About Primogeniture...
- The right of the eldest child to inherit an entire estate
- Means of keeping an estate unified
- Found in agricultural society where status depends on the amount of land that one owns
- Western Europe during feudal times: used primogeniture to avoid splitting up land and all titles/positions that came with it; younger sons received support from the family à could work in military, church, or state bureaucracy; daughters receive dowry instead
- Peasants eventually started their own system of primogeniture, but was much more flexible
- Stem family – rural Ireland; head of household shares home with one married son and his children while younger sons must move out with marriage
- Norman tradition – firstborn son would inherit all of a parent’s wealth, estate, title, or office à then he is responsible for passing the inheritance to younger siblings
- Spread from Normandy to Britain with the arrival of William the Conqueror in 1066
- Maintained the political and social status of the Norman barons
- Usually applies to only males, but rules have been bent: crown of England passed onto eldest daughter when there was no male present – Elizabeth II in 1953
- Also a principle of seniority in which siblings are ranked by their ages à social organization and cosmology
- Maori people of New Zealand (Polynesian) believe that human beings were descended from the gods & took part in divine potency (mana); eldest clans and lineages, continued on with a higher degree of sacredness than junior lines; chief of the group was the eldest and most eligible male of the eldest family line
- Also present in Indian society – caste system, joint family, and marriage arrangements; ideal joint family = elderly man and wife, their sons and daughters-in-law, and grandchildren; shares a single house, worships at same altar, cook at same hearth, works same field; every male has equal share of estate until it is formally/legally dissolved…senior male is ultimate authority and it passes to his eldest son
Variations...
Ultimogeniture - youngest son gets all land (pre-1925 England and Nazi Germany) - Seniorate and Juniorate rules - property passes to oldest or youngest members of extended family
- Secundogeniture, tertiogeniture - property is reserved for second or succeeding sons
The End of Primogeniture...
Under attack by Western world in the late 18 th century due to resistance against the landed aristocracy and the desire to release land into the open market First prohibited in United States after the conclusion of the American Revolution France – Napoleonic Code specified minimal amounts of estates to be passed onto children England – 1925: British Parliament abolished primogeniture as governing rule in absence of a will Still possible to reserve most of an estate for one specific child; encouraged by some countries to share property by enacting estate taxes; some discouraged by taxes created to prevent the partitioning of properties as part of public policies aimed at maintaining a viable rural economy
Legacy and Primogeniture...One and the Same:
The temporal aspects of ones legacy are being divided amongst descendants and then passed down to them. If the system of primogeniture is followed correctly, the descendants of the original landowner will have an increasingly smaller percentage of original land. This is true also in the idea of ethnicity and heritage being passed down by blood. If a child has one parent that is Jewish and one parent that is Catholic, the child is 50% of each religion. If that child were to marry a person who is 100% Jewish, their offspring would only be 25% Catholic. These two ideas lend themselve.s to the theory that ones legacy “decreases” and becomes less significant as time goes on. However, is anyone ever truly “forgotten"?
