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.
February 2026: Merchants of the Concordat
To call oneself a Merchant in the Concordat is to be one of a wide category of folk, one so wide that it might seem to be utterly meaningless. A merchant might be a simple peddler of cheap goods, living out of a tent and whatever basic amenities might be carried on a mule, in a life less comfortable than that of all but the most humble peasant, one step above starving vagrancy. A merchant might also be a person of such wealth that they might buy and sell the very Dukes of the Concordat. The wretched half-beggar who hawks discarded pots on the side of the road and the masters of the Iron League are all merchants.
Thus, we must ask, how are such people differentiated from one another, for to define ‘Merchant’ as a class would be like defining ‘rock’ as a material, conflating valueless gravel and polished marble and pure gold into a single category.
There is, however, a simple way to differentiate these strata, to sort the high and the low within that great category in a way which allows for a minimum of exception: namely, to define the class of a merchant by the distance they travel between buying and selling their goods.
If this seems like a particularly pedantic, mendacious, or even arbitrary means of classifying so varied and incongruous a group of people, then perhaps such a principle would be best considered in practice.
Take the lowliest group of merchants, those who barely even qualify for the term, and would certainly be denied that appellation by those who would claim to be their betters: the village peddlers. These individuals live often on the very edge of poverty, without fixed address or station. Their life consists of constant travel, from the market towns and the walled cities where they may try their best to acquire pots, pans, tools, and other goods sold cheap by the Guilded Crafters of those places – to the villages in the hinterlands, where they sell those same goods to the yeomanry and peasants in need of them for some meagre profit which is barely enough to cover the cost of food for themselves, feed for whatever pack animals they may possess, and the maintenance of a tent in times of business, or a cheap room in an inn when the snows fall and travel becomes impractical or outright dangerous.
The extent of the travels which such peddlers undergo is limited indeed. At most, they will go two or three days’ ride from the market town where they make their purchases. This is not due to a lack of courage or ambition, but simply due to a lack of means. Perhaps only the more prosperous half of the peddler class can even afford the maintenance and feed of a mule or donkey to carry their wares. The rest make do with a wooden-framed pack, and a bell to announce themselves to the villages where they ply their trades. By the time they account for the cost of their own living, the meagre profits which they acquire in the process of their dealing will very rarely exceed enough to purchase a new load of goods, repairs to their much-abused boots, and provisions for another few days on the road.
This meagreness of profit is the result of a vicious cycle. So long as the peddler possesses little in the way of wealth, they cannot buy the rare and expensive goods which make for real profit. Likewise, so long as the peddler can only travel a day or two away from the source of their wares, they cannot afford to do what their wealthier cousins do – namely, buy goods cheaply from those towns which specialise in their manufacture, and selling them farther afield for greater profit. For such peddlers, success often means scraping together just enough coin to survive another year. Failure is condemnation to a slow spiral of being able to acquire fewer and cheaper wares, which sell for less, which leads to further destitution, and either starvation, or a return to the land as a tenant on someone else’s fields.
Yet despite their marginal status, these peddlers are vital to the sustenance of the many villages which keep the great cities fed. They provide villages and minor estates with goods which are needed for living and agriculture, and which those communities cannot produce themselves. Without such folk, the inhabitants of these places would quickly be forced to go themselves to the towns to seek the tools they need and the common comforts they desire. Before long, it might be assumed that the best-suited of these individuals would take on the task for the whole village – and equipped with a mule or a pack – would fill the role of a peddler themselves. Despite the discomfort and the constant risk of failure, if there were no peddlers, those communities which rely on their services would quickly furnish their own.
There are, of course, those peddlers who make a real success of it, who happen upon some happy accident or take some great risk which pays off enough for them to be noticed as someone worth entrusting with greater wares. These are the merchants which most would describe as the quintessential examples of the name: relatively prosperous figures with a comfortable house in a walled city, and standing contracts to carry rarer or more expensive or more specialised goods from a town on one end of the Concordat to another. They travel by oxcart with a handful of hired guards, or in a great caravan with others of their type, pooling their resources for companionship, protection, and the common comforts which they can afford to bring with them.
The journeys which this middling class of merchants embark upon tend to be matters of weeks or even months rather than days. The profits they reap are often commensurate with such distances. It is not uncommon for iron purchased in Montfort to sell for three times the price in Amberhelm – and for the best Amberhelm timber to sell for twice its buying price in Arnault. Yet these profits are not entirely kept within the coffers of those who buy and sell, for to secure the contracts to traffick in such valuable goods on such risky routes, these merchants must almost always possess membership in a Guild. These organisations will primarily specialise in the transport and sale of a single product, which means they often are closely allied with the crafters’ guilds which produce those goods. As a result, they receive favourable prices and consideration by those who actually make the goods to be sold, and in turn ensure that the crafters they patronise are paid enough to prosper.
Merchant’s Guilds also provide other services. They coordinate routes to ensure that no town’s market is flooded, they control prices to ensure that no merchant undersells another, and they protect their members from the result of sudden and unexpected losses by brigandage, accident, or misadventure.
In return, the Guild demands two things: loyalty and payment. Most members of Merchant’s Guilds are raised much like those of crafters’ guilds. The child of a guild member will be brought into its traditions and hierarchy from a young age. They will serve as a clerk for the guild, learning the ways of commerce and accounting. With time, they become seconded to one of the guild’s senior members, accompanying them in the process of fulfilling a particular contract along a particular route, and eventually – if they prove able – inheriting that route and that contract when their mentor and predecessor retire. Such a process naturally promotes a certain way of thinking and doing things, and instills in the apprentice a sense of belonging and subordination to the interests of the guild itself. They owe their education and their status to the guild, and they learn just how valuable it is to have a larger organisation – and its affiliates and allies – negotiating contracts and deals on their behalf.
This no doubt makes the second part of a guilded merchant’s obligation much easier to bear, for the guild also demands a certain large fraction of guild member’s profits. This is to compensate for the cost of maintaining the Guildhouse, as well as for the resources needed to raise new apprentices, and cover the unexpected losses of other merchants. This burden tends to rest most heavily upon the junior members of the guild. As such individuals grow in seniority and in the esteem of their fellows, these exactions are often lessened as a sign of distinction or reward for years of loyalty. Regardless, these levies are rarely high enough to drive a guilded merchant to destitution. A well-run Guild uses its collective wealth to advance the interests of its members. No better example of this can be seen than in the greatest of the Concordat’s Merchant Guilds: the Iron League of Montfort, whose masters possess incomes which rival those of dukes, and whose members do not begrudge the heaviest guild levies in the Concordat for the simple reason that the guild monopoly on the trade of Marcher Iron allows them profit margins which others might only dream of.
The Iron League is not the only “Great Guild” in the Concordat, though it is the most powerful and wealthy by far. Perhaps half a dozen others also claim that distinction – one which they have earned through the domination of the shipping of particular goods: Korliandine salt and gold, Fiorentine glass, Khazari clockwork and spices. These “Great Guilds” distinguish themselves primarily by the fact that their routes and their members spread beyond the Concordat itself, and bring back goods from cities so far-off that only the wealthiest and most determined merchants are able to do so in any great volume.
These are not the junior guilded merchants of ox carts and river boats, for so valuable are these contracts and routes that the Great Guilds monopolise them for the most trusted, most influential, and wealthiest of their members. These are individuals who sit at the very height of the merchant class, ones able to hire not just individual guards, but entire mercenary companies and warships as escorts. The expenses for such preparations and precautions are enough to beggar most barons – but the profits which result from a shipload of glass or a caravan of pepper are enough to recoup the cost five-fold. These individuals quite often live like princes – to the extent that their wealth and influence rivals that of the most powerful members of the aristocracy.
This is not a coincidence, for with the exception of the Iron League, the Great Guilds do not possess fortresses or great estates of their own. They do not field armies or rent to peasants. They are reliant almost entirely on peace – provided by the protection and sufferance of the armed nobility. Thus the Great Guilds do their best to cultivate the favour of the landed aristocracy, usually by using the vast profits which the guild amasses as a ready form of funds for their nominal overlords. The Iron League may be famous for its trade of one metal, but it also deals in another – gold. When a Duke of the Concordat finds their coffers empty, it is to the Iron League or one of the other Great Guilds which they apply to for a loan – and the terms of that loan will often be dependent entirely on how that Guild has been treated in the past.
Thus, we see the whole range of individuals who may call themselves merchants – from the village peddler, who may be lucky to see a single gold piece in their entire life, to the masters of the Great Guilds, who may at times dictate terms to the greatest lords of the Concordat. Few of the latter would ever deign to put themselves in the same category as the former. The former often see the latter like an urchin with a stout stick might see a landed knight in armour – as a dream to be aspired to, but not one likely to be achieved. Yet they are all still merchants, bound to the same principles: to buy low in one place, sell high in another; to put aside a little money for security’s sake; and to keep the peasants, burghers and lords of the Concordat supplied with those things which they cannot make themselves, be it pans, silks, spices, or coin enough to raise entire armies.
Paul Wang 