inbreeding in history

[GraceAnais]

has anyone ever heard a story about french aristocracy in which a family all had a prominant chin. They kept interbreeding (i.e. first cousins wth first cousins etc) and the members of the family kept getting bigger and bigger chins until one child was born with such a large chin that he was completely deformed. i know i haven't explained it very well but i'm convinced i was told this story in history at school and we were discussing it last week and all my friends think i'm being stupid and have completely fabricated this story. we have searched google but to no avail. not sure if this is the right section but i would be interested if anyone has heard a similar story or has any information on inbreeding. thank you.

[Lonnie]

Don't know about this particular family, but inbreeding was quite common among the French aristocracy, eg, Toulouse Latrecs deformities can possibly be put down to inbreeding, his family was at one time quite close to the Royal family, and his family, is known to have intermarried..

[waimarie]

I have heard of the Hapsburg chin and told this caused malfunction of speech which is why the Spanish language has a sort of built in lisp. (everybody copied it to be polite !!) As the Hapsburgs comprised 90% of mainland royalty I would guess a substantial amount of inbreeding. It may all be apocryphal but it makes a nice story !!

[GraceAnais]

thankyou waimarie - yes that is exactly the one i was thinking of. it wasn't france - it was spain (knew it was in europe somewhere!!!)

Have just looked it up Wikipedia and although i may have deviated slightly from the original story it is exactly what i thought it was. going to show my friends this now and show them i'm not completely mad (and that i was quite clearly the only one listening when we were at school!!!!)

Thank you

[jno]

quite true. But Spanish colonists in the new world didn't know about the lisp, so (I've been told) Latin American Spanish doesn't have it.

[mike b]

There's a similar story about Harry Percy (Hotspur - d.1403) - people copied his speech peculiarities and gave rise to Geordie accent...