Small groups of magi who share a house and live among villagers as eccentric mundanes, buying their own supplies at the local markets, doing their own cleaning, and relying for protection only on whatever local police force or military exists to protect the residents of the area.
The social dynamics of the cottage covenants often far more resemble those of a family than those of a traditional covenant, and indeed, members of the smaller cottage covenants usually choose to pass themselves off as family to the surrounding mundanes of the area. They are very rarely open to new members, and usually consist of the descendants of the covenant's original founders.
Most of the Order's cottage covenants are descended from the Covenant at Felchester, which was founded in 325. Felchester and its descendant covenants are collectively known as the "Castrian Covenants," as they are all named for the Westmarch villages in which they have proliferated, villages whose names reflect their origins as the old military borders of Tympania: Felchester, Talchester, Morchester and Dunchester.
Members of the Castrian covenants raise their students together in loose Amicitian Fellowships. Although they originally came by this practice utterly independently of Spingelli and Cos's early fourth century Amicitian movement, their descendants have come to identify themselves as Amicitians: they refer to themselves as such and have come to adopt much of the terminology of classical Amicitianism -- "Fellowships," for example. The form of Amicitianism which evolved at the cottage covenants is known as "Castrian Amicitianism."
Although the term "cottage covenant" is usually used as a synonym for the Castrian covenants of the Westmarch, the term is also sometimes used to refer to the rural "hermitage-covenants" of St. Pyrandor, Niveum Pomeridianum, and Tinea Hiberna.
- The Covenant at Felchester: founded 325; dissolved 401
- The Covenant at Talchester: founded 345
- The Covenant at Morchester: founded 381
- The Covenant of St. Pyrandor: founded 394
- Covenant Niveum Pomeridianum: founded 406
- The Covenant at Dunchester: founded 413
- Covenant Tinea Hiberna: founded 423
