The Rise of the Mudblood (was; WW and empire)

[jodel at aol.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 51224

Ffred states;

>>I wonder if the real tension is not so much immigration into the WW 
ingeographical terms but in terms of the "25% figure".<<

Boy howdy. You *bet* that's the problem.

Mind you, that's the *current* figure, and we have no idea of how rapidly it 
reached that percentage.

I have a strong conviction that bonafide, (unantcipated) Muggle-born magical 
children were fairly rare in the period before the seclusion. (Halfbloods, on 
the other hand, were not uncommon.) For one thing, most Muggles were pretty 
well isolated in little rural hamlets until the late 18th and early 19th 
centuries and everyone knew pretty well who one's ancestors were. 

Among the Muggle retainers of the overlords who happened to be wizards, the 
birth of a magical child of two non-magical parents may have simply been 
regarded as a case of magic having skipped a few generations and that 
somewhere in the family tree there was a pretty dairy maid, or some such, who 
helped one of the sons of the "Big House" sow a few wild oats. In these 
little hamlets, everone had been passing around most of the same incomplete 
set of magical genes and this would have occasionally resulted in a full 
wizard when one of the missing links somehow managed to get invited to the 
party. 

But Muggle-born magicals only tended to happen in these particular hamlets, 
and, with about the same degree of frequency, in the cities. These births 
were rare enough that the Wizards' Council (or possibly the early MoM by 
then) ultimately decided that the danger to the wizarding population as a 
whole was great enough that to lose these few Muggle-born children to the 
witch hunters was a price they would just simply have to pay for the safety 
of seclusion.

It was the loss of the halfbloods, who had always been much more common, that 
brought the wizarding world to the population crisis that it landed in by the 
time they commissioned the charmed quill(s?). During that period, families 
which could have traced at least some mixed-blood ancestors at the beginning 
of the seclusion, gradually stopped thinking about that part of their 
bloodline and started regarding themselves as fully pureblooded wizarding 
stock. And not altogether without reason. The birthrate during the early half 
of the seclusion was far too low to maintain the population at the numbers it 
had been at the time of seclusion, but there was a far higher rate of 
"purity" in its ancestry. (Note: I think that the WW has still not completely 
regained its numbers to those of the time of the seclusion. Which at that 
point had also been mostly composed of halfbloods.)

Meanwhile, outside the wizarding world, not all of the Muggle-born magical 
children had been caught and executed by the witch hunters, and their fully 
functioning magical genomes had been seeded back into the general Muggle 
population, (rather than having found patronage from the "Big House", trained 
and absorbed into the wizarding population) further raising the percentage of 
magical genes being passed around in those districts.

And then the Acts of Enclosure started forcing the commons off the land and 
into the towns and factories. Where people with an incomplete set of magical 
genes had an exponientially higher liklihood of meeting and merrying someone 
from a district that had been passing around a different incomplete set that 
provided the missing bits. 

Mind you, Muggle-born magical births have never been common. Even now when 
they represent 25% of an average Hogwarts year's intake that only accounts 
for some 40 children in all of Great Britain (and whatever else is within the 
quill's range, using the 1000 people at Hogwarts estimate. If you use the 400 
students model it accounts for all of 12-15 magical births per year). But 
they became much more frequent than they had been when everyone was still 
isolated in the little villiages in the neighborhoods of the (now vanished) 
wizarding estates. And once these children were again being located, trained 
and absorbed into the WW, it means that wizards had to deal with their 
families over at least a seven year period, and usually longer. This sort of 
interaction was bound to result in attachments which would have resulted in 
mixed marriages and a new influx of bonafide halfbloods (as opposed to 
technical halfbloods like Harry, whose parents were both magical, but whose 
ancestry is half Muggle).

Ofcourse the fanatical pureblood faction can't stand it. Even leaving aside 
that purebloods, in their sense of the term, were never numerous enough to 
keep the WW going, and still aren't, and probably never will be.

-JOdel


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]