It's especially dangerous to assume minimal changes, when one can see maximal changes within cycling distance of this very keyboard. (What you say may have been much truer of the slightly-less-recently- modern situation...)
> >That's what I think happens, but I disagree with your conclusion.
> >Your husband and children are still your kin, clan membership
> >nothwithstanding.
>
> Ok, what happens when two clans who have a lot of intermarriages fall
> out? What do the wives do? If they stay with their families and work
> with that clan then the family bond is stronger than clan. Alternatively
> there are two groups of women leaving their children behind to return
> to their clan because they aren't trusted.
The short answer is 'depends'. It would be unreasonable and unrealistic to assume a crisp answer to such cases, _whatever_ one's view of the legal question of clan membership. Also it depends on what degree of 'falling out' you mean; two neighbours 'falling out' in Sartar would be as uncommon as rain before daybreak...
If a nightmare scenario like open warfare descends, then the women in such situations have some hard choices to make, and will more often than not to be heard to be pointing out, "There is always another way" (perhaps more in hope than in expectation).
> I'm not sure "corporate" is the right word to use here given the
> connotations with modern commercial practices but I can't think
> of a better one. The way I see it working is that a bloodline
> will have several hearths which may or may not be part of the
> same stead. Property (other than land) is legally owned by the
> bloodline although tending to be used by a particular hearth
> which provides a practical means of splitting property when
> the bloodline splits. Land is owned by the clan but bloodlines
> have a right to work their specific bits subject to various
> rules. This sort of multi-level ownership of land is very common
> in agricultural societies. A stead is a group of hearths usually
> centred around a carl with half-carls and cottars gathering
> together for strength and company. Rarely would a whole stead
> be made up of one bloodline but it is possible, particularly
> when a new stead is created.
I personally think it's deeply misleading to think of land as being 'owned' at all in anything like a modern sense. Clans occupy it; groups within the clan are assigned the rights to work it. That's the gist of it... No 'title' to the land could be bought, sold, or otherwise obtained by any means other than "It's been our tula these generations past, and besides, it has our weaponthanes all over it". But that's a semantic niggle of a digression, from which I will now return...
I just don't see any force or logic to the set-up you describe, or any argument (from sources or otherwise) for it. If a stead is a heterogenuous mix of any number of bloodlines, each of which having dibs on chunks of property, and rights to work land, etc, then the stead ceases to be any sort of organising social unit at all, in favour of a geographically hap-hazard bloodline. Contrariwise, if a stead is essentially composed of members of a single bloodline (and their resident spouses), then in such cases the distinction is small enough not to be worth arguing over.
> Well I just can't imagine a human society managing all property on
> the basis of group ownership where the group is hundreds or even
> thousands strong. Land certainly, because a clan needs to get most
> productive use of it but even there I see individual bloodlines
> having the right to continue using "their" bit of clan land as
> long as they still had an ox team to work it and did so.
It's clear that no one is saying _all_ property; KoS itself (or was that the G:G player's book?) makes that fairly clear. What I'm saying over above that is that the 'communal property' function you're ascribing to bloodlines, which IMO are in some cases rather amorphous collections, with no direct map onto the social condition of the clan, is more appropriate to either the stead, or the individual household (where those differ).
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