Quarters of nobility is an expression used in the bestowal of

hereditary title Hereditary titles, in a general sense, are nobility titles, positions or styles that are hereditary and thus tend or are bound to remain in particular families. Though both monarchs and nobles usually inherit their titles, the mechanisms often d ...

s 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 Heraldry is a discipline relating to the design, display and study of armorial bearings (known as armory), as well as related disciplines, such as vexillology, together with the study of ceremony, rank and pedigree. Armory, the best-known branch ...

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 = 2⁴ = 16. Alternatively, such a person might have exclusively noble ancestry for the five previous generations on one side but have a

commoner A commoner, also known as the ''common man'', ''commoners'', the ''common people'' or the ''masses'', was in earlier use an ordinary person in a community or nation who did not have any significant social status, especially a member of neither ...

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: (2⁵)/2 = 32/2 = 16. Some

orders of chivalry An order of chivalry, order of knighthood, chivalric order, or equestrian order is an order of knights, typically founded during or inspired by the original Catholic military orders of the Crusades ( 1099–1291) and paired with medieval concep ...

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 {{noble-stub