Why? stickpickers, in general, are the people who have no skills and no capital (tools, livestock, etc.). They are the ones who turn up for fyrd duty with a battered shield, a bent spear with a loose head and no armour. They're stuck in the back rank to make up the numbers but no one is surprised if they're the first to run away.
In truth the Lunar repressions probably increase the number of stickpickers. When a regiment of Lunar soldiers seizes and butchers a clan's entire herd all the thanes and carls are promptly reduced to cotters. Within a year no wheat can be grown because there are no oxen to plow, everyone is poorer and cotters who were only just managing find they no longer can.
>And it seems to me there's a model for "stickpicker makes good"
>somewhere in the Gloranthan literature.
Sure, the exceptional one does. Intelligence and grasping the right opportunities can get someone up in all but the most rigid of societies. However the majority don't.
>Perhaps that story is just a mythologized explanation of the
>socio-economic opportunities that presented themselves to the
>indigenous population after a period of imperial-colonial conflict.
>:-)
Perhaps.
-- Donald Oddy http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/
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