What was wage labor like in feudalism? I know it wasn’t hourly before clocks were around and stuff like that, but how was it thought of? Did they have the concept of employer and employee of a company (or the concept of a company outside of whatever the mercenaries count as). Did taking wages for work affect your class, maybe making you more than a serf but less than a skilled craftsman?

In terms of when you got paid, it depended. Most wage laborers were paid daily, but in some cases you could be paid weekly, monthly, or even yearly.

Companies were very rare, and required special licenses and legislation to set up (think things like the East India Trading Company or the Muscovy Company) because they were monopolies. So in most cases, wage labor took place between an owner-operator and their worker.

In terms of how it was thought of in class terms, it’s a bit complicated.

On the one hand, you had a significant body of journeymen who were paid wages, and they were significantly above serfs although below master craftsmen. Journeymen were legally free and no longer bound as apprentices were, they had property in their tools, they had certain rights (and responsibilities) as guild members, etc. And below the journeymen, you had a population of (unskilled) free laborers who worked for wages as well.

On the other hand, a significant percent of the population (about 4-5% in rural areas and 11-17% in urban areas) were servants. And servants had a different status than other wage workers. To quote Steinfeld:

“Servants were different from other wage workers – laborers and artificers – who occupied separate social and legal niches. Servants ordinarily were single and had not yet established households of their own. Hence, they lived with their masters and served them full time for a term. Laborers generally were married and maintained their own households. In most instances, they did not serve for a term, but worked on a casual basis by the day, week, or task…

Servants were “in the service of another.” But laborers and artificers [i.e, artisans], who did not live with their employers, might be employed by one person today and someone else tomorrow or next week, or they might…simultaneously undertake a number of different tasks for different persons.”

This distinction had important legal consequences: because they were part of someone’s household, servants were under the legal control of the master of the household; servants weren’t free to leave their employer until their term of service was up; etc.

How does bastard feudalism allow bannermen to have more troops then the obligation to supply troops? I mean that money is what was being used to train and equip the troops being supplied so how does that translate to more troops? is it just that they have more troops under their direct command but not really more overall? Also if the money is instead of obligation to supply troops, shouldnt the king also have more troops because the money goes to him?

1. To quote an earlier post:

Under the normal rules of feudalism, military capabilities were limited by the terms of the feudal agreement – you get so much land, you agree to raise so many men, the number of men per unit of land is fairly standardized – and it was hard to alter that, because the vassals’ vassals know their rights in law and get pretty litigious about it.

It’s really more when you get to what’s known as “bastard feudalism” that things start to go off the rails. Under bastard feudalism, instead of relying on those feudal agreements to raise soldiers, you convert military service obligations into taxes paid in cash and then use the cash to put fighting men on the payroll, who wear your livery and are counted as members of your “affinity.” So now you have a system where noblemen can raise and maintain private military forces above and beyond their feudal rights – and the only limit to how many of these guys you have on the payroll is your ability to make payroll on the first of the month.

By way of an analogy, traditional feudalism conceives the relationship of lord and soldier as an ongoing contractor-client relationship with terms that are fixed by written agreement and tradition. Bastard feudalism reconceived the relationship as one between an employer and a salaried, uniformed employee, which allowed the terms to be dictated by the means of the employer and the current conditions of the military labor market.

2. Members of an affinity were paid in cash, not in land, so while a noble only had a certain amount of land to give away to make up knight’s fees, if they could improve the productivity of their estate, then they could employ more men per acre of land then they had in the past.

3. The money doesn’t all go to the king. What makes you a noble is the right to extract rent and taxes from a given area of land, a portion of which you’re supposed to kick up to the king and the rest you get to keep. And if you were a powerful nobleman with a big private army, you might be able to get away with not paying your taxes, especially if the king you were dealing with was weak.

I have a question about sieges that always baffled me: How do you take a castle by treachery? As the besieger how can you identify and contact possible traitors in the castle?

Good question.

According to Aeneas Tacticus, author of the 4th century BCE best-seller How to Survive under Siege, key targets for treachery are social minorities, exiles, the families of hostages, and foreign mercenaries.

This is doubly true for any of them who are working as gatekeepers or guards, because those are the people who are physically closest to the enemy and could be communicated with more easily.

But in terms of how you contact them, you get close to the walls and shout up to people, or you send in written letters, or you set up a parlay and use the opportunity to have your envoy talk to people face-to-face, or you send in a spy, etc.

Hello Steven! Are there any historical examples of nobility “investing” in their peasants? such as buying them flocks of sheep or ox and plows to jump start productivity, like a medieval stimulus package? Whats a way that a lord could “spend money to make money” w/o including banking?

Interesting question!

Most of the examples that I can remember of nobles investing in their estates are things like draining fenland to create more arable land, building mills to turn grain into flour (thus, climbing the value-added ladder), or building weirs and the like to shape trade. These improvements are more akin to investments to fixed plant or capital goods than investments in the productivity of the labor force.

That’s not to say that lords wouldn’t buy livestock or plows or the like, but they’d usually buy them for their own lands, as those kinds of moveable goods were considered individual property. Indeed, in many cases peasants were required to bring their own plows on those days when they had to perform labor on the lord’s land as part of their feudal service.

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Catelyn III, ASOS

“Outside the thunder crashed and boomed, so loud it sounded as if the castle were coming down about their ears. Is this the sound of a kingdom falling?” Synopsis: Rickard Karstark commits suicide in an extremely elaborate fashion. SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector. (more…)

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Was it common for medieval kings to actively hold the noble classes in disdain? Something that I’ve seen somewhat regularly in medieval fantasy is a monarch that wants beneficial progress, but is blocked by the nobility, and hates them for it. Stannis is an example with his “if all the lords had but one neck” remark. Are these sorts of characters a bit of an overoptimistic take on absolutism, or did they turn up in real life?

Given the long history in many different countries of monarchs struggling with the aristocracy over centralization vs. decentralization of power, it’s not an inaccurate portrayal, but how common that attitude was did change over time.

I’m not sure I would always go as far as to say the class as a whole or as a concept was disdained – a lot of the centralizers would still defend at least the social prerogatives of the nobility against the peasantry or the urban burghers and none of them attempted to abolish or eliminate the nobility. Rather, the aim was usually to try to make the nobility a compliant and dependent part of the monarchical system.

Were twentieth-century aristocrats lazier than medieval aristocrats? I’m really only going by the fictional versions, but the medievals seem to always be doing something productive, while their 1900s counterparts spend all their time hunting and drinking. Some of it is because Downton Abbey doesn’t have to worry about being invaded by Bertie Wooster, but the medievals work hard at non-military projects too.

The medieval/early modern ones were plenty damn lazy, given that “not working for a living” was pretty much the definition of their social identity and actually doing a day’s work would be acting like a serf.

However, I would say the main difference is that the medieval/early modern nobility had two things that occupied a good deal of their time:

estate management: even though most of the “shop floor” work was done by stewards and bailiffs and the like, the lords did spend a lot of time on the management side of land management.
a monopoly on political power: in the premodern era, pretty much all jobs in politics were held by nobles or nobles who had joined the clergy; there were seats in Parliaments or Diets or Estates, there were places at court or in royal government/administration, there were judicial positions, there was the aristocratic domination of the army, etc.

After the economic/social/cultural/political transformations of the 17th-20th centuries that could collectively be described as “modernity,” the nobility lost those “places” in society. On the land side, they either lost a lot of their land or shifted their money into more liquid capital (which meant they could move to the city) or gave into the need for fully professional management (ditto, with a side of absentee landlordism). On the politics side, the rise of mass democracies, professionalized civil services, and militaries, abetted in no small part by the fact that the aristocracy had enthusiastically blundered their way into tons of increasingly bloody wars meant that noble titles shifted from a necessity to a liability.

What was left was their traditional pursuit of the “gentle life.”

I’m a bit confused about Knights as a social class. Were they all younger noble sons trying to make a living? How did they pay for their equipment? Could they own land or were they dependant on a master for their finances?

No. Knights were a particular section of the nobility, below the level of lord but above that of esquire. Indeed, one could argue that they were the foundational element of the nobility, since fiefdoms were made up of knight’s fees.

They paid for their armor usually in cash from the feudal taxes and rents that they extracted from their knight’s fee.

And knights usually did “own” land – the aforesaid knight’s fee – although there were household knights or tourney knights or the like.

How are feudal contracts negotiated and what would they cover and what would the terms be like generally? What about renegotiations of the contract?

See here and here for previous writings about the feudal contract.

Feudal contracts weren’t frequently negotiated, because tradition was considered incredibly important and breaking the traditional terms of the contract was frowned upon in the extreme, and innovations like scutage weren’t always thought well of either. Generally, if they had to be changed, it was usually done by trying to find some sort of ancient precedent, or if that couldn’t be done, by inventing one out of whole cloth and doctoring the records.

They varied tremendously, but usually they involved a bilateral exchange: the liege lord offers rights over a certain piece of land (not an absolute right to the land itself, but that’s a bit tricky given the difference between pre- and post-enlightenment conceptions of property rights) in exchange for stuff. It usually included military service (hence the practice of dividing fiefdoms into knight’s fees), although if a fiefdom was given to the church this was usually commuted, but it could also include various traditional forms of taxes (so many pheasants or so many butts of wine, etc.) or personal service (holding someone’s stirrup when they came to town, being their cupbearer, etc.).

I’ve been reading a bit about the petrol nations, and how discovering extensive oil reserves in a country often has a kind of “hollowing out” effect on the nation’s economy unless they act to put certain safeguards in place, or are already a significantly developed economy at the time the oil reserves are found. I’m curious about whether there are any historical equivalents to the effect that oil reserve discoveries have on a nation-state, whether raw resources or otherwise.

Well, the resource curse doesn’t just have to do with oil…

And if you’re looking for a historical example, I would go with the Price Revolution that the Spanish Empire suffered after its conquest of the Americas, where a tidal wave of gold and silver did enormous, lasting damage to the Spanish economy.