House of Fife, we are told, "derives from Fyfe Macduff, a
chief of great wealth and power, who lived about the year 834, and
afforded to Kenneth II., King of Scotland, strong aid against his
enemies, the Picts." The present Duke, however, has the good sense to
disclaim any hereditary connection with the old Earls of Fife, and to
place at the top of his family tree one Adam Duff, who laid the
foundation of the family prosperity in the seventeenth century. The
Spencers, it is claimed, spring lineally from the old baronial
Despencers, "being a branche issueing from the ancient family and
chieffe of the Spencers, of which sometymes were the Earles of
Winchester and Glocester, and Barons of Glamorgan and Morgannocke."
This, no doubt, is a very distinguished origin; but, alas! the earliest
provable ancestors of this "noble" family were respectable and
well-to-do Warwickshire graziers, and the first authentic title on the
true pedigree is the knighthood conferred on John Spencer in 1519, less
than four centuries ago. Similarly the Russells, Dukes of Bedford, are
said to be derived from one Hugh de Russell, or Rossel (who took that
name from his estate in Normandy), one of the Conqueror's attendant
barons on his invasion of England. Here, again, facts fail lamentably to
support the descent claimed, since the earliest known progenitor of this
"great house" was that Henry Russell who was sent to Parliament to
represent Weymouth in the fifteenth century, and whose great-grandson
blossomed into the first Earl of Bedford. (It may, perhaps, be well to
state that, although the pedigrees here criticised are those that have
been or are widely accepted, they are not necessarily approved by the
families whose descent they profess to give.)

Another Norman ancestor who must go overboard is the alleged founder of
the "noble" house of Bolingbroke--that "William de St John who came to
England with the Conqueror as grand master of the artillery and
supervisor of the wagons and carriages," since it can be positively
shewn that the St John family first set foot in England a good many
years after William I. was safely underground; and with this mythical
William must also go that equally nebulous progenitor of the Fortescue
family, "who" according to the venerable and almost uniform tradition,
"landed in England with his master in the year 1066, and, protecting him
with his shield from the blows of an assailant, was graciously dubbed
'Fortescu,'