Noble Houses

[S'mon]

I think 'Noble house' here clearly means 'aristocrat/upper class family', the French conception of nobility, not Nobles as in the English conception, where true nobles were very powerful, with seats in the House of Lords.

 

[Aholibamah]

Also check out lythia.com for some ideas about nobility and noble families.

Whisper72's ideas are a good basis for deciding what kind of nobles might exist. Generally the average noble retinue will consist of:

- the noble's immediate family
- in laws and immediate relations (who often have been delegated roles of responsibilty, such as bailiff, steward, etc--you can ideally trust family more than strangers)
- families of retainers, that is to say loyal followers who in exchange for provision, lands, etc do duty to the noble house. These would have jobs of importance like being captain of the guards, stablemaster, chamberlain and the like. They tend to be gentry and not quite titled nobility unless the noble house is very grand indeed.
- servants; generally commoners who are guards, porters, chambermaids, cooks, stableboys, huntsmen and so on.

Note that nobles traditionally in such societies often fulfill important roles in say the life of a city themselves unless there is some odd charter preventing this. They are likely to have the leisure, experience, wealth and training to be leaders, though not always exclusively. Tradition may gradually establish noble families in certain kinds of positions. For example it might be traditional that one noble house controls the position of harbourmaster, while another is always commander of the watch. Of course they may also do a form of musical chairs, which gives you a chance for more intrigue.

 

[Qwillion]

I would recomend looking at the appendixs of George R. R. Martain's A Song of Ice and Fire series (game of thrones, clash of kings, storm of swords, and feast for crows).

 

[Kahuna Burger]

In general, political nobility and landed nobility are quite rich, as they have plenty opportunity to enrich themselves. The free nobles might be dirt poor, and the 'merchant' nobility (for lack of a better word) can also be destitute if they make poor decisions in business.

Though it's a common storytelling trope to reverse this, such as in Corpse Bride, where the "fishmongers" are marrying into the noble house to give their fortune respectability, while the nobles are just as desperate to marry into the fishmongers to prop up their respectable home with some actual cash. If the story is set during a time of changing economies (land to cash, cash to magic, gold to power?) that reversal makes some sense.

 

[Cerebral Paladin]

I exchanged some e-mails with John Ross about this very topic. The important thing to bear in mind is that the noble households include the petty nobility. So for a town that has 5 noble families, that might be the lord of the local manor plus four knights and their families. It's not that it doesn't range up to the counts and dukes and the like-- just that they are a very small fraction of all of the nobles. So the 125 noble households in the biggest city would include a small number of high nobility (I'm not sure whether the townhouse of a noble who has estates out in the country would be counted, but it might be, especially if the nobles spend most of their time in the town and leave the estates to a steward to manage) and then lots of lower nobility-- knights and their families, the households of younger children of titled nobility who have reached majority and have the resources to set themselves up on their own, etc. The number of "peers" or their equivalent will be much smaller.

Incidentally, when I wrote to him several years ago about his great resource, the author was very friendly and helpful.

 

[moritheil]

I think 'Noble house' here clearly means 'aristocrat/upper class family', the French conception of nobility, not Nobles as in the English conception, where true nobles were very powerful, with seats in the House of Lords.

An excellent point.

 

[Celebrim]

I'm creating a small kingdom using John Ross' Medieval Demographics guide and calculator. Very cool tool, btw.

Yes, absolutely. It challenged my assumptions that I was playing a very realistic game, and made me think seriously about what I had been doing. That's always a good thing. I don't think you quite get the same rich texture to your world, even if you in practice end up handwaving away demographics, if you don't consider your demographics.

So, anyway, it says in my biggest city of 25,000 people, that I should have 125 Noble Houses, not nobles in total.
...
So I was hoping someone could point me towards an easy to access source of information regarding the breakdown of what a typical noble house would be like.

Thanks in advance.

It is very much going to depend on what period you are actually simulating. Most D&D campaigns I'm aware of much more closely resemble the early modern period in fashion, style, architecture, city life, and so forth than they do the medieval - much less the early medieval. And, if your campaign is anything like mine, the local 'tech level' can vary somewhat widely especially in what we might call 'social technology'. Make sure you are getting the feel that you want and asking the right questions.

For example, the medieval demographic pattern is actually based on the assumption of settlement before grain fed horses become the default means of providing animal power. The medieval countryside is laid out according to the needs of an ox cart. The reasonable daily round trip for an ox cart is only about 8 miles, which means that villages tend to be small and quite closely spaced (3-4 miles apart) so that commerce can flow between them. It's quite reasonable to assume that the area was settled at a time when everyone was using grainfed horses pulling wagons, and consolidate every 6 or so small villages into a single larger village (nearly a town) of 300-400 inhabitants spaced every 10 miles or so apart. This is what I do principally because its makes mapping a whole lot easier.

Another thing to consider is that the real medievals were living pretty much alone. I use Ross's demographic numbers not to give the population of the kingdom, but instead to give the total population of sentient beings living in the area of the kingdom. Not all of them need be human or even give fealty to or recognize the existance of the political entity that the humans have created.

If you really want to capture a medieval feel to the households, you need to consider that the aristocratic lords by and large live very much like the servants. They just don't work very much like the servants. But the Lord's manorhouse is likely to be simply a larger version of the wattle and dung, wood framed house that the peasants live in, possibly just the equivalent of three or four such houses built together, or with actual second (or third) floors rather than just lofts. The lord is likely to be wearing pretty much the same clothing as a peasant, with the addition of some color and perhaps some fur trim. He's going to be distinguished principally by the fact that he can change his clothes more than once a week. The household outside the Lord's bed chamber is likely to be just as crowded as thier peasant neighbors. The cook and scullions are sleeping in the kitchen. The servants are sleeping in the hall outside the bedchamber. The maids are sleeping in the common room, and thier is probably a boy sleeping in the kennel with the dogs and another one sleeping in the stables with the horses. All these servants, the families children, constitute 'the household' and are probably for the most part drawn from the tenant families that actually work the Lord's land.

The Lord is himself at this level really little more than some other greater lord's servant in some capacity. It's quite possible that if the Lord is at times sleeping in the hall of some greater lord's manor, being the Chamberlain, or the Butler, or the Huntsman or Master of the Hounds or whatever there (of course, with the addition of a staff that he oversees because it is a greater wealthier household). And when he is not, he's probably sub-contracting the job out to some nephew or cousin or some other trusted younger kinsman - probably one that doesn't stand to inherit land or manors of his own. Or else, one that doesn't stand to inherit enough land to pay for the upkeep of the manor he stands to inherit.

However, the medieval aristocracy is principally all about one thing - mounted soldiers. Most of these noble households are going to be knights, and there job isn't going to be running the bureaucracy of some greater lord, its going to be showing up to fight. That's going to be less true of the city than the countryside, where some many of the lords are going to be civil servants of some sort (and you think tenure in government jobs is a big problem now), but its still likely the case. The long and short of this is that the noblity on average actually end up living shorter and more brutal lives than most of the peasants. Thier standard of living isn't necessarily appreciably better than the peasants, and they spend alot of time going around killing each other or getting killed while training to kill each other. The only time its really good to be a noble is during a famine, because you own weapons and the peasants don't. Otherwise, your wealthier peasants, even if in the eyes of the law they are 'slaves', are likely to be better off than the nobility. In the towns, this is especially true, because the townsfolk are free, and busy forming political entities of thier own.

 

[Kzach]

Thanks again for the replies. All of this has been very helpful for the imagining of my little Kingdom. I've already got half a dozen adventure ideas to seed throughout it and a couple of campaign ideas as well, not to mention a very rich back drop