>>693About intermarriage between those of different classes and social status, the great kick-in-the-shin on my mother's side was of course, the commie revolution and the general breakdown of aristocracy following the first world war.
Many on various sides of her family (Russian, German and Dutch) were very well-to-do. I have one great great great great great grandfather who not only went to university with Beethoven, but was of a higher social standing than him at the time.
My dad's mum came from what I guess you could call an aspirational lower-middle class butcher's family. Her father was the oldest of 5 children, orphaned when he was 11, so he had a hard life. My gran wanted to marry a lowly dock-worker, but he put his foot down and said no, so she married my grandfather who was an RAF engineer who re-trained as a Barber.
Whilst both my parents could be described as being from a middle class background purely based on income, culturally speaking my dad had much more of a lower-class rural upbringing whilst my mum likes to imagine she still has it in her to be all fancy and posh and would consider herself more towards the upper-end of middle class.
>>699You can't really speak of comparing the Picts (an ethnolinguistic group) to Clans (a social structure pertaining to a given period of time).
However, you can compare the Picts (who were Brythonic, that is having been settled in Great Britain and speaking a language akin to Welsh), and the Gaels (who came from Ireland in the late dark ages and brought a Goidelic - gaelic tongue).
You couldn't really say that the tribal social structure of the Picts was juxtaposed to the clan structure of the Gaels, that's a false assumption. Prior to the middle ages, the Gaels were tribal as well. However, having subjugated the Picts, introducing the Gaelic language and also Christianity, the ruling elite in Scotlad were Gaelic, so that when the Clan system came about, the families which became the centre of clans were often of Gaelic origin.
Let me explain in more detail the differences between tribe and clan.
In the time of the tribes, surnames/patrinomes weren't really a thing, and whilst descent from a great leader would have been noted, it didn't necessarily need to be directly patrilineal. One tribal leader wasn't necessarily the son of the previous tribal leader, and they would have to have proved their merit to gain the confidence of their tribe to be considered the leader.
The Clan system came about due to nepotism. A great leader would make conditions rosy for their son to take rule after them, and to note their continued descent from one great leader to the next, these ruling families began to use patrinomes (and they did so many centuries before surnames became commonplace for everyone).
Now the problem with Europe's ruling elite is that they inbreed a lot, and that's not healthy.
The Clan system's solution to this was to have an "extended family" of non-related people who had sworn allegiance to the ruling family. They could inter-marry with the ruling family, thus maintaining genetic variance, but only those who had direct patrilineage from the ruling family could claim to be legitimate heirs to the clan and thus potential leaders of it.
Surnames became common for everybody around the 1700's, maybe as late as the 1800's, but to put this in historical context, the English and their traitorous allies were royally fucking up the Clan system, dissolving clans, proscribing surnames and claiming traditional Clan land for themselves. Since the keeping of patrinomes for the maintenence of the Clan system no longer bore relevance, all of the lower members of the clans didn't really have much to consider when they too began taking surnames, and so just went for the surname of the clan they had been allied to.
Hopefully that explains things to you.