Chapter 268

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House Affairs - sounds significant! However, on paper, everything turned out to be much more prosaic. This is just a huge heap of various agreements. Through all these endless folders, you can trace the history of the family for several centuries. They began to draw up the first documents back in the distant thirteenth century. The parchments of contracts were interspersed with the personal notes of the wizards, which was quite interesting. Although, Middle English causes a headache despite some experience with it from the Hogwarts library.

Closer to the fifteenth century, the documentation became more structured and less like poems. Who got how much and for what, who sold what to whom, who got married to whom, and on what terms - you could see everything here. In what feuds of ordinary people, feudal lords, they took part, on whose side, which of the wizards was against, how much they earned, and so on. There were also small contracts with various families of wizards that were just founded in those days, contracts with dukes for the provision of various kinds of services ... There's a history that no one really knows about!

For example, it is no secret that the British and the French had this tradition in the Middle Ages - to fight almost every hundred years. So the House of Black and several others took an active part in three such wars, including the "centenary." In truth, about a quarter of families took part in this series of clashes - there are militants, healers, and all sorts of saboteurs ... And it's all there. House of Black, in fact, for three centuries managed to be noted in almost all of Europe, and not only on the British Isles and French coasts. And they brought something back from everywhere. Sometimes all they brought home was news of the deaths of family members, but that was rare.

The most interesting thing to learn from these documents was something else. In the days before the Statute of Secrecy, rather crude and large-scale magical manipulation was common among wizards. Various maleficium, necromancy, and necromagic. Alchemy was popular. The wizards did not hide, and their activities rested on helping the allies on the battlefield, protecting a large number of people, or vice versa, weakening them. It was at that time that Protego Diabolica appeared - one dark wizard, with its help, sacrificing a dozen prisoners for greater magical energy, helped the allied troops retreat in some battle. Unfortunately, it is not specified in which one. Many such influences were implicit so that the enemy did not catch the use of magic and did not begin to pull up his wizards, turning wars into a farce. It's like nuclear weapons - they exist, you can threaten with them, but it's better not to use them. In everyday life, wizards also found use - they could curse the land of a neighboring feudal lord, or vice versa, remove, or even improve the harvest. There were plenty of healers, herbalists, and potion-makers, and some of them were not even known to be wizards.

With the introduction of the Statute of Secrecy, the need for large and cumbersome spells and rituals gradually disappeared. But not only the need for them disappeared - there was no way to apply them. Everything too obvious immediately gave away the wizards, and persecutions began from the side of the Church and from the side of the newly formed Ministry of Magic. In wizarding families, one might say, by inertia, they still studied those cumbersome spells and specific magical disciplines, but gradually this was declining. There were, by the way, other concentrators - staffs for cumbersome magical manipulations. They were also no longer needed, and they were finally replaced by wands, taking the place of ritual or symbolic attributes.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, I couldn't find a single mention of any serious use of magic. But there were plenty of mentions of the development of wand magic. Because of the Statute, the sciences that require accuracy, filigree execution received a boost, and the external effect of most spells became very scanty. Scanty, but surgically accurate. The militants have become more duelists. The sudden insularity of society had a deleterious effect-all rushed into politics, intrigue, and petty squabbles. The number of agreements and contracts had become enormous by the nineteenth century, but they were all somehow petty, with a trick, they smelled of some kind of meanness. Perverted theories of "Purity of Blood" surfaced out of nowhere, which was not particularly mentioned. Typical racism crawled out of all the cracks.

I think the whole point is that many activities, family affairs, became no longer available to wizards, which is why they literally went crazy. For example, until the very eighties of the twentieth century, I did not find a single contract for the provision of services as a militant. But before the Statute, there were many of them, even from the Crown. In general, everyone went into politics, but in a closed society, it turned out so that they gnawed each other's throats. Since the House of Black has always been numerous, these disputes spread to the family. As a result, almost no one was left. And this, by the way, is in almost all old families. We are few. We have successfully exterminated each other.

However, these are only my conclusions, based on documents and personal records both to them and to the situation at that time. I could be completely wrong.