[Banestorm] Why is the Cardien Council of Lords full of barons and vicounts?

[hal]

Some few thoughts to add after reading this resurrected thread...

If you want to have fun, dig through the material contained within THE DOMESDAY BOOK as far as determining the medieval structure instituted by a conquering feudal military/social group superimposed over the local structure.

Form follows function: What precisely was the needs of the people at that time, and what would they have instituted after the rebellion from Megalos?

You need the smallest unit of professional military to handle the self-training required along with the economic structure required. This individual would have been a knight. You can call him one thing in one language, or another thing in another language - but the primary function remains the same.

After that, you can have a single knight whose "ownership" may consist of multiple holdings. A simplistic way to look at it might be one knight one who holds three villages as a result of marriages over time. Unfortunately, his oath of fealty would, as a result of older "ties" to other villages to other lords - required the institution of a "Liege Lord" - one who was owed the bulk of a knight's obligations. It can get messy enough that a single knight with multiple villages - owes 60 percent of his obligations to one feuding lord, and 40% to the other, causing him to be conflicted either way as both go at each other. In GURPS terms, that single Knight's family with 5 villages is wealthier than a knight who only has the income of one village. Is it possible that a wealthy landed knight with a social status of 3, equate to that of a 4 due to excess wealth? Possibly. Does GURPS get it right that a given Knight with status 3+1 is on par with a noble who is status 4 from the start with normal wealth for said status? You tell me - any answer may be valid.

What are the obligations of a Knight?
What are the obligations of a Rich Knight?
What are the obligations of a Banneret with Multiple knights under him?
What are the obligations of a Landed Baron?

The questions are essentially the same - what are the needs of both governing and of military capabilities? Feudalism was "grown" to meet a specific need - it evolved. Don't get hung up on "names" or what have you, or when they came into existence in historical reality. Why? It would be ironic if the reason a given "status" or "Class" came into being later on Earth than it did on Yrth - and that Yrth would have already seen the same solution to a problem that historical Earth did - because they needed that solution 100 years earlier than it occurs historically.

Now for the bad news - if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, throw money around like a duck - chances are, someone said "Yup, he's a duke - because I said so, and he gave me his loyalty of him and his, to me and mine - to the end of time."

Then there is this funny oddity known as "Translating Yrth to English". They may very well have different names for their own version of a knight - that is an admixture of Christian and Muslim terminology. On Earth, we have to understand something using English terms, not some made up language of a fantasy game world (THANK GOD!). HARNWORLD does that, and I'm not all too keen with that (but hey, each to their own right?)

Here is a resource you can use to look at the UPPER peerage in 1190 time frame (King Richard).

And yes, for the record, I own a copy of a translation of the DOMESDAY BOOK just so I could research just how many families were listed for any given location - how much land they held, etc. I doubt anyone would want to do THAT much digging in historical documents just because, but what can I say, I'm a little bit of a masochist.