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Old 09-25-2017, 05:17 PM   #10
hal
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Buffalo, New York
Default Re: historically becoming landed as a small fry

Quote:
Originally Posted by fifiste View Post
The title thing is that is interesting to me personally - as long as I know "freeman" is a common "title" though in actuality it has not much to do with being an aristocrat. So i was thinking - I know that serf have been granted freedom or have bought themselves free but could a burgher or somesuch become a landed "freeman" not a landed small-aristocrat. A burgher or somesuch paying to become a a knight or even more is nothing unheard of but just becoming a farmer -- I guess marrying the right girl and getting some land out of the deal works. Can even be combined with "buying" a title - old time people being practical folks that is -- might be weird giving your lands under the care of a towny or worse a wanderer of somesuch but if he shows enough wealth to take care of it and your daughter then why not.
Instead of thinking "Freeman" as a title, think of it as a status if you will. If you didn't owe service, and you didn't have a binding contract upon you because your father made a contract with a Noble where the contract was not only binding on the original signatories, but also upon the descendants of the signatories - then you were "free".

If your father or grandfather agreed to harvest your fields, pay tallage fees, pannage rights, sheepshearing silver, etc - then you as a descendant of your father, also owed those same duties and fees. in return however, you were given the right to farm a given amount of land, and that land would be granted to your descendants through time. As mentioned above, "Farming" or the rent of land from a lord, meant that the "Free" didn't have the rights to land like the unfree did.

Then there were the names associated with the classes who held land. There are various terms used to describe the number of acres an ox could plow within a given time period. That the Acre was not always a standardized unit of measure, and you get to see where and how it may be difficult to reconcile what was standard in one area, might not be standard as far as "actual acreage" by today's standards. See my next post showing a "village" generated using HARN MANOR in my program I've been working on over the years...
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