Back in the late 70s and early 80s, Greg‘s only good source of agricultural data was based on the Domesday Book, and at some point he even got a computer printout of data on caloric intake, bushels of production, etc, all based on that. A lot of that stuff ended being the foundation for Pendragon’s manorial system, but it also was what he had to make sense of Sartar. So all sorts of weird assumptions got used, that had only a moderate relationship at best to the people, land, and climate he was trying to explore.
Now we have a lot more information on ancient and classical agriculture – not just in Greece or Rome, but also Macedon, Epiros, Thrace, Continental Gaul, etc.
So if you want the best historical matches for the Orlanthi, don’t look at Britain, Ireland, or Scandinavia – look at Epiros, Thrace, or Macedonia. Continental Gaul, Mycenae, or the Anatolian Hittites are also good matches (but not quite as strong as the first group). Anglo-Saxon England is about as bad a match as Abbasid Mesopotamia or the Roman latifundia.
One error that I got was I overstated the size of Orlanthi farms – a “hide” is the basic amount of land for a homestead’s subsistence farming. It’s a lot closer to 4-15 hectares in Sartar, rather than the larger number I gave in RQG. A bunch of reasons why that is so, but first and foremost is that mountainous Sartar really doesn’t resemble England at all (and Sartarite society is both more urbanized and more tribal than Anglo-Saxon).
Again, YGWV, but it might be helpful to know what my references are.
Note that the usual small farm in Sartar is largely subsidence farming and supports 4-8 people (including children). The farmers usually live in villages with other farmers, so those villages might have 50-250 people.
The leader of the village – the chief – is a military, religious, and administrative figure and might have 5+ times as much land assigned to support him, his household, and his retainers.
Note that there are no hills in England that even begin to resemble the Quivin Mountains or its surrounding hills (yes, people sometimes bring up Snowdon or Ben Nevis, but although Snowdon might be a a good source of ideas for one of the HILLS of Sartar, it is a very poor point of comparison for the Quivin massif – the Alleghenies are probably better points of comparison, although they miss the impact of the main mountains). When you throw in the difference in climate (England is an island that gets year round rainfall, Sartar is inland, with semi-arid areas and gets its water mainly in late winter and spring, etc.), its just a poor point of comparison.
How do these new measurements correspond to the need for a plough and ox-team? The old standard was 1 Hide = 80 acres, and you plow one acre in a day meaning you can plow the fields in two seasons (or one season if the assumption is that half lie fallow), and hence being a free farmer with 80 acres and having a plough-team matched closely. But an ox-team seems both excessive and unaffordable at 10 acres? It turns out that I used a wrong set of numbers. My current thought is divide the acres by 4 or 5. This also makes it a lot easier to fit those farms into the available valley land.
How easy is it to plough using Summon Earth Elemental and Command Earth Elemental? Or would ploughing fields be too lowly a task to make use of those? I think it would be a pretty poor use of Rune points. Rune magic lasts 15 minutes. Maybe an earth elemental could carefully move its way through a full hectare in that time, but then you are going to need to replenish those points.
Now this also ties into titles like “thane,” “carl”, or “cottar”. Greg was trying to get something that meant “minor military aristocracy”, “free commoner”, and “semi-free commoner”.
In English, “thane” has the advantage over perhaps more precise analogies such the Vedic “kshatriya samanta” or the Celtiberian “caudillo devotus” in that it is an English word. But maybe just “warrior-noble” is a better term and easier to translate.
However, the problem with thane is that it carries with it an increasing amount of irrelevant Anglo-Saxon associations. Given that the Anglo-Saxons really don’t have that much in common with the Sartarites (very different social organizations, wildly different urbanisation, literacy, material culture, etc. and in a location just not like Sartar in any meaningful way), why use the term?
Its a shame that kshatriya samanta is such a terrible mouthful in English. In Vedic India (ca. 1500–500 BCE), a samanta (vassal or subordinate lord) was a lesser Kshatriya (warrior caste – but worth remembering that at that time the castes were fluid and more functional roles rather than hereditary castes) serving a tribal king or chieftain. These retainers led warriors, participated in Vedic rituals, and managed villages or grazing lands. Their status was semi-hereditary, tied to Kshatriya lineages but dependent on royal favor.
Note in RQ a hide is pretty much an accounting unit – enough land for enough crops for a free commoner household to subsist.