There are three types of farmer out there in the Kingdom...
>Peasants: tenants to a liege lord working his land in exchange for a house to live and 80% of their crops they grow (the rest is paid in rent). Peasants can move elsewhere if they desire, including moving into cities and getting apprenticeships. They are allowed to own spears and can be part of village musters if they so desire to defend their homes.
>Serfs: farmers bound to the land and required to work. When said land is sold, they are sold with it. They have to provide 25% of their crops to the liege lord. Serfs are exempt from conscription and are not allowed to own weapons or train with them.
>Yeomen: Yeomen own a small plot of farmland as their own and don't have to pay any taxes. Each Yeoman household is required to keep some arms and basic armor, train at least one of their sons to be a soldier who will fight for his liege lord when the call to arms is given. Yeomen at Arms make up the medium infantry forces at the core of the Kingdom's army.
Types of farmer
is this historically accurate? because if so, holy shit have I been thinking about farmers wrong.
This sounds fairly solid.
Thought: what would the peasant infantry be good for besides basic order-keeping? Militia spearmen are known for breaking in the face of massed enemy attack- especially seasoned, well-equipped forces- and without armor of some kind don't seem likely to survive crossbow or arquebus fire.
>what would the peasant infantry be good for
Target practice
Mostly basic order-keeping, with a side of guarding camps.
very interesting indeed user
>digs a trench and sticks some stakes in front of it
Sounds like the order of the day. I'd imagine that yeomen would work well as more "offensive" troops who would not be tasked with camp guarding or basic city watchman-ship.
>laughs in longbow
>Thought: what would the peasant infantry be good for besides basic order-keeping? Militia spearmen are known for breaking in the face of massed enemy attack- especially seasoned, well-equipped forces- and without armor of some kind don't seem likely to survive crossbow or arquebus fire.
They can man a wall if they are stiffened by a decent corps of Yeomen, they can function as a useful labor force for digging field works before a proper battle, they can be functional auxiliaries (hunters, guides, lumberjacks, etc).
They will be essentially useless as fighters in a battle.
Depends on the period and area, really, but all three have basically coexisted from the Roman era (where a serf would just be called a slave) until the late 19th century in particularly benighted nations like Russia.
Although the idea of owing a percentage to the leige lord is anachronistic, typically you owed a flat tax in kind or tribute.
Also Serfs have rights to the grain stores of their lords in bad years while Yeomen and peasants do not, which is why so many people accepted serfdom.
Not peasants.
How much do they farm? I presume they get lots of food to pay off the 80% and still eat.
Wouldn't both peasants and serfs get conscripted?
Fuck no.
What are you going to eat if all the peasants and serfs are too dead to grow crops?
Also they are shit at fighting and have no motivation.
Generally speaking 1% of a country's population could be used for anything approaching a sustained conflict, and by sustained I mean longer than a month.
You can draft 2% of a population into an army, but anything longer than a few months and you essentially have crippled your country.
The fuck is gonna grow all these crops that we NEED TO EAT?
The enemy nation!
Once you conquer them, you can start butchering them for their meat further helping you survive a year without agriculture.
cannibalism was more common during wartime than you would think
>Famine, too, could produce stupefying incidents, and the following event, like the preceding one, may be adduced to throw light on the way we write the history of war. In the winter of 1630, a group of Italian villagers, subjects of the Duke of Mantua, caught a few disbanded soldiers out in the Mantuan countryside. The expert on the subject tells us that they proceeded to skin the captured men alive, to roast them, and then to eat what they had cooked. An event like this, belonging to the moral setting of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), is bound to trail an immediate, grievous history. And so it did. Floods and bad weather had stymied farming in Lombardy for nearly two years. The Po Valley lay steeped in famine. In September 1629, a few months before the grisly incident, thirty-six thousand Imperial soldiers had trekked down into Italy from Germany, intent on capturing Mantua. Two attacks on the city were bloodily repelled. The siege was lifted in late December. In the meantime, however, the soldiers laid waste to fields, plundered meager food supplies, set fire to houses, and treated peasants like pack animals by tying them to carts, using whips, and forcing them to pull loads. When the villagers got their hands on the demobbed soldiers, their choking rage and hunger dictated the ensuing savagery. Skinning, roasting, and eating them became a ritual of revenge and nutrition.
>How much do they farm? I presume they get lots of food to pay off the 80% and still eat.
You read that backwards, user: they got to KEEP 80% of everything they grew and only had to pay a 20% crop tax.
Like wise the Serf got to keep 75% of what they grew and paid 25% of their crop to the lord.
I understand Yeoman are freeholders and are eligible for military service, but the serf and peasant confuse me a lot. Serfs are tied to the land, can’t leave it and are not allowed to carry arms. But a peasant is someone who is working on the land for food and board, but is allowed a spear? Wouldn’t the line between peasant and serf blur? Because as I see it, every serf is a peasant, but not every peasant is a serf. How wrong am I in this assumption?
just go read the wikipedia page on "serfdom"
what said is kind of true but obviously it changed from place to place and depends on the time period.
Also the trick is they usually didn't produced enough food.
Here is some data from early modern germany
>A picture of the shaky foundations of peasant life comes from a study of the county of Hohenlohe. Here, in remarkably fertile land, one measure of seed grain could produce seven or eight measures of harvested grain. With eight acres of this land, a family of three could produce enough grain to feed itself for a year—no surplus envisaged. A family of eight to ten people required about twenty-five acres of that land for their subsistence. Thomas Robisheaux found that in his Hohenlohe sample region, 52 percent of households “never produced enough grain on their small plots of land to feed themselves,” while another 20 percent or more lived on the margins of self-sufficiency. Hence in bad years, with prices soaring, these families had to buy grain in order to survive. Clearly, then, only a minority of families ever produced sizable surpluses for the market. If we transfer these findings to areas where the land, more commonly, was not nearly as fertile as in Hohenlohe, and where in fact the yield ratio might be four or even three to one, we realize at once that the German countryside was a world of poverty for most people. But this was generally true of the whole of agrarian Europe. A tenacious German peasantry held on to life by doing paid farm labor, keeping a kitchen garden, raising a pig or two for the market, or growing and spinning flax into thread for sale. Yet overnight that poor life could be put on the edge of a precipice, even for an enterprising peasantry. For the moment soldiers began to touch it, hunger and then famine spread in the wake of their plundering, arson, and calamitous impact on farming. Often, indeed, in their hunger, they even stole the seed grain. No wonder, then, that both soldiers and peasants starved.
entirely depends on the time period and the palce. Those things changed a lot over the decades even in one specific country.
>People thinking that farmers have no motivation to fight