Households, marriage, birth and death

Growing up in stages

Portions follow the stage, which sounds like a detail until children's portions are given children's satiety and a generation starves without anybody noticing.

• An infant stays home and keeps its mother there half the day for a year.
• A child sits lessons with the clerk one morning in three, goes to church on Sunday, and otherwise plays: a favourite spot in the morning, home for a meal, and the game in the afternoon.
• Which children a child runs with is not drawn out of a hat. Every village has six crews, and a child belongs to the one their own corner of the village belongs to, for years at a time. Each afternoon the two crews with the worst blood between them take the field as captains and the other four pick the captain they mind least, so this week's ally is often last week's bloody nose.
• A scrap hardens the feud between two crews, and the crews with a feud going are the ones who end up in front of each other. A feud hot enough stops being a game: the whole of one lane goes at the whole of the other, several children are carried home, the parents take it up at their own doors, and then it is spent for a while. The ties keep the damage after the feud has cooled. Some of it still ends in friends across the line.
• A youth helps at a parent's bench in the mornings.
• At fourteen the village puts them to the thinnest trade.

Arms, and the flag on the square

Every village bears arms, and the shield is a claim about the place rather than a pattern: the charge is counted off the trades its people are in and the landmarks it has, so a valley that fishes bears a fish and a valley that ploughs bears a garb. The tinctures follow the rule of tincture, colour on metal and metal on colour, which is the reason a shield can be read from the other end of a field and the reason the banner can be read from the far bank.

The banner is a job, not a prop. The crews take the pole a day each, and the eldest child of the crew on duty walks out at seven to raise it and back at dusk to bring it in. What happens instead is the interesting half: a famine or a sick crew leaves the pole bare all day, a burial drops the flag to half, and a crew with real blood against the crew on duty will run the banner down in the middle of the afternoon, which costs everybody ties and sends somebody back out to put it up again.

Violence and its memory

Drink and temper start it at the inn. Grudges keep it going, families inherit it, and the constable's posture decides who gets taken up. A killing is rare and never forgotten: it stays in the ties and in the lineage, and somebody's grandchild still will not sit at that table.

The register, which outlives everyone in it

Somebody who dies is taken out of the world, because a corpse that still walks to market is worse than no corpse at all. Their lineage is not taken out with them. The moment before the villager goes, their parents, their marriages, their children and which generation they are get copied into the parish register, and every question about kin in the valley reads the living, the ones who walked up the road and the dead as one list.

That is the difference between a village with a family tree and a village with a list of who is in the house tonight. A grandmother buried two winters ago is still why two people are cousins, still the name at the top of a sheet, and still a stone you can click on.

So the sheets say it properly. A house names whose child each person under the roof is, who they are married to and on what day, who is widowed of whom, and how many generations are sleeping in it. The families panel holds every surname in the valley as a tree, and it is one line long on the first morning and four generations deep a week later.

Where they lie

A grave has an address: the churchyard, a row and a plot, eight stones to a row, filled in the order people die. The stone is on the map and it can be clicked, so a name on somebody's sheet takes you to the grave, and the grave says who is still alive to visit it.

The yard only changes when somebody is buried, so the stones are not on the wire four times a second. A frame carries a number that moves at a burial, and the browser fetches the yard again when it does. That is the same trick the wood uses, and it is what lets a valley run for a week with thousands of graves in it.

Why lineage is worth the bookkeeping

Because it is where stories come from for free. A household you clicked on twenty minutes ago is now two households. The boy who lost a fight in the summer is the smith's apprentice by winter. The graves on the Sunday hill have names you recognise. None of it is authored. It is a population model, kept honest, and left alone long enough.