Depending how you count it in canon, there are between 40 and 160 students in a Hogwarts class, per year, from all 4 houses combined. 1⁄4 of them are purebloods, so that’s between 10 and 40 purebloods per year. If wizard families have on average 2 children and start having kids when they’re 30, then we’d need to account for between 150 and 600 pureblood nuclear families at the time of the story. Arbitrarily assuming that a pureblood family should have about 3 branches at a given time, that’s 50 to 200 pureblood family lines to classify.
How many noble houses should there be? According to this page, there appear to be 498 existing hereditary peerages in the UK. While Magical Britain isn’t proportional in size, I don’t see any reason why it should be. I rather think of it more like the SCA.
My feeling is that in the beginning, all the wizards got to be Lords, and you’re a pureblood if you can trace your line back to them.
My feeling is that in the beginning, all the wizards got to be Lords
The SCA can get away with having an arbitrarily large proportion of lords and ladies because they don’t need any real assets or authority. But if everyone is a Lord, then for practical purposes nobody is. You end up with a Too Many Chiefs, Not Enough Indians situation. A Lord needs to be able to have servants.
It’s silly to assume that Magical Britain has a similar proportion of peers to nonmagical Britain, that would imply fewer than four peers in the entire country even by the most generous counts, but when you’ve got Lords with real rights and privileges of nobility over the rest of the population, and in many or most cases, real money too, having them at a rate of one in four, or even one in forty, just seems demographically bizarre. It’s the sort of proportion you might expect of land-owning citizens with voting rights, in an earlier democracy, not the sort of proportion you’d expect of Lords and Ladies.
A wizarding lord is in no way restricted by servants. You have house elves, enchantments, transfiguration, apparition. You don’t have lesser wizards as servants. You don’t even fall into the problem of having too many lords and not enough land, since wizards can create or hide land among other land. It would be entirely plausible to me that a very large proportion of wizards were “lords.”
You can also remember that Hogwarts isn’t the only educational possibility for wizard children, and indeed that it is an expensive one, judging by how the weaselys complain about the cost every year. There’s probably a higher proportion of lords there than among the general population, due to the wealth needed to study at hogwarts.
All of those things except for house elves are accessible to any wizard. Having things anyone can get won’t set you apart status-wise. Without having things that are scarce to other people (not just things like land and wealth but intangibles such as privilege and authority,) there’s nothing to set a lord apart from an ordinary person. Slightly scarce assets can only lead to slight status elevation.
The Weasleys may complain about the cost of attending Hogwarts, but they’re poor, and have managed to send several children there, so it can’t be all that expensive. There may be a higher proportion of lords at Hogwarts due to its status as Magical Britain’s preeminent wizarding school, but if a low-income family can afford to put all seven of their children through the school, then the cost is clearly not a significant filter, and having several scions of Noble Houses in each year still looks weird unless Magical Britain is considerably larger than it’s implied to be.
My feeling is that in the beginning, all the wizards got to be Lords
But if everyone is a Lord, then for practical purposes nobody is. You end up with a Too Many Chiefs, Not Enough Indians situation. A Lord needs to be able to have servants.
It’s important to remember that the Statute of Secrecy was only established in 1692. The family tree of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black goes back to the Middle Ages.
Noble wizards / common wizards is unlikely to be the relevant demographic proportion; it makes sense that wizards would be disproportionately represented in the peerage.
Depending how you count it in canon, there are between 40 and 160 students in a Hogwarts class, per year, from all 4 houses combined. 1⁄4 of them are purebloods, so that’s between 10 and 40 purebloods per year. If wizard families have on average 2 children and start having kids when they’re 30, then we’d need to account for between 150 and 600 pureblood nuclear families at the time of the story. Arbitrarily assuming that a pureblood family should have about 3 branches at a given time, that’s 50 to 200 pureblood family lines to classify.
How many noble houses should there be? According to this page, there appear to be 498 existing hereditary peerages in the UK. While Magical Britain isn’t proportional in size, I don’t see any reason why it should be. I rather think of it more like the SCA.
My feeling is that in the beginning, all the wizards got to be Lords, and you’re a pureblood if you can trace your line back to them.
The SCA can get away with having an arbitrarily large proportion of lords and ladies because they don’t need any real assets or authority. But if everyone is a Lord, then for practical purposes nobody is. You end up with a Too Many Chiefs, Not Enough Indians situation. A Lord needs to be able to have servants.
It’s silly to assume that Magical Britain has a similar proportion of peers to nonmagical Britain, that would imply fewer than four peers in the entire country even by the most generous counts, but when you’ve got Lords with real rights and privileges of nobility over the rest of the population, and in many or most cases, real money too, having them at a rate of one in four, or even one in forty, just seems demographically bizarre. It’s the sort of proportion you might expect of land-owning citizens with voting rights, in an earlier democracy, not the sort of proportion you’d expect of Lords and Ladies.
A wizarding lord is in no way restricted by servants. You have house elves, enchantments, transfiguration, apparition. You don’t have lesser wizards as servants. You don’t even fall into the problem of having too many lords and not enough land, since wizards can create or hide land among other land. It would be entirely plausible to me that a very large proportion of wizards were “lords.”
You can also remember that Hogwarts isn’t the only educational possibility for wizard children, and indeed that it is an expensive one, judging by how the weaselys complain about the cost every year. There’s probably a higher proportion of lords there than among the general population, due to the wealth needed to study at hogwarts.
All of those things except for house elves are accessible to any wizard. Having things anyone can get won’t set you apart status-wise. Without having things that are scarce to other people (not just things like land and wealth but intangibles such as privilege and authority,) there’s nothing to set a lord apart from an ordinary person. Slightly scarce assets can only lead to slight status elevation.
The Weasleys may complain about the cost of attending Hogwarts, but they’re poor, and have managed to send several children there, so it can’t be all that expensive. There may be a higher proportion of lords at Hogwarts due to its status as Magical Britain’s preeminent wizarding school, but if a low-income family can afford to put all seven of their children through the school, then the cost is clearly not a significant filter, and having several scions of Noble Houses in each year still looks weird unless Magical Britain is considerably larger than it’s implied to be.
It’s important to remember that the Statute of Secrecy was only established in 1692. The family tree of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black goes back to the Middle Ages.
Noble wizards / common wizards is unlikely to be the relevant demographic proportion; it makes sense that wizards would be disproportionately represented in the peerage.