>I may have missed it but nobody seems to have quoted the suspiciously
>precise information in KoS giving half-carls 27 acres of land and carls
>81 acres
Sounds like a ritual obligation to plow that much, at least to me.
>(it would've been nice to also have a figure for cottars - 9
>acres maybe ?).
If it is a ritual obligation, I doubt the cottars have to do anything of that on their own account. They will work on the carls' (and thanes') fields, I suppose.
>While at one level this is rather silly - what sort of land: arable,
>pasture, good, bad?
Sounds like the arable land to me.
>nevertheless there are RW analogs for such notional figures (the late Roman
>empire for instance taxed its subjects according to how many iuga of land
>they held - although how big an iuga was varied from province to province
>it was IIRC a standard unit within each)
IIRC also the Anglo-Saxon Tribal Hideage gives different sizes for say Kentish or Wessex hides (or different taxation values, amounting to much the same thing).
>Now using my trusty old calculator and imperial/metric conversion tables
>(which tell me there are 247 acres to the square km)
Thanks a whole lot! I never managed to find those tables in Germany...
>and assuming that the half-carl is the average Sartarite clansman
The Report on the Orlanthi says something like "there is also a half-carl, but let's not get into this". IMO a Carl is the usual land-holder (not owner), and cottars make up part of his work force.
However, for your calculation, the combination "one carl, 8 cottars" families might work out like your assumption.
>and that he supports a household of 4 additional people,
This number seems too low. The average carl household would IMO house about a dozen family members, and a number of thralls or cottar-class workers. The average cottar household would have about twelve members, but possibly hiring some of these out to carls or thanes (=carls with an office and an attitude).
>unless my mathematics is seriously at
>fault this gives the average clan of 1200 26 sq km or a block of land
>roughly 5 km square - which would fit nicely into a single hex (for some
>reason I seem to recall reading somewhere that the scale on the DP and
>Balazar maps was only 8 km or 5 mile per hex - is this correct ?).
Roughly if you use the estimate by which an encumbered unit of infantry can march in a day (three hexes) off the road, or six hexes on a well-kept highway. 15 to 30 miles should be just manageable if you have good morale - something the high casualty rates in DP seem to imply.
BTW, the numbers in Questlines 1 (or were it those in Greg's original hexmap version published in some obscure APAZine) seem to indicate that 1200 is a larger clan. The Hero Wars clan making procedure resulted in a moderately wealthy clan of 800 and an impoverished clan of about 1100 at the German con.
>assuming that only part of the 27 acres is
>good arable land this figure doesn't seem too out of order and makes the
>average Orlanthi farmer a relatively prosperous figure by RW
>ancient/medieval standards
He has to be to continue being a free farmer. The Real World free farmers in the middle ages (i.e. the ones able to field a militia which could hold off a feudal force) tended to be quite rich oligarchs with cottar-like dependants, e.g. in Frisia or Ditmarschen in northern Germany or Trondelag in Norway.
>What really interests me are the social dynamics behind these figures -
>while we're told that land is owned collectively by the clan and
>(presumably) re-distributed regularly between bloodlines and households
>who makes the decisions?
I for one assume that a "carl's stead" could be jointly inherited by his sons, and managed by one of them in the legal position. This might make them individually half-carls (one with the plow, two with a half-team each)...
(Shouldn't "half-carl" more correctly be called "third-carl", based on requirements and equipment?)
What isn't covered at all is working to clear out new fields for the plow, i.e. the pioneering settler (e.g. the younger sons of a wealthy carl or the ambitious cottar?).
>and what is the basis for giving some clan
>members (the carls) parcels of land up to (maybe) 9 times the size of
>others (ownership of a full ox-team and plough for a carl or half a team
>for the half-carl?) and I hope that the HW clan generation system takes
>this into account.
I.e. what are the laws of inheritance? Can't be primogeniture among Heortlings (though Vingkotling law might).
>I'd also like to know what the average size is of an Orlanthi stead as
>this determines how far from each other settlements are - frex if there
>are 50 people to a stead then they'll be on average well over a km apart
>while if it's only 5-10 people per stead they'll only be a couple of
>hundred metres apart.
IMO the average "stead" (or village) is run by one to three carls and the appropriate number of cottar families. Cottar and carl activities should roughly even out. With "cattle loans" the number of cattle kept in the carl's house might be kept lower than the full number of herd animals to support 8 oxen by leasing out the animals to the cottars. There should be room for wealthier and poorer carls, really.
Solitary steads should be limited to pioneer types. Pioneers who manage to draw enough people to their place that they can manage a carl's requirement are the real social movers, I suppose.
While my campaign was Heortlander, and more feudal than in Sartar, I tried to use similar estimates for the population while trying to allocate the vast number of 500,000 Heortlanders to a land no greater than Lunar Tarsh. The obvious answer was "less commonly held wildmark" where settling conditions were favourably (i.e. the "flat" parts of the plateau). Less free carls due to the feudal influences, more dependent half-carl like farmers, and lots of cottars (since the Heortlanders abhor slavery, and even thraldom) or stickpickers (no great difference in housing or arable land, but in number of sheep).
Further up in the foothills, I tried to have mostly (wealthy) carls and cottars, because of less centralizing influence and practically no feudal influences; and of course in between all manners of transitory states. High up in the mountains, only pioneers endure.
End of The Glorantha Digest V6 #106
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