Picky, picky, picky. ;-) (OK, it was a confusing way to put it, mea culpa.)
> >Not at all. _Everyone_ in a 1000-strong clan will be known to each other.
>
> I can't believe that, they may know _of_ each other but actually
> knowing them as individuals is not on, even being able to recognise
> a thousand different people is doubtful.
Depends what you mean by 'know as individuals'. Recognise? I'd bet money on this. 'Orlanthi Everyone', at least. These are basically the people you deal with all the time. It'd be hard to never meet any significant number of them, and these are the people you bump into far, far more often than anyone from outside, so a degree of familiarity seems likely, if in some cases largely by association. "Yet another one of those shifty Lunar-lovers from _you-know-who's_ lodge." Granted the geography is more dispersed than in a modern 'village' of 1000 people, but equally the social structures are that much more closed: no commuting to work three valleys away, or whatever.
> >Wealthy people are more marriageable. If you're a cottar, it's
> >unlikely that the fourth son of your fourth son, if you had one,
> >would be marrying at all, so his powers of fertility don't really
> >enter into the equation.
>
> Assuming that a roughly equal number of each sex grow to adulthood
> and multiple partners are not socially acceptable then nearly all
> people will get married and have families. It's in the clan's
> interest for them to do so.
I don't believe that's so. Though the 'if you had one' is not a trivial antecedent, since I think by one means or another he's also less likely to have one. I think this is a just belabouring the sociodynamic obvious, here: steads and bloodlines undergo population and economic booms and busts, and the two are strongly corrolated.
> A whole animal is a rather large gift and a lot of meat surpluses
> will be hunted animals rather than domestic ones. Basically the
> restriction is any produce normally consumed fresh.
A whole cow isn't an unreasonably large gift from one whole stead to another entire stead. Other animals correspondingly less so, to belabour what _really is_ the obvious, sorry. ;-) But yes, if necessary meat can be preserved and divvied up before being gifted, so I still think that steads with 'net economic surpluses' in almost anything are both viable, and likely, certainly including the main three clan-gen 'food groups' of grain crops, herded cattle and sheep, and hunted game. So conversely, I think there are other steads not really 'self-sufficient' in all of these, though of course when push comes to shove you just need food of some sort to put in your mouth, not necessarily but of a 'balanced diet'.
> That's rather what I thought which implies each stead grinding their
> own on hand operated grindstones although I believe some parts of
> the arab world still use ox powered grindstones which have been
> traced back to Old Testament times. They're probably not efficent
> enough to justify centralising though.
That was my thought too. Plus they don't have the specificity of geographical requirement, or the large outlay cost to build, that would motivate this.
> It follows that a dispute between clan members can be brought
> before the clan moot where a single juror does not have authority
> over both parties. It may be that this is untypical because most
> internal clan disputes are resolved by a lawspeaker advising what
> the clan preceedent is but the mechanism is there.
But it doesn't follow that this follows the described procedure for a law suit. Indeed the implication is not, since as I've quoted, that section describes the 'typical' case as being between clans, whereas a page or so earlier, it's stated that "normal justice occurs within a clan, and concerns only its members", surely implying that 'normal justice' is not, or at least need not be, the same as this later-described lawsuit procedure. If justice is dealt at a clan moot, then the lawsuit mechanism is essentially redundant, as the clan is completely sovereign and competent, whether in the person of a the chief, the ring, or the clan itself in a wapentak, can make any necessary 'ruling', or a decision that would make one redundant.
> Then there is confusion with the modern idea of 'rights' which are
> even more at variance with the idea we are talking about than
> 'property'.
At least there the confusion is evident enough to bring one up short, rather than quietly misleading, as I think the term 'property' does. (A weak form of the 'least surprising result' property, as beloved by we CSists.)
> >Practice is a very tricky thing, but there's surely no doubt about
> >that power. Feudalism is not a useful comparison, as it lacks
> >the 'vote the bums out' option.
>
> Which is the very reason why the Orlanthi wouldn't accept arbitary
> use of that discretion.
Ah, _that_ I agree with. To steal from David D., the correct answer to most crazy-sounding hypotheticals about what megalomaniac things a chief could, it would seem, 'legally' do, "A wise chief would not". (Which conversely implies to me that occassionally they do happen, as some chiefs are simply either very unwise, and do them, simply to be unseated (and doubtless murdered in his bed) shortly thereafter, or is abusing his position in a systematic way, but cunningly enough to get away with it. But these would be very much the exception.)
> >I don't share the apparently widespread zeal for seeing odal property
> >as a 'problem', that has to be defined out of any effective existence.
> >Donald, to be fair, at least doesn't seem to object to communal
> >property as such, which seems to be the more common syndrome ("Must
> >Avoid... Anything Uncomfortable... to Modern Western Lifestyles...")
> >but does seem keen to try and minimise the size of the 'communal' unit.
>
> I don't see a problem with communal property and can easily imagine
> how it works in a group which is small enough for all the members
> to relate to each other as individuals. Once the group gets bigger
> I can't see how it works without some form of enforceable rules.
Thus you can see why I don't think it works, or indeed ever existed, in Elkenval bloodlines. ;-)
> We're largely in agreement here, except for the idea that in a group
> as large as a clan can avoid formalising the rules whereby disputes
> between members are resolved.
Well, there's always 'Obey chosen leaders', and 'no one can make you do anything', which between them cover everything, I think. ;-)
> It may be custom rather than law and
> there are probably variations between clans but they will exist
> simply to reduce the clan chief's work.
It's not so much that there are customs exist to resolve the disputes, but the the way previous disputes were resolved _are_ the customs, as it were. The Inarssons live around here (vague sweeping gesture of the arm), ever since the time Inar himself slew so-and-so with his bare fists, and we've lived here ever since, and we hold the rights to hunt north of the Hill of Four Winds because we always have done, and know how to speak to the spirits of those places. Nowhere is it said that bloodlines get a maturing freehold on their rights, it's just that rights get pickled into custom, which gets ossified into tradition, and if the chief does decides to change this, there's nothing we can say to prevent this 'legally'; though we can remind him (loudly) of all of the above, agitate and conspire to have him replaced as chief, forcibly resist being 'moved along', or in the extreme case, leave the clan and stitch up some deal annexing us to the the Varndings, or something like that. In the normal run of things, deciding to take such a troublesome and alienating course would be in the category of something to think up if you think you, the chief, don't already have enough problems to deal with... Normally such things would only even be thought of if there's some obvious reason on the ground (lots of Inarsson lodges half-empty, and their rights under-utilised) or forcing political circumstance (I'm a Lunar brown-noser, and the Deputy Garrison Commander at Jonstown says that if I do such and such...).
Cheers,
Alex.
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