Brettonian Peasants: How do they work?

Reminder that in particularly shitty parts of Bretonnia, saying "I hope you die soon" is a compliment.

I get that you're joking, but seriously, it's not that bad. The nine tenths is probably the harshest part, and that's explained by the lords allowing what's necessary to survive to be given back, or get 'stolen by outlaws.'

The thing about the horse is exaggeration - one noble did that with his royal pegasus, which is an admittedly rare creature and he was an especially jealous and paranoid noble. Most nobles would just stick with refusing to allow peasants nearby. Peasants are allowed to hunt, they just aren't allowed to eat the game meats - they still get plenty of mutton and pig, and they could probably get away with an occasional rabbit or bird, as evidenced by their miniatures. Their hovels are wattle and daub - something that a lot of real medieval peasants managed to survive in perfectly well, and the richer peasants can afford brick, or in Paravon they carve their buildings out of stone.

You have to understand, half of what makes Bretonnia interesting is that they have strict and rather stupid laws, and nobles that can decree just about whatever they want good or bad, and the people of Bretonnia have to work around those strict laws cleverly and carefully. That is half of what makes them so interesting, not bullshit about them being beastmen or daemons. They have a system that should not work and stubbornly make it work by looking they other way or bending the rules until they can fit reality.

>They have 9/10's of all they produce taken from them. What little they are given back, they are taxed.
The 9/10ths IS their tax. Portions are usually given back as "Charity" by the Lord, to keep them dependent on the Duke or Baron. A fool who starves his peasants won't have peasants much longer. It's a bad system, but it can work.

>They are not allowed to hunt for food, and can be executed for catching so much as a rabbit.

On specific lordly lands. This is going to depend heavily on the local lord-landowner, since you can argue they own ALL the land. Most simply keep preserves of the best hunting ground for themselves and let the peasants scavenge for whatever

>Not a single one of them can leave the village they were born in, without express permission from their lord

True, but only easily enforced if they stick to the roads or go to another village. If they just wander into the woods and dont die.. well, that's how you get herrimaults

Like everything else in Warhammer, Brettonia is exaggerated for comedic effect. When you get down to it, it relies heavily on double-think to get by. The rules are ideals which are paid lil service to, but in reality are facade.

For instance, a merchant class exists despite the fact there shouldn't be one, simply due to necessity. Guns and cannons are forbidden... On the land. Meanwhile the Brettonia navy packs more heat than the Empire.

9/10ths is the tithe law but that's because it's a castle economy. Those resources are meant to be distributed back by the more responsible and educated nobility, because the peasants are idiots and would eat themselves to death otherwise. Incidentally, soldiers who served in the king or local Duke's army as men at arms are exempt from tax. Actually surviving to enjoy it is another matter entirely.

>ITT: Bretonnian Internet Defense force
Liberation soon fellow humans

>You have to understand, half of what makes Bretonnia interesting is that they have strict and rather stupid laws,

This. What makes Brettonia fascinating is the double think it runs on. Like, women can't be knights. But still the same time,.it would be unchivalrous to point out a Knight is a lady in disguise, not to mention it's impossible to fathom a lady disguising herself as a knight. The end result is the occasional very falsetto Knight who seldom removes his helmet but he's a good chap really, gave me advice on my poetry. Really seems to get what the damsels want to hear.

Essentially if you have the armor, horse, and sword, and can pass in social functions, you can be a knight. This is why the nobles invent labyrinth social conventions and speak an entirely different language from the peasantry

>Bretonnia is an accurate depiction of feudal society

Also don't forget that peasants are generally allowed to leave their village on a pilgrimage. Nice reference back to Chaucer, and it's actually a good excuse for them to potentially rather widely travel. The merchant thing is more of a loophole, since Bretonnian law was made with agriculture in mind - it catches craftsmen, but not people who buy and sell for a living, since they don't technically produce anything.

You'll never reconquer West Mark, you self-righteous unchivalrous ale guzzlers. Get back over the mountains and hope that the dwarves don't realize that your women have beards too.

I thought that Bretonnian peasants were all super mutated and fucked up, and you couldn't ever advance from serfdom unless your great great grandfather was also a serf?

But I second the Skaven, beastmen, and other chaos creatures idea. Maybe Brettonian peasants are in many ways half breeds between the various races, or half breeds between humans and animals with the powers of chaos mixed in. I also like the idea of them being minor warp demons, or perhaps their villages are simply 'restocked' on occasion by daemonic influence, or the warp allows women to have many more children then normal, who cares if one of them has a rat head?

I honestly really dislike 99% of Warhammer "lore" and Britonnia is no exception. It's just an edgy turned up to 11 view of feudalism.

>I honestly really dislike 99% of Warhammer "lore" and Britonnia is no exception. It's just an edgy turned up to 11 view of feudalism.

There was once a time, not too long ago, that Bretonnia was never meant to be viewed as serious. This is a world where the Orks are slang-flinging hooligans, the Rats are diabolical evil geniuses who kill things in giant hamster wheels, and the Arthurian society looks like something out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Bretonnian peasants are filthy, inbred bastards that are hardly worth the muck they till. Their extreme levels of ignorance and backwards thinking is meant to enhance the joke of their kingdom by making the knights seem downright superhuman in comparison (the fact some knights are in fact superhuman notwithstanding.)

"As bad as serving these 'nobles' is, its an improvement over being a Skaven slave/in a bray-herd. The nobles at least won't EAT me if I can't grow enough."

And sometimes the Lady of the Lake just goes "Yo, all of you follow this shepherdess into battle", to which the only possible answer is "Yes, ma'am".

You seem knowledgeable, what is the status of artisans in Bretonnia? They have to get somebody to make all this armor and stuff.

>"lore"
what

This. It still astonishes me how many people seem to take the Warhammer settings at face value. They started as absurdist black comedies, and even if GW somewhat forgot that the ridiculousness never went away, they just got more straight faced about it. Although they seem to have been relaxing and embracing it a bit more again, recently.

IRL Serfdom could be just as brutal. England & Scotland in the 11th through 14th century, France in the 15th century, Poland-Lithuania, Russia until the 19th century.

Does it matter? They're all dead and replaced with Stormcast Eternals

>he needs company support to be able to enjoy his plastic army men
you should outgrow this need for validation, it's not healthy.

That's really wrong though, the conditions are too extreme even for Russian serfs.

>despite the comic exaggeration

I'm aware they're more extreme. That's the joke. I said 'Similar', not 'The same'.

Although, as the thread points out, it's also not actually as bad as OP portrays.

The wealthiest merchants have armies of gun wielding mercenaries. That and the bribes they give their noble overlords ensure they're essentially above the law.

Law in Bretonnia is basically how much your noble overlord is paying attention. In the cities, the peasants often have their own (illegal) courts.

If you don't like the lore, stay out of the kitchen

Depends on the dukedom. There's at least one dukedom where peasants are encouraged to leave their village, at least to marry. The cities are also rather lenient when it comes to movement.

The only place that is REALLY inbred is Mousillon. Rural peasants in that former dukedom almost never leave their village.

Even the shittiest Lord would find himself in a pretty poor position if he worked all his peasants to death.

They'll treat them like shit for sure but there's no value in having them die for no gain at all.

Just in general terms of income but also you never know when you might need some militia to throw at something.

Nah bro, its cool. Peasants respawn pretty quickly, doesn't matter if you work a bunch to death.

Seriously though, I have no idea how peasants keep up their numbers at all, especially in a war-stricken world where whole villages get razed.

That's more a general problem of the entire Warhammer setting. Look at Elves. Theoretically a dying race with a shrinking population, and yet they're able to die by the tens of thousands whenever an event or invasion occurs without it actually having any meaningful impact on the faction overall.

The population numbers of Warhammer Fantasy and 40k make no sense.

I remember reading a really long detailed post somewhere about how brettonia is actually a long running eugenics experiment by the wood elves to make supersoldiers. That's why the best swordsman in the Empire can get utterly shreked by some no name knight.

Think that became canon, what with how the Lady being a elven goddess that used Grail Knights to make a new pantheon of defender gods in a new world she would build after the end times, unfortunately, demons caught on and wrecked the place, makes me wonder how a setting would be in a place like that, certainly more chivalrous than Sigmarland.

>lol wouldn't it be funny if all bretonnian peasants were really skaven and beastfolk haha x3
I wonder who could be behind this post

>tfw no qt lake gf

:3c

All what you posted is theory. In practice, it is enforced as and if, which means with absentee lords and lot of war going on, the peasants can and probably do get away with lot, which the nobles compensate for by being extra harsh when someone does gets caught.

You are also forgetting that on average, Bretonnia is safer and more productive agriculturally than the Empire, which means the peasants do produce a lot more than you would expect and what they are allowed to keep is sufficient to survive on, on top of individual lords treating the peasants charitably if they fancy it so, which adds to their survival rate and the lord's subsequent prosperity.

The absurdities in law and customs are not as harsh when you think about the impossibility of executing all said laws all the time.

While the description of peasants in fantasy is hyperbolic, it does describe real actual feudalism.

>You seem knowledgeable, what is the status of artisans in Bretonnia?
Guild system. Usually second and third sons of lower level aristocratic families. They control the 'secrets' of the trade, take on other low-tier nobles as apprentices and then have peasants do all the actual labor as journeymen. It's probably a little better paying than farming, but you still do 9/10ths of a work for someone else to take the credit.

>aristocratic middle class
Strange, I wouldn't have seen bretonnian nobles as the kind of people wanting to work with their hands. Especially since it's modelled after french second estate.
On the other hand, bretonnia doesn't seem to offer much opportunities for male clerics or magistrates.

>but you still do 9/10ths of a work for someone else to take the credit
If they are noble, they should be exempted.

Plus bretonnian peasants aren't completely immune to jacquerie.
You may raze the entire village afterwards, but it doesn't prevents the lord's head from being atop a pike.

They're not. They're typically nobles with not chance of inheritance who married into wealthy merchant families. Any children they have would not be considered nobility. However, they still consider themselves better than the rest of the peasants.

The cities of Bretonnia are run by the merchant class. Any nobles who look too closely into their affairs are accused to attempting to become merchants (and thus get shat on by the rest of the nobility.

The cities also have cannons and guns. Guns aren't outlawed in Bretonnia because the law only exists for crossbows (and the merchant class lobbies heavily to keep it from being updated). The wealthiest merchants have their own armies.

...

Some nobles do get involved with craft or produce more than martial arms - there's some part of Bretonnia that actually only pays casks of brandy as its feudal dues, its land is so good, and they apparently get involved in trade - but generally most nobles will never dirty their hands with such things. At best they'll stoop to some positions of civil management, or perhaps the work of scribes since it's rare to find peasants educated enough to do so.

>Let a bunch of giant, voracious bipedal rats handle and manage your kingdom's food supply
What could go wrong? Still a heartwarming theory I agree

Why do you think the nobles tax 9/10th of it for a careful redistribution afterwards?
It's perfect symbiosis

>"ahoy, the envoy of the laborers, sieur skeek-kill-stab-in-the-dark"
>"he may enter; what do you want this time, serf?"
>"my lord, we won't last the winter with our current provisions. Could you redistribute some of your reserves to the common folk in the duchy?"
>"you're beginning to sound like a dirty ratman, skeek-kill-stab-in-the-dark."
>"on second thought, we have more than enough. We thank the lady for your hindsight and benevolence, my lord."
>"I know, skeek. I am the very picture of virtue."

Nigga you шhaт

>After the harvest, sieur skeek-kill-stab-in-the-dark and his labourers bring the precious food-food to the bailiff
>The salt pork is half-eaten, the grain sacks reek of rat piss and the cheese wheels are covered in suspicious gnaw marks
>R-rejoice, peasants! Your lord grants you a tax exemption this year. You may keep your produce.