Society
The primary unit of social organisation in Germanic and Celtic Europe was the kin group. The mention of descent through the female line in the ruling families of the Picts in later sources and the recurrence of leaders clearly from outside of Pictish society, has led to the conclusion that their system of descent was matrilineal. However, this has been challenged by a number of historians who argue that the clear evidence of awareness of descent through the male line suggests that this more likely to indicate a bilateral system of descent.
Scattered evidence, including the records in Irish annals and the warriors like those depicted on the Pictish stone slabs at Aberlemno, Forfarshire and Hilton of Cadboll, in Easter Ross, suggest that in Northern Britain, as in Anglo-Saxon England, society was dominated by a military aristocracy, whose status was dependent in a large part on their ability and willingness to fight. Below the level of the aristocracy it is assumed that there were non-noble freemen, working their own small farms or holding them as free tenants. There are no surviving law codes from Scotland in this period, but such codes in Ireland and Wales indicate that freemen had the right to bear arms, represent themselves in law and to receive compensation for murdered kinsmen.
Indications are that society in North Britain contained relatively large numbers of slaves, often taken in war and raids, or bought, as St. Patrick indicated the Picts were doing from the Britons in Southern Scotland. Slavery probably reached relatively far down in society, with most rural households containing some slaves. Because they were taken relatively young and were usually racially indistinguishable from their masters, many slaves would have been more integrated into their societies of capture than their societies of origin, in terms of both culture and language. Living and working beside their owners they in practice may have become members of a household without the inconvenience of the partible inheritance rights that divided estates. Where there is better evidence from England and elsewhere, it was common for such slaves who survived to middle age to gain their freedom, with such freedmen often remaining clients of the families of their former masters.
Read more about this topic: Scotland In The Early Middle Ages
Famous quotes containing the word society:
“The growing of food and the growing of children are both vital to the family’s survival.... Who would dare make the judgment that holding your youngest baby on your lap is less important than weeding a few more yards in the maize field? Yet this is the judgment our society makes constantly. Production of autos, canned soup, advertising copy is important. Housework—cleaning, feeding, and caring—is unimportant.”
—Debbie Taylor (20th century)
““I” is a militant social tendency, working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of tendencies. So far as it can it waxes, as all life does. To think of it as apart from society is a palpable absurdity of which no one could be guilty who really saw it as a fact of life.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“...many men choose a wife amid the deft-fingered clerks in preference to the society misses. The woman clerk has studied the value of concentration, learned the lesson that incites to work when a burden bears heavily upon her strength. She knows the word of self- reliance, and the fine courage that springs from the consciousness that a good result has been accomplished by a well-directed effort.”
—Clara (Marquise)