SR - Principality law question

Timothy A. McDaniel tmcd at crl.com
Tue Oct 20 12:32:07 PDT 1998


Pendaran wrote:
> the incoming Coronet (we've got to find a name for that position)

"The Heirs Apparent".  Not "the heirs": "a living man has no heir" is
an old Roman principle.  "Heir" means the person you're inheriting
from is already dead.  (Beware if someone says "I'm your heir".)
"Apparent" because short of legal proceedings or your own death, you
will inherit someday.  Not "heir presumptive": "Presumptive" means
that someone could be born and displace you -- e.g., you're a nephew,
and your rich uncle might conceivably get married and have a kid.

If you wanna go Celtic, "Tanist" is quite justifiable as I understand
it (never looked into it), and "Tanista" is apparently grammatical in
this case.  (The notion "Add '-a' to make it feminine" works in
Romance languages -- that is, languages derived from Latin.  I
understand that it happens to work in this case as well.)  I think
Ealdormere and sometimes the Middle use that.

The fancier period idea is to give 'em a landed title -- Earl of
March, Duke of Cornwall, Prince of Wales, Dauphin, King of the Romans,
Prince of Asturias, Duke of Rothesay maybe?, whatever.  There's a
little problem with that in the SCA, tho.  However, if a southern
barony wanted to wickedly depose their baron and baroness, say, and
make themselves available to get a new one every 6 months, it'd be a
lovely period notion.  Their baron/ess would be rather busy with other
things, so maybe they could get away with more stuff.  No more debates
about the succession.  Hmmm, some advantages indeed!

Not to make any existing Southern barons or baronesses nervous, of course.

Daniel "South Forks, you have a call at the gules courtesy phone"
de Lincolia
-- 
Tim McDaniel.   Reply to tmcd at crl.com;
    if that fail, tmcd at austin.ibm.com is my work account.
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