Meaning & Analysis
Over long stretches of time, genealogies crisscross social ranks: today’s poor may have royal forebears, and today’s rulers often have humble ancestors.
Insights
Fortune’s wheel
Social status turns like a wheel: prosperity and poverty alternate across generations, so present rank is no guarantee of future station.
Common humanity
Beneath titles and rags alike lies shared blood; the proverb levels pride and contempt by asserting a familial kinship of all people.
Accident of birth
Kingship and beggary are framed as products of circumstance more than essence, challenging claims that nobility or baseness are innate.
Hope and humility
Offers hope to the lowly (rise is possible) and imposes humility on the mighty (fall is plausible), tempering despair and arrogance.
Cycles of house and name
Dynasties and fortunes follow rise–crest–decline patterns; lineage glory and family shame are both transient currencies.
Genealogical math
Ancestors double each generation; over centuries, lines intermingle so thoroughly that royal and peasant ancestry coexist in most trees, making the claim figuratively—and often statistically—true.
Fortune and moralism
The image echoes medieval and early modern Fortune wheels and sermon tropes: ‘exalteth the humble and abaseth the proud,’ warning elites against hubris and consoling the poor.
English resonances
Stage and pulpit writers used it to puncture pretensions of birth and to note upstarts’ ascent—apt in an age that witnessed staggering mobility and even regicide, when ‘riff-raff’ could become rulers and rulers cast down.
Cross-cultural kin
Parallels proverbs like ‘clogs to clogs in three generations’ (rise then fall) and ‘rice paddy to rice paddy,’ each charting the volatility of family fortune.
Social critique
By making descent symmetrical, the saying undermines strict hereditary hierarchy: if bloodlines wander, legitimacy cannot rest solely on pedigree.
Psychological ballast
For individuals, the thought steadies identity: pride is checked by memory of lowly roots; shame is eased by imagining noble branches—both perspectives curb extremity.
Rhetorical Devices
Chiasmus
King ↔ beggar inverted across the semicolon creates a mirror structure that enacts the proverb’s reciprocity of rise and fall.
Parallelism
Balanced clauses (‘Every beggar…’ / ‘every king…’) produce isocolon rhythm, aiding memorability and authority.
Antithesis
Beggar vs. king sharpens the moral by yoking extremes of status in a single breath.
Universal quantifiers
‘Every… every…’ lends proverbial sweep, presenting a local observation as an all-encompassing law.
Epigrammatic brevity
Concise, aphoristic phrasing compresses social history into a portable, witty sentence.
Transcription
Quotations
Theres legions now of beggars on the earth, That their originall did spring from Kings: And manie Monarkes now whose fathers were, The riffe-raffe of their age.
(We have a saying, Every).
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.