> The fourth caste of the Malkioni isn't the peasants but rather the
> citizens. It's only called the farmer's caste because so many citizens
> are farmers.
This is precisely the shortcut I was using, though it's notable that "peasant" is a word that has changed in the English language -- your clarification is a good one to make though, as the original meaning of the word, which can be a bit unclear, is more something like "locals, villagers, hoi polloi, the people" and whatnot rather than the connotations of rural serfdom that the word supplies in modern English. "Workers Caste/Working Classes" would possibly be more accurate, if used neutrally, except that it seems to assume some implicit socialistic ideas unlikely to be pertinent to 1st, 2nd, or 3rd Age Glorantha -- the notion of a "workers caste" in a pseudo-medieval context can conjure up politicised imagery straight from Bakhtin and other Marxist writers, likely to be quite inapplicable to the Malkioni !!!
It's also a little hard to talk about this caste in general terms, because obviously serfdom and the truly downtrodden peasantry do both exist in the West to start with, even though the social positions of members of this caste will be extremely variable from place to place, individual to individual.
Julian Lord
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