Royal and noble courts?

[Caged Maiden]

man that got really big. Sorry. I should have answered one at a time.

 

[Jess A]

Anihow - sure, I will read through what you just wrote tomorrow (whilst I'm writing a history essay on the printing press, oddly enough - hehe) because I want to absorb it properly (and I'm brain dead from work). No worries about posting a lot; you've seen Ravana's essays, right? Love essays. A quick scan shows me that I will find everything of use!

 

[Ravana]

Heh.

You want to know what's frightening? I go back and reread my posts from time to time. You'd think one time through would be enough even for me to tire of them.…

(Actually, it's usually because I need to check what I already said… so I don't end up repeating myself and making things even longer. )

 

[Jess A]

Ravana: -chuckle- If you have compiled all of your wonderful ideas into a miniature 'essay', then I think that is valuable and worth referring back to indeed!

Anihow - I have read your wonderful information (finally; I finished my essay) and I thank you again! I will certainly request some books. I can get them from my University's library. I found some wonderful history books on early modern European culture (one is cleverly named 'Early modern European culture').

We discussed post-plague Europe last week and the week before, so I understand what you are saying. I find post-plague Europe very interesting and I will probably use elements of that period to structure my work. I originally liked the feudal-system idea, but I also like the thought of having a middle class and I do love those wealthy merchants! The more I understand these things, the more I can play with the rules (and break some if realistic enough).

Thanks again guys.

 

[SeverinR]

I also like rich merchants, a good source of annoyance and of charity in a story.

Did the rich merchants mark the end of the feudal system or was it just modified?

I guess my system would be a modified feudal system, land grants and ownership is possible, and royalty are in control of the military and justice, and of course taxes must be paid to support the goverment.

 

[Ravana]

While this is a considerable oversimplification: rich merchants were the antithesis of the feudal system. Though you have to be talking about "feudalism" correctly in the first place for this to be so. (Not saying you aren't; just using that as a lead-in.) I suspect that many people confuse "feudalism," which is a specific approach to economics, with "monarchialism," rule by kings and nobles. The two are far from synonymous. In fact, strong central monarchies were another antithesis of feudalism, since feudalism distributed power across thousands of pairs of hands; the rise of strong centralized states required taking it back.

Feudalism was premised on land ownership, which in turn was premised on the assumption that controlling land equaled controlling production. This is one of the biggest reasons the populations of cities plunged following the Roman period, and remained low in Western Europe until the Renaissance: a city of 5,000 was considered quite sizable, and 30,000 was immense. Large urban areas weren't good for anything, as far as the powers that be were concerned, since a peasant can only be expected to walk so far to a field to provide a day's work. They were, in fact, downright inconvenient in most cases. Upwards of 90% of the population of Europe was spread out in tiny hamlets and individual farmhouses, pursuing agriculture on behalf of whatever noble happened to own that particular stretch.

Merchants, on the other hand, rely on trade–and barter never made anyone "rich." So it had to be cash trade, which means selling to people who actually have the surplus cash to spend. Trade also benefits from scale: the more of an item you can purchase or sell at a single point, the lower your transportation costs. The former, in most cases, requires concentration of production–i.e. towns and cities; the latter requires concentration of consumers–i.e. towns and cities. Or, in either case, a concentration of the flow of goods through a single point, with markets where those goods can be exchanged and then traded farther up or down the line… which, while it doesn't require a town or city, is guaranteed to cause one to spring up. So, for merchants, large urban areas are not only convenient, they're all but vital, and in the long run vigorous trade makes them all but inevitable.

This is an oversimplification: it's also not necessarily the way a world would have to be. It's conceivable for large urban areas to exist side-by-side with a feudal system of land ownership in the rural areas. And they did, to a certain extent, during the periods of transition away from feudalism… though in Europe, at least, the rise of urban areas was invariably fatal to feudalism in the long run. You can all but map feudalism's death simply by mapping out the increase in towns and cities, and populations residing in them, over time. You can also map out the fortunes of many noble families by mapping out how rapidly they adapted to the notion of cash-based economies, or the notion that "production" does not always equal "tillage."

Outside of Western Europe, processes differed slightly. There were immense cities in China and Japan even during their feudal periods; in contrast, Eastern Europe had very few large cities even up to the time of its passing. What killed it in all these cases was centralization–the Tokugawa shogunate in Japan, the imposition of centralized nation-states following WWI in Eastern Europe, the Communist Revolutions in Russia and China.

So, no, feudalism didn't get modified. In Western Europe, what we usually are thinking of when discussing "feudalism," it got strangled; in Eastern Europe and Asia, it got axed.

 

[SeverinR]

Makes since, if all you want is agriculture and sustaining occupations, small spread out population was productive.

So my system of goverment would be more of a sub-nobles ruling as mayors, nobles ruling as governors, with one main ruler, have not ued it, but probably a house of commons or such, to make the lowly citizen feel like they have some input.

So did most of Europe change from Feudalism to monarchialism? I assume nobility still had privlege in the monarch's realm.

 

[Ravana]

Sometimes rather too much privilege.

Feudalism is technically a subcategory of monarchialism–there's still a monarch at the top in either case: what matters is how much power those below the top held, and for what reasons. (I suppose it would be possible for feudalism to exist without a monarch, though I'm having a bit of trouble imagining it… especially in the long term.) The privileges of nobles were eroded over time in most cases–a process that generally involved centuries, except for the later ones where the whole system was replaced at one go due to revolution.

As an economic system, feudalism comes down to two factors: (1) means of production and who controls it… which, as mentioned, in the traditional view meant land ownership; (2) the distribution of military power, and responsibility to pay for providing it, among those same people. So, conceivably, if all a society's military were provided by a number of wealthy merchants and/or manufacturers answerable to a single higher authority, it could still be regarded as a form of feudalism.

Control over production, in feudal terms, has broader implications, though. For starters, in order to control production, you also need to control all the factors that go into production. For agriculture, this pretty much comes down to two things again: land and labor (and consider all the things that might factor into "controlling" labor… for feudalism, it could mean controlling every aspect of the laborers' lives, not merely the administration of justice but, by extension, who could marry whom, move where, build what, buy from or sell to whom, and so on; in later periods, what religion was practiced). Which is why the system started breaking down as cities rose–the landowners no longer controlled that sector of the labor; worse, there was some very important production going on that did not directly involve land use. Which in turn meant that a great deal of a nation's money was suddenly following channels other than that which the feudal nobles controlled… and of course the monarch, always happy for extra funds–especially to pay for his military–was tapping into sources that had nothing to do with traditional hierarchies, and which were not in the business of providing him with the elite, heavily-armored and highly expensive troops that formed the core of that military.

On the other hand, the members of that wealthy mercantile class didn't much care for providing the bulk of the king's ready cash if they were going to be treated as second-class citizens… which meant that if the king wanted to keep the money coming in, he had to do something about restraining–you guessed it–feudal privileges.

It isn't possible to generalize about which privileges were eliminated when, as this was different (and took place in different orders) from one country to another. England regularized its (common) justice and taxation systems fairly early on; in France, justice fell increasingly to a central system over time, but the taxation system wasn't even addressed until the 1600s, and wasn't entirely regularized until the Revolution (it was in fact one of the main causes of it); in the HRE, local princes retained most of their privileges–including, in the cases of the most important princes, that of choosing who the monarch would be–up to the time the Napoleonic Wars swept them away (and were, in fact, re-established to a certain extent during the half century following them, prior to Prussia uniting Germany into a single country… and even then they weren't completely done with them).

Of course, even after those times, the nobility still retained several more or less important privileges. Apart from being allowed to wear shiny hats, in most cases the nobility still owned nearly all the land: the common folk–even those who had money–only got title to their own bits of it gradually. Justice could still be rather less than "equal" for nobles and non-nobles, regardless of what the laws said: this tended to be one of the biggest ongoing gripes of the newly-formed middle classes. Often, it was only the nobles who had a direct say in how the country was run–though increasingly one finds that the wealthy managed to work around this obstacle through creative mechanisms (i.e. they bribed people). Even post-reform, offices tended to go overwhelmingly to nobles… and where they didn't, they generally went to other wealthy citizens (i.e. they bought them). Within most militaries, the officer corps consisted exclusively of those who could trace noble lineage–in a way, the last holdout of the concept underlying feudalism, once it had disappeared from other aspect of life… and the few exceptions went to other wealthy citizens (i.e. they bought them). Religious appointments… I'm sure you can figure out the rest of that sentence by now.

Not saying that nobles didn't buy a lot of those offices and appointments anyway. If you're selling, you'll probably sell to whoever can pony up the coin. Nor am I saying that these issues have vanished completely to this day, even in Western democracies, though at least nowadays your ancestry tends not to matter nearly as much as your wealth… which I guess is an improvement.

 

[SeverinR]

I understand most, but this one: "who could marry whom".
Except noble marrying commoner, why would a ruler care who married whom? (I understand marrying in your same area)
I understand to control the people, you have to restrict their movement, if you let them move freely, they would move to a nicer noble, and leave you with no workers.

My military does have noble leaders, but some are bascially warrant officers of equal title. The higher up the more likely to be of noble blood. I could see a general-warrant officer if he was extremely gifted in controlling troops and earning their respect and the respect of fellow officers, it would of course be an extreme rarity.

 

[Jess A]

SeverinR: (Edit: Re-read your post and realised I misinterpreted it)

On marriage - if you were a ruler in feudal times, you would probably want healthy children produced to become laborers as well.

I suppose it depends on your novel, though. I think it is plausible to have commoners who are military leaders but who have risen up in the ranks and are perhaps almost like nobility. It depends how your world and laws are structured. Some monarchs might place such a high importance on military (and perhaps religious priests as well) that their birth doesn't matter. Alternatively, perhaps only nobles are allowed to train or rise in the ranks.

 

[Ravana]

Except noble marrying commoner, why would a ruler care who married whom? (I understand marrying in your same area)
I understand to control the people, you have to restrict their movement, if you let them move freely, they would move to a nicer noble, and leave you with no workers.

Right–you wanted your subjects to stay on your lands, which meant marrying another of your subjects. Though control over marriage is also a logical consequence of some of the other controls… laws and religion being the obvious ones. Control over land was another. If the noble's land was already as heavily cultivated as he wished to allow it to become (keeping in mind that many of them liked to keep forests around for hunting), he may actually prefer a subject to marry outside his borders, rather than try to find a place for the new couple to farm and raise their own family; similarly, he might forbid marrying someone from another fief even if that person would be moving onto his lands, if he felt that the outsider would be problematic in some way or other… loyalty, for instance. He might have some reason to wish to control the lines of inheritance of a certain piece of land, keeping it in some family's hands: even prior to the private ownership of land, most tracts descended from parent to child. Or keep it out of someone's hands, if he wanted the land for some other purpose and felt this was an easier (read: safer) way to do it than simply running the present tenants off of it–keep in mind that in a society where owning land equaled status, the most obvious way to reward service was to give someone land. (The Roman perfected this, as their "retirement benefit" for legionaries, with the result of constantly expanding the areas inhabited by loyal, experienced, enculturated ex-soldiers, and thus of their own control. I suspect this practice–minus the cultural part–may have been one of the things that inspired the feudal system in the first place, though it ultimately had more to do with the social structures of the Germanic tribes, which were based foremost on personal loyalties.) Or the noble might want to keep a tract from being subdivided among the tenant's current and prospective heirs, a process that led in the long run to no single farmstead being large enough to support a family… which happened a lot as time went by and populations started to grow.

The noble might wish to impose ethnic restrictions–no intermarriage with Jews being the most common, though hardly the only one, especially in the earlier periods, when there were still great migrations of peoples and tribes taking place. ("You're a Dane, she's a Saxon: forget about it.") He might want to impose class separation at some level other than noble/commoner: there were often "unfree" or "half-free" classes… and the noble may also want to discourage the growth of craft and merchant classes (foolish as that may sound in hindsight). He might allow a marriage as a favor to a vassal–or prohibit one as a favor to a vassal who wanted a particular spouse who planned on a different union. He very often would require payment of a fee to permit a marriage to take place–today we call that a "marriage license." He might even, gods forbid, take a genuine interest in the well-being of his subjects, and disallow or at least delay a marriage on the grounds of an insufficient dowry or other factors that seemed likely to lead to economic disaster for the prospective couple. Along the same lines, he might compel a marriage in cases where it was obvious the bride-to-be would be requiring the support of a husband soon… regardless of who swore what about who the father was or wasn't.

Or the noble might just be a petty, arrogant, meddlesome git who enjoyed making his subjects miserable… or at least making them crawl.

So, yeah: complete control over the vassals' lives meant complete control. In most cases, permission to marry wold have been granted perfunctorily (once any financial obligations were met, at least, and barring any obvious disqualifier that would normally prevent anyone from raising the question in the first place). But there are plenty of reasons why it might not be: none of the above is speculative. And I probably missed a few somewhere in there.

My military does have noble leaders, but some are bascially warrant officers of equal title. The higher up the more likely to be of noble blood. I could see a general-warrant officer if he was extremely gifted in controlling troops and earning their respect and the respect of fellow officers, it would of course be an extreme rarity.

It was possible, in most times and places, for exceptional persons to find their way to the top (generally getting ennobled in the process: if not, that person would always find some subordinates too stuck up to accept orders), though this would seldom have been anything even approaching normal. Still, sometimes, excellence–or something similar to it–will out. The King of France once turned his entire army over to a schizophrenic teenage peasant girl, after all.…

 

[SeverinR]

Still, sometimes, excellence–or something similar to it–will out. The King of France once turned his entire army over to a schizophrenic teenage peasant girl, after all.…

With some of the officers and NCO's I worked with in the military, she might have been a better leader.