The chart shows their (claimed) descent from the traditional first king of Wessex,
Cerdic, down to the children of
Alfred the Great. A continuation of the tree into the 10th and 11th centuries can be found at
English monarchs family tree.
The tree is largely based on the late 9th-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the
West Saxon Genealogical Regnal List (reproduced in several forms, including as a preface to the [B] manuscript of the Chronicle),[1] and
Asser's Life of King Alfred. These sources are all closely related and were compiled at a similar date, and incorporate a desire in their writers to associate the royal household with the authority of being a continuation of a unified line of kingship descended from a single original founder.[2]
One apparently earlier pedigree survives, which traces the ancestry of King
Ine back to Cerdic. This first appears in a 10th-century manuscript copy of the "
Anglian collection" of
Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies. The manuscript is thought to have been made at Glastonbury in the 930s during the reign of King
Æthelstan[3] (whose family traced their own royal descent back to Cerdic via a brother of King Ine), but the material may well date back to the earliest reconstructable version of the collection,
c. 796; and possibly still further back, to 725–726.[4] Compared to the later texts, this pedigree gives an ancestry for
Ceolwald as son of
Cuthwulf son of
Cuthwine which in the later 9th-century texts sometimes seems confused; and it states
Cynric as son of
Creoda son of Cerdic, whereas the Chronicle annals go to some length to present Cerdic and Cynric as a father-and-son pair who land in and conquer the southern part of Wessex together (a narrative now considered spurious by historians).[5]
^Sisam, Kenneth (1953). "Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies". Proceedings of the British Academy. 39: 287–348. Dumville, David N. (1976). Clemoes (ed.). "The Anglian collection of royal genealogies and regnal lists". Anglo-Saxon England. 5: 23–50.
doi:
10.1017/S0263675100000764.
^Dumville 1976, pp. 40, 42, 46. It is also possible that the material may first have been joined in with the collection in a copy made in Mercia
c. 840.
^Yorke, Barbara (1989). "The Jutes of Hampshire and Wight and the origins of Wessex". In Bassett, S.R. (ed.). The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms. Leicester University Press. pp. 84–96.
ISBN0-7185-1317-7.. Yorke's theory "has met with general acceptance (I cannot find any historian or archaeologist that disagrees with her conclusions)", according to
Bush, Robin (28 August 2001).
"Were the West Saxons guilty of ethnic cleansing?". Time Team Live 2001. Channel 4. Archived from
the original on 19 February 2006.