how did the British royalty become “ royal”. What started this 1000 years ago?
In: 1643
The current British royal family gained their status by being descended from warriors who in turn gained status by being good at repelling Viking attacks during the Early Middle Ages and/or filling the power vacuum created by the political turmoil such attacks caused. The same is true of most other Western European royal and noble families; it’s hard to trace any of their families prior to this point (the late 8th century).
This was because most of the earlier Anglo-Saxon and Frankish kingdoms of Western Europe did not fare well against attacks by the Norse. All of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms except Wessex collapsed and the Frankish Carolingian kings over what are now Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Italy, and Austria had to delegate authority to better mount military defense. Not helping matters was that the Carolingians practiced partible inheritance, which meant dividing all of their holdings between sons, which led to infighting and fratricide.
The current British royal family’s specific ancestors who fit this pattern are Kenneth MacAlpin, Alfred the Great of Wessex, Dietrich I of Wettin, Alberto Azzo II of Milan, Ingelger of Anjou, Elimar I of Oldenburg, and Rollo of Normandy — the last of whom, ironically, was a Viking who converted to Christianity in exchange for a land and a title.
(This general pattern, however, is not true of the Iberian kingdoms, where instead the problem was the failure of the last Visigoth king to deal with the raids and invasions of the Umayyad Caliphate; but once again, the kings of Navarre, Leon, Castile, Portugal, and Aragon came from Visigoths and Basques who managed to keep the Emirate of Córdoba at bay until it basically self-destructed in the 10th century.)
Royal status specifically is a much older concept and in most European and Asian cultures, it was born out of being an effective military commander mixed together with a sense of either divine descent or divine favor. But it’s far from a static concept and there’s been been a lot of scholarship about how it was was developed. I’ve read some of it (like the classic work *The King’s Two Bodies*), but to go into full detail, though, would be way beyond the scope of ELI5.
Latest Answers