I've just deleted my entire glorantha digest folder from Hotmail and have lost #70-81 - can anyone send them to me ?
2) Sartar population density
A few posts back there was some discussion about population density in Sartar with the conclusion that there were roughly 2 Dragon Pass hexes of land per clan
Two points:
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 (it would've been nice to also have a figure for cottars - 9 acres maybe ?).
While at one level this is rather silly - what sort of land: arable, pasture, good, bad ? 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)and I can easily imagine the Lunars establishing such an arbitrary measurement for tax purposes.
Now using my trusty old calculator and imperial/metric conversion tables
(which tell me there are 247 acres to the square km) and assuming that
the half-carl is the average Sartarite clansman and that he supports a
household of 4 additional people, 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 ?).
Looking at David Dunham's useful compilation of data from Braudel there is an example from France c1700 of 3 or 4 acres required to support each peasant, while my Historical Atlas of Ireland tells me that in the 1880's only 15 acres was considered a large enough estate to be broken up under the Land Laws - so 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 - particularly remembering that he probably only has to give up to the chief and temple a fraction of the rent, tithes and taxes RW peasants generally had to pay. It also leaves plenty of land for common grazing and hunting.
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 ? 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'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.
Of course I know there's not going to be any one answer and that some clans will be more egalitarian (most of the land 'owned' by half-carls with relatively few richer or poorer clansfolk) and others with lots of cottars in varying degrees of debt/dependency/clientage to the carls and thanes - but I'd be interested in knowing how the various groups running Sartar farmer campaigns handle this ?
3) Lunarisation
This brings me on to my other point of what constitutes 'Lunarisation' particularly in the context of its effect on traditional clan society.
FWIW I'm inclined to think that we can use the Romanisation of Britain and the Highland Clearances of the late 18th - early 19th century as useful analogues as in both cases what happens is that rather than a new ruling/landowning class being imposed from outside most of the old chieftains are fairly rapidly Romanised/Anglicised and with the support of the state convert their clan holdings to personal estates and either reduce their fellows to serfdom or in the Scottish case drive them away and replace them with more profitable sheep or cattle (which are also more useful for paying taxes in).
While I can see that an analogous process might have started in Sartar after 1613 (the Sartarites 45' rebellion)- particularly given that there are rich and highly populated states to the north and south to provide a big market for Sartarite wool, I don't believe the Lunars are going to apply the same policy to all tribes.
In fact I rather like the idea that while in some tribes/clans the leaders are Lunarising like mad, being granted Lunar citizenship and titles and establishing slave plantations while systematically undermining the existence of the free peasantry, in others with more traditional anti-lunar leaderships the Lunars are adopting a radically different approach, sending out idealistic young Seven Mother's missionaries to sell to the poorest cottars the benefits of collective farming as allegedly practised in Peloria, and even setting up model communes in clans whose traditional leaders have been wiped out in the various rebellions and granting them tax exemptions and guaranteed prices for their produce which make them highly attractive to the poorer members of the more stratified Sartarite clans as well as too immigrants from outside.
Plus there are also several examples of direct colonisation or plantations (in the Jacobean and Cromwellian sense)of ex-Lunar soldiers and auxilaries at strategic points.
Rather than a simplistic view of Lunarisation this creates a nice messy ferment of conflicting social and religious forces which the various rulers of Sartar have to try and sort out.....
End of The Glorantha Digest V6 #88
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