Chapter 98: Extended Family

One of the legal bases that the Imperial Assembly used as their guidance in developing consistent laws across the Empire were the previously answered questions regarding citizenship which had been refined in the years earlier.

''Specifically, prior to the political conflicts and developments of AD 1043, the laws regarding citizenship, tribal and clan membership, and other such identities were extremely variable across the Alban Isles and its constituent polities. Berk and its sister Norse societies had laws that automatically granted freed thralls tribal membership upon arrival in their territories, and the Bog Burglars had similar laws regarding women seeking refuge, both cases of which were laws that had been adopted out of pragmatic need over the previous decades and centuries, to give two examples, but free individuals outside of those classes were not considered to be tribal members outside of specific actions taken to adopt them in, which themselves required particular conditions.''

''Due to this, then-Chief Stoick's ad hoc mass 'adoption' of Vedrarfjord in AD 1041, bringing the residents of the city into the tribe, was technically not in line with the law. However, as it solved a moral quandary no one spoke up against the action at the time. Still, the action ended up creating an effectively new class of tribal citizens who held their citizenship by dint of their residence within Berk's territory. This new class quickly grew to be overwhelmingly demographically dominant as new outsiders came in and took up residence in Berk's new territories, becoming tribal members as a result, on the technicality of being a resident in a region under Berk's control. The annexations that followed on that precedent made legal matters worse in this regard, and the need for an overhaul of the tribal citizenship laws became quickly apparent.''

''Further complicating matters in this regard were the interactions between tribal citizenship, clan membership, and the various permutations of life. Was an individual who had been brought in as a clan citizen due to annexation of their home territory still a citizen upon receiving a sentence of temporary exile due to the commission of a crime, either during their exile or upon their return? What citizenship rights could a transient merchant claim? Was it based on his home port, origin of birth, or some other factor? What rights and privileges were granted to outsiders adopted by citizens, or even directly into a clan, especially with adoption law itself being a complicated tangle of precedents? What status, if any, did an individual claiming sanctuary or refugee status, still hold with their old community? And so forth.''

—Origins Of The Grand Thing, Edinburgh Press, 1631

Foreshadowing
Put spoilers here

Epigraph Tie-In

 * The epigraph discusses Berk's citizenship and adoption laws. The chapter ends with Stoick adopting William into Clan Haddock.

Links to the Chapter
ArchiveOfOurOwn link