Tonguez said:
That got me thinking in the real Medieval world and in your game how does the monarch and royalty relate to the rest of society?
There is an excellent book called
The King's Two Bodies or something very much like that tracks the development of ideas of kingship in the Middle Ages. I'm going to offer some historical answers because my current game is an historical game.
Of course, as with anything, there is no monolithic idea of kingship that covers the whole period. But here are some ways of thinking about kingship that operated during the period. Note that they are somewhat contradictory and were emphasized to varying degrees in different regions:
(a) The king as incarnating the land. The Arthurian cycle of legends was very committed to this idea: the king and the land are two sides of the same coin. The king's health, morality and conduct were sympathetically linked to the land itself. A bad king caused crops to sicken and die and weather to deteriorate.
(b) The king as personal sovereign. Early medieval ideas of kingship and, interestingly, early modern ideas of kingship understood the king as king not of a physical territory but of one or more peoples. Each people had a different set of laws and customs but were often geographically intermixed throughout the territory. A holdover of Roman theories of law, Neustrians in Charlemagne's world, were a different people than Romans, even though both groups existed in the same empire. When a Roman went to Neustria, he was still tried under Roman law. Obviously, in this model, the various peoples of an empire have one thing in common: their king. In this way, the king functioned as the personal sovereign for a heterogeneous, variegated group.
(c) The king as suzerain. High medieval ideas of kingship, especially as exemplified in France, saw the king as the top of a vassalage pyramid whereby he unequal exchanges that made up the vassalage structure beginning with the relationship between a manorial lord and his peasants filtered all the way up to the relationship between a baron and the king.
(d) Grace-created sovereignty. Henry of Susa, or Ostiensis, argued that kingship was a creation of God and that the church, as God's representative on earth, could anoint or depose a king based on God's will.
(e) Grace-completed sovereignty. THomas Aquinas argued that kingship was a natural thing that emerged from human nature, irrespective of the church's actions. Hierarchy was hard-wired into the world and God's hand could be seen to act in the natural emergence of kingship without the action of the church.
(f) High kings and emperors. Systems in which there were kings of kings are comparable to contemporary Britain. There is a core territory ruled directly by the high king (like modern England) but there are other territories with another layer of government (like contemporary Scotland and Wales) where there is a local king who is a vassal of the high king or emperor. The relationship between people and their high king is different based on whether his rule is filtered through a sub-king or not.
(g) Petty kings. In a system where governance is personal, in the absence of a high king or emperor with the capacity to force unity (and usually this required being constantly on campaign, half the time at the frontier and the other half smashing lords who defied him), big political entities could, like Charlemagne`s empire, dissolve into "petty realms and lordships." (This is one of the great instances of Gibbon quoting authors of the time and Tolkien then quoting Gibbon.) And in Scandinavia in the same period, the situation was more extreme. Anskar, the missionary to the Danes, reported that every town he visited had its own king.
(h) Peripatetic court. In order to maintain a big kingdom (and to not starve out and over-hunt the land where the palace is), kings spent a lot of their time on the road, dropping in on local lords, eating them out of house and home and then leaving again. During these visits, the king's hand might be heavy on a region but between them it might be quite light.
(i) Elected kings. Like Holy Roman Emperors, early Carolingian monarchs were chosen by election -- nobles and other notables would show up and "elect" or acclaim a pre-chosen candidate who had already established sufficient military hegemony to call the election in the first place. Partway through the empire, the Carolingians moved to anointed kings, laying the groundwork for what would become the Ostiensian theory of the state much later.
Do they have any real influence on daily life?
Yes. Remember: the reason feudalism worked and the thing that powered it was that people needed protection from raids, wars and other physical threats. The king might not be able to make food show up when it was needed. But the difference between an effective king and an ineffective king might be a whole lot of raiding, crop-burning and extortion.
Kings were also important for maintaining public infrastructure like bridges and fords that joined local lordships together. They were also important in insuring standardized coinage, weights and measures were in effect.
Also, if you're going with how medievals thought about kingship as opposed to what it actually did, people, especially in regions with vestigial Celtic minorities in Britain and France, would understand good harvests and weather as coming from a morally upright and divinely-favoured king.
Do villages hold Royal Feast days in praise of the Monarch?
This is something much more likely done by local lords who want/need to impress the monarch with their loyalty. While peasants were happy to take a day off and celebrate pretty much anything, local festivals celebrating a monarchical marriage or territorial acquisition would come from a lord's knowledge of the events at court not from a grassroots upwelling of approval.
Do rebels and dissidents plot against the crown?
Absolutely. In some rare cases, the plot is against the political formation itself but usually, people just hope that by replacing the monarch, things will get better. Because it is the person of the monarch that makes all the difference, changing the person, as opposed to political structures is what people believe will get results.
Does the King ride through & cure disease by his mere touch?
Kings curing scrofula by touch is an obscure high medieval belief from France. It is a mistake to generalize this too much.
Are princesses kept in towers and do kings offer the hands of their daughters to would be heroes?
Princesses were, indeed, extremely valuable assets requiring careful guarding. Sometimes this was because they were valuable ways of extending lineages and making alliances. Sometimes, as in Charlemagne's case, their father and his friends at court just wanted to sexually abuse them.
Do average adventurers actually get to experience the machinations of the court?
Absolutely! In my game, the adventurers are part of the Carolingian Missi Dominici system where local lords and conditions were checked-on by centrally appointed small parties of civil servants who would be given a mission by the court like, "Go to the Elbe, see how the Sorbs and Wends are being treated on our side of the river and how well they are being instructed in the Catholic faith. If they are not, give the local bishop and margrave a stern warning."
