ANST - Peer/peasent ratio (was:White Scarves as Peers?)

[Galen W. Bevel]

Joel Schumacher wrote:

> 
> Speaking of peerages, historical accuracy, etc. Does anyone know what a
> historically accurate "peer-to-peasant" ratio is?  What about in the SCA?
> I would guess there's a huge difference between historical accuracy and
> the SCA.
> 
>
> -Karl von Augsburg
> __________________________________________________________________________


I can give you the line that I always heard about why things are as they
are.  Throughout a large portion of our history, in many areas, people
who were not born noble were little better than slaves.  they were tied
to the land and lived, died and worked at their Lords whim. (Yes, I know
that I am making an over generalization, but our whole group is one big
over generalization)  Since we wanted to _award_ advancements in rank
based on merit, that meant that persona's from these times/places would
have to start out as serfs/peasents/etc.  Since the opportunities for
advancement from that rank were pretty small (read as "none") that means
that anyone starting with such a persona would be stuck at that level,
living his/her SCA life eternally at the bottom of the social ladder, as
it were.  Since that didn't really appeal to anyone, it was decided
(evolved, whatever....) that everyone in the group was considered minor
nobility.  That way advancement, recognition, social climbing and back
biting were open to all.  So, we aren't really recreating the entirety
of medieval society, just the top few percent.  The rest was scraped off
and discarded (sort of the way religion and the church were).  

This actually fits pretty well with how I play the game.  Whenever I
begin to tackle a project I ask myself "what portions of this job would
have been done as menial labor, or at the least by lesser trained
apprentices"  Then I simply use power tools to replace those
apprentices/labor which are not available to me under todays economy. 
So the serfs/peasants/thralls (or whatever name you like) have, for me,
been replaced by drills, circular saws, and power sanders.  Although I
do admit that walking out into my garage doesn't give me quite the same
feeling of superiority that riding my charger through a field of mud
stained farm laborers might......


Graf Galen Kirchenbauer

-- 
Galen W. or Rebecca Bevel
galenbv at ix.netcom.com
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