this cult of continuity, the confident assumption of knowing to whom and to what we owe our existence - whence the importance of the idea of ‘origins’ – Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”
What passes for legal tender is a convention for the reckoning of debts – and a legalised violence steps in where convention falters.
… there is no foundation in nature or in natural law, why a set of words upon a parchment should convey the dominion of land; why the son should have a right to exclude his fellow creatures from a determinate spot of ground, because his father had done so, before him … - William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769).
And here’s a pdf for the frontier household piece.