# Royals and their free-time



## TopHat (Nov 2, 2013)

What does a prince or princess do? What does a crown-prince/princess do? What are their duties, do they have ordinary jobs? Does their duties and/or jobs differ between ages and countries?


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## wordwalker (Nov 2, 2013)

_Completely_ depends on periods and countries. As does whether they have any free time, or if it's all free time.

For large parts of the middle ages, the answer was "hunting," the number one passion of nobles. Or it could be any kind of art or game, from painting to chess to watching horse races, or of course feasts. Or you have more distinct answers; Marie Antoinette loved to go to a little "farm" and play peasant, with her servants to help her of course.

Also, keep in mind if your prince (or princess?) is also a classic knight in a warlike society, they could be spending three to six hours every day working out. Fights in heavy armor can come down to a slight edge in raw strength or endurance, and nobody wanted to be beaten by someone more dedicated.


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## psychotick (Nov 2, 2013)

Hi,

Don't forget the more useless / self indulgent activities - drinking, gambling, wenching (if it's middle ages fantasy etc). You can't hunt and fight all day long after all. There was a reason a lot of nobles were sent off to military school etc. Not just to make them accepted military leaders, but to straighten them out.

Cheers, Greg.


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## GeekDavid (Nov 2, 2013)

There's also tormenting the household staff (slaves?) by endlessly finding minor things for them to do that the royal could just as easily do for themselves. I think some royals would have the servants go to the bathroom for them if they could figure out how to transfer the need.


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## Sam Evren (Nov 2, 2013)

In some cultures, princesses and noble ladies in general would have been taught embroidery, probably spinning (wool), and other textile work at younger ages. As they got older, they would lead groups of lesser nobles/ladies in waiting in the activity. 

They weren't making clothes for the peasants, though; this would be higher-order textile work. This also shouldn't be looked at as a formal occupation, more a preoccupation to while away time _and_ _yet_ create something useful.

They would also lead their ladies in waiting in prayer and read them passages from the bible. The goal would have been to reinforce beliefs and share them.

These would have been average, day-to-day activities. 

These examples come from the late 1600s.


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## skip.knox (Nov 5, 2013)

TopHat's subject line asked about free time, but the text asked only about duties. The one tends to define the other. The very notion of "free time" is rather a modern one (Maggie Smith: what's a 'week end'?). Disclaimer: what follows is specific to medieval Europe. Other folk may chime in on other cultures.

A prince is the son of a reigning king, so a prince had no duties (and therefore no real free time -- it was all just time) except those his daddy might put upon him. Rather like any teenager. Now, some princes were fully adults, if their father was rude enough to live into old age, and most commonly the prince would be given some duchy or appanage to rule, in which case the prince had the duties that any monarch had, except he also had to report to Dad once in a while.

So, what were the duties? Put broadly, it was to administer justice, to lead in battle, to show hospitality, to protect the weak (this was a later addition), and to consult with his barons. How this was done varied greatly by time, place and individual, but it was not unusual for a monarch to have a set time for hearing petitions and rendering judgments. Leading in battle is self-evident, but someone here mentioned hunting. One could call that a leisure activity, but hunting was much more important than that. It was a way to practice skills (both personal and group) that were useful in battle. It was a way to show one's own competence and courage. And it was a way to entertain other nobles. It was hugely important in maintaining one's social position.

Hospitality is an interesting one. The hunting just mentioned is one aspect, but it includes providing other entertainments carefully chosen to fit the status of the visiting noble or other official. Hospitality was the primary opportunity for showing one's liberality, that ancient aristocratic behavior of showing off by giving gifts. There are whole books devoted to feasting, gift-giving and other aspects of hospitality. It's a great chance to add some color (G.R.R. does this, perhaps to excess).

Protecting the weak covers widows and orphans first, then was extended to protecting the Church. The ruler was regularly portrayed as a father, so justice and protection sort of went hand-in-hand. But there were some surprising angles to this, too. I think of the King's Touch, the belief in France that the king could cure scrofula (a skin disease) by his touch. On his accession the new king was expected to pass through the town (Paris or Reims, or both). The usual image is of the king dispensing coins, but at least in France there was this semi-miraculous aspect that had people reaching out, straining to be touched by the divine as embodied by their new king. 

This is too long, so I'll stop there. Put briefly: many duties, but irregular and rarely scheduled, and no clear line between duty and pastime.


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## TopHat (Nov 5, 2013)

Thank you skip. knox!  
You have no idea how much easier my writing just became.

//TopHat


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## Malik (Nov 5, 2013)

One other point about hunting, and a reason that nobles hunted so much: hunting familiarized them with their territory and with what we in the military call terrain considerations, which to them wouldn't be much different from what we look for, today: observation and fields of fire (or in this case, fields of view), cover and concealment, obstacles, key terrain, and avenues of approach. You can't attack or defend an area without knowing all this. It's essentially murder to move a force through an area that you haven't analyzed.

Tracking animals takes you to places that you would never, ever, get into on your own. You also learn the easiest ways around the place, because most animals are lazy. You will find hidden water sources, concealed avenues of approach (dry creek beds, deer trails, etc.), natural chokepoints, great ambush sites, old ruins, and so forth. 

This is information that an invader from out of the area wouldn't have. Good maps are tough to come by, even today. A good, capable military leader would hunt enough that he or she would be able to hear a report that the badguys are in one area and know off the top of his head how they're going to move through that area -- where, how fast, and why -- and how to counter them.

Hunting. Lots of hunting, even if that just means riding around all day.

And who knows? There might be something cool in those old ruins.


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## skip.knox (Nov 5, 2013)

I've been exploring hunting as an aspect of my fantasy world. The hunting isn't for wolves or deer or boar, though, it's for orks, goblins and other monsters. I figured that if hunting predators in historical Earth was done in part to control the predator population, it just made sense that people would have hunted the even more dangerous giant spiders or whatever other fang-and-claw was running around the neighborhood.

This, to expand on Malik's point, has the effect of familiarizing the warriors with lairs and dens of the fang-and-claws, not to mention keeping up with their fighting tactics (all animals have their fighting tactics, from foxes to ogres).


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## Malik (Nov 10, 2020)

Man, I'm necro'ing this thread and for that, I apologize. But the past two months have been germane to the conversation.

Rabbit season opened up on September 1st. My neighbor, who owns a 25-acre parcel of wetlands across the road from Malik Manor (not swamp wetlands, but Pacific Northwest temperate forest with springs), gave me permission to hunt his property. Our local rabbit population exploded; there are likely thousands of them on this hill right now.

What's interesting to me is, after two months of just walking the trails up and down the hill every couple of days with my bow, I can now spot an anomaly in the brush or the treeline in an instant. That rabbit or squirrel who thinks he's hiding? No chance. That bump wasn't there two days ago. It's incredible how fast your eye acclimates when it's seeing the same thing regularly.

I bring this up to reinforce the amount of hunting I believe nobles and landowners would have done, if for no other reason than to burn their lands into their brains. I can tell when a limb falls down, when a game trail is more heavily used than it was a few days ago, when the patterns shift with the weather.

There is no place to hide from me on these 25 acres, and it's only been half an hour at a time, a few days a week, for two months. Give me a hundred times this much land and a couple of years to walk it and I would know it intimately.

If the local lord doesn't want to expend the energy to hunt, I guarantee you his marshal or captain of the guard will be an avid hunter and will know every bush and hillock in their domain.


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## Insolent Lad (Nov 10, 2020)

I'm writing a rabbit hunt right now, but Neanderthals, not nobles (in my SF time-travel novel in progress). I suspect all that would absolutely apply to them. They would indeed know their territory intimately.


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