Families
Family heritage is exceedingly important to some people in Albion (and not very important at all to others). By custom, that heritage is sorted into five categories.
First Families
The First Families are those who trace their lines back to Aeneas (if you believe your mythology) or the Romans. Many of the First Families have some form of lararium in the home as a result, whatever their other religious life might look like. Many of them hold estates that date back for centuries. Most of the land magic families are First Families, though there are some notable exceptions. The Edgartons, Carillons, Leftons, and others are First Families.Second Families
The Second Families trace their lineage to Hellenistic Egypt, and thus also at least nominally include pre-Hellenistic Egyptian traditions. Alexander Landry and Ibis Ward both count as Second Families (though both of them come to it via direct Egyptian parentage rather than more distant heritage.)Third Families
The Third Families are proud of their descent from the Merovingian Dynasty. The older families came over with the Norman Conquest, while a number of newer families came over following the Terror of the French Revolution in the 1700s. The Fortiers are Third Families.Fourth Families
The Fourth Families are the native Britons, Celts, and everyone else who descends from the pre-Roman peoples of Britain or the various migrations, invasions, and displacements between Roman Britain and the Norman Conquest. Basically, if you can't trace your family to one of the previous lines, and you're fundamentally British in background, you are Fourth Families. The Wains and the Davies are Fourth Families as an example.Fifth Families
The Fifth Families include anyone who's had magic in their family for at least two generations, but who doesn't fit into another category. Most commonly used to describe people who've immigrated to Albion in the past generation or two, but not entirely.The Great Families and the Gold Book
The First, Second, and Third Families are collectively known as The Great Families, because frankly, they're the ones who care about the issue and gave it a name. They maintain the Gold Book, a reference work similar to the non-magical Burke's Peerage or Debrett's, which lists the various familial lines, their living members, and various other relevant notes. Because of this attention to lineage (which also plays a factor in some inheritance agreements), marriages are often carefully negotiated when they occur between, say, a member of the First Families and a member of the Third. The marriage contract will then determine which family magics a potential child would have access to, as well as other issues of inheritance. Other families don't particularly care about that, or circumstances are such that these negotiations are not relevant.Naming patterns
Among the Great Families, it's common for an acknowledged but illegitimate child to be given a surname of "FitzLastname".“Well, the Fitz, that usually means someone somewhere in the line was a bastard. If she’s part of the First Families, that’d be her immediate line. Her or maybe her father. If she’s something else, it could mean other things. Aunt Silvia might know, she was trying to place her.”.
