A good of friend of mine let me borrow his copy of 'Saxons!', and I must say I'm quite intrigued. Were I not in the middle of running a GPC game, I think I'd have my crack at an anti-arthurian campaign.

Now, as someone who likes to obsess over economic details, I have a few questions about how things work.

For starters, everywhere I look I see a different definition of 'hide'. It's either enough land to feed one family, so 10-40 acres at about 1L value, or it's enough to support 1 ceorl and his extended family, or enough land to support 60-80 people at 12L value as it says in the Saxons! book. Granted, the 12L figure is meant to be used in conjuntion with Lordly Domains which is supposed to be bunk now, so could anyone tell me what the current consensus is?

Secondly, who does the farming for saxon nobles? It says that a thegn has a minimum of 5 hides, but does that mean 5 hides he owns personally, or that he controls 5 hides already occupied by ceorls who pay him taxes? If the former, who actually works the fields? The saxons don't have feudalism, at least I don't thin they do. I got the impression that saxon farmers were fairly independent, and paid their lord a portion of their crops rather than toil away in someone elses field a few days a week. Is it all slave labor? Depending on how much land a hide actually is, that's a lot of slaves. Like, 'on par with the antebellum south' lot of slaves, and that's just the field hands. If so, it seems odd to me because pretty much every menial job is described as belonging to a ceorl, be they pig-ceorls, hunt-ceorls, etc.

Finally, and this is really looping back to the first question, how many hides is a manor? I've heard that in an older edition, a knights demesne was 2 hides, and around here I think I read that it was actually 5 hides to make knights on par with thegns, but again I have no frame of reference for how much land that is or how much that land is worth.

I'm inclined to think that a hide might be worth something like 100s (5L) A. because it's a nice round number B. because that would make a 2 hide demesne line up with the 10L manor exactly, and aside from that, it's enough render to support 20 adults or 40 children, not an unreasonable estimate for one cynn group, if extended to second cousins. So for neatness we could say 1 hide supports 25 peasants.

So, you could reasonably place a knight's fee at 10 hides (2 demesne hides, 8 mesne hides), supporting a population of 200 not counting the knight and his family. For a while I thought this was about the right amount of people for a medieval village. That would mean there would be roughly 10 knights (or undistributed knight's fees) per hundred, which on a macro level makes sense because there are 13 hundreds in Salisbury, meaning that as a geographical region a united Salisbury could field 130 knights, rather than the 100 it has currently. From this we coud extrapolate the relative strengths of neighboring counties based on how many hundreds they had. Cornwall for example seems to have had 10 hundreds, whereas Devon (duchy of Cornwall in 485) has 32, which gives some idea of just how powerful Gorlois was.

However, in the 5.1 rulebook it says the manor population is actually around 420. This would mean manorial lands would have to be twice as expensive as stated above, with perhaps a manor being comprised of 20 hides (2 demesne, 18 mesne) for a population of around 450. This kind of throws the whole thing for a loop, because that would mean that salisbury with it's 13 hundreds could support a maximum of 65 knights.

It's a head scratcher.

However, in the 5.1 rulebook it says the manor population is actually around 420.


KAP 5.1 is unfortunately wrong, and the same error was propagated to BotE intro (I take the blame for that). Greg's more up-to-date research is implying that the number of households should be somewhere in the 40 - 50 range. My preference is 40 (for many reasons that I won't get to here), which gives that nice 200 peasants per knight.

Hopefully, I will be able to post an errata on the BotE on these forums about the above soon, but until then, I'd recommend you use 200 peasants per manor as the rule of thumb.

Alas, I wasn't in any way or form involved with Saxons! and it has been a while since I have read it. I'd have to give it another look before I'd dare to say something about the hides.

Alright, I glanced quickly at Saxons! and Lordly Domains. Since Saxons! is equating 5 hides = 1 POP, and Lordly Domains is saying that 1 POP = normal manor supporting 1 knight, it follows easily enough from this that 5 hides = £10 to the thegn.

However, there is no way that these two statements
1) 1 hide = enough to support a peasant family, and
2) 5 hides = enough to support 1 POP (about 480 people)
are BOTH correct.

If we assume that the £12 per hide is correct and the 5 hides corresponds to £60 worth of income from the land, of which £10 goes to the thegn, then we are actually right in the £10 Manor ballpark of 40 peasant households (= 200 peasants) making £1.5 each (total £60) and paying the knight £10 in total. Once you correct the population scaling in Lordly Domains & KAP 5.1 from ~400 - 500 peasants to 200 or so, then statement 2) works.

The problem with the above is that it doesn't match the historical definition of a hide, which is the statement 1). In Domesday, 1 hide = £1 of income, which matches statement 1) to a T in our economic system (£1 supports one peasant family). Another thing that needs to be noted that 1 hide = 120 acres is not true everywhere: the area tends to vary, it is the income that is important. A more fertile field is smaller for 1 hide than a more rocky one. The problem, I suspect, comes from the definition of a thegn in Saxons: apparently in Anglo-Saxon England, it was 5 hides to a soldier, which would correspond much better with our foot soldier (£0.5 upkeep) than a knight (£4). Also, that soldier was probably a part-time farmer himself, only joining the fyrd when called to do so for brief campaigns.


Warning: The rest is me shoehorning the Saxons! to fit the BotE model.

If we have thegn = knight, then the easiest thing IMHO is to make it 40 ceorl families farming 60 hides (instead of 5 hides) of land, of which they give £10 to the thegn's household. And then you can have pretty much one-on-one correspondence with a knightly household and a thegn household, save that instead of a warhorse, you can add another heorthgeneat 'squire'. Incidentally, this would mean that the average Saxon peasants are subsisting on £1.25 instead of £1, which might go towards explaining why they are bigger and stronger than Cymric peasants on average... Actually, what I'd probably do is to make it:

60 hide (£60) village
1 thegn household (£10, provide 1 thegn, 2 'squires' and 3 spearmen)
10 fyrdmen families (£1.5 each, provide 10 spearmen for the fyrd)
20 ceorl families (£1.25 each)
10 poor ceorl families (£1 each)


Another option would be to make it 1 thegn per 50 hides, which has the nice advantage of being 2 thegns per hundred. (However, it is clear that the hundreds in BotW vary a lot in size and wealth: there are some that are just one manor in size, and others which are over £100+ in Assized Rent -> support 10 knights = 400 peasant households rather than the eponymous 100. So it shouldn't be cavalierly assumed that one hundred is the same as another one, and that you can just multiply to get the number of knights.)

The £50 case might be a more egalitarian one, with:
£5 to the thegn's household (1 thegn, 1 heorthgeneat squire)
10 fyrdmen households (£1.5 each = £15)
30 ceorl households (£1 each = £30)

This would actually match the idea of the thegn's 'wages' being 5 hides = £5, even though the workforce would (mainly) come from the ceorls. It also fits with the idea of the fyrdmen being 1 per 5 hides, and being part-time farmers.

Thegn's expense sheet could look something like this:
£1.5 thegn himself + riding horse
£1 heorthgeneat squire + riding horse
£1 wife + sumpter for stuff
£1 children
£0.5 wife's maid

The servants would be similarly downsized. There probably wouldn't be a separate bailiff: the wife would take care of those duties, and probably no real horse herd, either. So it might look something like:
£0.75 blacksmith
£0.50 clothier (wife of the above)
£1.25 in raw materials (transformed into £5 in Production)
£0.25 laborer
£1 cart & team (2 carters, 2 oxen)
£0.75 cook
£0.50 two domestics

I rather like this more 'rough and ready' vision of a thegn's household, rather than drawing 1 thegn = 1 knight in every way except horses.

I'm inclined to think that a hide might be worth something like 100s (5L) A. because it's a nice round number B. because that would make a 2 hide demesne line up with the 10L manor exactly, and aside from that, it's enough render to support 20 adults or 40 children, not an unreasonable estimate for one cynn group, if extended to second cousins. So for neatness we could say 1 hide supports 25 peasants.

So, you could reasonably place a knight's fee at 10 hides (2 demesne hides, 8 mesne hides), supporting a population of 200 not counting the knight and his family. For a while I thought this was about the right amount of people for a medieval village. That would mean there would be roughly 10 knights (or undistributed knight's fees) per hundred, which on a macro level makes sense because there are 13 hundreds in Salisbury, meaning that as a geographical region a united Salisbury could field 130 knights, rather than the 100 it has currently. From this we coud extrapolate the relative strengths of neighboring counties based on how many hundreds they had. Cornwall for example seems to have had 10 hundreds, whereas Devon (duchy of Cornwall in 485) has 32, which gives some idea of just how powerful Gorlois was.

However, in the 5.1 rulebook it says the manor population is actually around 420. This would mean manorial lands would have to be twice as expensive as stated above, with perhaps a manor being comprised of 20 hides (2 demesne, 18 mesne) for a population of around 450. This kind of throws the whole thing for a loop, because that would mean that salisbury with it's 13 hundreds could support a maximum of 65 knights.

It's a head scratcher.


Its probably best to think of the Hide not as an amount of land as much as a unit of production. One Hide is equal to whatever amount of land it takes to provide 1 family with enough grain, vegetables, and pasture, to live. The acreage will vary depending upon the quality of the land.

SDLeary

One of my players just bought me a book of the Warlord PDF on DriveThru, Huzzah! Except it works off the 10L book of the estate model and we haven't got book of the estate...bugger.

But it's still some great material!

Anyway on the subject of hides and hundreds, it appears on the new map of salisbury that there are 25 hundreds, not 13. Now, I'm aware that several of them are outside the counts domain, wereside for example. But on reflection I think that the double digit quantity of hundreds shared by almost all british counties (that I've researched) draws scrutiny on the idea that 1 hyde = 1 family = 5 peasants. If that were the case the whole geographical region of salisbury only supports 12,500 people, and there would be 1 landed knight in every eighty people, which is obviously ridiculous.

It says in the saxons book that 1 hide is meant to support 1 ceorl (for the fyrd) and his entire cynn, cynn being all descendants of the same grandfather or in some cases great grandfather. By all accounts a hide regardless of its geography was between 60-120 acres. I'm not an expert on medieval agriculture but I am absolutely positive that it did not take 60-120 acres to feed a family of 5. 10-30 seems to be the conventional estimate, which is in line with bocephas' claim (in this thread http://forum.nocturnal-media.com/index.php?topic=2957.0 ) that generally, an arable southern acre for the sake of convenience can be accounted to be worth 1s or thereabouts.

I think using the Domesday books reference as 1 hide = 1L, and carrying that over to Pendragon's 1L = 1 family of 5 is problematic. For starters, knight's fees as laid out in the Domesday book, from what I have read, define a knight's fee as about 5 hides or between 2-5 carucates (a carucate being the amount of land an ox team could plough in a single annual season, sometimes equalling 1 hide if the land is poor but not usually). If that's taken to mean 5 hides of demesne land irrespective of land occupied by serfs, well we know that has to be at least a little off as that would mean a render of 5L rather than Pendragons 10L. But, as is the more likely case in my opinion, that's 5 hides or between 2-5 carucates total. This is in line with the Saxons! example settlement, which shows a wealthy Ealdormans settlement as requiring 8 ox teams, one of which owned by himself. And going back to the idea of Carucates, i think it's a relevant point that under Alfred the great I think it was, a man was required to provide two fyrdmen for every plow he owned, quite the burden if we're still talking about 1 hyde as Pam and Paddy Peasant and their three kids.

Which leads me to believe that the pendragon 1L family of 5 peasants occupies something closer to a virgate (1/4 hyde, 15 to 30 acres) or smaller, with 1 hyde representing 5L of render or 25 peasants (1 cynn group). Taken back to the macro scale, with manors accounting for around 200 serfs each (8 hides) and 10L render to the liegelord (2 hides), A hundred contains roughly ten manors. What makes this exciting is that it means that 1 hundred corresponds to 1 eschille. We know that rodericks Servitum Debitum is 150 knights or 15 eschilles, so we can then determine that he controls 15 of the 25 hundreds of Salisbury.

I...think I've just answered my own question unless anyone here would like to correct me on anything. Again, great work on BotW guys!

One of my players just bought me a book of the Warlord PDF on DriveThru, Huzzah! Except it works off the 10L book of the estate model and we haven't got book of the estate...bugger.


Appendix D is your friend. You are welcome. :)



Anyway on the subject of hides and hundreds, it appears on the new map of salisbury that there are 25 hundreds, not 13. Now, I'm aware that several of them are outside the counts domain, wereside for example. But on reflection I think that the double digit quantity of hundreds shared by almost all british counties (that I've researched) draws scrutiny on the idea that 1 hyde = 1 family = 5 peasants. If that were the case the whole geographical region of salisbury only supports 12,500 people, and there would be 1 landed knight in every eighty people, which is obviously ridiculous.


Quite agreed there... Your breakdown seems quite reasonable.

Other way of looking at it could be that the hides = Assized Rent ('tax value') rather than the full production of the land, leading to 1 hide = £1 in Assized Rent. It doesn't quite work for the knight's fee, which should be 10 hides in this case to make it match with our system rather than 5 hides, but that is also the number you reached in your own breakdown, so I am not too bothered by that. And if we set Assized Rent = 1/6th of the total produce (with another 1/6th going to Church, Court Fees, Liberties...), you'll see that the knight's fee is producing a total of £60, of which £10 goes to the knight, £10 to the Church and stuff, and £40 to the peasants = 40 peasant families per knight's fee. The above Assized Rent 1/6th leads to 1 hide = £6 in actual production, rather than your £5, and thus covers the other feudal obligations.

In the Saxons' case, if the thegn is OK with £5 Assized Rent, it means we'll have 1 thegn per 5 hides (of Assized Rent), which matches the Saxons! nicely, and leads to an easy ratio of 2 thegns per knight's fee. The earlier breakdown is a bit off, as there are only 20 ceorl families (per thegn), who would have £25 between them, leading to £1.25 per Saxon family, making them a bit more affluent than the basic Cymri peasant family. I am totally fine with the Saxon free peasant being a bit better off, but I'd actually prefer to have some additional warriors from the peasant stock, like:
4 warrior families (£1.5 each = £6) (1 warrior per 5 families)
4 well-off families (£1.25 each = £6)
13 average families (£1 each = £13)

Which would leave our thegn and army of himself, his heorthgeneat 'squire' and 4 warriors from the peasantry, and possibly one extra foot soldier with his £0.5 discretionary funds. Which leads to the following comparison:

1 knight + 2 foot soldiers (field army)
vs.
2 thegns + 10 warriors (heorthgeneat + 4 warriors per thegn; the Saxon peasants will fight to defend their homes, so no garrison soldiers needed)

This means that the Saxons have roughly a 4:1 advantage in manpower (3:1 if you count the knight's squire as a combatant), which seems to account for those huge armies they throw around in GPC. But they would be very much lacking in heavy cavalry, which evens the odds for the Cymri.




I...think I've just answered my own question unless anyone here would like to correct me on anything. Again, great work on BotW guys!


Thanks!

The problem I see with the 60L break down is that it lumps in the knight's income as well as the cottage industries into one value, which is counterproductive in my opinion. The production of the manor may very well be 60L, but that's not necessarily how much the land is worth.

The value of a hyde doesn't count for how much cloth your wive weaves or how many fish or rabbits you catch, it is purely and simply the amount of food you can grow with that land.

I grant you, 60L is a sound number for the GDP of a manor, just not it's food output, which is what the hide is supposed to measure.

Each Household produces 1.25 in food from the land (1.25L x 40 = 50L = 10 hides), .25 of which is grown in the knight's fields (2 hides) and thus goes to his upkeep. Each household (generally the wife) also produces .25L in goods, bringing up the households total production to 1.5 (x40 = 60).

Of 1.25 Food and .25 Goods
Knight .25 = .25 x40 = 10
Tithe .125 .025 = .15 x40 = 6
Market/
Court/
Liberty .1 = .1 x40 = 4

Which leaves each family with their 1L upkeep.

This is very interesting. My numbers for production come very close to what's being discussed here.

My model is based on a "Hide" consisting of 4 peasant families and 120 acres cleared land (30 acres per family).
The acrage is divided as follows:
60 acres grain fields (3 x 20 acre fields, 1 sewn barley/oats, 1 sewn wheat/rye, 1 sewn peas)
12 acres other crops (4 apples, 4 nut trees, 2 vegetable garden, 1 herb garden, 1 flax/hemp)
34 acres Meadow/Pasture (supports 4 oxen, 4 cows, 40 sheep)
14 acres waste (buildings, roads, fence lines, marsh, useless land)

The Hide produces 6.75L in total production, including all agricultural and pastoral produce, plus a few processed goods, including:
1. Home-brewed ale and cider
2. Spun/weaved linen and wool cloth (not yet made into clothes)
3. Ground flour (processed by the miller for a fee)

This level of production is based on the per acre (and per animal) production numbers given in my thread on economic details.
The Hide produces enough basic support equivalents (0.25L in food/cloth) to support 25 adults (6.25L).
The remainder of the 6.75L (0.5L) is mostly in hay and oats (for horses) and excess linen/wool cloth.

The Hide requires the expenditure of 0.75L in capital expenses (cost of growing the food). Of this:
42d is spent with the miller (2d per acre of ground wheat/rye x 20 acres, plus 1 acre barley))
42d is spent with the blacksmith (repair and purchase of metal tools)
42d is spent with the carpenter (repair and purchase of wooden tools)
18d is spent with manorial staff on other crafts (rope, candles, leatherwork)
12d is spent on salt (60 pounds at 5 pounds/d to cure meat/leather not included in the 25x basic support)
24d is spent on town goods

A note on the craftsmen:
With 10 Hides to a Manor, each craftsman would bring in 420d (1.75L) from the farmers.
With the miller, 1L supports his family, 0.25L is raw materials used to maintain mill, and 0.5L is profit (0.75L to manor industry).
With the blacksmith, 1L supports his family, 0.5L is raw materials, and 0.25L is profit (0.75L to manor industry).
With the carpenter, 1L supports his family, 0.5L is raw materials, and 0.25L is profit (0.75L to manor industry).

With the other crafts, 10 Hides brings in 180d (0.75L) to the manorial household.
Of this, 0.25L is raw materials, and 0.5L is profit, and the labor is provided by manorial staff (0.75L to manor industry).

These craftsmen and household crafts can be used to explain 3L in manorial production (and 1.5L in raw materials).

Now back to the Hide:
After deducting expenses (0.75L), the Hide produces 6L free and clear. Of this:
4L is kept by the farmers (allows 1 comfortable family at 1.25L, 2 average families at 1L, and 1 poor family at 0.75L)
1L goes to the knight as Assized Rent
0.5L goes to the church as tithes
0.5L goes to the higher liege and/or king as taxes

This means 10 Hides (40 farm families, 1200 cleared acres) makes up 1 standard manor with 10L in assized rents (1L per Hide).

It also means the production value of cleared land after expenses (on average) is 1 shilling.
Thus, each peasant family with 30 acres produces 30 shillings (1.5L) in foodstuffs, ale, cloth, etc.
Each Hide (4 families, 120 acres) produces 120 shillings (6L).
Of that 6L, 1L (16%) goes to the knight, and 1L (16%) goes to other obligations (church tithes, taxes for liege).

A few purely academic comments on your above breakdown, Bocephas.

The land leased to the peasants didn't count wasteland, buildings, and roads, it was meted out in long even strips of the open arable fields of the estate. A Hide is a measure of these fields, generally. Not the landscape as a whole.

With this in mind, your supposition of 30 acres per household appears to be correct as an average for medieval England. However, given the fact that the fields have to be rotated, the household would only be cultivating 20 of those acres a year, 20s worth.

Not to say that the livestock on the fallow pasture counts for nothing, but as we all know from a standpoint of the foodchain animals a drastically less calorie efficient from solar rays to supper time. They take a lot of land to graze compared to the amount of food you get from them. Ten acres of planted crops, in my opinion, would yield significantly more than ten acres of pasture, such that I'd put thirty acres as providing 25s, rather than thirty.

In my (substantially less detailed) evaluation, it ought to go a little more like this.

1 Villein Hide, 120 acres (4 families; 9 adults, 16 children; 25 pop.) Value 5L, or 100s
80 acres cultivated, 80s of food (primarily corn), but also assorted vegetables, and perhaps a scattered herb garden or orchard. This provides the 4L for the 4 families, which is either eaten or bartered away for other goods or services.
40 Acres pasture. At least six oxen, an indeterminate number of cows and sheep. Production from cheese, wool, hides, and meat nets 15s, or .75L.
Cottage industry work, turning corn to ale, weaving wool to cloth, etc. nets 5s, .25L

Ergo, each tenant villein household produces 1.25L (300d) on their own allotment of land.
240d, whether in food or bartered goods, keeps them fed clothed and sheltered.
30d goes as a tithe to the church
18d goes to royal taxes, or the tax farmer as the case may be
12d goes to court fees and various burdens of feudal liberties.

Therefore, each hide of villeins produces 5L or 100s
80s Villeins 4L
10s Church .5L
6s Royal Tax .3L
4s Liberties .2L

The 10 hide manor in my mind is comprised of 2 demesne hides which yield the knight the lovely dovely 10L figure, whilst the other 8 hides are held in tenancy by the knight's villeins, ~200 in all.