That would seem fairly logical, and pretty Vingan.
> OK there will
> be some small highland steads which don't grow grain and concentrate
> on sheep farming and growing vegetables but to them bread will be a
> luxury because they have to trade for the grain.
To quote John H., over and above my own example 'mechanisms', such exchange can occur through fairly frequent 'gifting and counter-gifting', without any resort to formalised haggling. Others such cases are where hunting is the dominant activity, or where there's pasturage for cattle that's not rotated for arable (not that I want to veer off into the transhumance bunfight...).
> KoS is pretty clear about the different status of different occupations
> with Thanes, Carls, Half-Carls, Cottars and where applicable Thralls.
> Although I feel there is a missing group of freemen who have no land
> and work or assist others, particularly in tribes with no Thralls.
That role would be filled by cottars, surely. I really must get KoS and my keyboard in the same place, but I don't think one status equates to just a single occupation. (The reverse may be true, though.)
> Certainly Carls and Half-Carls will teach their sons the skills
> required for ploughing so to a significant extent status will be
> hereditary. That doesn't mean it is difficult to change status,
> just a tendency for sons to follow their fathers occupation and
> thus status. However the third or forth son of a Carl is unlikely
> to get enough wealth together to be a Carl himself but a well off
> cottar may get a chance to buy a share of an ox team becoming a
> Half-Carl even though his eldest son has to learn how to use it
> from another clan member. So changes in status usually occur
> gradually over generations by which time the bloodlines have
> separated.
If you agree that such changes can occur in _one_ generation, then a bloodline, which at a practical minimum will contain four, and often IMO (and indeed IMG, I think five is pretty commonplace) will contain allsorts, surely. Five generations from sceptre to shovel, to coin a phrase.
> I was using trade to refer to all sorts of exchanges between steads
> rather than just straight forward buying, selling and barter. In a
> society which places a high value on hospitality and gifting such
> things become a matter of correctly balancing obligations - in
> effect a form of trade.
Well, sort of. A form of 'exchange', at least.
> I don't quite see Orlanthi putting up with micro-managing though.
Well, obviously good politics would be to couch it as 'micro-suggesting', of course. To wax irrelevant, this is why I have a bit of a knee-jerk reaction against anything with smacks of abolsolutivism and strict prescription or proscription among the Heortlings. It's not that they're unreasonably open-minded, or anything of the sort -- it's just that such stances are hopelessly weak in a social and magical sense. Just as a Rex would run as if from the harbinger of his own death if you tried to make him an 'emperor', telling anyone "You _must_ (or must not) do that" is a classic Orlanthi straightline that no-one is daft enough to ever utter. OTOH, having strong preconceptions (or less politely, prejudices), or 'strongly (dis) incentivising' one alternative over another is no problem at all.
So, where was I? Oh yeah...
> The examples you give though are precisely
> the sort of thing which will be exchanged within rather than between
> steads.
You're assuming there's enough of the stead for there to be much 'between'. One-lodge steads would be fairly common (though certainly this is still several families, in modern 'nuclear' reckoning).
> If there isn't someone capable of making decent fresh bread
> in my stead someone's mother has failed badly. If there is why should
> I be interested in John's day or more old baking. There is the labour
> cost of moving all this stuff about as well, the nearest stead could
> easily be a days journey away by wagon which means a couple of days
> when someone and their team could be doing something more useful.
I don't see how it's reasonably, or even geometrically, possible to arrange 25 steads on a typical tula such that they're a day's journey apart. A quarter-hour walk would be rather more like it, IMO.
> >What I'm saying is basically that IMO, the dominant means of small-scale
> >organisation is the stead (or in larger steads, perhaps more practicably
> >the hearth, even), rather than the bloodline. There's in fact if
> >not in law 'stead property', simply because stead property is often
> >_used_ by everyone on a particular stead (which isn't true of
> >a bloodline). Steads will generally have in fact, though not in law,
> >a single recognised leader (same again).
> There may be some 'stead property' used by everyone but I think it will
> only be trivial items. Most property will be regularly used by a few
> people. Thus the plough and ox team will be used by the Carl himself
> and his grown sons, tools will be generally the responsibility of one
> person although frequently lent to others.
There 'ownership', there's 'responsibility', and there's 'use'. The distinction/overlap between these may not be entirely crisp, I fancy.
> Certainly there will be
> a stead leader but she (or he) isn't a manager with authority, more
> a person who's experience other defer to. It probably isn't even the
> same person on all matters.
While not anything like as formal as at clan level, or maybe not even in multi-lodge steads, as clear as within one hearth, I think stead leadership is more day to day important, and more defined, than bloodline leadership, which spread over more than one stead, is likely to degenerate into whatever political dodge your relatives may or may not be trying to pull currently.
> >It has indeed disappeared, which is what makes it such a hard
> >concept for us to get our heads around, in any sort of intuitive
> >manner. Especially all these Orlanthi-playing Republicans John H.
> >keeps warning us about, I imagine! But I'm not in any way
> >disputing the 'communality' of property among the Orlanthi, just
> >that it has any association with the bloodline.
>
> Then what's the purpose of the bloodline? If it has no property,
> no formal head it becomes nothing more than a drinking game of
> who's got the best ancestors.
And for who is allowed to marry whom. (As John seemed to agree at one point, before going off on a strictly-exogamous-clans tangent.) Personally I think 'what's a bloodline for?' is a question with highly variable answers. In some clans, a small bloodline may correspond to (the dominant members of) a single largish stead; in others, a bloodline may have members in many different steads, and even in extreme cases verge on being a 'sub-clan' unto itself. (In which case it does become sensible to talk about bloodline property, and bloodline leaders, in fact if not in law.) I wish I knew which model of a bloodline KoS had in mind, but if it had in mind common property or recognised leaders, it certainly forgot to mention 'em.
One relatively simple case makes bloodline and stead co-incide closely enough for the two not to be identical, clearly, but effectively a single 'layer' of organisation. But I don't think that's invariable, and I'm not sure even how common it might be.
> Villages I can
> see as an extended clan chief's stead, but I'm not at all sure
> about towns - tribal chief's village ?
I'm inclined to go with the KoDP rationale that towns are an antifact of tribal formation. (Somewhat like cities and tribal federations, in the classic case of Sartar, and likely more widely to some extent.) But I don't think it's the tribal king's village, because the rex isn't always from the same clan... (At least in most set-ups.)
> That doesn't mean I've
> explained it all that well though. I might try and put together
> a few sample steads and show how they relate to and deal with
> one another.
Might not be a bad idea. I suspect a hazard, as I've said, is that many of us are extrapolating from what we know about one clan, or maybe one tribe, which will show much less than the total variance (deviance?) of all Heortling. But rather that than none at all!
> >> If they are not of the
> >> same bloodline then it becomes a matter for the clan lawspeakers and
> >> potentially the clan chief
> >
> >Agreed. And/or the ring, in some manner that's by no means clear
> >to me...
>
> Well the Gaelic method was for the aggrieved party to get a patron
> (e.g. a bloodline head) to take the case forward with a lawspeaker
> to argue the case. Of course the respective patrons might choose
> to settle it between themselves or no lawspeaker might be prepared
> to take the case on.
What I meant was, I'm not clear what's formally a matter for the chief, off his own bat, and what's formally a matter for the ring. In practice, it's doubtless very much the case that a particular ring member's word carries 'obvious weight' in some matters, rather than there being a formalised 'division of powers' as such.
The Gaelic procedure sounds more to me like what happens between different clans, among the Orlanthi (KoS has a reasonably full description, IIRC). Within a single clan, things are IMO supposedly less formal, with the decision purely for the chief and ring being as formal as it gets, but doubtless much of a tactics of a lawsuit carries over. "Men of the Inar's Rock Stead, who are those sages with expensive surcoats and 12 pounds of gold apiece doing standing next to you at this moot?"
> >> At the same time it
> >> defines a clear set of resources to collect fines from, with the
> >> law being able to take the most convient bits to satisfy the
> >> judgement and leave the bloodline head with the job of sharing
> >> the penalty among the members. Certainly where the property is
> >> on different steads and used by different people that's going
> >> to be an awful headache.
> >
> >To the point of negating your claim that there's anything 'clear'
> >about it, I'd suggest!
>
> But the headache is now the bloodline head's rather than the clan
> chief's. Say the bloodline is fined five cows, its head has to
> produce five cows or the chief can sieze any five owned by the
> bloodline (probably the nearest ones). And maybe a sixth for the
> extra trouble.
But a clan has the benefit of having 'chosen leaders'. A bloodline does not. Hence if it's not something that can be settled by agreement, the clan is in a formally stronger position to do it by dictat than is a bloodline. I don't see why it would be imposed on as amorphous an entity as a bloodline, when it could be done with much greater precision.
> Well I may be guilty of revisionism but I think the only property
> rights existing at clan level are land.
As I've asserted before, I don't think those even _are_ 'property rights', or at least I don't think that what the Orlanthi mean by 'odal property', so this really would be pretty Revisionistic. (Why do I think of Trotsky when I type that?)
> In the case of inter-clan
> disputes the property of all clan members is treated as one pot
> rather like a partnership in English law. Any assets can be used
> to satisfy an external claim with the decision about how that
> should be split being an internal affair.
Right, that's an important sense of it. But I think the odal/personal distinction is applicable here. That is, much of the property is odal, however 'allocated' it seems to be, and thus can be expropriated with no muss, and no fuss (supposedly -- in practice, maybe not...), whereas depriving someone of their genuinely personal property would be much more of a headache.
> I just can't get my
> head round the idea that a group of between 500 and 2000 humans
> can mutually own a wide variety of property without some form
> of allocation between them. Now dragonnewts on the other hand....
Oh, but I'm not saying there's no allocation! I'm sure some 'odal' property has been allocated to a particular hearth or stead (or bloodline, come to that) for so long (generations, or even centuries), that if the chief tried to 'reallocate' it without some huge amount of horse-trading, there would be bloody murder to pay (hopefully just figuratively, but maybe not...).
Cheers,
Alex.
End of The Glorantha Digest V8 #8
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