Arn & The Dowry

In Swedish, with subtitles

We started watching Arn: The Knight Templar this evening. It looks like somebody took this movie and its sequel and cut them up into a mini-series. Anne thinks we've seen it before. I think we have just seen so many medieval epics that they all begin to look alike, not that this isn't a fine movie on its own.
     In this story we have two sisters and their father can only afford a wedding/dowry for one of them, so the other will be doomed (DOOMED!) to life in a convent. The dowry has always been a bit of a mystery to me. Kind of sexist and unfair. Why should the father have to put up the money to marry off his daughters? What about his sons? And then it occurred to me that this is a capital investment. Back then it probably was much more difficult to raise the capital needed to start any kind of enterprise, and an enterprise is what you needed in order to maintain any kind of civilized lifestyle, like a roof over your head, a pot to cook in, clothes to keep you warm, and enough extra food to feed your growing brood of children.
    You probably didn't pay the dowry to just any John Doe. The son of a wealthy man is going to require a larger dowry than the son of a poor man. For some reason this was never made clear to me in any of classes I took, or maybe I just wasn't paying attention. Probably day dreaming about rocket ships and ray guns.