THE GERMANIC METHOD OF CALCULATING DESCENT THROUGH BOTH MALE AND FEMALE LINES vi

THE GERMANIC METHOD OF CALCULATING DESCENT THROUGH BOTH MALE AND FEMALE LINES

via Lisa Outhwaite

‘Maitland was well aware that the current anthropological orthodoxy, for instance in the work of Sir Henry Maine, was that all societies, including the Teutonic peoples, had gone through a period of agnatic kinship, that is, descent flowing through the male gender, leading to the formation of powerful clans or, as anthropologists call them, unilineal descent groups. Yet detailed study of Tacitus and the codes of the Anglo-Saxons and other materials did not bear out this evolutionary sequence. Maitland first worked back to the thirteenth century text of Bracton, which showed a system of tracing descent through both males and females which is identical to that which is used in England today.5 He then took the analysis back to the Anglo-Saxon period. In a section on ‘Antiquities’ he showed that Anglo-Saxon kinship was bilateral or cognatic, tracing descent through both genders, and hence the formation of exclusive groups or clans which could have been the basis for political and legal action, was impossible.

Thus ‘we ought not to talk of clans at all’ for ‘our English law’. Such groups could not act as the bedrock of the politico-legal system. Whatever the earliest unrecorded history, ‘What seems plain is that the exclusive domination of either “father-right” or “mother-right”…should be placed for our race beyond the extreme limit of history.’ The absence of the patriarchal or patrilineal family, he argued had nothing to do with Christianity – its emergence ‘we certainly cannot ascribe to the influence of Christianity.’ The Germanic method of calculating descent through both male and female lines, preserved in England, was very different from the method of calculating through the male line alone, characteristic of the later Roman Empire even after the spread of Christianity.’

– F.W. MAITLAND AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD, by Macfarlane.