People, Race and Nation in These Islands, Part II

As a boy of nine or ten, I was asked the following question: “If you were employed for twenty weeks, would you rather be paid at the rate of a pound a week or a farthing the first week, a halfpenny the second, a penny the third and so on, doubling the amount each time?” Upon working it out, I discovered that by the latter scale of payment I should in twenty weeks receive something over a thousand pounds.

The tendency to view our descent as a succession of fathers (each, perhaps, with a wife) obscures from us the fact that in twenty generations we have accumulated over two million ancestors, each potentially of equal importance to the composition of what we are pleased to call our “blood”. At the twentieth generation back, over a million of them stand in a row or would do so if we were not descended from some of the same people several times over by different channels of descent. If we take three generations to a century, the ancestors of each one of us at the time of the Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland numbered almost eight and a half million, a figure much greater than the probable total population at that time of both islands.