Re: Priests in Space! [was nomenclature etc.]

On Wed, Dec 19, 2001 at 08:04:27AM -0500, Richard and Emily Bell wrote:
>At his death, the
>estate was divided among the surviving sons, but in the lower rungs of
the
>nobility, the land was too small to be divided, and even at the higher
levels,
>dillution was a problem.

Actually, under the English system, the estate went to the oldest son;
it was younger sons who had problems. The French system of division,
which you outline, actually caused much bigger problems, because it 
often ended up with a situation in which nobody's parcel of land was 
big enough to support him.