Lords of Men Chapter Six: Manorial Fiefs

See Also

• The Ars Magica Reference Document
• The Lords of Men Open Content page.
• The Lords of Men product page on this wiki

Chapter Six: Manorial Fiefs

Feudal society is made up of a series of personal relationships. A powerful man offers to loan land, or some other valuable right, to a less powerful man in exchange for his military support, his counsel, and other benefits. These other benefits often include a share of the harvest from the land and may also include services like acting as a judge, garrisoning a castle, or collecting tolls. After this transaction, the more-powerful man is the less powerful man's liege, the less powerful man is the liege's vassal, and the valuable right or land is called a fief.

This arrangement is solemnized by a ritual called the commendation ceremony. During the commendation ceremony, the lord and vassal are tied by oaths before mortal witnesses and God. The form of this ceremony differs between places and times, but a popular version begins with an act of homage. In this, the vassal-to-be kneels before the lord and places his hands together in the position of prayer. The lord then places his hands over the hands of his supplicant, enclosing them. The supplicant then asks to become a vassal and is accepted.

Following this, the new vassal swears an oath of fealty to the lord on a Bible or holy relic. "Fealty" means "faithfulness." The vassal promises the liege aid in war, good counsel, and whatever else is usual in the area. The oath of fealty is usually kept brief, so the finer points of what exactly is owed, and on what schedule, are not described. In some areas, there is no break between the act of homage and the oath of fealty, so it is completed with the vassal still on his knees. The lord may reply with an oath of his own, promising land and military support to great vassals, or financial support to lesser vassals.

Knighthood

The ceremony that creates a knight and the ceremony that creates a vassal are often tied together. This is because a knight is usually created with the understanding that he will join the household of the liege, and fight in his service. He is, therefore, a sort of minor vassal. Most such knights are supported by a salary from their lord. Knights who achieve particular favor may be offered the smallest possible land fief, a manor.

Subinfuedation

In England, which has the simplest feudal system, all land has been owned by the king since the Norman invasion in 1066. Soon after the Conquest, the king parceled out land to his most powerful supporters, in exchange for military service. Although the makeup of this group of families has changed since that time, the tenants-in-chief of the king still form England's upper nobility. It was initially intended that the tenants-in-chief would only hold their land for a lifetime, but in times of trouble successive kings have made great volumes of land the hereditary possessions of powerful families.

Each of these powerful nobles requires a personal army to fulfill his obligations to the king. Some few maintain a standing army paid with coin, but this is expensive and thus rare. Most have divided up their estates into smaller parcels, each with sufficient land and workers to support a warrior. In turn, some of these parcels of land, once developed, have been further divided.

At the bottom of this pyramid of power is the individual knight, with a personal holding theoretically sufficient to maintain his equipment and lifestyle. Most knights have fiefs that are agricultural, and for the purposes of this book, such a holding is called a manor. A manor's size varies depending on the fertility of the land, the population working the land, and the value of the crops produced.

The Manor: The Model Fief

The basic fief is a single the manor. A manor, for the purposes of the game, comprises the amount of land traditionally required to maintain a knight, his family, and his household retainers. Powerful noblemen have other minor sources of income, but most such noblemen also have many manors for which they do not owe the service of a knight. This provides them the surplus income required to support their opulent lifestyle.

The simplest manor is made up of a large hall where the lord's representative lives, surrounded by farmlands and a village. Large villages may, however, be divided between two or more manors. Most manors have all of the elements described in the following sections, although many manors may lack one or more of them. The Domesday Book even records one manor that had no inhabitants. It was farmed by men from neighboring manors for a fee.

Alternatives to the Manor With Demesne

This section describes in detail a manor with demesne and resident bailiff. (A demesne — pronounced "domain" — is land farmed on behalf of a lord by his villeins as part of their rent.) This might give the impression that this is the dominant mode ofland use in Mythic Europe, but it is not, because it is dependent on a particular soil type and a particular balance between the cost of labor and the price of grain. The manor with demesne is considered in such detail in this chapter because its alternatives are simpler, and so troupes can design them using the information provided here as a basis.

How Big is a…?

This insert provides average measures of land size to help players get a sense of the scale of medieval landholdings. The terms used are regional English. This book lacks space to describe the thousands of forms of land division in Mythic Europe.

An acre is the amount of land a single person with an ox can plow in one day. The definition of an acre is a historical one predating the use of ox teams; no actual person plows an acre a day with his personal ox in Mythic Europe. In Mythic Europe the size of acres varies, even within kingdoms, depending on local custom. For the sake of simplicity an acre is considered to be 4,840 square yards. An acre has no particular shape, and plowmen prefer fields that are long, thin strips so that they do not need to turn their plows very often. An acre that was square would be just short of seventy yards on a side. For Terram magic affecting dirt to a depth of two feet, this makes it an Individual Target with three size modifiers.

A manor is sufficient land to maintain a knight. It is around six hundred acres in area, although land fertility, manors which collect rights instead of farming, and other considerations can increase or decrease the size of a manor by a third without it being considered exceptional. The prototypical manor is a single unit of land whose residents make some use of the woods, marshes, and waters that surround it, but in most areas manors actually abut each other, and their lands may intermingle in confusing ways.

A landed knight's income from a typical manor is twenty pounds per year, realized as a mixture of labor, goods, and money. This is sufficient to sustain the knight's household and maintain his equipment. The income from a manor is not sufficient to pay for personal crises, such as the need to replace a lost war horse, commission an entire suit of armor, or ransom gear lost at tournament. The manorial system is failing in Mythic Europe. Some knights supplement this income by working as mercenaries, officers of a lord, outlaws, or pirates.

A hide is the amount of land required

to maintain a family of affluent, free peasants. Even neighboring villages have hides of dramatically different sizes. For the sake of visualization, a hide is 120 to 144 acres, adjusted for the fertility of the land and local farming practices. A hide produces four pounds of income for a lord, usually in money or goods. Free peasants make up less than ten percent of the population of most manors. They have inordinate influence in manorial affairs, and are often selected as jurors in manorial courts.

A virgate (or yardland, or rood) is the amount of land a two-ox team could plow in one day. It is either one-quarter or onesixth of a hide, between 24 and 32 acres. Many peasants, called virgaters, rent an area of land this size. This amount of land is sufficient to support a family of unfree peasants, who pay their taxes partially through service on the lord's demesnes. A virgate provides a little surplus in good years, so a virgater with a run of luck can buy off a succession of villein obligations. This frees additional money and allows him to take on extra land. It's unlikely that he, personally, will become free, but he may reasonably hope that the children of his eldest son might, some day. A virgater family, between services, fines, fees, and other forms of usefulness, is worth about a pound a year to a lord.

Some peasants rent an area half the size of a virgate. This is called a bovate in a limited area of Britain, but it has been favored in this book over the usual term "half-virgate." Bovaters supplement their main income, which usually comes from performing some other service, by farming this small area around their homes. Bovaters, for example, are often millers, reeves, shepherds, or the personal servants at the manor. A bovate, in a good year, can support a family of unfree peasants, but is usually intended to supplement the income of a family whose primary income comes from other work.

Cottars have smaller areas of land, ten acres or less, far too small to support a family. They live either by hiring out their services as laborers or by pursuing a trade. Blacksmiths, for example, are often cottars, farming only small personal gardens or tiny pieces of the common land, living in the main by their craft.

As a rough guide, only a handful of peasant families in any given manor have more than a virgate. Twenty percent have a full virgate, thirty percent have a bovate, and fifty percent are cottars. This does not include servants who are landless or have cottar strips.

A village may technically be of any size: a village becomes a town not because of its population, but because of legal rights granted it by a nobleman in a charter. The residents of a town are free in the sense that they do not owe the services of villeinage. A village is literally a place where villeins live. The process by which villages become towns is discussed in City & Guild.

The average village has around sixty families, each with five members, and grows very slowly. An average village adds only five new people to its permanent population every two years. Villages larger than five hundred people are all but unknown.

Towns are like villages that have been granted rights by an overlord. The first of these rights, freedom of the residents, is what distinguishes the town from a village. There are, therefore, new towns, with only a handful of families in them. Some planned towns fail, and during this process it is possible that a town's population may dwindle to a few families who then agree to rejoin the manor of the lord who granted the charter. An "average" town has perhaps three hundred people, the same as an average village, although many towns are smaller, and a handful are many times larger. In England, 40% of towns hold their land from the king, 35% from a neighboring lord, and 25% from the Church. In the rest of Europe the proportion that holds from the king is far higher.

A city is a settlement where a cathedral is.

Large-field farming, as described here, uses up roughly half of the agricultural land in Mythic Europe. It is only suited to heavy soil types. It is found in most of central England, although it is rare in the east, northwest, and wooded and mountainous parts of the country. It is found in France and Germany, as a rough guide, near large cities. In areas unsuited to this style of farming, farmers instead care for individual plots, or herd sheep or cattle. Each troupe can, therefore, choose any type of agriculture for their covenant, and simply state that the soil, vegetation, or topography make it the suitable choice for their locale.

Demesnes are found on just over half of the manors using the large field system. Before 1220, it was more common for the lord's portion of the cropland, or even the manor as a whole, to be rented out. Players doing their own research should be aware that the period term for renting out land, in England, is "farming," which can be confusing.

Land is rented out for many reasons. A manor that is some distance from the rest of a lord's estate may, for example, be rented to one of its neighbors. This provides the owner with easy coin, and the renter with economies of scale. Churches and towns sometimes rent lands that abut their territory. Free tenants occasionally pool their money to rent their manor from a distant lord, allowing them to take control of the apparatus of local justice. Renting is a convenient institution for the Order of Hermes, because it is not against the Code to pay for land use.

Renting out manors is falling from favor in 1220, because the population of Europe is booming. Settlers are available to extend manors and make them increasingly valuable. Renters usually do not extend manors because they see no point in suffering the expense involved. The large population means that wages are very low, while, simultaneously, the prices for foodstuffs are high. It is more profitable for a lord to crop his own lands than rent them out.

The most profitable way of using cropland in much of Europe is to stop cropping it and turn to over to sheep. Turning farmed land over to sheep improves the land's income after expenses markedly. It does this not by boosting the lord's income, but by cutting his expenses. Manors that have been turned over to sheep require virtually no staff beyond the lord's immediate household. Depending on the transport available, some nobles who turn their lands over to sheep pull their villages down to sell the wood and stones in the houses. Transforming a cropping manor into a sheep manor thust causes immense social dislocation.

Even given the potential for profit, few manors have been changed over from cropping to sheep, because characters in Mythic Europe do not know how long the current boom in the price of wool will continue. Thus, few nobles are willing to take the drastic step of pulling down their villages on the chance it will be sustained.

Greater Fiefs

The lands of greater nobles, the surplus they produce, and the number of soldiers they are expected to provide are detailed in Chapter Three: A Comparison of Titles.

Capital Messuage

A messuage is a small, enclosed piece of land around a house. The capital messuage of an estate is the messuage belonging to the lord. It contains his hall, the outbuildings described in the sections that follow, and curtilage. Many of the structures below are placed in the messuage to increase their security. They contain valuable items, like food and equipment, and proximity to the residence implies that the lord and his personal servants can confront raiders or thieves. In Mythic Europe many workers sleep in their workplaces, providing extra security, but this is less pronounced in manors, particularly those that have bovaters.

Hall

The chief building in a manor is the hall. This is the residence of the lord, if he lives at the manor, or of his appointed deputy, called a bailiff, if the lord does not. Many lords with multiple manors travel between them in a great circuit, exhausting the surplus food collected from the rents of their tenants at each in turn. The bailiff is expected to keep the residence in good order, and to be able to vacate the best lodging when the lord or his steward arrives. Bailiffs and their staff are dealt with in considerable detail in Chapter Seven: The Peasantry. Halls vary considerably in size, construction, and opulence, depending on the value of the manor and the degree to which the lord uses it.

This system of circulating the court of the noble to where his rent is stored as food is swiftly being eclipsed in those parts of Mythic Europe where the economy is strongly monetarized. This is a fortunate circumstance for covenants with agricultural holdings, because most magi prefer to stay near a static laboratory. The unwillingness of most magi to circuit their holdings has, in the past, meant that they could not fully utilize the income of their rents. The need to sell their surplus, then use the money to buy food closer to home, has been a necessary expense. The greater nobility of Europe similarly prefer that their surplus food be translated into money by the inhabitants of towns so it can be spent on food and luxuries close to the nobles' preferred residences.

Story Seed: The Foundation Charm

Many halls have a charm in their walls or foundations to protect the building. Such a charm can be placed by a hedge witch (see Hedge Magic) or using traditional sacrifices described by local folklore. These charms may cause stories. For example, a sacrificed animal's body may become the spiritual anchor of a faerie that takes the role of the hall's guardian spirit. Characters may have to protect the corpse, or find and destroy it, based on the friendliness of the faerie that has anchored to it. In some pre-Christian areas, humans were occasionally walled into new buildings. Their spirits may seek burial, cause mischief, or have come to terms with their fate and aid the current inhabitants of the hall.

In some areas, the charm is a witch bottle. Witch bottles prevent minor magic users from entering buildings by hexing them if they attempt to do so. These hexes are weak, and easily resisted by Hermetic magic. Magi aware of a properly made witch bottle sometimes leave it in place to see who it harms as a way to identify young Gifted people as potential apprentices, for example.

Witch bottles have a wide variety of effects, which can be simulated using the rules in Hedge Magic. These effects usually have two components: they weaken the witch, but they also mark the witch. Attacks on the body are common, so witch bottles may fill a witch's face with boils, strike her blind, fill her so full of urine that she bursts, make blood pour from her nose, or snap the bones of her feet. If you do not have Hedge Magic assume that the bottles can detect the magical power to curse (InVi 10, Penetration 5) as well as the Gift (InVi 15, Penetration 0), and that they have a PeCo effect up to level 40, with a Penetration of 5, that they use when triggered.

Castles in Lieu of Halls

On large estates, a castle may replace the hall. Castles have been described in detail in the Covenants supplement. An overview of that material is included in Chapter Eight: Massed Combat.

Most halls are not fortified; they serve as simple centers of administration and accommodation. The vast majority of halls are constructed of timber and delay attackers only briefly. Those halls that serve as the chief accommodation of their lords are more imposing. In areas where there is, or has been, frequent raiding, manor houses are more formidable. In England, for example, some manor houses that have survived since the Normans subdued the country are built from stone and have defensible ditches or moats. Similarly, on the Scottish border, many lesser nobles live in defensible towers.

The average manorial hall is rectangular, between 60 and 75 feet long, and 30 to 40 feet wide. Additional rooms may augment this space, and these are sometimes constructed after the completion of the initial hall. The long axis of the hall often lies north-south. Typically a hall has two doors, facing each other, piercing the wider sides of the building near its middle. Windows are absent or small in lands where raiding is likely.

The space within the hall is usually divided into two sections. The great hall, which gives the building its name and function, is the area where the personal servants of the lord eat and, often, sleep. It usually contains a hearth that provides warmth and may be used for cooking, but it is also common for manors to have kitchens separate from the hall. Hearths are usually set on the long axis of the hall, about one-third of the distance from one of the shorter walls. The great hall takes up approximately three-quarters of the space in a basic manorial long house. The remaining space is separated off as a chamber for the lord.

Animal Sheds

Many types of animals are kept within the messuage. Chickens and geese are raised for the table. Dairy cows may be milked here, to provide butter. Sheep are often herded into a pen in the messuage before lambing and shearing.

A dovecote is a small building used to raise doves or pigeons. A dovecote may contain several hundred birds, and they may not be harmed by the lord's tenants. In some areas it is permissible to scare away doves as long as they are not harmed, so one of the main responsibilities of small children during sowing is to shy rocks near the lord's birds. Peasants are forbidden from raising these birds because they might feed on the lord's demesne.

In some areas dovecotes are kept in the fields, but in many others they are kept within the messuage to prevent theft of eggs or birds. In some areas they are built into the upper stories of manor houses or watch towers.

A stable is a building where horses and other animals are cared for, and their equipment is kept. Horses are valuable as draft animals, but lords who act as knights require finer stables, for their war horses. Stables are often subdivided into smaller pens, called stalls, to prevent horses from harming each other.

Some messuages contain a pen for impounded animals called a pinfold. Animals that stray are the property of the lord, but in some manors it is possible for a tenant to have his animal returned in exchange for a fine.

Barns

A barn is a work-building. It is often split into two levels, and the upper level used to store hay, grain, flour, or other produce away from rodents. The barn might be used as the threshing floor in a manor. When threshing is complete, it is often used as a dry space to perform wet-weather work, like mending equipment. Many of the manor's lesser servants sleep in the barn, which is warm and has comfortable straw within it. Ignoble characters offered impromptu hospitality are often lodged in a barn.

Curtilage

Curtilage is unroofed land enclosed within the messuage's wall. Lords use this space for a variety of purposes: some have orchards in their curtilage, while others hold court in these yards. The curtilage of a manor may be over an acre, even in small manors. Some manors' curtilage is surrounded by a moat used to pen animals and exclude predators. It is not usually designed as a defensive feature.

Fishponds

Fishponds are a feature of large messuages that have a stream as one border of their curtilage, but that are far from river or sea fisheries. Fish serve an important role in the medieval diet, as the Church requires abstinence from meat on Fridays, during fasts, and on certain feast days. A person keeping all of the required days is forbidden flesh, but permitted fish, on 175 days a year, although this degree of self-denial is found only in monasteries and among the poor. A manor cannot entirely fulfill its need for fish from fishponds, so salted and smoked fish are eaten on most fish days, with fresh fish drawn from the ponds on special occasions. In manors where there are fishponds, unsupervised fishing is sometimes forbidden.

Granary

This is a building where threshed grain is stored, prior to milling into flour, and where flour is kept. Some granaries are raised on steedles, which are small pillars, to prevent rodent infestation. Others have steedles within the building that hold up a false floor.

Granaries are prime targets for raiders. The theft of grain allows an enemy army to remain in the field longer. Burning a granary causes famine, destroys the grain reserved for use as seed, and ruins the place where grain is stored to keep it free of mold and rodents.

Kitchen

The kitchen of the messuage, and its bakery if its bread is not supplied by the communal bakery of a village, is often a separate building from the hall. This reduces the risk of fire spreading from the kitchen to the hall. The kitchen is one of the busiest parts of a manor because its workers do not cease to labor when the sun sets, or during winter.

Stackyard

A stackyard is where harvested grain is kept until it is threshed. It is located within the messuage to prevent theft. The way grain is stacked varies across Europe, but a common idea is that one cartload makes one stack. The wider a stack, the less tall it needs to be, but a conventional size is twelve feet in diameter, sloping inward to twelve feet high. After stacking a net is placed over the grain and, in some places, weighted with a heavy stone. Over the next week the stack settles, and during this time wooden props are used to encourage the stack to retain a stable shape.

Steedles are used to raise the stored crops above the ground, to prevent rats and insects from nesting in the grain. Some steedles are themselves a dozen feet wide, but in less wealthy estates the steedles support a framework of boards on which the stacks of grain rest.

Stackyards are fenced more robustly than other areas of the messuage. In many areas, where buildings and fences are made of wattle and daub, the fences around the stackyard are triple the usual thickness. This additional effort is required because oxen like to raid stackyards. Oxen are known to push their way through conventional wattled fences, and even through the wattled walls of buildings, to reach the grain drying in the stackyard. The defensibility and limited lines of sight within stackyards make them interesting places to stage combats.

Story Seeds: Dovecotes

Pigeons are delectable; that's why nobles raise them. These delicacies attract both carnivorous familiars and magical animals suitable to become familiars, so characters who prevent raids on a dovecote by such animals may gain both a favor from the lord and a magical creature as well.

Some Mythic Europeans kill crows and hang them in prominent places, to scare the doves away. In Italy animal skulls on poles are placed in the fields, and in Germany carvings of witches are used for similar purpose. Each of these activities excites the interest of faerie powers. Killing crows and nailing them over a field may also draw the interest of the Infernal, whose servants take crow shape.

The British style of scarecrow, a manikin of old clothes and straw, has not been invented in Mythic Europe. In this story seed, they are invented due to a local outbreak of plague. The plague kills the old and the young, so there are no boys to be hired as bird-scarers and replacements must be made. The idea of the scarecrow spreads across the continent, and faeries are strongly drawn to them because they are human in shape, act as guardians, and are replacements for children who have been lost. The scarecrows are capable of taking on many new faerie roles, including forming armies to harm the lords of disgruntled peasants.

Farmland

Mythic Europe's economy is essentially agricultural. The economy is monetarizing, and trade is making the cities blossom, which allows colorful people to rise to power and gather armies to do interesting things to each other. Beneath that drama, however, the trade system of Mythic Europe is a method of getting grains and clothes from the areas of production to the centers of population.

Each piece of land has one of six legal statuses. It may be an allod, which means that it is held by the occupant without a feudal relationship. The land may be part of the demesne, which is land reserved for the lord's own use to provide income and maintain his household. The land may be part of the glebe, which is reserved for the maintenance of the Church and its servants. The land may be rented to free peasants. The land may be granted to villeins in return for rents and services. Free men taking up villein land owe service for it, despite their freedom, although they are generally wealthy enough to hire a laborer to do the actual work. Finally, the land may be unfarmed; that is, it may be wasteland.

The main land types in the heavily farmed sections of Mythic Europe are arable, meadow, pasture, and waste.

Arable

The most precious land is the arable, which is used to grow grain and legumes. After the harvest, this land reverts to common use, and is used as a supplement to dedicated grazing land. In 1220, an increasing amount of land is being drawn from meadow into arable land, but a few nobles have noticed that the price of wool is so high that it is more profitable to force land the other way.

Yield on farms is poor. The average winter grain crop is sown at two bushels an acre, and repays that effort with eight bushels of grain. Spring crops are sown at four bushels an acre, and their yield varies, but averages sixteen bushels. The lowest yielding grain, oats, will grow in marginal land where other grains are not profitable.

A bushel measures volume, not weight, so the amount of food it represents varies between grains, but for wheat a bushel weighs roughly sixty pounds, and is made into seventy pounds of bread.

Meadow

Meadow is used for growing grass. This is harvested and stored as hay, to provide stock feed when the weather turns cold. No manor has as much hay as it would like. Hay supply determines the maximum size of a herd after winter, so a community with more hay could increase the size of its herds. Unless additional land is bought into meadow through improvement or by not cropping arable land, herds cannot increase in size. Haymaking is, therefore, an obvious form of magical economic interference.

Pasture

Sheep are the primary grazing animals raised in Europe. A piece of land over which the right to graze sheep has been granted is called a foldcourse. As a rule of thumb, land that is heavily wooded can support fewer grazing animals than land that is lightly wooded, and marshy areas can support the highest numbers of sheep per acre. This is because sheep can pick through land too stony or soggy for the plow, seeking food.

In England, the lords of some of the marshy manors in Anglia run sheep instead of cultivating much of their demesne, and these lords have demesne flocks of over a one thousand head apiece. The average lord has a demesne flock of six hundred, and lords in highly wooded areas often have only three hundred sheep. This is a small enough flock for a single shepherd to supervise.

The number of sheep kept by any peasant family varies considerably with the type of land they hold. In some areas, 12 sheep are paid as the rent for each hide of land every year. In others, peasant families are permitted to keep six sheep, and they pay one lamb per year for this privilege. As a general rule, the lord has two-thirds of the sheep of any manor in his demesne flock. Sheep that are grazed by peasants must often be driven to the lord's demesne for penning at night. This allows the lord to move the sheeps pens around the demesne and harvest their dung for himself. Other animals are also grazed, but are scarcer than sheep.

Pigs are, individually, more valuable than sheep, but they are less valued as farming animals. Their grazing damages land, their manure is not as good for crops, and they lack the herd instinct that enables a single shepherd to drove and supervise hundreds of sheep. It is common for pigs to be turned loose in woods, particularly after acorns begin to fall. This is a right, called pannage, for which a villein pays his lord. Pannage varies from one pig in six to one pig in ten. On most manors, the lord's swineherd is in charge of a number of pigs equal to one-quarter the size of the lord's flock. This is inadequate work for continuous employment, so the swineherd may also care for the pigs of free men and villeins.

Goats are used as grazers on land that will not support sheep. They do not thrive on summer stubble, which limits their usefulness. They tend to eat things that might otherwise be eaten by pigs, and it is therefore unusual to find a manor that has large numbers of both. As woodland is cleared and made arable, the numbers of pigs and goats on a manor fall and the numbers of sheep rise.

Nobles eat beef regularly, but peasants eat it rarely. The average ox is considered to take two years to train, and to work for four, after which it is killed and salted or smoked for winter. Cows are rarely killed until past bearing.

The Lord's Portion: The Demesne

The demesne of the lord is land that is worked for his profit, by his peasants, as part of their rent. In some manors, the demesne is separated from the land of the peasants, while in others it is intermingled. There are advantages to each system: a lord with a separate demesne can watch his crops for theft, and can supervise his laborers more effectively. A demesne that is scattered through the striplands of the manor is worked as the peasants work their own lands, which makes the task less onerous.

Villeins do about a quarter of the work required to plow, sow, and reap the demesne. The rest is done by paid laborers or the lord's liveried famuli, who are described in detail in Chapter Seven: The Peasantry. The famuli are those who live at the manor, or whom the lord is required to feed, for a substantial proportion of the year. The famuli include those who have a little land, like the bovaters, or virtually no land, and are paid in kind for labor.

The lord's demesne is the most fertile land in the manor. His right to demand that all of the livestock of his tenants be grazed on the stubble of his crops also means it is the best fertilized. It is not, however, the most productive: that land belongs to the free tenants. Many of the ways that free peasants increase their yield are highly labor intensive. A lord does not keep sufficient famuli, or hire enough day laborers, to de-stone and weed his demesne in the way that free tenants do, because for him, the additional cost of this labor is less than the additional yield from grain. Free peasants lose nothing but time to these processes, and so undertake them more readily.

Market Fair

A market fair is useful to both the lord and his tenants. It provides them with the opportunity to exchange their agricultural surplus for manufactured goods. It does, however, provide slightly less money than if the lord ships his grain to the city himself. Cartage is one of the many duties owed by villeins. This means that market fairs are more common where roads are poor, river transport is unavailable, or travelers are insecure due to banditry. Markets are almost always held on the demesne of the lord, so the manure of animals penned for sale falls on his ground.

Most towns with the right to hold a fair do so twice a year. More frequent fairs are common in richer towns, but the frequency of the fair is in large part due to the agricultural cycle, so more frequent fairs serve little purpose in small communities. Fairs are described in greater detail in City & Guild.

Mills

On certain manors, milling is one of the lord's greatest sources of income, exceeding the value of the crops grown on the demesne. This is particularly true on those manors where the demesne has been carved up or leased out in previous generations.

The simplest technology with which grain can be milled into flour is the quern, or hand mill. Querns were widespread in Roman times and virtually every peasant knows how to make one. Querns are illegal in some places, because lords demand that their tenants use the lord's mill. In some areas free men are permitted to use querns. In some areas, the population is too dispersed, or insufficiently interested in agriculture, to make mills worthwhile, and everyone uses a quern.

Mills on smaller manors do not have sufficient business to support the miller, and it is common for the miller to have a second occupation. Many have land, a virgate being typical. A miller might also have a trade and work at it from the mill. Some millers are members of the famuli, and so they receive food and lodging, but owe the lord agricultural labor in addition to their duties as miller.

Millers sometimes rent mills. They pay for them with their labor and either with a proportion of the grain milled (a fee called the multure), with the grain from land they farm in addition to their mill work, or with fish. Rents of fish for water mills are surprisingly common and large. Some millers provide thousands of eels a year, or a similar value of salmon, for the right to their mills.

Baking

Peasants are often required to use the lord's bakery. The bakers take a proportion of all the bread baked. Bakers sometimes rent the bakeries from the lords, paying a fixed fee for the monopoly of the manor's bread.

Commons

The commons of a village are areas set aside for the use of the villeins, or, in some cases, all of the residents. The commons are typically pasture, with a pond to water stock. It is from this pasture that these areas sometimes take the name "village green." Common land can, however, include buildings or woodlands. Land becomes part of the green through tradition of use, or by being set aside when the village is first laid out. A green is useful in that it gives a mustering area for a large village court, a venue for village fairs, and space for sports and dancing on holidays.

The use of the green is regulated by the manor court. Each villager is permitted to have some stock graze the green, but the other users of the green, and the hayward, monitor overgrazing. The number of sheep or goats that may forage on the green varies with its size and fertility, and this number of stock may be divided equally by all villagers, or by their obligation to villein service. The right to run some stock on the green, collect a little firewood there, and in some cases plant small gardens or harvest wild nuts and berries, acts to mitigate poverty. Villages without greens have cheaper labor costs, because more workers have to accept day labor or starve.

The Tragedy of the Commons

Players may mistakenly believe that commons are desolate places, destroyed by overuse. After the game period, the Enclosure Movement in England popularized this idea. They suggested that each peasant, acting in his own interest, ran additional stock on the green, which demanded more from the green than it could provide, destroying it. This metaphor is popular in the economic discussion of many environmental problems. The Enclosure Movement's solution was basically to give the green to neighboring landed gentry, who could look after it properly. This also had the useful effect, from their perspective, of making the peasants dependent on day labor, so wages fell.

Greens actually don't operate in this way, because peasants aren't allowed to just choose how many animals they will run on the common. Commons are highly regulated by the manor court, and are defended by the vigilance of every other villager who uses the green. Greens are less productive than if they were cropped with wheat in the sense that they produce less food, but they are more productive in the sense that they provide a minor element of social security, and provide a venue for events required by the social life of the village.

Waste

On a manor, the waste is land that is not planted. It is vital to the manorial economy because it includes woods and marshlands. Marginal land on the edge of the waste is often used for grazing, is called pasture, and is described earlier.

The wasteland is the domain of the faeries. It is part of the known landscape of the community, but does not fall within the boundaries of the fields that are blessed at various times of the year. Humans who clear land are, for a time at least, going onto faerie lands to spread the Dominion.

Fisheries and Marshes

Many communities draw their income from the sea, or from marshland. Fish and salt are both common exports from coastal areas. The duties of villeins who live by the sea vary with the strength and greed of their lord. At minimum, the king or his representative has the right to the proceeds of shipwrecks, to certain species of fish and waterfowl, and to commandeer any villein's vessel at any time. Greater nobles usually have the right to demand the services of ships from towns to which they have granted charters.

Marshes are the source of many useful raw materials. The lord sells the right to use these resources or demands that villeins harvest them on his behalf. The right to cut peat, called turbary, alleviates the lord's monopoly on firewood in some areas. Some marsh plants, particularly sedges, make superior roofing thatch and woven implements. Draining marshland is one of the main ways that additional arable land is bought into production. This is covered in more detail later, in the section on assarting.

Woods

The woodland on the edge of a community is its main source of wood, which is used for fuel, and as the main resource for the creation of all implements and tools. This means that the demand for wood is insatiable, and lords ration how much of it may be gathered, and by what method. In many areas, a peasant may take whatever wood he can carry, provided that it is lying on the ground or can be pulled down with a hand tool. After major storms, wise peasants head for the wood to seek "windfalls," trees that have been knocked over by the storm.

Story Seed: Joining The Navy

Proportionately, far fewer nobles than covenants have private ships. Those nobles who have trade vessels may prepare them as troop transports when needed in war, but even this is rare. It is far more common for a nobleman simply to demand the carriage of troops from a port city, and then turn up on the appointed day with an army motivated by the promise of pillage in some far distant place. Few towns want these men to be both disappointed and nearby, and either accede to the nobleman's demands or haggle a price for carriage. The negotiating position of such a town may appear weak, but a lord with a feudal levy is under extreme time pressure. Even a brief siege destroys his campaign season.

A covenant hears that a powerful nobleman has sent word to a town near the covenant that carriage will be expected on a certain day. The covenant may want to hide their own ships, or offer them for hire, or find other ways to profit from the presence of an army. Might they trick the army into crossing the lands of a troublesome faerie, or rival covenant?

The lord can often be convinced to sell a particular tree to a peasant for a small sum; trees of the right shape and size are required for building the internal supports of most peasant homes. Villeins are often required to pay the lord for use of his wood, although this service is often in the form of cutting and carting wood for the lord.

In England, much of the woodland belongs to the royal demesne, and most of it is forest, as described in Chapter Five: Leisure, Hunting. A forest warden is sent to inspect the king's woodland on a regular basis. If, standing on a tree stump, he can see two other tree stumps, he has the right to lay a heavy fine on those who have paid for the right to harvest from the king's wood, for overgathering.

The warden also charges nobles who have made illegal clearances in the king's forest. This is so unpopular that in the time of King John, the common people of Devon and Cornwall paid the king 2,200 marks and 20 palfreys, and 5,000 marks, respectively, to have their land "desforested." That is, they had all the land, in the whole of their counties, legally reclassified as woodland rather than royal forest, so that no fine would be due for clearances.

Parks and Lodges

Lords often reserve a portion of the wasteland around a manor for their own pleasure. This land is harvested for wood and other useful resources, but is also used as a game reserve. The use of these areas is covered in greater detail in Chapter Five: Leisure, Hunting.

Warrens

On a less-regal level, the right to trap small game is also held by the lord, and called the right of warren. Much as a lord can raise doves and leave them to feast on the crops of his tenants, so similarly is he entitled to raise as many small game animals as he likes and let them feed on the lands of his tenants. Poaching is, therefore, one of the most popular crimes in Mythic Europe. In some areas lords have banned the ownership of small dogs that can be used to chase hares down their burrows. There are records of arable land being abandoned because it has been destroyed by a lord's rabbits.

The laws protecting warren extend to pests like foxes, which cannot be killed without the lord's permission, regardless of the damage they are causing. Magical monsters, including potential familiars and vis sources, may also belong to the lord under the right of warren.

Mineral Rights

Certain mineral rights are reserved by the king, and major mining operations rapidly evolve into towns. Rights to minor resources are significant on a manorial level. On the principle that the lord owns everything, and has the right to charge for the use of anything, any valuable thing beneath the ground might attract a fee for use. In Mythic Europe a character who finds a gold nugget, or even a gold mine, doesn't own it; just because the lord doesn't know that it exists doesn't mean he doesn't own it. Useful mined resources include slate, quarried stone, flint, potter's clay, fuller's earth, and clay dyes.

Legal Rights and the Manor Court

A serf leading a typical life regularly pays fines to his lord. Fines are not, in this case, the result of a criminal act, but are instead a monetary compensation paid to the lord in exchange for him waiving one of his rights. Lords have so many rights, and they are so burdensome to administer, that it has become easier in most places for these breaches and resolutions to become monetary payments.

Entering the Manor

A peasant pays a fee to the lord for entering the manor by taking possession of a piece of land. This fee may be varied if the land is poor, to be assarted, or the villein has some skill sought by the lord.

Heriot, Mortuary, and Laity Objects

The heriot is a death duty owed when the head of a household dies. The heriot is the peasant's best beast in many places, but far heavier penalties are found in others. In some locales even free men pay the heriot. On some manors the death of a wife also triggers a heriot, and on others a man owes a heriot for every hide he had. On some manors a heriot is just under half of the man's goods, including many of his best beasts, anything he possessed made of metal, all of the wool and sides of bacon he had, and the things his widow will no longer need, such as his tools and clothes. In exceptional cases the heriot is but a token, purely symbolic of the fact that everything the serf owned is the lord's anyway. On one manor, for example, the heriot is the best copper pan from the house.

Mortuary is technically a fine, not a tax, but is collected with the heriot in many places so the two seem connected. It is the second-best beast that the peasant owned, or its negotiated equivalent. If there is no second-best beast, crops or tools are taken instead.

The mortuary is based on the assumption that every peasant is a thief. It is taken to make good the share of the Church tithe that the peasant — it is assumed — artfully withheld during his life. The peasant, having paid mortuary, is forgiven his debt to the Church and therefore has an easier passage through Purgatory. Serfs on monastic manors pay both heriot and mortuary to an agent of the monks.

Laity objects are items that are given as gifts to the Church by dying people. Common laity objects include the bed in which the person dies, his best robe, or some other object given as charity. Many priests assume that since these gifts are customary they are compulsory.

Most lords believe that serfs cannot make wills. Serfs do not own anything; everything they think they own has risen from their labor, which is owed to the lord, and thus they have nothing to give away. The Church wishes to collect the laity objects offered by rich serfs and sees no reason why it should not, given that in practice serfs do own personal property. Clashes between local lords and minor priests over this issue are common.

Death duties strike poor widows particularly hard. In addition to the death of her husband, the widow generally loses her working animals, or next-best assets, as well. This means she is short both of human and animal labor. Given that her home is rented with labor, the loss of a husband quickly becomes the loss of a home. Fortunate widows remarry, or fall into the lower subclasses of serfdom. Those less fortunate become vagrants.

Tallage

Lords have a right called tallage, which they exercise sparingly, but may legally employ whenever they wish. By this right a lord may, at any time, and for any reason, tally an amount of money from the manor and his villeins are required under law to supply it to him, with each villein responsible for an amount proportional to his land holding in the manor. The tallage may be as high as the lord wishes, up to and including the sale of everything his villeins own, the repossession of their land, and the sale of their service and progeny to another lord. Tallage does not apply to free men, because the things that they own are theirs, not the lord's, so he may not demand them.

Few lords actually tally exorbitant amounts. To do so causes his serfs to flee the manor and seek work elsewhere, stealing much of the manor's removable wealth as they go. In times of national crisis, like during civil wars, tallage is very high, its proceeds used to pay for mercenaries. Since many lords embroiled in a civil war feel uncertain that they will hold their lordships though the course of the war and the ensuing negotiations for peace, they take as much as they can, while they can.

Story Seed: The Gite

In France there is a tax called the gite, which is a feast for the lord and his retinue to celebrate his arrival on his tour of inspection of his manors. The gite has become increasingly extravagant over time. In politically unstable areas the gite is now unsustainably large, but this does not bother the nobles because they do not expect to hold their lands in the long term, and so see no point in preserving them. Some nobles now take their gite in coin, but this is difficult to transport, so they give or sell the gite to a friend, political contact, or anyone else who would like to feel like a lord of the manor for a day.

A village that has ties to the covenant has had its gite purchased by a merchant. Merchants who purchase a manor's gite tend to be greedy and cruel on that day even if they are not not on others, because they only have one day to live the vices of the lordship. The village is preparing for the merchant to descend with dozens of people in his retinue, drink and eat as much as they wish, order any beasts killed that they wish, and sleep in whatever houses they wish. The peasants also fear taht the merchant and his retinue will rape indicriminately and burn down a few buildings, and that the lord rather than the peasants — will ultimately be compensated.

It would be difficult for the peasants to arrange it, but if the merchant could be waylaid in the woods, then all might be well. The gite falls only on a certain day, and although the merchant could simply use his guards to force the peasants to submit on a later day, that would be a crime for which the lord could, and would, take him to court for tremendous damages. The lord would not care if the merchant misses his date of opportunity, for he keeps the price he sold it for regardless. The difficulty is the guards that each of the merchant's friends will have with them. The characters do, however, know where the merchant will stop the night before the gite, so there's some chance they can waylay him for the 12 hours necessary to ruin the feast.

On some manors, the peasants have convinced the lord to commute his demands for tallage to a set fee, paid every year. This has advantages to both sides in times of peace. The lord gets his money with less ill will, and the peasants are freed of the uncertainties of tallage at whim.

The Manor Court

Medieval justice is, as a simplification, divided into three spheres. The Church's courts deal with those who are priests, and with crimes against God or the Church. The royal courts deal with the rights of the king. This includes the right to maintain the king's peace. This allows royal officers to try anything that might be punished with death. Such crimes include murder, rape, burglary, and arson. The manorial courts deal with lesser matters. These include assault, minor thefts, and commercial disputes between villeins.

Procedure of the Court

A court meets as is customary for that manor. In some places this is as rarely as twice a year, or on set days at a traditional interval. In others the court meets as often as the lord or steward deems necessary. An announcement that court will be held may be made in church, or the beadle may knock on doors and inform his neighbors.

The court often gathers at the manor hall, but this is far from universal. In many areas a particular tree or part of the common is the traditional site for the court. Courts are rarely held in churches, despite their spaciousness. The steward convenes the court, and sees to the rights of the lord. He is attended by the bailiff, and perhaps the messor, who keep order. He is also assisted by a clerk who keeps the manorial rolls, which are long records of previous cases and debts.

Juries

The court often begins with an empaneling of jurors. Many free men resist the duty of jury, although free men are prized as jurors because they are seen as having more free time than villeins. The agreements that make men free often includes a clause requiring them to continue performing jury service.

A jury may serve three purposes, described below.

The simplest jury is a body of free men gathered together to swear that all of the duties owed by the free men of the manor have been completed, or, alternatively, to put forward those matters that require consideration. The members of such a jury are responsible for the accuracy of their statement. They may be penalized if they fail to draw attention to matters that affect the rights of the lord.

Juries are often used to decide matters of court custom in cases between villeins, or between villeins and free men, or between serfs and the lord. On some manors, there are separate juries for the matters of free men and the matters of villeins. Membership on these juries is decided by election, or the lord's appointment, or a system which mixes these. On other manors, these decisions are made by the steward or the acclaim of the entire court.

Juries of inquisition are groups of men appointed by the court to investigate a matter and report their findings at the next session. For example, in a case of sheep theft the jury might be asked to review the animals, consider the upkeep of fences and hedges between the lands, and use their knowledge of the character of the claimants to come to a decision. The considerations of juries are not private. If some members of the jury obstinately refuse to see reason, as determined by a different jury, then the victorious party in the later suit may sue earlier jury members for failure to provide a unanimous verdict.

Disputes

Most of the court's work involves disputes between serfs, or between serfs and the lord. Disputes between serfs provide the lord with fines, so it is cheaper for villeins to come to some agreement on their own before the bailiff becomes aware of the dispute, if they can. A smaller fine is paid when a dispute is settled amicably outside the court. Other villeins deliberately hold disputes until the coming of the court and then demand that their claims be checked against the court roll. There is a small fine for this, perhaps a couple of pence, which is doubled if the court roll is found to not support the villein's argument. Similarly, a man may pay a fine to demand that the court hear his case when the case could instead be summarily dealt with by one of the lesser officers. The court's ruling becomes binding, is added to the manorial roll, and the villein pays about a shilling for the court's time and trouble, or two shillings if the case went against him.

Disputes Based on Weights and Measures

There are no standard measures in any kingdom of Mythic Europe. This means that a character required to pay a pound of flour to his lord may be giving slightly more or less flour than an equivalent peasant with an equivalent debt in a neighboring lordship. Medieval people work around this lack in two ways: they use natural measures, and they haggle.

Natural measures are supposed to be unarguable, but they generally favor the lord because of his dominance of the manor court. Natural measures include injunctions that salmon paid to the lord must be "as thick as a man's wrist," that wheat paid to the lord must heap up "as high as a man's thighs," or that nuts gathered for the lord must fill "a pair of hose of medium size." These measures favor the lord because in marginal cases, it is for the manorial court to decide which man's wrist is too thick or too bony, which man is too short or too tall, and whose legs are too fat or too thin to act as a natural measure.

In some courts, each man is his own measure. A man due three handfuls of oats for carrying a load of oats in his cart is in luck if his hands are big. As a restraining feature, many men are allowed to have as much as they can carry, provided none of it spills. For example, many haycutters are allowed to take from their work as much hay as their scythe can carry, but if the scythe breaks they get nothing and are fined.

Fines

There are a wide variety of fines levied on peasants. Fines vary between manors, but some of the commonest are described below.

Story Seeds

Tiny Eggs

Faeries often play with natural measures as a way of causing tension in human communities. As an example, a popular natural measure is the egg. Many peasants have a number of eggs incorporated in their dues. If a faerie makes every egg laid on a manor the size of a thimble, it causes tension in the community. Either the lord accepts a reduced income, or the lord's servants try to take more from the peasants, who themselves already have less, as a way of maintaining his income. This sort of trickery often leads to accusations of witchcraft, so magi may feel the need to resolve these kinds of situations.

Weight in Gold

A mercenary captain has saved a monastery from raiders, but the abbot foolishly agreed to pay the mercenary his weight in gold in exchange. The local baron has demanded that he be present for the weighing, as an arbiter, and that he be permitted to bring his entire court, as it will amuse them. The baron has done this because he hates the abbot, and the procession of the lord's court will delay the weighing for a month. The mercenary has retired to a nearby town to stuff himself with sweet luxuries before the official weighing.

The abbot is praying for a miracle, because Daniel was able to fix a weigh-in with the help of God. In case there is no miracle, the abbot would like the help of the magi. He has heard that magically created food does not nourish. He'd like the magi to make sure that his rival eats nothing but magically created food for the rest of the month. That should save the abbot a tidy sum, which he'll divide with the magi. If the captain actually loses weight, the priest will pay them a bonus.

Warped Consors

An Autumn covenant in a neighboring Tribunal has fallen and its covenfolk, who are in some cases highly Warped, have spread into neighboring towns. This has led to strife with the local nobility and church. For example, a village that has the right to take one handful of salt from every pan boiled has become far richer, at the local lord's expense, by convincing a man Warped with a hand five times normal size to settle locally. Although none of the Warped consors have magical powers, and although they are no longer strictly the business of the Order of Hermes, the sum of their actions has disadvantaged a large proportion of the region's magnates.

Seizure

The goods of a felon automatically become the possession of his lord. A felon who flees or is put to death leaves his land vacant. A new landholder pays the lord a fee to enter the land, and so death is particularly lucrative for lords, but the death penalty is restricted to the greater nobility in many areas. Some buy the right to kill felons from their kings.

Story Seed: Fines for the King

The king of England owns all of England. (This is unusual; generally kings are owed the service of various nobles to various degrees.) This means that the king of England is in a unique position to cause the Order of Hermes discomfort. In this story seed, he does this by claiming that he is owed fines when magi in England are fined.

If a Hermetic magus is found guilty of abusing a magus from a neighboring Tribunal, a fine is often paid. This requires material of value to pass from England to another kingdom. This deprives the king of what is his, because everything that comes from England is his. This means he is due reparation of equal value to the thing lost. The king sends a representative to Tribunal, who is laden with relics to ensure he is not mishandled by magic, to demand the king's rights.

Characters may need to deal with this request from the king. It is likely a ploy to establish an ongoing payment of money in exchange for the king's recognition of the authority of the Hermetic Tribunals as courts. Payment could be a problem, though, because it would be made public and set a precedent that other kings would seek to follow, regardless of the unique legal niceties of the English situation. Characters might also seek the Hermetic magi who arranged the king's intervention. Fingers might be pointed at House Tytalus, whose domus magna floats smugly off the coast of Normandy and is the cause of much strife in its neighboring Tribunals. Could it, however, have been someone else, seeking to embarrass the Tytalus? They have many enemies that have become as cunning as they are.

Sex Taxes: Merchet, Leywrite, Childwrite, and Fines for Celibacy

It is legally forbidden for the serfs of different lords to marry. To secure the permission of the lord, each serf pays a fine called merchet. Merchets are higher if the woman is receiving a large dowry, because the lord's permission gives the bridegroom a greater benefit. The merchet is also larger if the bride is moving into the manor of her husband's lord.

The bride's lord collects a larger merchet to be compensated not only for her lost labor, but also for her lost brood. That is, she is fined because her children, if any, will not become her master's serfs. This fine is sometimes lowered when the two lords have adjoining estates, and come to an arrangement concerning the division of the brood between their manors.

Merchet is widely loathed by peasants. They see it as a tax on their children. In theory, if not in practice, the law of the Church forbade any people within seven degrees of consanguinity from marrying each other until 1215. This was found to be so unworkable that a majority of marriages, in many places, were legally incestuous and therefore false. The pope reduced the prohibited degrees to four, so that only people who share a great-greatgrandparent cannot marry. Since peasants live in tiny villages and do not travel far in their lives, their communities are either incestuous or are continually paying for the fresh blood that their community requires. On some manors, lords ask merchet even if their own villeins marry.

Story Seed: Tithe of Vis

A representative of the bishop arrives with a writ to examine the covenant, from top to bottom, to determine its compliance with his lord's tithes. Many of the things that magi collect are suited to tithing. Vis arises from the natural processes of the world, and therefore is suitable for tithe. Magi create things from their skills, such as books and magic items, so these things are also tithable. Can the characters hide their vis sources from the bishop's inspector? How does he know about vis? Why does he want to collect it anyway? To sell it back to the covenant, or to force them to perform a small favor?

Peasants who sidestep the issue of merchet by simply not marrying face an even stiffer fine, for leywrite. Leywrite, the right for laying down, is theoretically an adultery tax. It is charged by the lord on a woman who has deprived him of merchet by making herself unmarriageable by losing her virginity. This is difficult to prove. Leywrite often absorbs a related fee, childwrite, which is a tax on unmarried pregnancy. It is due each time an unmarried serf becomes pregnant. Leywrite is far more common than merchet: it's a particularly lucrative tax.

Fines cannot be avoided by celibacy. On many manors, a fine is paid annually by every serf, of marriageable age, who has been unmarried for more than a year. Some serfs bargain with their lords to receive a bulk rate for a lifetime without marriage. On other manors, men are regularly fined for choosing not to marry the widows appointed to them by their lords. When the daughter of free peasants sells herself into serfdom, it is often on the condition that she will not be forced to marry. Serfs and free men who die without children cannot, generally, will their property to their nephews. It automatically belongs to their lord.

Fines for Being Fined

It is illegal for a peasant to waste the things his lord owns. The lord owns everything that the peasant owns. Therefore, if the peasant is fined somewhere outside the manorial court, like the ecclesiastical court or the shire court, then the fine paid has been stolen from the lord, and the peasant owes the lord equivalent compensation.

Trade

Trade is heavily taxed, but only by the upper nobility or representatives of the king. There are ways for characters to make money from manufacture and trade. These are considered in detail in City & Guild.

In this supplement, non-agricultural sources of wealth are treated either as an unremarked component of agricultural income or as a bonus to the character's agricultural income. As an example, a manor by the sea that considers fish and eels as part of its income is nevertheless treated, in the economic rules, as an agricultural manor. The fact that the goods it produces for its lord's use include some fish rather than wheat or honey or cheese is significant to the color of the stories told, but not to the mechanics in these rules. If the same manor is permitted to run a salt kin as service to its lord, and use a portion of the salt to pay its taxes, this is treated as a simple monetary bonus.

A player character nobleman who uses the agricultural surplus of his lands to engage in local and international trade should be designed using the rules given in City & Guild.

For example, sins may lead to fines in ecclesiastical courts. A man convicted of being a fornicator, if a villein, must pay a fine, and then pay his lord a second fine for paying the first. As another example, in parts of France it is considered a breach of the peace for one person to call another person a serf as a term of abuse, even if the person actually is a serf. Similarly, clever synonyms, like "villein," "bondman," or "rusticum," are illegal words and a fine is due. That fine is paid from the transgressing serf's money, which belongs to the lord, and so a second fine is due.

Church

Religion plays a significant role in the life of almost every person in Mythic Europe. In feudal areas, that role is to provide the sacraments that mark significant occasions in the life of each person. Each community has a local priest appointed by the bishop, with the duty to care for souls in that community. This priest is called a curate, and the parish that supports him is his living. In many communities that have multiple manors, there are separate churches, and priests, for each manor. This is because the individual churches are owned by their respective secular nobleman and lent to the Church.

Curates are required to provide the sacraments required by the life of the community. They oversee celebrations of holy days. Each is required to preach four sermons a year, although this rule is only weakly enforced. The curate has the duty to maintain the Church's land in the vicinity of his flock. The income from this land, and the tithes of the community, are used for the priest's own support, to maintain the fabric of the Church, and to aid the poor.

Over time, the role of priest has become enmeshed in the financial and political structures of medieval life. This means that a particular priest may be curate for lands distant from each other, or for a contiguous area larger than it is possible for him to actually serve. Such curates pay assistants to perform their religious functions. The Church calls these servants "temporary curates", contrasting them to the "perpetual curates" they serve. For simplicity, this book uses "curate" for whoever is providing local services, and "rector," which means "ruler," for whoever has the right to collect tithes.

Curates of minor parishes are likely to have poor education by the standards of the Order of Hermes. Perhaps one-fifth of all the local priests in Mythic Europe are able to do little more than repeat the sacraments by rote, and cannot read Latin in any effective way. The sacraments of these priests are, nonetheless, completely effective, and these priests still serve their communities as resolvers of disputes, witnesses of oaths, and maintainers of the Church lands. Many provide religious education through their sermons, and some provide basic schooling for children.

Churchyard

The churchyard plays an important role in the civic life of the manor. It is common, on Sundays, for many villagers to gather in their churchyards, to drink, dance, and gossip. Informal markets are also held in churchyards. Priests have been forbidding unsolemn behavior in churchyards as sinful for hundreds of years, but this has not prevented it in most areas. Churchyards are hallowed places, protected by the Divine.

Glebe

The glebe is farmland set aside for the use of the Church. It may, like the lord's demesnes, either be set aside from the fields of the villeins or may be intermingled. On lands that have an ecclesiastical lord, like the manors belonging to monasteries, the glebe and demesne may combine, or the glebe may be left separate, for the use of that particular curate.

Glebes may be cropped in a variety of ways. Glebes may be rented out, which alleviates the need for the Church to have involvement in their management. This is a popular option on lands that have a distant rector and a salaried curate. In this case a small amount of land around the curate's house is usually retained as a garden. Small glebes are tilled by the priest himself in many cases, but larger glebes are tilled by hired workers. If the glebe is of sufficient size, the priest may have a permanent staff of villeins, much like the famuli of the manor's lord.

The most contentious of a curate's servants is the "hearth mate." A hearth mate is technically a woman of all work recruited to perform domestic labor. Effectively, the hearth mate is often a wife. Provided the relationship is deniable, or the priest claims to be penitent when found guilty of fornication by ecclesiastical authorities, this does not much damage the prospects of a manorial curate.

Church and Priest's House

Parish churches are not the grand structures of arching stone found in the cities. Most are built in the same way as the houses of manorial lords, so in areas where manor houses are made from timber with thatched roofs, the churches are made the same way. The interiors of churches tend to be highly decorated. The church is one of the few buildings where it is considered inappropriate for servants of the owner of the building to sleep, so priests require residences other than the church building.

Story Seeds

Brotherhood of the Black Mask

In England the problem of rectors is felt more intensely than in any other part of Europe. While King John was excommunicate, many livings fell vacant, and when he swore fealty to the pope, many of these were filled with Vatican functionaries who never visited England. Many others were filled with priests who did come to their livings, but did not understand English customs and were considered severe in their interpretation of their rights.

Roughly parallel to the game period, a minor nobleman whose church is given away without his permission forms a league of equally annoyed minor nobles, called the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood robs and beats Italian priests in their part of northern England. As word of the attacks spreads, other nobles, with no connection to the original Brotherhood, join in. If a comparable organization to the Brotherhood appears in the player characters' Tribunal, magi may be targeted. The magi, after all, speak Latin, and in many cases act in strange and possibly foreign ways.

Player characters who attempt to track down the leaders of the Brotherhood face several obstacles. The Brotherhood is more a social movement than an organization, so it has no ultimate leader. Its members often keep what they steal, but many of the brothers have emptied the tithe barns of the local churches and given the food stored there to the peasantry, so they are very popular with the common people. Many Brotherhood attacks are staged by great nobles, seeking revenge on priests they dislike. If there is a coordinating hand behind the best-planned of the attacks, it is likely one of the king's inner circle, who is deliberately spreading disorder for political ends.

Swift Assarting

It is possible to assart land far faster than normal by hiring a large workforce and then dismissing them afterward. When a lord does this, it leads to many problems. Petty crime rates rise while the outsiders are in the manor, particularly as their work comes to an end. The workers know they will move on soon and are unlikely to be caught in petty theft. Some groups go further than this, and stage burglaries after their work is done, or become brigands.

In this story seed for a Spring covenant, a band of brigands has begun to raid areas nearby. They have been telling the victims of their crimes that they were once workers from the group that assarted the covenant's lands. The magi, however, know that they assarted their own land magically. They must find this band, determine who they are working for, and figure out what this mysterious individual hopes to achieve by blaming the magi for a series of crimes. In the interim, the magi must deal with aggrieved local lords, who claim compensation for the damage caused by the covenant's reckless practice of hiring massive assarting teams.

The houses of curates in minor parishes are flimsy things. This is because the curates of minor places are usually no wealthier than villeins, given that the tithes and perhaps even the crops from the Church lands are collected by the curate for the rector, rather than for his own use. The curate receives a small wage that is supplemented by farming a small section of the glebe.

The houses of curates on manors where the glebe is more significant, or where the rector is also the curate, are far more substantial. Local priests of this type are as wealthy as prosperous free men. In some cases their houses are extremely large, second only to the great hall in size, because they provide accommodation for a personal staff of laborers who farm the glebe. Other wealthy priests simply rent the glebe to peasants who do not share the rector's home.

In some richer holdings, the lord has a personal confessor and a private chapel. This priest is a member of the lord's household staff and is paid a wage or offered part of the demesnes to farm, rather than drawing on the glebe. When not providing the sacraments, a personal confessor often acts as a secretary, teacher for children, or estate manager. It is possible for a lord's personal confessor to also be his manor's curate, particularly if the rector is distant from the manor and the lord allows the wage he offers his confessor to partially offset the wage of the curate.

Improvement

Non-magical characters may improve their fiefs in a limited number of ways. Most nobles do not bother with land improvement if the realm is in dispute. If landholders cannot be certain of keeping their lands, soldiers and castles are considered a wiser investment than improvements to the land. Absolute peace is rare, but sometimes war is restricted to the zones where two realms abut, and those far behind the battle lines see improvements as profitable.

Assarting

Hermetic scholars know that the weather in Mythic Europe is notably drier in the 13th Century than it was in preceding years. This has made farmable a great deal of land that was previously marginal. Coupled with the population boom being experienced in Europe, one of the simplest ways of expanding a fief is assarting: carving new cropland or meadow from fertile wasteland. This process has been occurring for much of the last century, so marginal land is becoming increasingly scarce.

A single strong laborer with proper tools clears one acre of lightly wooded land per month, if he does no other work. This means that villeins who are assarting land work much slower than an acre a month, because their other duties take precedence. Many lords use only local labor, or hire a small team of famuli who assist with the clearing and then are kept on to work the lord's increased demesne, so that assarting is a gradual but continual process that takes years to have a marked effect.

There are many ways of assarting land magically. Changing the topography or soil type to allow large field farming where it was previously impossible, altering water flows for irrigation, and removing trees or reducing them to ash are all simple and popular strategies.

A covenant that secretly clears itself land using magic alarms nearby lords. The sudden appearance of cropland in an area that was previously waste indicates to neighboring nobles that the new lord of has hired an enormous workforce. This, it is assumed, will cause predictable problems when it is dispersed.

Conquest

Taking land by conquest is rare, among the lower nobility, in most of feudal Europe, because it requires political skill and perfect timing. Conquered land must be taken from someone, and the lord of the dispossessed noble appears weak if he does nothing. In some cases, he will do as little as demand a fine and fealty from the invader, but this is seen as a pathetic response by his other vassals who, sensing their lack of security, form coalitions of mutual support that are often provoked into open war. All nobles know this, so unless a lord is beset by more important issues, conquest is rarely able to succeed in the extended term.

Nobles often are, however, beset by more important issues. Conquest can take place in times of general anarchy, because there is no lord able to prevent it. It can also take place during civil war, provided a conqueror chooses the winning side and limits his depredations to followers of the rival cause.

Land Management

The rules in this chapter assume manors that are controlled by a competent bailiff. Monastic centers have, for centuries, been researching ways to improve the yield of land. Their conclusions have recently been popularized among secular landlords. It is assumed in this section that characters cannot improve their lands simply by managing them better unless, during the setup of the covenant, or during story events, it has been noted that the covenant is run badly.

Players using City & Guild may develop businesses on the land, using the rules in that book. Those businesses that are part of the fi ef by custom, however, like the mills and bakery, are already included in the manor's income source.

Marriage

Marriage to heiresses and widows is one of the most lucrative ways of extending a character's fi ef. It is dealt with in greater detail in Chapter Two: Politics.

Purchase

Characters may purchase land from their neighbors. This costs between thirty and fi fty times its annual income, although this may be adjusted downward if the characters allow the seller to retain some of the rights of the land, or agree to take on some of its dues. Characters can get a better price by paying in immediate coin, since large transactions for land are usually paid in installments over many years. In some areas, the lord of a landholder must acquire the right to sell the land from his lord, who typically demands a cut of the price, which correspondingly raises the price.

Fief-like Holdings

In Mythic Europe there are some land holdings that are not fi efs, but can be treated as such for the purposes of these rules.

Allods

In England and Normandy, it is illegal for farmland to exist outside the feudal system. Every piece of land must have a lord, and that lord must hold by permission of the king. In other parts of Mythic Europe it is possible for a person to hold land without owning allegiance to anyone. A piece of land that its lord owns outright is called an allod. Allodial l a n d is signifi cant to the Order of Hermes because this entire system of villages and manors is less than three centuries old, so the oldest covenants in the Order predate it

Alms and Charities

and are therefore allods.

The Church is the greatest landholder in Mythic Europe, and individual priests may hold land as if they were noblemen, on behalf of the Church. Some Church land is allodial, because successive groups of monks following the Benedictine model have sought places in the wilderness to settle as monasteries, and peasant land-holdings have grown up around these sites. In England and Normandy this is considered legally impossible because all land is held from the king. There are two main types of non-allodial Church land, which are described in the following sections.

Alms land

Alms land is land given to the Church for its use, in perpetuity. It is still held from a major noble. The Church may farm the land or offer it to vassals. Other rights, like the right to take tolls, to require knight service, or to take a portion of the fi nes from local courts, stay with the nobleman. This means that the Church is required to have a small standing army and fi ght on both sides of many wars, simply to render service for its lands.

Charities

Charities are lands given to the Church in exchange for particular services. The most popular service connected to a charity is the provision of sacraments to the residents of a parish. They may also include masses for the soul for the land's initial donor, prayers for the success of a lord's ventures, the provisioning of hospitals and hospices, clerical duties, and teaching the lord's children. Under law, if these services are not provided, the lord can reclaim the land.

Over time, charities are increasingly being offered to nunneries. They are considered more dependable in providing services than priests or monasteries. Men are too often distracted, in the eyes of some donors, by secular concerns that women are barred from by their gender.

Towns With Royal Charters

Towns are founded by the lords who hold the land on which the town stands. Lords create them for several reasons. The higher population of a town means that even if the lord cannot claim as much rent per person as he can for peasants, he still makes additional money by packing more people into the space of the town. The townspeople also provide a ready market for the agricultural products that make up a large portion of the taxes collected by the lord, allowing them to be sold easily and quickly converted into manufactured goods. Townsfolk often pay their rent in money, which is convenient when a lord needs to settle his debts with his liege. Towns that already exist are coveted prizes, because the lord has all the benefits of a town with none of the foundation costs.

Some towns, however, hold directly from the king. Towns usually gain this right by offering the king money in exchange for a charter during a period of civil strife. Their offer is likely to be accepted if the town's noble overlord is a rebel. A royal charter places a town beyond the rapaciousness of the agricultural aristocracy. The council of such a town, as represented by its mayor, may even act as a feudal overlord itself.

Story Seed: Catching Up On Masses

If a charity is based on masses for the soul of a dead donor, but the priest hasn't been saying the masses as frequently as he should, then a court can confiscate the land and grant it back to the donor's heir. If the local abbot or bishop has significant power, this is a serious step with possible political consequences. A minor lord may, instead, ask the court to declare that the land be resumed unless the unsaid masses are made good. When this occurs, it is common for a group of priests to be sent to the charity. They perform many masses every day until the backlog, which may comprise many hundreds of masses, is completed. They often perform additional masses, so that there can be no question that the charity remains with the Church. The performance of the many masses in these situations attracts pilgrims, and seems to boost the Dominion.

Such an intense series of masses is one of the possible effects of Hermetic magi encouraging sloth in priests. When a marathon of masses is being said in an area, the creatures of the Faerie realm behave in odd ways. Some are geographically dislocated by the process. Some pretend to be refugees, or to be vacationing away from town. Some seem to go mad. Similarly, minor demons leave their usual haunts and seek new victims in the countryside. Powerful magical creatures, who must stay in Magic auras to avoid being affected by the creeping mundanity of the mortal world, may find their home's aura suppressed, and seek lodging at the covenant.

Discuss Poverty in Your Saga

Different troupes of Ars Magica players select different degrees of realism for the setting of their stories. The material in this book tends to the historic, rather than the fantastic. (This orientation has been chosen because accurate historical detail is difficult for storyguides to research, but not to remove.) The consequence of this book's historical rather than fantastic position is that the lot of the poor in Mythic Europe seems miserable by modern standards. Worse, it is in part made miserable by rich characters, like the player characters, and by the Church. Troupes should discuss this and choose a degree of realism that suits the stories they wish to tell.

The Simplest Choice: The Happy Peasant

Many troupes will find it convenient to simply select the level of peasant happiness for their covenant at creation, as they would any other feature. The covenant design system allows sagas set in flying castles that are defended by undead knights riding mechanical manticores, so choosing happy peasants represents a comparatively mundane option. The rest of this chapter is for troupes who want greater realism, a darker tone, and more extensive material to work into the backgrounds of their companions and grogs.

You Don't Want to be a Swineherd! You Want to See the World!

The aspiration to escape poverty and become prosperous is found throughout period folklore and also acts as a powerful driver for player characters. Characters from peasant backgrounds who serve in most covenants find that their working conditions are far superior to those of peasant life.

Noble Villains Provide a Change of Pace

How far a lord pushes his rights, and how much harm he does his peasantry as a consequence, is often a matter left to the lord's conscience. In many cases, medieval society's tolerance of the abuse of the peasantry encourages that same abuse.

Nobles who behave villainously with respect to their peasants can provide adversaries that are qualitatively different from monsters and demons, and therefore require different strategies to overcome. This allows players who want their characters to kill monsters and loot their bodies to share the limelight with players who wish to design magi from Houses like Merinita, Jerbiton, and Criamon, which have a weaker focus on combat.

The Church Was Sometimes Oppressive

In this chapter, the Church is portrayed as oppressive by modern standards. The Church in the 13th century is an institution of its time. Its members, for the most part, believe that many activities that modern players consider oppressive are morally just. These activities are presented so that stories and character backgrounds may be framed according to these medieval beliefs.

In 1220 the Church's officers also do many things that they know are morally questionable, but are less bad than any alternative they perceive. This is particularly true in financial matters. Much of the work of the papal court is performed by non-resident and pluralist priests, for example. The Church knows this is not ideal, but can see no better option given that the work of the Church is so important. The real-world Church worked through these complex issues over the centuries following the game period.

There is no need for troupes to play in a setting with a realistic Church. Some troupes may prefer that a Church guided constantly toward righteousness by the Holy Spirit. For such troupes, the material here may instead provide examples of the sins of exceptional priests, who can serve as foes during stories.

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