When Fosterage and Marriage go Wrong

Fosterage and Marriage, in the city, grow more and more complicated, the closer one gets to the high Houses. For common folk, they're simple as anything. Make an oath, put your thumb to a contract, and there it is! You're bound, in whatever way you want to be, for as long as you've agreed to be. Make home together, make love, make children, share property, all of these fall onder the provenance of thhe same general set of oaths. Likewise, the settling of children into households to see to their keeping is a simple thing, amongst ordinary folk. If someone can't see to children they've born, better placement is found for them, with kin, or perhaps with a guild that suits some talent or potential they may have. Both of these, amongst the lofty Houses of the city, are a good deal more complex.
Fosterage ought to be a trading of young ones, both to learn skills and wisdom that they can't gain in their own house. It is half that, and half a hostage-taking. Marriage, likewise, ought to be an equal exhange, but of course not all Houses are on equal footing.  Therefore, there is also typically an exchange of wealth that accompanies such exchanges as make up the difference. When Houses aren't equal, there's often also an exchange of wealth for many marriages as well. Because of this, one will hear sometimes of both being used to enact plans that bend the laws until they break, and go entirely against the original purpose of why these arrangements were made, and how they were formed. They will hear of fosterages being used to exhange bastards for agknowedged children, and then one child being lost - and the wealth, mislaid, the debt defaulted. They will hear of one spouse taken into the home of another and then taken and held for ransom - only to be lost, and the ransom too, along with the mahr. It is a terrible business altogether, but the laws of the city are capable of great subtlety, no matter how sensible they were, when they were made. And they were, when they were made. You see how over the years their shapes have bent over and over, been folded a hundred times.
The spouse from the House of lesser status, wealth and power takes the name and joins the House of the spouse from the House of greater power. It has always been so.  The spouse from the House of lesser power, wealth and status joins the House and takes upon the name of the spouse of greater status - it has always been so.

History

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