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LONDON - The richest man in Britain's history is not a steel magnate, trader or football club owner but a soldier.
Alan Rufus, a French immigrant who went to Britain to help his uncle William the Conqueror in 1066, amassed a fortune estimated to be worth £81.3 billion ($217.3 billion) in today's money.
It dwarfs Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich's £10.8 billion and steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal's £19.3 billion and is nearly three times the wealth of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
Old money dominates a list of Britain's wealthiest over the centuries, with landowners, traders, bankers, the clergy and the military dominating the top 250 places.
Mittal comes in at 20, while Abramovich is at 59.
The list is published in a book called The Richest of the Rich by Philip Beresford, compiler of the annual Rich List for the Sunday Times, and William Rubinstein, professor of history at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. It excludes monarchs, whose wealth is difficult to calculate.
When Rufus died at 53 he had a fortune of £11,000, thanks largely to the huge swathes of land he was given by William for suppressing Saxon rebellions in the north.
Rubinstein said: "The further back you go, the wealthier the wealthy were. It was easier to become wealthy in the past than it is now.
"Plainly the wealth was based on land and trading before the industrial revolution. Since then, much more of the rich have come from London."
Other figures who feature in the top 20 of the rich list include soldier and landowner Richard Fitzalan, 10th Earl of Arundel (1307-1376), who used his £59.4 billion fortune to help bail out the king; Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket (1120-1170), who had an estimated fortune of £24.6 billion and James Craggs (1657-1721), who made £20 billion thanks to his army clothing contracts.
- Reuters
