cultural titles

[RaspK_FOG]

The correct writing for "Mac" is actually "Mc"; as far as I know, the writing "Mac" was one of the changes wrought onto the english language and idioms by the immigrants for America...

You might be surprised with the Latin writing and proper pronounciation of most Celtic-originating words; for example, in the freely online-distributed novel "The Falcon and the Wolf", there is reference of Cwldon (&#33, which is pronounced "Cooldhon" as far as I can tell.

[geeman]

At 10:05 AM 5/5/2004 +0200, Magian wrote:



>Mc is Scott? What is Mac?



A once fantastically successful brand of home computer?



I`d always understood Mc to be Irish and Mac to be Scottish--at least what

my grandmother told me, and she was weirdly proud of her Scottish heritage

despite the family being American for several generations before she was

even born. British heritage lingers in a family tree for quite a while...

not unlike a genetic disorder.



Gary

[Don E]

The version I have been presented is that Mac and Mc comes from 'son of' in scotish and irish respectively, and that the prefix O' is irish for 'daughter of'.

[geeman]

At 11:23 AM 5/5/2004 +0200, Don E wrote:



>The version I have been presented is that Mac and Mc comes from `son of`

>in scotish and irish respectively, and that the prefix O` is irish for

>`daughter of`.



Well... technically, Mac and Mc are both derivative of the Gaelic "son of"

with Mc really being just the abbreviated version of Mac. The same Gaelic

origin is sometimes written as Mag or further abbreviated M`. Generally,

Mc and Mac are thought of as being Irish or Scottish (and so my grandmother

would have had everyone believe) but there are plenty of Mcs in Scotland

and lots of Macs in Ireland, and several of both on the Continent, not to

mention scads of Americans who immigrated from any of those areas and had

their names transliterated or misspelled upon arrival in the States, so

it`s hard to really give the Mc/Mac origin in Ireland/Scotland much

credence. My family kept the Mac in their name after immigrating, but lost

it a generation or so on either side of the turn of the century. I was

told they dropped it intentionally after an uncle started a brewery that

used the family name prominently on the label of his beer, much to the

embarrassment of the rest of the family. I`ve always figured that was a

colorful family myth, however, and that someone just dropped the Mac at

some point to "sound more American." After all, most of us seem to like beer.



Given the vagaries of spelling and the lack of literate people up until

more recent centuries there wasn`t a real standardization of the naming

scheme by national or cultural identity, or in

pronunciation. Phonetically, Mc and Mac would be pronounced very much the

same by most readers. Even nowadays I`ve heard both Mc and Mac pronounced

"mick," "mack" and "muck" and sometimes the same spelling of the same name

gets one or another pronunciation. It`s also pronounced sometimes without

an identifiable vowel sound at all.



O` means "grandson of" not "daughter of" and is also of Gaelic

origin. Actually, O` has more of an ancestral link IIRC. That is, if

there was some ancestral figure who founded a clan the whole family might

take his name as a sort of "of the" kind of way. That is, O`Brian means

references some particular, and possibly long-forgotten, ancestor in the

same way the Mc or Mac now references some (probably) long forgotten

parent. I`ve heard some people suggest O` has more of a noble or clan

connotation for that reason, though its such a prolific convention that

such an inference is a bit of a stretch in reality.



Gary

[Don E]

Thanks for clarifying that one Gary. It makes much more sense considering how male dominated the gaelic culture appears to have been. Only goes to show you can't even trust the native speakers to know their own language

E

[Osprey]

That is, O`Brian means references some particular, and possibly long-forgotten, ancestor

Maybe Brian Boru (pronounced Bree'-ahn Bor'-oo, rolling the r in each), the almost-High King of Ireland from the Dark Age era - he was mortally wounded in the battle which would have united the various tribes/petty kingdoms of Ireland. Bummer.

hah hah! Found it in my Gaelic dictionary - the surname "daughter of" in Scottish Gaelic is Nic. heh, good luck finding that one in a name.

And to round out the Celtic language lesson, in Welsh I do recall that "ap" was the surname for "son of..." (such as Pryderi ap Pwyll), while "map" was "daughter of"...and again you won't see much of the latter in the patriarchal societies of Celtic Britain.

Osprey

[Magian]

It is good to know what the Mac in my last name means now. The downside is I can't say it means king anymore. (King Arthur)

[Foundry_Dwarf]

Originally posted by RaspK_FOG@Apr 28 2004, 10:03 AM
As far as I know, Counts were above Barons due to their financial supremacy most of the time; a Baron is only below the King of the realm. I could be wrong, but that's what I remember.

Here are some "standards" from my research:

King, Archduke, Duke, Prince, and Marquis/Margrave were the highest nobility (royal blood).

Earl, Count, Sheriff (Shire-reeve), Viscount (Vicount, vice-count), and Baron were the nobility (nobility not of royal blood).

Baronette, Knight, and Baliff were the gentry.

A Duke held land directly from the king (or emperor).
An archduke was either an independant, or held directly from the emperor (possibly was once a seperate kingdom, but later added to the empire and given a slightly higher title than "duke" to indicate the greater holding).
Marquis or an Earl ruled either a shire (roughly 3 counties) or a county and tended to hold directly under the king. Earl was the highest title someone not or royal blood could hold.
A Count ruled a county and may have been appointed (they generally served under higher nobles).
A Sheriff was in charge of part of a shire as was generally an appointed position. Viscount controlled part of or assisted a count and may or may not inherit.
A baron generally held land directly from the king (or at least directly from royalty).
A baronette held land under higher nobility and was generally appointed (not inherited).
Knights and Baliffs both held manors. Knights tended to inherit, baliffs were appointed. Knights were expected to provide personal military service if called upon, baliffs were more of just overseers. In either case the amount of land was often called a "knighthold" (about 10-14 hides, aka about 1200-1500 acres).

Therefore, yes a barony could conceivably be larger than a county, or a Baron could be above a count, depending on period, interpretation, etc. For example, "Earl" (from "jarl") was common in England but not in France, and therefore in France Comtes (counts) were definitely higher than barons. In other areas the term March Lord or March Baron was used for a person in charge of a march (basically a Marquis, Margrave, or Earl) but the "official" title was "Baron". In this case a Baron is clearly more powerful than a Count. In some areas Earl and Count are just different words for the same thing (ruler of a county). Things can be very confusing and what exactly is meant by each term can even vary wildly in the same country.

So, a king might have a March Baron in charge of shires (instead of counts), Counts and/or Earls in charge of counties, and these in turn would have baronettes in charge of hundreds (100 hides) who would in turn have knights or baliffs for every 10-14 hides (about 3 villages, or 1 vill). A county would be about 300 knightholds (3,000 hides), and a March (or barony) about 3 counties. A single domain unit in Birthright may be a "county" by that definition.

More to come later

[Foundry_Dwarf]

There are a few different ways to look at things ... from the bottom up, from the top down, or starting in the middle.

First a look from the bottom up:
At the "bottom" is the serf. He is a type of peasant that has more in common with a sharecropper of post US civil war merged with the coal-miner who "owes his soul to the company store" than any other equivalent most Americans can grasp. He may or may not have had inherited rights to work the land (copyhold), but he was required to pay if he left the land, or even if he died (to preserve the copyhold). A villein was the next stage up. He had some more inherited rights, but still was not entirely free to leave. Below the serfs were the thralls (almost literally slaves). Yeomen were the stage of peasant above villein and were free to leave. This is my understanding of peasants. Some freemen almost reached the gentry in wealth and land.

Next on the "food chain" was the "middle class". Guildsmen, craftsmen, artisans, masters (crafts & guildsmen), merchants, and eventually burghers (which could mean about the equivalent of "mayor" or refer to any towns person, depending on the source you read). These are all townspeople. Common laberors were basically the equivalent of yeomen, possibly lower.

Now we "leave" the town and go back to the country where we start with the gentry (baliffs, knights, and other "lord of the manors"). Above the gentry is the nobility and the peerage.

So we have peasants, townfolk, gentry, nobility, and peerage.

Peasants lived in villages. The basic difference between a village and a town is what it's primary occupation was. A village existed almost enirely for agriculture, a town for trade. Villages tended to be anything under 300, towns well above 300. (80-300 for a village, 600-3000 for a town). Realize that what was a city in ancient times was only a town during the early middle ages, a village during the renaissance, and almost unincorporated today. The word village may have derived from "vill", a unit of land about the same as a knighthold. A parish was also similar in size.
Therefore we have three different terms refering to an area of land approximately 8-14 hides in size and able to support peasants plus a single manor and a knight residing in said residence (or baliff ... in either case, the "lord of the manor"). Anyone who has watched Cadfael (especially "the Devil's Novice"), etc, has seen how small a manor can be (basically a longhouse plus outbuildings. Three villages were typical (4 hides each village, or about 480 tilled acres, basically up to 2 square miles per village) per knighthold. [note: a hide could range from 30-260 acres, a virgate from 8-60 acres, etc, depending on quality of land and usage]. Reeves were peasant members of a village "hired" to better control/enforce the laws, collect taxes/rents, supervise harvests, and coordinate work (peasants typically owed 3 days labor per work-week to the lord of the manor). The reeve was elected or selected for a term (generally 1 year) and tended to have an assistant or two himself (a Hayward, generally carrying a horn, to watch the fields and make sure cattle, etc, didn't stray into fields they weren't supposed to go into, and a Woodward who similarly watched/patrolled the woods). So, the knight/lord would have a representative called a Reeve, watching out for his interests for a cut of the fines and use of the lord's plow, in each village. Getting ahead of myself for a minute, shires had similar appointed people (generally a knight or a baron) called shire-reeves, or "sheriffs". The Sheriff of Nottingham could well have been more powerful than a baron and actually ruled areas including being in charge of parts of Sherwood Forest (shire-wood, IIRC).
The "lord of the manor" was usually some form of armed gentry and was allowed to carry weapons, organize troops, etc (and generally was under feudal obligation to either serve themselves, or provide so many infantry or archers, or both). Their manors were not supposed to be fortifications of any real sort unless they received special dispensation (generally only the king or ruler could grant this). The baliff was basically a butler that managed the land for the overlord (Baron, baronette, vicount, sheriff, count, etc) either when he was away or on a permanent basis (although the position was generally not inheritable, but some knighthoods were ... patents of nobility was the knight's equivalent of a copyhold, and these could be revoked).
The next step up (ignoring half-steps of Banorette or Viscount) would either be baron or count in Birthright terms. This would be one domain unit. The court for a single unit could therefore be 30-300 people. At this level the nobility were generally granted rights of crenelation (able to put up walls with crenelated defenses ... aka, they were allowed to defend themselves with other than force of arms. If still in "middle mangement" they were required to provide service, plus X knights, plus Y archers, plus Z infantry OR a certain sum of money. Some kings "declared war" simple to replenish the treasury, may a show of it, then dismessed the troops as soon as possible, just to get money due out of the barons.

Hope that helps.

[tcharazazel]

Really cool history about titles and ranking, thnx.

So to make that a little simpler it going from lowest to highest. if im not sure i put a ? at the end of the name Just want to make an easy list to look and copy down.


peasants: thrall, serf, villein, yeomen, reeve (who worked for local knight/lord)

townfolk: Common laberors <= yeoman, guildsmen, craftsmen, artisans, masters (crafts & guildsmen), merchants, burghers
are these 3 equal in rank? guildsmen, craftsmen, artisans

gentry: Baliff, Knight, Viscount, Baronette (or are these last 2 inbetween gentry and nobility?)

nobility: Sheriff? (or is the title just added on to a count or baron?), Count, Baron, Earl

Peerage: Marquis/Margrave, Prince, Duke, Archduke, and King (then emperor if you take it the next level)