January 2026: The Life of a Peasant
It is said by some that the life of a peasant is unrelenting toil and hardship: that a peasant’s lifetime is one of working a plot of land which they do not own, for the profit of a lord who will never see them as equal, with tools that they cannot truly call their own, and raising children in a leased cottage who have no prospect but the same life ahead of them.
This is, at best, a half-truth. Peasants make up eight or nine out of every ten people in the Concordat, and their living conditions vary greatly from region to region.
It is on the established lands of the coast – where humans have dwelled in great number for centuries – that these conditions are the most uniform and perhaps the most humble. Here, the estates are ancient and consolidated, the distinctions of social class are heavily reinforced, and the prospect of mobility within the social orders is a rare and precious thing, fit to benefit only the lucky few and befall an unfortunate handful.
Here, for centuries, the relatively poor land of the coast has made surplus harvests rare and good cropfields even rarer. Paradoxically, this has meant that the surpluses which are generated by the land are hoarded ever the more tightly, for in the days before Malcolm the Negotiator, it was these surpluses which allowed the old Petty-Crowns to raise the armies needed to wrest more arable land from their neighbours, and build the meagre prosperity of their own kingdoms at the expense of others.
It has been many generations since then, but many of the old ways still hold sway. It is the landlord who owns most of the fields, having consolidated their hold on them in hungrier times. It is likewise the landlord who rents out that land and the cottages on them to their peasants, who must pay a levy in produce for the privilege of farming a plot and living in a cottage. They must likewise pay a portion of their harvest to use the mill which grinds their grain into flour. If they should desire to purchase goods from a travelling merchant, then they must pay yet more of their harvest to their landlord at a price far below what might be gotten in a town market, so that the lord may change it for coin.
Furthermore, a landlord is also owed a rent in labour, which is used to work the fields of their own estate for profit, or maintain the walls and keeps and roads of the locality. In the rare times of war, that labour may also be levied as military service, although this has not happened since the time of the Bad Doge, generations ago.
Yet things are not all ill. A landlord too, must fulfill certain obligations. They are expected to protect the peasant-tenants of their land against not just brigandage and foreign invasion, but against cold and hunger and blight as well. Although they may charge rents for the use of a mill, they are required to provide one. Although those rents may drive a family to the brink of starvation, any who do starve are counted against them in the Courts both Mortal and Divine. Tools for labour and weapons for defence must be provided in times of peace and war – although they must also be rented – and there are limits to the amount of rent in both produce and labour a landlord can charge.
Many of these landlords also maintain additional services for their peasant-tenants. Guilded Crafters to maintain tools and other implements, a Sanctuary to provide medical care and handle disputes, and even a Court Mage to provide certain conveniences and protections against blight, weather, hostile wildlife, or other such threats. This means that while the peasants of the coastal Concordat rarely own much of anything, they have a guaranteed access to a great deal in the way of services and tools. The proliferation of Peace Mages in these more settled areas also mean that the growth of more bountiful crops have become less of a rarity in recent years. There is a degree of security in such a life, and most are – if not happy – then at least content with the conditions which they live in.
Perhaps part of this is due to the gradual change which has come to the hidebound estates of the countryside these last two centuries. The increasing prosperity of the Eastern Concordat and the receding danger of war has led to a slow drop in the proportion of the harvest which must go towards rents. The increasing spread of tools made from Marcher Iron has increased productivity. Perhaps most importantly, the population of the countryside estates has gradually decreased, as peasants depart for the coast to make their living from trade, or further inland towards the frontier. The Eastern peasant of today works more land, harvests more crops per given measure of that land, and lives better than their parents, who in turn lived better than their parents.
The Lords of the East have allowed this without trying to squeeze away more of this increasing prosperity for themselves for a variety of reasons. The most important is the fact that peasants are not tied to the land which they work. They are free to leave at a moment’s notice, a freedom enshrined in the Concordat’s law and in the laws of almost every Petty-Kingdom before it. In the days of old, this was seen as a formality, for there was nowhere to go. However, with the disappearance of the Flowering Court and the opening of a vast and fertile frontier, the Lords of the East quickly found themselves in competition for labouring hands with the endless promise of a vast and untamed land.
This challenge, they have faced in a variety of ways. The first is through simple salutary neglect. Intentionally, they keep the rents as they were two hundred years ago, even if the acreage of a given family’s allotment has doubled and its yield tripled. The second is through the provision of more services – the Crafters, Court Mages, and Watchers and so on. The last is through the increasing provision of festivals, indulgences, and feast days. A lord might mark the wedding of a local family by providing free drink, or the news of some great event by throwing an open feast. They may celebrate their birthday by inviting a travelling fair or mark good news by waiving a certain amount of rent. All of this is done to keep a sufficient number of labourers in the estate fields and enclosures, for almost all landlords are well aware that they must have renters to receive rents.
Yet for some, even these changes come too slowly, and the indulgences of the landlords are too miserly. For these peasants, two roads stretch before them. The first leads into the towns, where those lucky peasants who have saved up enough wealth to buy their way into a Guild or go into commerce or freelancing may yet make a fortune and raise their station. For most, more mundane wage and domestic labour is their more likely destination – lines of work with different restrictions and obligations than tilling the land, but just as heavy ones.
The other road, of course, leads to the frontier.
There are those in the East who say that on the frontier, every peasant is a lord in their own right. This is, once again, a half truth. The basis of this part-fact comes from the acknowledged legal principle that any household who should clear unmarked land for productive work is to own that land and anything built atop it until it is wholly overgrown again. As a result, most of the land which is under cultivation in the frontier regions is held as freehold by the descendants of those who first cleared it. There are transactions of course – inheritances, sales, purchases, and other such transfers, but the result remains that the vast majority of land held west of Arnault is not rented out to tenants by great lords, but held as private property by yeoman households.
Of course, this does not mean there are not lords in the frontier. Great estates still remain, as do the castles and keeps which overlook them. Yet the relationship between a frontier lord and their neighbouring freeholders is a very different one from that of the coastal landlord and their tenants. For one thing, there are no rents charged. A frontier lord’s obligation to protect a given region of territory is funded primarily through the maintenance of their own land, which is worked by local freeholders who may hire on seasonally to work that land for a wage paid in coin. The proceeds of these harvests are then sold to the towns and cities, the profits are used to fund the maintenance of the lord’s retinue, and the wages allow freeholder households to purchase goods which they might not make themselves.
This is an important distinction to make, for given the more fertile and sparsely populated nature of the frontier, the value of surplus crops are much lower for those who lack the wherewithal to transport them to distant markets. Those on the frontier also tend to have more food to go around, and as a result, coin is considerably more valuable. Although in many cases, a freeholder on the frontier is “poorer” than their counterparts on tenanted estates in the east, they very often possess more land, and eat better.
Yet perhaps most precious to the freeholder is not their land or their surplus crops, but the prospect of social mobility. Lordship is a more fluid concept in the frontier. While many of the frontier aristocracy come from the cadet branches of eastern houses, or are descended from successful merchants or adventurers, others are simply the descendants of particularly successful peasant yeomen, who saved carefully, or got lucky. Through purchase, inheritance, or simple overachievement, they clear and cultivate enough land to hire on others to work that land for them, to become sellers of produce in their own right, and to grow wealthy enough to support a retinue, or raise a frontier keep, and win the acknowledgement of this or that Duke who offers to have their heir squired and anointed as a landed knight, and thence a lord in their own right.
Not all freeholders become lords, of course. Most do not. A relative minority exist in a marginal space between true peasants and aristocracy. These prosperous “great farmers” maintain large farm estates which may require a dozen or more additional hands to farm them during the appropriate seasons. The often possess investments in city mercantile interests, inns, and other such establishments. Their estates may include sheepfolds, breweries, and even workshops. They may sponsor fairs, lend out money, or invite travelling merchants and intercede with others upon their neighbours’ behalf. They are families to be respected – perhaps even feared – and certainly to be aspired to for the vast majority of those who may boast of neither noble title nor membership within the “great yeomanry”.
And there is a great deal to aspire to, for although the eastern peasant may envy their frontier counterpart’s freedom, there is little doubt that they do not envy the uncertainty that comes with it. The landlord of an Eastern estate may demand a great deal, but the frontier freeholder may count on little of the security which might be found in more populated lands. In the frontier, the wilds are more dangerous, the land more untamed, and the forests still yet teem with the feral remnants of the Flowering Court. Although local lords are obliged to coordinate and lead the defence of their communities, it often falls to the freeholders themselves to fill the ranks of any militia. Furthermore, because the income and privileges of a frontier lord are much lesser, their obligations are commensurately smaller. They have no duty to provide mills, tools, or charity. They do not need to offer the service of Court Mages and Guilded crafters. A frontier freeholder may eat better and be subject to less obligation than a coastal tenanted-peasant, but when they should desire entertainment, they must organise it themselves. When they need some great service, they must seek it out upon their own initiative. When they fall ill or upon hard times, they are on their own for better or ill.
These are, of course, illustrations of two extremes. There are lords and great farmers in the frontier who hold a degree of informal power over their neighbours that any coastal lord would envy. There are also freeholders present even in places like Amberhelm. Likewise, in the hinterlands of Arnault and the eastern reaches of Torinhall, there are places where tenants and freeholders live side-by-side, so alike that only a legal document and a catalogue of daily complaints could distinguish one from the other. Given such a variety, it should come as no surprise that any single statement about the peasantry of the Concordat should be only a half-truth, no matter how based in the reality of any individual’s life it might be.
Paul Wang 