A Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft #17: Houses of the UK

Houses in the United Kingdom are divided into three categories:  Great, Lesser, and minor.  Great Houses are those which possess a Well of class S or S+, Lesser Houses are those which possess a Well of class A+, and all other Houses are classed as minor.

While in the past the Great and Lesser Houses had various special privileges under the law, these were chipped away at over the centuries, and most of the remaining ones were effectively nullified by the Oakenshott ruling of 1927, which set the precedent that House membership did not grant any special status in criminal or civil proceedings.  Great and Lesser House status does still give the House the right to a seat on the Board, but corporations and private individuals with appropriate Well holdings also qualify for Board seats in exactly the same way.  Nowadays the only legal benefits unique to the Houses are extremely minor and antiquated ones, such the right to a certain term of address or being entitled to wear a particular item of clothing to Board meetings.

By the mid 20th century, it was commonly believed that the time of the British Houses was coming to an end, and that they would dwindle into insignificance.  While many Houses did indeed suffer this fate, others proved more adaptable, and successfully made use of their Wells, sigl traditions, and inherited wealth to carve out a niche for themselves in the modern world.  Most of the current Houses of the UK are weaker than they once were, and in absolute terms the fraction of the British economy that they control is small, but they command an amount of influence out of proportion to their size and a House surname still carries a good deal of social weight.

The Great Houses

At the time of writing, the Great Houses of the UK number eight:  Barrett-Lennard, Cawley, Chetwynd, De Haughton, Hawker, Meath, Reisinger, and Winterton.  There are currently nineteen S+ and S-class Wells officially registered in the United Kingdom, and these Great Houses collectively own just under half of them.

These Wells rarely change hands, and as such the number of Great Houses rarely rises or falls.  This is partly due to special UK regulations that restrict the sale and purchase of S+ and S-class Wells, and partly because the Great Houses are all fantastically wealthy – for a new Great House to rise, they’d have to buy an S-class Well from its existing owner, and said owners generally have little motivation to sell.  The last time that the count of Great Houses changed was in 2009, when House Egmont sold its Light S Well to LLV Holdings, relinquishing its Great House status in the process.  The roster has remained steady since then.

A brief overview of the current Great Houses can be found in Chapter #18.

The Lesser Houses

Lesser Houses are those Houses of the UK who own a Well of class A+.

A+ Wells in the UK are highly valued.  The legal restrictions on their sale are much less onerous than those on the sale of S-class ones, and while acquiring an A+ Well is still a difficult and expensive process, it’s a realistic goal for a sufficiently wealthy House, corporation, or individual.  Lesser House status also grants a seat on the Board, automatically making the holder a player in UK politics.  As a result, competition for these Wells is fierce.  A minor House will fight tooth and nail to own one, and a Lesser House won’t sell theirs unless utterly desperate.  It’s almost unheard of for a House to own more than one A+ Well, and very few corporations have succeeded in purchasing one (though not for lack of trying).

Unlike the Great Houses, Lesser Houses see a fair amount of turnover.  While some of the current Lesser Houses have held their place for more than a century, there have been just as many new arrivals who owe their places to a meteoric rise (often followed by an equally meteoric fall).

There are too many Lesser Houses to list in detail, but a few of the more notable ones are described in Chapter #19.

The Minor Houses

Any House whose most powerful Well is of A-class or below is considered a minor House.

There is no significant barrier preventing a family from declaring themselves a minor House.  In theory, anyone with a D-class Well in their back garden could draw themselves up a coat of arms and start calling themselves ‘House Something-or-other’ – they’d be laughed at, but they could do it.  In practice, though, most minor Houses are quite old, with family trees and ancestral holdings tracing back hundreds of years.  Often they end up outlasting Great and Lesser Houses vastly more wealthy than they are, simply because they aren’t notable enough to draw unfriendly attention.   

Minor Houses often have a strong connection to their family Wells and lands.  A typical minor House will have held land in a particular county for hundreds of years, and it’s not uncommon for them to have groundskeepers or Well tenders or shapers whose great-grandparents worked for the great-grandparents of the current Head of House.  It’s common for minor Houses who’ve recently made the jump to Lesser House status to place heavy emphasis on this family history, as if to remind everyone that they haven’t forgotten their origins.

But while most Minor Houses are old, many aren’t.  It’s surprisingly common for a new House to be founded by some locator or investment banker or car salesman who by some strange set of circumstances came into possession of a Well and decided to make a go of it.  Most of these new-born Houses disappear within a generation or two, but others take root and grow, and over time come to develop histories and traditions of their own.