Quarters of nobility is an expression used in the bestowal of
hereditary titles and refers to the number of generations in typically an
ahnentafel
An ''ahnentafel'' (German for "ancestor table"; ) or ''ahnenreihe'' ("ancestor series"; ) is a genealogical numbering system for listing a person's direct ancestors in a fixed sequence of ascent. The subject (or proband) of the ahnentafel is l ...
in which noble status has been held by a family regardless of whether a title was actually in use by each person in the ancestral line in question.
For example, a person having sixteen quarterings (formally in
heraldry Seize Quartiers
Seize quartiers is a French phrase which literally means a person's "sixteen quarters", the coats of arms of their sixteen great-great-grandparents quarters of nobility, which are typically accompanied by a five generation genealogy ahnentafel ou ...
) might have exclusively noble ancestry for the four previous generations (''i.e.'', to the great-great-grandparent level): Given two parents per generation, four generations of uninterrupted nobility = 2
4 = 16. Alternatively, such a person might have exclusively noble ancestry for the five previous generations on one side but have a
commoner for their other parent, such that the latter side of that person's ancestry would "dilute" by half the nobility they derived from the former side: (2
5)/2 = 32/2 = 16.
Some
orders of chivalry limit their membership to persons who can prove a certain number of quarterings (''e.g.'', sixteen for the
Order of St. John).
References
Titles
Family trees
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