways?

There is a lack of certainty about descents from Bertha -
|athelberht's son and successor Eadbald is said to have married his
step-mother, clearly a subsequent wife of his father. However, Bertha
may not have been the first and possibly she was also a step-mother
of Eadbald (who did not adopt her Christian religion until later).

There is also a chronological problem with Bertha as the mother of
|athelberht's daughter |athelburh (wife of Eadwine, king of the
northern Angles), who appears to have been born too late to have been
a child of the daughter of Charibert (died 567) if Bertha was indeed
married in his lifetime as evidence suggests.
an
David Kirby discussed these questions in *The Earliest English Kings*
(revised edition, 2000). Barbara Yorke in *Kings and Kingdoms of
Early Anglo-Saxon England* (1997) traced male-line descendants of
|athelberht down to the sixth generation, to Eardwulf, king of West
Kent in the mid-8th century, beyond whom she said there is no
genealogical information. She also traced female members of the
family through three further generations from Eadbold, but several of
them appear to have been nuns.

Peter Stewart

Thank you Mike and Peter for your replies. It's interesting that some
people (Charlemagne, for example, and his ancestors who were
contemporaries of Bertha and |athelberht) have a multitude of well-
documented descendants and other don't.

Are there other European couples who lived c. 600, other than ancestors
of Charlemagne, who have known late medieval or modern descendants? If
so, what are some of the known pathways?
I know there have been discussions of descents from antiquity, but
perhaps the question of documented descents from people born in Europe
about a century after the fall of Rome is also interesting.

Other Frankish ancestries traceable from ca 600 are under the same
caution as with Charlemagne's alleged descent from St Arnulf - although
there was almost certainly an agnatic connection, exact relationships to earlier individuals ascribed to the lineages are less than fully
certain. This is the case for the Robertians (still extant in the
Bourbon male line apart from innumerable cognatic offshoots) and the Etichonids (with present-day descendants through later Carolingians as
well as through the counts of Eguisheim).

Peter Stewart
--
This email has been checked for viruses by AVG antivirus software.
www.avg.com
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From Newsgroup: soc.genealogy.medieval

On 9/17/2024 5:36 PM, taf wrote:

On 9/14/2024 7:06 PM, Jan Wolfe wrote:

Are there other European couples who lived c. 600, other than
ancestors of Charlemagne, who have known late medieval or modern
descendants? If so, what are some of the known pathways?

Depends what you mean by 'documented'.

There are Irish and Welsh descents that trace that far back, but they
derive from pedigrees recorded 1000 years later, too long to view them
as fully reliable. (The Irish at least have chronicle sources naming
some of the people in the pedigrees, so at least they were historical.)
The DalRiada of Scotland also connect to these Irish pedigrees, but the connections in the earliest Scottish generations have been questioned.

This is very misleading. Given the context of this thread, which
started with |athelberht of Kent and his wife Bertha, and expanded to the question of whether you could get descents going back to ca. 600 or
earlier, the figure of "1000 years" is inappropriate, even if you use
the date of a surviving manuscript to decide when something was
"recorded". The Irish have at least two surviving twelfth century
manuscripts that I can think of off the top of my head (the Books of
Leinster and Glendalough) having huge collections of genealogies, and a
slew of others that are only a century or two older, often having copies
(or independent revisions) of much earlier genealogies. A large number
of these genealogical manuscripts have sections which can be traced back
to the eighth century with confidence by comparing different
manuscripts, and in some cases to the seventh century. As for the Irish annals, it is now generally agreed that there were (rather sparse) contemporary annals going back to ca. 550, but that all (or at least
virtually all) earlier events were added retrospectively. By the middle
of the next century, contemporary annals were being kept in several
places, and shared back-and-forth and collated with each other in a way
that makes their earlier versions difficult to trace. The extent to
which the pre-550 part of the annals can be trusted is unclear, but by
the time you go back to the early 400's, what passes for Irish "history"
is an inconsistent mess. But the picture from the middle of the sixth
century on is pretty solid, with a chronology that is almost always
exact to the year (after correcting for known errors) from 711 on, and
from ca. 680 on (and within one year back to ca. 660) if the convincing corrections of Nicholas Evans are correct. It is true that parts of
these records have been deliberately falsified over the years, but the
volume of the Irish manuscript corpus is so huge that falsifiers can
often be exposed by the inconsistencies they offer with other sources.
Many Irish dynasties have genealogies which fade into a mist of obscure
names not mentioned in the annals, of which many of the later names
might be valid until the earlier ones inevitably connect to some branch
of the mythical "Milesians." Still, there are some major dynasties
which appeared in the annals on a regular enough basis to be reliably
traced back to the sixth century, fading out before that when it becomes impossible to verify them. Of these, the Ui Dunlaing ancestors of Mor
(mother of "Eve" of Leinster) give the easiest path back to ca. 550
(although dubious elements are reached in the late 400's and early 500's).

The earliest Welsh manuscript collection of genealogies (the "Harleian" genealogies) dates from ca. 1100, being probably a direct copy (except
for possible copying errors) of a genealogy composed in the mid-900's.
Based on comparison with independent versions, some written version of
the genealogy of the kings of Gwynedd probably existed during the reign
of Mervyn Vrych, who became king of Gwynedd in the 820's. One of the genealogies in the Harleian collection (that of the kings of Dyfed) can
be traced back even earlier, to an independent Irish source dating to
the eighth century (although present only in later manuscripts) giving
the genealogy of the kings of the Deisi, an Irish sept from which the
kings of Dyfed descended. This tenth century Welsh source and eighth
century Irish source converge on an eighth century individual whose
ancestors in both sources agree back to the prehistoric period, and
include the historical early sixth (or late fifth) century king
Vortipore, king of Dyfed, a contemporary of Gildas. This gives a
plausible genealogy going back to ca. 500, but verified by contemporary evidence only at three points, ca. 500, ca. 750, and ca. 950. The Welsh annals are contemporary only from around the late eighth century, but
the Irish annals occasionally mentioned Welsh kings, including Cadwallon
(d. 633), an ancestor of Mervyn Vrych.

As for the kings of Dal Riata, the descent from king Gabran mac
Domangairt (sixth century) to king Eochaid amd Echach (d. 733) is well-documented. If a patronymic can be considered as "historical", we
could add Domangart at the beginning. With regard to Fergus, alleged
father of Domangart, I am now a bit more skeptical than I was when I
wrote a page for him for the Henry Project. I still lean toward
Fergus's existence as a king of Dal Riata (perhaps as the first
Christian king, which would explain why he heads the kinglists), but I
am now dubious about his genealogical connection to Domangart. As for
the genealogy back from Kenneth (Cinaed mac Ailpin), his father Alpin
and his grandfather Eochaid are names without any clear historical
context (apart from late sources), but his genealogy gives his great-grandfather as the historical king Aed Find, apparently the first
king of Dal Riata after the domination of Dal Riata by Onuist ("Angus"),
king of the Picts, for much of the eighth century. Aed Find was the son
of an Eochaid, apparently the king of Dal Riata who died in 733, so the ancestry of Kenneth is plausible enough. However, it must be
acknowledged that the documentation of Kenneth's descent from Eochaid
(d. 733) is much less solid than the generations from Eochaid back to
Gabran.

My apologies for omitting certain accents. I'm not that confident that
they would be correctly represented in the forum we now use.

Stewart Baldwin


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