This email started out really short, but came out much longer than I intended. Sorry in advance.
So, I was reading from stuff about the Ancien Regime leading up to the French Revolution and parts of its bewildering complexity appealed to me as a game setting in a way that the little I've read about the Glorantha west has not. But I admit I know little about the west. I've not yet bought the new Fronela book, for example. (Shame on me.)
Is there any part of Glorantha that is something like this? (And, no, this isn't a fair representation of the Ancien Regime. It's just a caricature of the parts that I liked as a game setting.)
a. Nobles: A hereditary nobility exists. There are lots of fancy titles, many of which correspond to nothing and nowhere. Nobles are limited in what occupations they can follow, but many royal and military offices are reserved to them. They are not subject to the same courts as commoners are; only other nobles ever judge them, with the predictable results.
b. Seigneurs: Some people own permanent "seigneurial" interests in the land, which do not include the right to possess and use it. These seigneurs overlap substantially with the nobility, but many of them are commoners. The rights are a complex assortment, but include things like: a small annual payment; a large payment on death or sale; the obligation to provide labor and cartage; annual gifts, etc. The rights are usually not written down (like everything else, local custom varies), so are open to manipulation by the local courts, which might be run by the very same manipulators.
c. The Church: There is an established church that gets something like 3 to 12% of the annual farm produce, with a the rate varying geographically and a complex assortment of assessments, exemptions, and blind eyes. The king appoints nobles to the big positions in the church, and they appropriate a lot of the tithes for their personal purposes. Some hold bishoprics almost as if they owned them. The church is organized in parishes (each of which has a parish council) that are supposed to help the poor and such, but are often underfunded. There are usually no parishes where an abbey or other religious institution is the seigneur.
d. Taxes: The king imposes a bewildering array of taxes; as a whole, the system defies fairness. Some regions have a direct tax on land, but not all land is subject to it. Of course, the land survey is wildly out of date, too. Other regions have a notional personal income tax, but it is unscientifically assessed at the local level, so is based on appearances of wealth more than anything else. (I.e. it's horribly unfair, especially if you have a good year.) Additionally, there are indirect taxes on things like oil, salt, beer, wine, and leather. For all of these taxes, there are a zillion exemptions, some full, some partial. Nobles and churchmen usually don't pay. Some towns have bought exemptions. Lands are treated differently depending on whether they were added to the kingdom by marriage or treaty or conquest and on whether they were ever in revolt. So they only make sense historically.
e. Farmers: Farmers resent all of the above, but do nothing about it. (Yet.) The farmers have a local council that decides many things. It may have the right of low justice. It usually handles land management issues, such as when land that is not fenced in will be harvested, how many livestock each farmer can put on common pastures, etc. The boundaries for the local council do not necessarily match those of the seigneur or the local noble or the parish. Sometimes, the local seigneur runs these things. In most places, it would be fair to call the farmers peasants; in a very few places, they are really serfs (i.e. not free to leave the land without forfeiting all their worldly possessions).
f. A Rising Gentry: There are agricultural entrepreneurs who are mostly of common origin and who do a combination of two things. First, they lease land from whoever possesses it and farm it more efficiently. (For example, they might own a better plow and a full team of horses for plowing.) Second, they lease the seigneurial interests, and operate those more "efficiently" (e.g. by "restoring" supposed rights that had not been honored for a hundred years). The other farmers both resent and aspire to the second, and conflate the first with the second as often as not. Many of them also lend money. (Since interest is banned, they theoretically "buy" the debtor's land for a fixed sum, collect annual "rent" that is actually a percent of what they lent, and contractually commit to selling the land back to the debtor for the same amount as the original "purchase" price.) These guys often run the local council and the parish council.
g. The Constrained King: The king, while notionally absolute, in fact is constrained by custom and the threat of revolt. A hundred years or so ago, there was a big revolt of the nobles when the king tried to change some of their rights. He suppressed the revolt, but took the lesson.
h. The Royal Court: The quality of the individual in the office of the kingship is wildly variable. So, the officials around the king often run things. They are all nobles. There are power struggles between different factions. Foreign wars and an extravagant palace mean that the court is always looking for more money.
i. The Cities: There are few big cities. The population of the cities is a small minority -- 10% or so. Half of that is in the capital city, which is always a net importer of food and other things from the countryside.
j. More Complexity: Every generalization has at least one exception. Even this one.
Thanks,
Chris Lemens
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