Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6812717" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ok, first, it differs from country to country.  In England, an Earl was a pretty high rank.  In France, it was not.   In Sweden, the word 'knight' implies more the connotation of 'ronin' or 'bandit' than it does noble.   So, pick a country for your model.Secondly, keep in mind about what you said about it being complicated and full of exceptions, because it was.  While in general a Count was in theory of lower rank than a Duke, some of the Counts of France rose to be of the first rank among the nobility.  You pretty much have the right of it.   What the rules cyclopedia describes is sort of the idealized system of how it was supposed to work.  But over time it would vastly diverge from its idealized form, leaving the title just an abstract degree of respect and honor.For example, one of the big problems any lord faced was that after he granted fiefs, his vassals might each effectively control more resources than he did.  This would make it impossible to compel a vassal to behave without the cooperation of his other vassals.   And a lord that wasn't a particularly good money manager would often borrow money from his vassals, and if he couldn't pay it off, he'd pay it off in more land.  Eventually many lordly families reached the point that they held a title but little else.  Meanwhile their former liege's family had grown in wealth and power, until they encompassed basically all the lands held in theory by their former liege.   This problem surfaces up and down the whole of the feudal chain, so that you actually will find serfs that are wealthier than their lords and to whom their lords owe money.And keep in mind that at its heart, feudalism was little more than government through private contract.  And every single one of those private contracts could be different, and often had a very great many qualifiers on them.   In particular, the feudal system differed from the modern system in that it was assumed that a person had full right to control how his property was used after his death.</blockquote>

Verification