Page 76 - DSOC402_SOCIOLOGY_OF_KINSHIP_ENGLISH

Sociology of Kinship

Notes would have daughters and no sons, the former would therefore inherit land and could attract
men to them as marriage partners and perhaps live with them. Where women received land,
the basic means of production, as dowry, it had social implication of re-organising ownership.
Large quantities of land may also come under direct or indirect control of women as a result
of death of their husbands. Female infanticide was not altogether unknown in dowry systems.
However, women were valuable if not as daughters, than as wives since both spouses often
brought property into marriage. The surviving partner also enjoyed some kind of continuing
right in conjugal estate, whether in terms of widow’s free bench or the husband’s courtesy.
Widow’s rights were the most durable and firmly established in the late medieval England.
The attachment of property to women was important not only in making of a match; it was
also relevant for a woman whose marriage had ended either by widowhood or by divorce. For
if such a woman was young and had control of property, she could increase her attractiveness
as a marriage partner. The emphasis on conjugal estate and the making of a match was closely
linked to the emphasis on monogamy. The fate of a widow’s marriage was of critical concern
to the children of her late husband, but there was no prohibition on such marriages. Similarly
women in European societies had possibility of succession to office. The entitlement to immov-
able property could easily be generalised to land or to office. There were intricacies and varieties
of local customs that make inheritance systems look different. These local differences centred
on the notions of primogeniture or ultimogeniture, partibility and indivisibility, equality and
preference and dowry and inheritance. Inheritance is the transmission of rights in material
property at death. It is everywhere dominated by kinship and conjugality. Property is usually
redistributed among kin-group. In non-literate, pre-modern societies, this was achieved with
flexibility of local customs. The concept of a binding testament or a written will, as against the
demands of the potential heirs was not a norm, it was rather an exception. It became an instru-
ment for alienation of property not only to ‘irregular heirs’ (for example mistress rather than
wife) but also institutions like church.
The problem of family splitting (fission) is also linked to transmission of family property. Very
often this point of family fission was determined by marriage, for sons as well as daughters.
It is the time when sons and daughters leave parental home and are endowed. Whether such
endowment included landed property also, could change the social-agrarian relation. Under
the ‘equalitarian’ system of Normandy, children received an equal share at the death of their
parents. In other systems children were excluded from parental property so as to avoid divi-
sions of estate (parental). Laws of inheritance supported by church and state generally upheld
the interests of landlord by not allowing division of their estates. Unigeniture or inheritance by
one heir was considered to be more desirable in case of feudal (military) tenures so as to avoid
division of parental estate. Of course, ‘exclusion’ of other children was never complete. It gener-
ally meant only exclusion from land; the other siblings have to be paid off in a manner that may
insist upon equality in value as distinct from equality of object. There was a marked geographi-
cal division between areas where inheritance was shared out equally – putting lineage before
spouse and those where one heir took a larger share and other were ‘excluded’. The examples
of former were Western France, Flanders and England under Norman law. In Southern France,
Germany and Latin Europe, preference to one heir laid greater stress on unigeniture, except for
a token legacy or fixed portion, children who had received a dowry were excluded. In Latin Eu-
rope, state authorities usually favoured primogeniture because it facilitated control over the tax
system, military service and rural enterprise. The multiplicity of forms and strategies adopted
by families make it impossible to present a single image of the medieval family and show a clear
line of its evolution.

11.2 Lineage Structure

Lineage refers to a body of people who are arranged together on the basis of common blood
linkage, a special type of blood relationship that is bringing people together. In a patriarchal so-

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