Worldbuilding 202: Feudalism
Greetings and scullion! 😏 I can be, if you’re not nice! But welcome to today's blogpost! What mysteries will we unravel today for your worldbuilding wonders? The thing fantasy people love so much but seem to understand so little: feudalism!
Yes, M’lord?
Feudalism is a complicated socioeconopolitical system but it can roughly be viewed from this fundamental principle.
Land is given in exchange for services and labour.
This is fundamentally what feudalism boils down to and how, I will explain in the next bit!
Work the land, peasants!
The way to look at it is this: the top dawg, usually king or emperor, or the female equivalences queen, empress, or, for the adventurous, the hermaphrodite versions, quing and emporess, “owns” all of the land in the “nation.” I put quotation marks around nation because the notion of nation in those eras is generally very vague. I will explain why later.
As I explain in my post on communication, a week can be considered “instant” in terms of communication, but when you are as big as France, or even larger countries, it will take MANY weeks to travel across and get all the information out as the ruler wants. This is only made longer if your roads are, well, shit. One reason why Romans could keep it so big was thanks to their amazing roads. So, what do you do when it will take too long to respond to anything?
Why, you have local people do the work on your behalf! If you were the king, they would be lords (and sometimes ladies), or if you were an emperor, it was usually kings (or sometimes queens). But of course, no one does anything for free. In my rules for rulers post, I talk about keys and how they are important to your reign, and here, we are creating the keys for your reign, in other words, the people who are the keys to your success. They rule locally, so you can rule greater. What do you give them in return in feudalism?
Land, of course! You keep some for yourself, but if you give your dukes and duchesses some land for themselves in exchange for their service to you, they will be happy, as they get lots of money and power then. This continues on where the dukes hand out land to those below, and so on, until you get to the local lord, each layer swearing fealty to the one above. Though, as always, be careful about taking land back, as it angers keys, and angry keys can make up reasons why a new king or queen is needed… Oh look, it seems you were a bastard child and not the rightful heir to the throne!
Peasants, Bourgeoisie, and Aristocracy
In Feudalism, there are essentially three classes of people, if we exclude religious people who have historically not contributed to the economy of the system. You can probably guess which classes, so you know what, I won’t write more.
Peasants
BAHAHA, yeah sure. You think I would give up a chance to define things? So, peasants were the bottom of the bottom. Which has historically always translated to them being considered disposable and worthless. Though let’s be honest, are you really that disposable as a group if you’re literally the one making the food everyone needs? No, not really, but hierarchies and people tend to think that just because you possess no real power. I hear a distant voice calling “UNIONS!”, I wonder who?
Peasant is the generic term for anyone who “works the land,” which we would today call farmers. But they came in many flavours. Let’s start with one of the big ones that, in my experience, is often misused in fiction.
Serfs! What’s the difference between serfs and slaves? One is furniture, and the other is trading cards! Yeah, it's horrible, but you know me by now. Slaves were like pokémon cards that you could trade and sell, serfs were more like furniture too bulky to move so you don’t bother selling it. Serfs were locked to the land and could not pack up and leave. You’re sick of your lord? You’re staying under them anyway. Serfs owed services to the lord; after all, it is the lord that gave the land, and the serfs had to fulfil them. But serfs were pretty much free beyond that, with the exception of the whole “cannot move” part. They lived on the land, did their things, and were called to do their duty by the lord on and off.
Freemen were the big type of peasant you wanted to be. Either you had stopped being a serf or had never been one to begin with. You could move and marry freely. Oh yeah, serfs had to ask often for permission on who to marry by the lord. This is probably where the myth of the “Right of the first night” comes from, or, if one wants to be fancy, jus primae noctis. This is a myth where the lord had the right to sleep with the serf’s bride on the first night. This is, however, considered entirely a myth.
Anyway, a freeman could marry without permission, move around, and do a lot that a serf couldn’t. If you got sick of the lord, you could pack up and leave. You didn’t want to tell the lord to take one of the chickens and shove it up his cloaca–after all, you want to live–but you could leave. Freemen tended to rent land and pay directly to the lord and were more often prone to military services. Not always, though.
And now for a few lesser known types in rapid succession. Villeins were a kind of serf, predominantly only in England. From my research, they seemed to be mostly focused on serving the lord than on working any particular land that themselves had. They had their own plot of land, but their work was more about working anything the lord had directly. Two more types, cottagers and bordars, lived in small cottages or small buildings. Cottagers tended to have little to no land while bordars had much less land than any serf but more than cottagers. Their statuses were very varied but tended to be more for additional labour where they did this and that as needed where they lived.
Bourgeoisie
The bourgeoisie–who the hell came up with that spelling? It’s killing me 😂 –anyway, they were also known as Burghers, not hamburgers dagnamit! Some use bourgeoisie to mean the middle class of city dwellers, but here I use it and burghers to mean city people in general. Because honestly, if you ask me, being able to live in a town or a city was pretty middle class and above in that era when most people were in the peasant category.
These people tended to have highly valued skills that were not easy to come by and were skills peasants could not do themselves. This could range from blacksmithing to writing. Some burghers were pure traders. They didn’t make money producing anything but instead transported and sold what was produced. This group is, in my view, both under- and over-represented in fiction. It is under-represented in the way that a lot of the adventure people don’t tend to come from burgher families but rather peasant families, or at least the main protag, that is. It is, however, over-represented in that as the peasant protag goes on, there is much more focus on burghers and very little on peasants.
Though keep the burghers in mind, they’ll come back as the destroyers of feudalism!
Aristocracy
In feudalism, these were the nobility. How the nobility got the legitimacy to rule the land differed from culture to culture. In Europe, it was by the right of being chosen by god by what checks thesaurus meat popsicles put a homunculus into a fluid-filled oven for 9 months to bake.
Yeah, don’t ask me how that really works; as a Limax, it baffles me. But it has been popular historically! A thing for the aristocracy, during feudalism and beyond, was that they had a huge tendency to only marry within themselves. Exactly where the cut off point for a viable marriage without losing status was is very culturally specific. A princess might only be able to marry a marquess or above. Which gives me a good excuse to give the various titles that have existed!
Emperor/Empress, Tsar/Tsarina, Kaiser/Kaiserinne
King/Queen
Grand duke/duchess, Archduke/Archduchess
Duke/Duchess, Crown Prince/Princess, Jarl, Prince/Princess-elector
Marquess/Marchioness, Margrave/Margravine, Marcher Lord/Lady
Count/Countess, Earl
Viscount/Viscountess, Burgrave/Burgravine
Baron/Baroness
Baronet/Baronetess
Knight
And I still didn’t include all of the possibilities! There are more, but I felt some of those are too obscure; if I went “Is that real?”, I felt it was too obscure to be included in the list. Use this as a rough template and modify as you see fit. But when it comes to marriages, think about how far up and down you can marry. It is generally allowed as far up as possible, but only a few steps below.
This propensity to limit marriage due to status, and the ever shrinking pool of people, does lend the system to extreme forms of inbreeding. So, historically, a lot of high ranking people have suffered a lot of illnesses due to inbreeding, including insanity. So, if you want to make it realistic, and the nobility is quite old, give them various genetic diseases! Keep in mind the old saying for nobility also,
Wives are for marriages, mistresses are for love
Except you can reverse it if your culture is more matriarchal, or mix it in. I need to get in on writing how to do matriarchies, ANNE! (Anne: Added to the list!) Point is, marriages were more about politics, and mistresses were for the fun emotional things.
Feudal warfare
This won’t be a long segment. I won’t go into the specifics of warfare and how it is conducted as I am working on a series on warfare. The important part here is that while peasants and other locals could be in warfare during feudal times, they are not the most reliable. But hey, it is part of the deal: the lord gives you land, and you can spare some time to fight for them.
And that is the big difference between what many can think of as war and feudal war. The deal with the local lord is that they have a deal with the one above them. The soldiers, unless mercenaries, don’t fight for the king: they fight for the lord that they have some semblance of loyalty and fealty to. The king (or equivalent) is some random person they have never heard of other than in passing.
But who they are, what they do, and so on, means very little to soldiers as they have no experience of them. Everything comes through the local lord, and thus anything good is attributed to the local lord, no matter what the king (or equivalent) has said. So it has, historically, been very complicated in wars. You can have a mix of civil war and invasion at the same time because internal lords and such side with the invader. Tsan, you can have a count side with the enemy to fight the king, but then several barons under the count side against the count but not for the king, or maybe with the king. Due to the layered nature and relationships generally only being with the person directly above or below, it gets complicated fast.
Enough gold makes a noble
Feudalism lasted for a very long time, 9th to19th century, with Western Europe ending around the 15th century and Eastern Europe ending in the 19th, but what put an end to it? Well, some of the answers can be found in Rome and their lack of feudalism. Good transport facilitates having a more centralised structure of the land. In my rules for rulers post, I say that you should keep the keys as few as possible, and with good transports and roads, you don’t need as many local rulers with a great deal of power to do your bidding as king, queen, or quing.
So, as infrastructure technology improves, the foundation of feudalism starts to crack, but that alone isn’t enough. What more is required? Well, as said before, feudalism is built entirely around the concept that land equals economy. And as long as it remains mostly true that land is the main arbiter of how much wealth one possesses, feudalism will reign supreme.
And this is where the burghers come in. I told you we’d come back to them! They play an important role in the dismantling of feudalism because they are the ones least affected by feudalism. They are not forced to spend all their lives working miserable jobs in the field nor are they nobility incentivised to maintain feudalism. The burghers are incentivised to do the jobs they are doing and do them as efficiently as possible. They even have a bit of free time to think of new ways to do it without risking starvation.
So, the burghers will labour away and learn about the world, and as they figure out more ways to make money, trading, stocks, machines to reduce their own labour, the system starts experiencing a shift in what is perceived as wealth generation. Land stops being the fundamental unit of wealth generation, and, bit by bit, it goes toward machines. It didn't reach its full potential until the Industrial Revolution, but by then, feudalism was generally long since dead.
The merchants and burghers gain more and more power as this process progresses, which neither a church nor nobility will like. But as their power grows, those at the really far top will place more focus on controlling the centres of wealth generation, which are becoming cities rather than large swaths of land. So if you wish to show that it is leaning toward the end of feudalism, focus on the rise of wealth production other than land and that wealth and power are going more and more toward the cities rather than land. And if it is at the high point of feudalism, the burgher class of people should not possess a lot of power.
Feudalism, IN SPACE!
I blame Dune for the love of feudalism going into space. In the traditional sense, at least… or is it? If we replace land with planets, it starts to make some sense again. Especially if space travel is slow, inefficient, and overall a giant pain in the ass. And add on top of that communication should be equally troublesome to do. With all of that you can reasonably make a space feudalistic society.
Or so it seems on a surface level. For this to work, you still require advanced technology. Advanced technology is anathema to feudalism because the source of wealth is then people and machines, not land. So on the planet itself, feudalism cannot reasonably be going on as people will not order themselves according to feudalistic principles.
So, maybe if you do it only on interstellar level only? Can it work then? Maybe? It is more feasible there, as the communication times and travel can be anything you reasonably want, and the “land” are the planets. But that has the issue of the planets, as they are likely to have a rotating leader rather than one that remains consistent. The loyalty of the leader is likely to be more toward the people than toward those above. Which can be quite fun, actually. It all depends on how your FTL works, if you have it at all. In a non-FTL setting, a feudalistic system would make sense to some degree.
Fandalism, the bad pun
I tried a pun there, but we saw how garbage that became. In fantasy, which is often set in the mediaeval era, feudalism should fit greatly, right? Well, it will if you do it well. The big problem that a lot of fantasy feudal societies face is that magic drastically changes everything. The obvious way is that magic users can become such weapons that they would logically be the ones in charge, not non-mages on the thrones and nobility.
On top of that, we have that magic can make it so that power and wealth start concentrating earlier into the cities, and land loses its value as the primary, and only, source of wealth. Then, there is the problem that magic often causes fast communication and/or transport, which again means concentration of power rather than division as feudalism inherently requires.
So, if you want feudalism in a fantasy setting, think about how you can keep communication and transport slow, and also keep wealth production spread out. And as awesome as the king, queen, or quing is, to most people they are an unknown person.
Summa summarum
When it comes to feudalism, the central component for society is land. It is what generates wealth; it is the wealth. Feudalism requires these factors to thrive:
Land as primary wealth generator
Slow transportation
Slow communication
Wealth generation is geographically dispersed
As these start to disappear, whether through technology or magic or societal changes, feudalism tends to give up, and other systems come in and take its place. Until next time, keep working the fields, peasants!
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