Some cadet branches came to inherit the crown of the senior line, e.g. If a cadet chose to raise a family, its members were expected to maintain the family's social status by avoiding derogation, but could pursue endeavors too demeaning or too risky for the senior branch, such as emigration to another sovereign's realm, engagement in commerce, or a profession such as law, religion, academia, military service or government office.
A cadet, having less means, was not expected to produce a family. In such cases, primary responsibility for promoting the family's prestige, aggrandizement, and fortune fell upon the senior branch for future generations. Both before and after a state legal default of inheritance by primogeniture, younger brothers sometimes vied with older brothers to be chosen their father's heir or, after the choice was made, sought to usurp the elder's birthright. While agnatic primogeniture became a common way of keeping the family's wealth intact and reducing familial disputes, it did so at the expense of younger sons and their descendants. Moreover, brothers and their descendants sometimes quarreled over their allocations, or even became estranged. In families and cultures in which that was not the custom or law, such as the feudal Holy Roman Empire, the equal distribution of the family's holdings among male members was eventually apt to so fragment the inheritance as to render it too small to sustain the descendants at the socio-economic level of their forefather. In the ruling dynasties and noble families of much of Europe and Asia, the family's major asset ( realm, titles, fiefs, property and income) have historically been passed from a father to his firstborn son in what is known as primogeniture younger sons, the cadets, inherited less wealth and authority to pass to future generations of descendants. In history and heraldry, a cadet branch consists of the male-line descendants of a monarch's or patriarch's younger sons ( cadets).
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