How to do a feudalism right?

How to do a feudalism right?

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isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1350026.files/Brown-Tyranny-of-a-Construct.pdf
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifunctional_hypothesis
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Incest and murder.

Not possible

Stagnant country with no real cultural drive to improve things before you die.

You don't, Feudalism was completely opaque and organic; not this pre-defined shit you see in high-school history books.

There's a strong chance feudalism didn't even exist except for a tiny period of time:
isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1350026.files/Brown-Tyranny-of-a-Construct.pdf

That only higher classes have rights, doesn't mean anything by itself.
Because in some ways, its a society without laws. And even then, there is a big difference between a society with formal laws, written core laws(an eye can't be paid for with more than a eye), laws existing but only the read can use them, and the total anarchy between city states.

doesn't fucking matter. this is a fucking fantasy setting

these pyramids always ignore the bureacratic aparatus that the clerus provides the king.

Is anyone going to aknowledge the fact aristocracy seems to be magically shitting food ?

They also ignore that trading can belong in either of the 3 bottom classes.
Or that there is large differences between peasant and farm owner.
Or slavery and permanent indention

On top of the fact that style of feudalism wasn't nearly as widespread as people think, yeah the priests being considered lower class is incredibly silly. The priests were the scholars and physicians of the time, they hardly were on the same level as farmers.

What do you even mean by "right"?

Yeah why the hell would food be going down? Farmers make the most food, they're farmers after all.

A country becomes Protestant
But: Priests are still THE LAW until almost 1900s

>The priests were the scholars and physicians of the time
Uh, barely.

>implying the church shouldn't be at the top

This is clearly the most stable form of government.

Its certainly more stable than city states.
But not really.

I think we've had wars over this.

So I get how knights provide protection to peasants (hypothetically), but how to the landed lords provide protection to the knights? And what's to stop this whole system from breaking down the second some fuckwit gets a bunch of other fuckwits with swords together to kill everyone above them and establish a new nobility the answer is nothing. Feudalism as it's described here is basically a propaganda piece, put it into practice and you get a society that is 100% Heinlein's principal.

...

And how to landed nobles provide protection to knights whose only job is killing motherfuckers? Surely the average knights' protection comes from banding together with like-minded individuals under the assumption that they'll watch each other's backs, and the "noble" is just one of them chosen to be in charge based on largely arbitrary criteria.

>doesn't fucking matter

Why ask, then?

kys

does the second knight have two heads?

You can't

There's a serf fucking a monkey, and that's what you notice?

why would I pay attention to serfs?

So if each noble can supply 10-20 knights, those knights supply 5-10 soldiers when they come along.
Then a regional prince can supply 20-30 knights.
Essentially: Its a gamble on if the next part of the system will bother to do fuck all.

Actually the lords played a HUGE role in forming armies, whether levied troops or simply from paying taxes which would then raise armies. Throughout a large amount of English history, for example, the Kings had trouble trying to continually tax the nobles to pay for wars.

It is important to note as well that peasant rebellions often failed to do much. Whether that was because communication between villages was actually fairly difficult in that age, or because most people simply adjusted to their lives, the simple truth is that in Europe peasant rebellions didn't succeed very often. In fact, peasant rebellions that were successful often resulted in simply putting up another form of feudalism

>priests that low

>trying to merge a complex set of relationships in a single pyramid

>no god above the king

Holy fuck.

The nobles take food from the peasants and give it to their retinue.
The knights weren't actually important outside of war, but in general I assume the picture refers to the fact that knights were often bound to serve lords and the like, and get a castle's barracks or a nice fort to live in.

>The priests were the scholars and physicians of the time, they hardly were on the same level as farmers.

Depends on the place. In some places, you had priests who were serfs in all bur name, with fields to till and obligations to fulfill to their earthly liege. And you're confusing priests with monks in terms of being scholars and physicians.

Ah yeah, sorry, I did misplace priests with monks. In general monks were the scholars and physicians, though.

GM is kind, players are Lords, PCs are Knights, NPCs are Peasants.

ALL TTRPGS ARE FEUDAL, FIGHT ME REVOLUTIONARIES!

Stop thinking of it as pre-revolutionary proto-capitalism. Or, to put it in other words, step away from Karl Marx and GRR Martin and remember that things working right rarely make the papers or the history books.

Farmers want to farm and will happily follow someone who will arrange for the goods to be moved and provide for their protection. Professional soldiers will happily follow people who pay them to protect things. Competent nobles will happily be followed, incompetent nobles tend to suffer hunting accidents and strange illnesses. Throw in a handful of entertainers and a preacher and you've got a pretty stable system as long as everybody keeps their head down. That's "feudalism" when it works and as long as you don't mess with it, it's one of the best self-sustaining, self-repairing systems in history.

You will, however, be tempted to mess with it. A BBEG noble or a peasant revolt or a secretly corrupt church or a greedy sheriff or anything else. It seems like free plot points. Do not do this. The system fails hard, publicly, and messily when trust between the players broken and things go to hell until people run screaming into a new system trying to get their stability back and the cycle renews.

So: just don't do that. Beef stew for the workers, pheasant for the knights, venison for the king, and pretty girls singing pretty songs right after evening prayer and you'll have a town where the lowest serf will gut you with a pitchfork before they'll let you "liberate" them right into starvation. That's when it works.

Early, High or Late Middle Ages?

This.

In a world where gods are real and magic can help cure plagues and hopefully smallpox/TB/etc, there is a LOT less death and superstitious bullshit cures.

>oh, you want me to take rosewater for my headache?
>that priest said a few words at congregation and my syphillis is gone
>try harder buddy

Coincidentq that's why fantasy realms shouldn't advance fast in science if they have widespread magic usage.

Slavistan, Scandinavia, Italian City States, Western Europa or Brittain?

>The knights weren't actually important outside of war
>what is a feudal juidicial system?

>feudalism had no abundance of nobles abusing their power over the peasantry
nice fanfiction, bud

This.

Technically most things people write about feudalism is fanfiction in the first place because the word feudalism is used to describe a shitload of different kinds of governance in a shitload of different time periods that in many instances didn't resemble the pyramidal structure we're taught in schools at all.

Do the same thing reactionary authors like Tolkein did.

Have a common enemy, an evil and irredeemable outside force. This legitimises the nobles role as protectors, and if they are obviously the bad guys nobody scrutinises their opposites so much

Have Divine Right be the objective truth. The rulers are descended from a race of men gifted with wisdom, a prophecy details how a King of Dynasty X will save the world, the Gods are in open communication with their faithful and appear to approve of feudalism and the current nobles. Many ways to do this.

>And what's to stop this whole system from breaking down the second some fuckwit gets a bunch of other fuckwits with swords together to kill everyone above them and establish a new nobility
The current bunch of fuckwits has it okay and doesn't feel like risking this status quo unless you can promise more than the current fuckwit with your wealth, diplomatic connections, personal military might, political influence and cultural kitsch. In which case you get your classic dynasty sucession.

You where nobles upheld laws in their domain? Or the Kings upheld laws in theirs? Or perhaps in which (granted, Late middle ages) actual courts were held?

Knights weren't actually judicial. They provided fighting service in the middle ages. Maybe they had political power in some obscure legends such as King Arthur's knights, but in reality that was during a time of political upheavel in which military might was the law.

In real life knights were mostly cavalry, albeit with greater rewards. They didn't actually do judicial work, and any 100 level history course that talks about feudism would teach you that.

On the other hand for fantasy worlds, go wild. Huge precedent for it in literature, and it's a cool trope regardless.

The textbook pyramidal structure is a simplification, since pretty much all the actual systems tended to evolve into a convoluted system of shittons of classes and sub-clases tied by branching and looping obligations. The pyramid portrays the key principle of all these systems - numerous and underpowered working class supporting the noble administartion/military, in turn morally tied with the head of the government.

The first thing you learn about studying 'feudalism' as an undergrad is that it didn't exist how people think it existed, it changed and differed everywhere you go and is closer to a system of interdependent contracts over land possession that outlined rights and responsibilities each party would obtain, usually overseen by a third, usually ecclesiastical, party.

>all countries are ultimately ruled by ageless beings like elves and dragons

Best fantasy goverment.

Simple. Just remove the unfree element of society. In many ways, Feudalism, as seen in high medieval northern France, is a fairer and more effective way of allocating and controlling land possession that we see across the world today. The only reason people bitch about it is the unfree serf aspect which, quite frankly, is not necessary to run the system and emerged out of a consolidation of powers by a dedicated military aristocracy after the collapse of the Carolingian kingdoms.

But a numerous and underpowered working class supporting a head of government that asserts itself as a moral authority basically describes every form of governance outside of a direct democracy.

Even if it's a direct democracy, unless the franchise is universal, it's still as you described.

>Build enterprise
>Get workers
>Each workers earns 2-5x his wage
>1-4x the workers wage to to the company
>Maintenance and insurance fund eats most of that
>Still massive profits due economy of scale

>Be Media company
>Literally leech of the people to exist

>Be Government
>Tax Enterprise, Corporations, Goods and Workers
>Literally exist on economy of scale

What does that have anything to do with what we're talking about.

Well, I can't speak for other countries but here in Germany (HRE), the landlord had juidicial powers in case of lesser crimes (Niedere Gerichtsbarkeit). In fact, it was a relevant source of additional income for those landlords, as they retained part of any compensation payments.

Yes, the middle ages are a patchwork and the further back you go, the more patchy it becomes. But generalizations can be made.

>GM is kind

Monks and monasteries were basically precedents for corporations and shareholders - monks would generally have to "buy into" a monastery and in turn receive literal "shares" of the monasteries produce and supplies.

This is why the breaking of monasteries was fairly common throughout the medieval period - a feudal kingdom could control or even manage a monastery like it would any other institution in medieval times short of wipe the damn things out, even repeatedly murdering several abbots only increased the shares available to the other monks and allowed more junior monks to climb up the monastery's ranks. Which meant that when the local monks started raiding local villages for wenches and goods the local rulers would have a nasty choice between burning the monastery down before the peasantry did (which might lead to repurcussions from the church) or trying to pay off the monastery to stop ransacking shit or pay off the church to fuck the monastery up for you before it causes trouble.

"couldn't control" even.

Aren't feudals basically landlords who make peasants plow their fields and ship some crops, goods and sometimes peasants to higher ups?

That's how I do it anyway.

How the fuck do knights provide food to the serfs?

Your description skips the landed nobility class, which largely defines feudalism.

Feudalism was, at it's core, the functioning of three separate societies (the sacred, the martial, the economic) that were united by a trifunctional leader that kept the whole system running.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifunctional_hypothesis

>In a world where gods are real and magic can help cure plagues and hopefully smallpox/TB/etc, there is a LOT less death and superstitious bullshit cures.

I doubt that this would be true. I mean even today bullshit cures exist for stuff that can be healed/treated with modern medicine and people buy it. And bullshit warding charms might even be more common because they actually can see some of the "super natural" stuff.

For certain diseases like the plague or smallpox there are most likely not even enough clerics to outheal the amount of people who get infected everyday. They might be able to prevent an outbreak in the beginning but that would take a huge amount of logistic effort.

And even if we assume that the clergy does not use their healing powers to gain money but use it to help, they would still need some very strict rules when to apply it. Because if they just sell it for a couple of silver and then someone dies, the clergy would get all the blame and people might start to resent them.

Obviously that stuff only applies to settings were people with magic abilities are rare.

well, for peasants it was basically a trade off of security (from muslims, vikings and hungarians) against liberty. (anyone reminded of the NSA and all those organizations that "only want to protect us" here?)

unfortunately, things have a tendency to get out of hand over time, so the landlords started to abuse their positions of power ever more.

a cautionary tale.

>unfortunately, things have a tendency to get out of hand over time, so the landlords started to abuse their positions of power ever more.

Things had a tendency to get worse in the same way a democratic society might occasionally elect a demagogue or mismanage the funding for essential public services.

Kingdoms and empires were typically safer and more stable for the common man than democracy.

>a democratic society might occasionally elect a demagogue or mismanage the funding for essential public services
More often than anything else they get annex'd by their less liberal neighbors, who are better at war thanks to more centralized administration.

See Athens vs Sparta, Novgorod Republic vs Muscovy, Polish-Luthuanian Commonwealth vs all of their neighbors.

Prior to the introduction of a robust Norman bureaucracy and legal system, the petty barons were more or less independent. The system of vassalage is actually not one of barbarity in the wake of Roman Empire collapse but actually a complex network of interlocking obligations that requires a civil service class, which the Normans brought to England and Wales.

I'd completely disagree with that assertion. Prior to the Norman Conquest, England was perhaps the most rational, organised polity in Western Europe at the time; while of course below the levels of the Eastern Roman Empire, but by the size of territory controlled, far more organised than their Norman counterparts. Indeed, this is what allowed such a rapid transfer of power, as well as making the territory so attractive to foreign conquerors.

Is it automatically feudal if ruled by a military aristocracy?

Who said Shakespeare was dull?

Why does she have no cleavage

No. In the broadest strokes possible, feudal describes a society where property and obligations are linked and people are socially structured in accordance to whether or not they have the means and legal right to perform military service.

People who don't read Shakespeare or only have it taught to them in schools by bad teachers.

Or people who read all of the Shakespeare and see he's been regurgitating the same shit over and over again.

Well, everybody who disagrees with me is a demagogue.

Guy needed to pack the theatre to make sure he gets his people paid and needed to appease the authorities so they let him stay open. A lot of his repetition is due to the fashion and tastes of his audience at the time. Not to mention that at least his stuff's decent even when he repeats.

We still live in a world where the small doesn't have as much rights as the big.
Its just not as bad, since the economic power of the Invisible Hard do remove some of the worst edges.

And even in Direct Democracy its still true: If you can afford to pay for commercials, ads or promotion campaigns, you have a lot more influence than a nobody. That makes it extremely unequal.
It grows even worse with larger nation, simply because the barrier to enter is higher as price for a total campaign increases.

>Because if they just sell it for a couple of silver and then someone dies, the clergy would get all the blame and people might start to resent them.
You are bringing Modern Capitalism into the picture. Stop that.
You can't get them to buy those services, because they don't have money. Nor do you have any real way to use that money.
Money in pre modern societies is more like.... a rarity. Its like medals, collections of postal stamps, or you are actual merchant.


Look at it this way: You can't trade healing for money. But you can trade it for tax burder, or a more modern variant: Lease/subscription on healing
You heal Grandma. She trades in goods when the tax season arrives. If she dies before that, she doesn't trade.
This also changes the trade dynamic. Its like if you wanted a custom furniture. You would maybe have to pay a commission fee upfront, but you won't pay for the actual furniture until its arrived, and its checked for flaws.
But image that, for every single service and goods. Because you can't just buy something, money is worth far less. Because nobody can just buy your stuff, you can't just trade. Because you can't just pay wages, money is not useful as a barter tool for employment.
But the Feudal economy is even more complex than that. Its certainly alien if you haven't studied it.

First, go play Crusader Kings 2 for about fifty hours.

Then come back and remember that like Mornington Cresent, the only rules to feudalism is making people think there are rules to feudalism.

KENDER GO IN EVERY OVEN.

Reading first Marc Bloch's La Société féodale

>I have no proofs but I must post

This is foolish marxist revisionism, the underclasses did not support the nobility.

By not doing it at all. Also, this:

>Being contrarian just for the sake of it

No, a society defined mostly with military aristocracy is likely to look like an ordenstaat or junta.

welcome to Veeky Forums

No, that's just yet another oligarchy. Or junta, if things are more toward military and less toward nobility.

>Implying I'm being a contrarian

Contrarian at least assumes you are doing things on purpose. If I call you uneducated cunt, that would instead assume you simply sprout bullshit, because you don't even know it's bullshit.
So as far as my personal book goes, it's better to be contrarian than uneducated.

Woah, it's like, I'm just an uneducated person who like, doesn't even know what's good for me so I act against my own interests by reinforcing the ruling class

Not possible. Try fascism next time.

...

t. GRR Martin

This is sounding dangerously close to some "dark enlightenment" monarchist shit

I don't know what country you come from, but I'll have you know that my country fought a war to be free from kings thank you very much.

>Reactionary Fantasy: The Post
Kill yourself

>portraying the typical social structure of a game world as other than a dystopian hellhole
>reactionary
Must we really act like the past is a prison that we've recently escaped from? Someone can accept that less liberal forms of government are still liveable for even the lower classes while recognizing the alt right as an alt blight.

Actually serfs/workers would only eat meat on special occasions, like the local lord inviting his favorite peasants to Christmas dinner. The lower class lived off a diet based on grains, dairy, and maybe eggs until the agricultural revolution. Also, the system's stability (as well as the average standard of living) could vary depending on several factors, ranging from implementation to climate to population.

Of course, in your game's world, all of these factors can be optimized via technology and magic to make everything much better or far worse than it really was.

>but I'll have you know that my country fought a war to be free from kings
Thats.... Switzerland?
And mostly because they used Swizz as a transportation region, meaning all wars just passed trough, without there ever being war INSIDE Switzerland.
Seriously, read Wolfsmund. For a historical manga, it manages to capture the essence of why Switz didn't want to be part of Hapsburg Empire. Or some shitty Italian city state.

Outside of that, there is terrible few countries where they kicked out their King, and didn't replace said king with Monarchy/Aristocracy.
Especially before Modern times.

Like most political systems feudalism isn't a blueprint. There's not a king telling a country "Alright guys, now here's how the government is going to work." The very concept of defining HOW a government "works" is a relatively modern idea. Feudalism is more of a rough description of how power structures tended to work in decentralized preindustrial societies, particularly those on the fringes of "civilization". When a bunch of city states or minor nations decide they really ought to band together under one king feudalism is what you naturally get. The states maintain some vestiges of independence (politically and socially) that slowly fade with time and development. The alliance (as embodied by the king) leaves them to manage their lands and in exchange the pact requires them to give financial and military support to the whole alliance, run by the king.

There isn't really a way to "do feudalism right" as in make it a stable and everlasting form of government. Now, if you just want to accurately represent a period of social development then I suppose the way to "do it right" would be to highlight the period as a time where loosely organized peoples learn to become a proper state. It should involve the nascent but growing concept of the rule of law, the strange new wonders brought by organized instead of haphazard trade, and the development of a national identity.

Fucking magic then you giant whore.