Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steel_Wind" data-source="post: 3551806" data-attributes="member: 20741">To the above I would add three critical points in the feudal contract:1 - the Lord was obligated to protect his vassal's lands when called upon by the vassal with a just complaint. Like many things, it was honoured as much in the breach as in the observance, but a failure to protect your vassals was the surest way to ensure that when called upon, your other vassals would have pressing business elsewhere or claimed to have never to have "received" your summons;2 - the service owed to the Lord was for a set period of time. It was not an open-ended contract of service. This meant long campaigns were hard to manage without incentives (plunder, more lands, titles, marriage offers and other heriditaments - (which is why the Hundred Years War became very much concerned about these things); and,3- the Lord was obligated to feed the men contributed by the vassal when they were called upon for service. This was not a small point; in fact, it was the trickiest point of all.  Honouring that more in the breach than in the observance means your men ended up spoiling your own lands or just plain going home.Given the limited nature of medieval agriculture, lack of preservatives  for food and poor transport, the simple presence of an army moving across the land and spoiling it to feed itself was an economic disaster that could take a decade or more to recover from. It was worse than any plague of locusts.As agriculture improved in Europe as it moved into the modern era, by Fredrick the Great's and later Napoleon's times, the land could support many more soldiers marching through a given portion of it.  Napoleon's method of breaking up his armies and marching his troops across the land through several paths to then unite them at their destination was mostly about spreading the load of feeding that army as they moved across a far larger area of land.The problem of logistics and supply are not too terribly heroic. They are, unfortunately, what medieval warfare was very much about.</blockquote>

Verification