D&D - Mediaval Social, Political & Economical Structure.

Also, every time a social situation would be resolved by an administrative arrangement in the modern state - police, prisons, taxation authorities, ambulances, standing armies etc - assume that in your mediaeval world it has to be solved by the local and private exercise of power: local courts, militia rather than armies, personal enforcement of legal claims rather than police, etc, etc.
I think that's an excellent starting point for understanding pre-modern societies. There is no state; there's only the local lord and his men. There's no notion of universal human rights; you have whatever rights your own ancestors earned from their own lord, etc. They're a kind of property you've inherited. You can't assume your rights will be protected by anyone except your lord, to whom you owe allegiance.

Another way to look at most D&D worlds is to look at much of our own war-torn "developing" world, where no one takes law and order for granted, especially not from the official government.
 

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That's the institution of the Polis, which I do agree contains a lot of the aspects of the modern concept of the state (and the Roman Republic/Empire contain more).

I'm not so sure about the rule of law rather than the rule of man. So much of the legal system wasad hoc, influenced by the prejudices of the jurors and the quality of the oratory. Certainly punishment was highly variable, depending on how popular you were. And of course there was plenty of scope for semi-legal punishments, which might themselves turn out a few years later after a change in government to be grounds for criminal cases. The law code of Hammurabi is a lot older and more defined, I suppose is as close as I can get to the word I want.
Hammurabi's 'laws' are his edicts on "how things are to be." What is the procedure for changing them? There was none, except overthrow Hammurabi. They are still from the rule of man.

Even where the polis (Athens) had a lawgiver in Solon, the entire circumstances and force of the resulting legal code were different. "Unlike Lycurgus, Minos, Hammurabi, and Numa, [Solon] made no claim that a god had given these laws" Will Durant, The Life of Greece, p 117

"Legally his work marks the end of government by incalculable and changeable decrees, and the beginning of government by written and permanent law. Asked what made an orderly and well-constituted state, he replied, 'When the people obey the rulers, and the rulers obey the laws.'" Durant, p 118

"One test of Athenian law is the reverence that nearly every citizen feels for it: the law is for him the very soul of his city, the essence of its beneficence and strength. . . Here for the first time in history is a government of laws and not of men." Will Durant, The Life of Greece, p262
 
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Another way to look at most D&D worlds is to look at much of our own war-torn "developing" world..

This is because much of the war torn 'developing' world is pre-modern, and in some cases actually feudal.

I had a friend go to Pakistan in the aftermath of the quakes to assist in building shelters, and he reported back that the people of rural Pakistan had to take their grain to have it ground at the mill owned by the local warlord/land owner, where the warlord could then take a portion of it, or else face retribution. This taxation arrangement would have been fully familiar to every medieval serf.
 

I don't worry about those things. Instead I use superficial medievalisms, such as naming conventions, professions and so forth. Like an NPC called Ulver the Spagyrist. This is very much in accordance with the worlds presented in the D&D rules. They have the trappings of the medieval - platemail, swords, horses, castles - but aren't really. They are closer to Vance's Dying Earth, with its monster-infested wilds and magic item collecting wizards or, as has been said, the Wild West.
You sir, have a WIS of 18!
 

This is the whole reason I started buying Harn, then I found out how awesome the content is, and kept buying more and more! Then they started putting up all kinds of awesome fan made freebies on Lythia.com!

Learning such things from an RPG is much more fun than learning them from text books.

But Harn is expensive, the internet is already paid for, and you can find tons and tons of great links.

Yes, I have to agree with you, Harn is a beautifully offered setting with a real sense of medievalism. I can't recommend it enough for any gamer looking for a setting that offers something a little more historically accurate.

Also, I'd like to suggest The Black Death: A Personal History by John Hatcher. The book offers great insight into the minutia of village life in the 14th century.
 

We have PAYG, most people do not have to lodge a yearly return. The issue for her was that every penny she earned was being taxed at the Basic Rate + National Insurance, as she had not successfully claimed her tax-free Personal Allowance. Edit: And her efforts to do so was stymied by a big cultural gap in how you're supposed to relate to Authority. She was being all Stoic on the phone - "Just a little problem...", so the UK tax man just ignored her requests. Only months later when she realised she needed to get tearful and emotional - "We're starving! *sob*" did they finally grant her her personal allowance. British authorities expect a supplicatory tone; American authorities require a kind of cheerful stoicism.

As someone who's recently suffered through incalculable hours of education on the US federal tax system, I'd like to note that most Americans also pay income & employment tax on a pay as you go basis--as long as they're employees, and not self-employed (that is, not independent contractors). Our system of federal income taxation remains, rightly or wrongly, a point of contention as to its constitutionality, but also stemmed from a need to finance the Civil War (which has parallels then to the UK's development of their system).
I think tax is pretty interesting but it's excruciating to be lectured on.

Legal and financial complication is, IMO, a function of how long the society has existed, and how the function of government has changed, and what historical conditions have transpired. A younger civilization is not as likely to have the bulk of laws that an older one does, under those conditions. Compared to US federal tax 'stuff,' Hammurabi's code is a vacation pamphlet. (I say 'stuff' because the Code isn't the only thing we have to refer to when doing tax accounting... Blarg.)

Back in undergrad, I took a pretty interesting dual-program course in England called "Shakespeare and the Modern Self." This topic is really good for reminiscing on our drunken arg---errrr, discussions. ;)
 

One of the central differences between the modern and the pre-modern is the notion that the world is ruled by laws rather than men. Interestingly though, I think it is the Feudal System that first begins to blur this line and becomes the stepping stone from Rule of Man to Rule of Law. This is because the Feudal System encodifies the relationship between the leige and his subject. This leads directly to such things as the Magna Carter and eventually to the modern idea of a Constitution, but certainly back at the time of the feudal system society is governed primarily by private to private relationships.
An interesting discussion of the emergence of legally-constituted administration is Robert Bartlett's [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Making-Europe-Robert-Bartlett/dp/0691037809]The Making of Europe[/ame]. He discusses, in particular, the way in which the availability of "standard form" charters for new towns facilitated the expansion of Christian Europe in the medieval period.

If you're referring to the rule of laws rather than the rule of man, that goes back to Greece, and the polis . . . the origin of civilization.
That's the institution of the Polis, which I do agree contains a lot of the aspects of the modern concept of the state (and the Roman Republic/Empire contain more).

I'm not so sure about the rule of law rather than the rule of man. So much of the legal system wasad hoc, influenced by the prejudices of the jurors and the quality of the oratory. Certainly punishment was highly variable, depending on how popular you were. And of course there was plenty of scope for semi-legal punishments, which might themselves turn out a few years later after a change in government to be grounds for criminal cases.
I'm not really talking about the rule of law rather than men, although as Bluenose says the Greek polis doesn't really instantiate the rule of law. The best discussion I know of the political dynamics of the polis (and I should say it's not my field, so I havn't read that widely) is Finley's Politics in the Ancient World. The significance of ostracism, in particular, as a political tool seems to me somewhat at odds with a rule-of-law based society. And the presence and use in Roman practice of the senatus consulta ultima is one piece of evidence against the existence of the rule of law in Rome.

But in any event a polis is not a modern state, despite the tendency to render "polis" as "state" in translations of ancient Greek works. Here is one characterisation of "the state", from Geuss's Philosophy and Real Politics (p 44):

an abstract structure of power and authority distinct both from the population and from the prince, aristrocracy or ruling class, which successfully enforces a monopoloy of legitimate violence within a certain territory.​

This does not characterise the polis, or even ancient Rome - for example, both within the polis and in Rome various sorts of private militias seem to have been accepted as legitimate. (Again, this is something which is easy to incorporate into a fantasy RPG in order to convey a sense of "premodernity".)

Furthermore, a polis is not abstract in the same way - for example, it is not conceived of as a bearer of rights and duties distinct from the rights and duties of its people. This is not just an abstract point - it is something that plays out in social and political reality. Thus, as Finley puts it in the book I mentioned earlier (at page 8), in antiquity

the citizen's personal contacts were directly with the government - the legislators, the executive, the courts - because there was no mediating bureucracy.​

(Geuss elaborates on this point at pages 44 to 50 of History and Illusion in Politics.)

Finley also notes (pp 22, 130) that a Roman soldier swore an oath of loyalty to his general, which he was required to repeat whenever the general changed.

What distinguishes the modern state, then, is its abstractness, which is realised via the bureaucracy, and its claim to totality in authority. You can have this without law in any rule-of-law sense (eg Soviet Russia), but the sort of law that realises the modern state has to make claims to normative preeminence - preeminence over family, religion, custom, etc - that are quite distinctive.

much of the war torn 'developing' world is pre-modern, and in some cases actually feudal.
The gloss I would want to put on this is that much of that same world is also highly imbedded in a global and more-or-less liberal economic system. So while aspects of it resemble feudalism (as per your milling example) it is also very different from past social and economic life because of the impact of that economic system.

Not to put to fine a point on it, but I think you can go a long way toward making your world feel suitably ancient by having things which we would now consider gross injustices be reutine: officials require bribes in order to do their duty, judges require payment before they'll hear a case, lords hear cases in which they are a party, taxation is arbitarily applied, the office of tax collector is up for sale to the highest bidder, people are judged according to their station, punishment is by a modern perspective grossly outsized to the crime, slavery is accepted as a part of life in even 'good' societies, and so forth. You don't have to put all of that into every society, but neither should your civic society parallel the modern.
I agree with all this. It's the absence of this sort of thing from some published Greyhawk material, and even more markedly from nearly all published FR material that I've encountered, that makes me need to rework the first world a bit before I use it, and makes me ignore FR altogether.

Legal and financial complication is, IMO, a function of how long the society has existed, and how the function of government has changed, and what historical conditions have transpired. A younger civilization is not as likely to have the bulk of laws that an older one does, under those conditions.
I'm not sure about the "how long" - over time complexity builds up, but redundant law can also be swept away. The law of land tenure was more complex in pre-modern than modern Britain, for example. But I agree with your points about "function" and "historical conditions".
 

S'mon, thanks for the reply.

We have PAYG, most people do not have to lodge a yearly return. The issue for her was that every penny she earned was being taxed at the Basic Rate + National Insurance, as she had not successfully claimed her tax-free Personal Allowance.
OK. If I'm making proper sense of this, in Australia that would be called the "tax free threshold". When you start a job and fill out the payroll documentation, you have to tick a box that indicates whether or not you want to claim the tax free threshold from that employer - which affects the rate at which tax is then deducted.

A quick look at the ATO tax tables here shows that, for a more-or-less median income of $1,000 per week failure to claim the tax free threshold will take the withheld tax from a little under $200 to $280. (Naturally enough, the lower the income the more significant it is not to claim the tax free threshold, and the higher the income the less significant.)

The taxfree threshold in Australia is $6,000 (before a 15% rate cuts in on income up to $35,000). A quick google of HMRC suggests that the personal allowance in the UK is around 7,000 pounds and the rate that cuts in is 20% - so failure to claim the personal allowance would certainly be more quite a bit more costly than failure to claim the tax free threshold!

British authorities expect a supplicatory tone; American authorities require a kind of cheerful stoicism.
I've also heard that in Britain it helps to have a reference/recommendation from an "esteemed" person, such as a member of the armed forces.

I'm not sure I can make any general comment about the expecations of Australian functionaries - sobbing can sometimes help, but isn't generally required. Getting increasingly heated (while nevertheless remaining polite) tends to be my main strategy.

I find comments on these sorts of cultural differences emmensely fascinating.
I don't know that I'd go that far, but it is interesting.

I think tax is pretty interesting but it's excruciating to be lectured on.
And again with these outrageous slanders against your law lecturers!
 

The gloss I would want to put on this is that much of that same world is also highly imbedded in a global and more-or-less liberal economic system. So while aspects of it resemble feudalism (as per your milling example) it is also very different from past social and economic life because of the impact of that economic system.

The gloss I would put on that is that the percentage of economic value tied up in it may have changed and the world has gotten smaller, but the civilized world has always been tied up in a more or less global more or less liberal* economic system. It's easy to simplify the past, but the past was never simple.

*Liberal in the sense that the people who bought things here and sold them there could pocket the profits of the transactions and become wealthy thereby.
 

A quick look at the ATO tax tables here shows that, for a more-or-less median income of $1,000 per week failure to claim the tax free threshold will take the withheld tax from a little under $200 to $280. (Naturally enough, the lower the income the more significant it is not to claim the tax free threshold, and the higher the income the less significant.)

The taxfree threshold in Australia is $6,000 (before a 15% rate cuts in on income up to $35,000). A quick google of HMRC suggests that the personal allowance in the UK is around 7,000 pounds and the rate that cuts in is 20% - so failure to claim the personal allowance would certainly be more quite a bit more costly than failure to claim the tax free threshold!

This was in 1998, I think her gross income was about £14K, the tax rate AIR was 25%, plus 10% National Insurance which applied to almost all her income. The allowance I think was £4.5K. So her net income with no allowance was 2/3 of 14K, which was not enough for us to live on (pay rent, heat house, buy food). I had no income at the time, doing my PhD - we had actually been better off with me getting a tax-free student access fund grant from my University.
 

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