Chapter 357 – Manor Banquet 2
Chapter 357 – Manor Banquet 2
“Lord Fergus? What are you gawking at?”
Other people calling out interrupted Fergus’ thoughts, and he looked up to see that it was one of the people sitting across from him calling out to him.
The Northwesterners’ style was so rough, even for the rich and powerful.
“Haha, Master Shank, just now I heard you guys talk about last year’s war, and it’s a shame to remember that I, a vassal of Gleeman, didn’t even serve under the Count’s command.”
“So that’s what happened, Lord Fergus need not think so.”
Lord Valen, who was sitting in the main seat, raised his wine cup to comfort him, “I heard that besides the lords who are still serving as officers in the army, Earl Gleiman has not called up any other knights who are at home, the current Alda has a strong army, even if there are no battles it is still raising several thousands of soldiers and drills them daily, I think that even His Majesty’s army is not as good as that, is it not? With these soldiers charging into battle, do we still need to trouble an expert like you, wouldn’t that be killing a chicken with a bull’s knife?”
Hearing this description from Master Valen, the crowd at the banquet let out a burst of laughter. In this era, knights were the deciders on the battlefield, but the crowd didn’t seem to have considered that the Kent family, who was the enemy, would almost certainly send their own knights to the battlefield, and could only be described as being oblivious to the immense victory and glory they were immersed in.
The one called Shank, who had just spoken to Fergus, smacked his lips and said, “Keeping several thousand soldiers, I really don’t know how Lord Greymane can afford it, even with the taxes from Bairdine and Emden it’s still a struggle!”
The person next to him said, “With food, we can raise as many soldiers as we want, think about it, not to mention Bairdine and Emden, let’s just talk about our Alda, how much new farmland has been opened compared to when Lord Gleiman first took the seat of the lord?”
This one sentence led to a lot of talk and discussion among the people at the banquet.
“I reckon it’s twice as much anyhow? Who wouldn’t want to grow more crops after buying machinery such as harvesters, soil crushers, and threshers from the Lakewood Town Machine Shop. Praise Lord Gleeman, he’s the one who invented these great machines.”
“The farmland has become more plentiful and the crop rotation system has been promoted, the output of this field can be doubled compared to two years ago.”
“A lot of water conservancy has also been repaired in these two years.”
“Iron farming tools are also cheaper, like sickles, hoes, forks, shovels and so on, especially iron plows, not to mention not afraid of your jokes, a few years ago I used farming tools there were all made of wood. It’s always strange to say that in recent times our iron in Arda has become so cheap that the stores in the town are full of it, and it doesn’t cost much to buy it.”
Hear this Fergus some can not help but laugh, now the manor is almost all self-contained, self-sufficient, this group of landowners stay at home all day long to drink their own brewed wine, eat their own food grown in the ground, wear their own servants weave out of the cloth, rarely with the outside world to deal with, only to use their own production of things, only to the town or the city to purchase some, on the understanding of the peasants than their men in more than They are not much more knowledgeable than the peasants under them.
It is estimated that most of the people in this house do not know that Count Gleiman has used new technology to build several iron smelting yards, Alda, Bairdine, and even Emden, which has recently taken over, is also closely exploring the ore veins, examining the water resources, and preparing for the construction of a new ironworks.
Now Alda – Bairdine has monopolized nearly half of the territory of the Northwest Gulf of iron supply, the traditional way of iron refining in the new technology under the impact of the unbearable, those folk mine owners, iron refinery have gone bankrupt, their original workers moved to Alda or Bairdine a large number of people to make a living, many of their own also opened a mine of lords rely on raising tariffs or direct a ban on the Alda’s iron barely blocked out of the door! Why do you say “barely”? Why do I say barely? Because there is still smuggling, and in this day and age, smuggling is a phenomenon that cannot be stopped.
The master of the banquet, lord Valen, raised his cup and said with great admiration, “In previous years, which winter did not have to freeze and starve to death a lot of people, this winter, although there are also, the deaths are reduced, this is all due to the good governance of lord Gleeman.”
Someone proposed: “Let’s toast Count Gleiman again!”
“To Count Gleiman!” The crowd agreed and raised their cups to drink.
Everyone at the banquet had already drank a lot of wine, and although the wine wasn’t of a high degree, there was a lot of it.
A man with a drunken face shook his cup and said with a crooked body, “Speaking of this little lord we have now, here or there, there is just one thing that is not good.”
Fergus frowned at that and said to the man, “Eldo, you’re drunk.”
The man named Eldo shook his head vigorously and heatedly laughed a few times, “Lord Fergus, I don’t mean to accuse the lord, for Lord Gleeman, I am one hundred percent in favor of him, may he live a long life. But …… people will always whine a few times, so you can take me as drunken nonsense.”
Seeing that everyone in the room had their eyes on his side, he continued on his own, “Speaking of Lord Gleiman’s one bad point, it’s that he’s too indulgent with merchants who fall into the money pile and can’t climb out.”
Someone asked, “What does that mean, Lord Eldor?”
Eldo shook his head and replied, “It’s not right to say that it’s Lord Greiman’s indulgence, but it’s not our lord’s fault, rather it’s that those merchants are relying on the lord’s importance to do things that are not in line with the rules. This was a month ago, there were a few escaped peasants from my manor that ran away to Port Fulan, I brought my men to look for them and found them working as laborers in the salt farms.”
“And then?” Eldo snorted, “Tied them back up, of course, the lead one beaten to death for public display, and the others punished severely to show the others what happens when they run amok.”
Most of the peasants in the Northwest Bay and even the Kingdom of Aldo had no personal freedom, they could not leave their villages without authorization, and were ruled by the owner of the land they were on, that is, the landlord or manor owner, and although there was not an official [serf] designation in the regulations issued through the generations, their situation was indeed no different from that of a serf.
This serf system is a remnant of the ancient slavery system, but with the development of the times, especially the intervention of the Church, the living conditions of the serfs have improved, they can have their own houses to live in instead of being crammed into shacks like animals, they can find their own preferred spouses to get married and be blessed by the Church, and they can even have their own modest savings to pass on to the next generation.
Of course, all of the above is on the premise of not violating the interests of the local landowners, the landowners can take their own land serfs with other landowners to trade. The landowner also has the right to catch and punish the serfs if they run away without authorization.
However, the serfs nowadays have one [benefit], each village or manor will have a piece of [communal land], and the harvest from the communal land will be divided equally among the serfs.
“But I will say this – the owner of that salt farm – what’s his name – hiccup… -what’s-his-name-Godwin, even stopped me from taking the people, saying that those mudbloods had already he signed the deed, I’ll go to his damned head!”
“Eldo, what did you do afterward? How did you get the people back?”
Eldo’s face flushed and looked very excited, “I was too lazy to argue with him, letting people go back to the manor and call a large number of people, directly smashing his salt farm and snatching people out. I didn’t expect that this stupid bastard still didn’t know what to do, but even sued to the town mayor Theodore.”
Ferguson’s face flinched as he asked, “How did Mayor Theodore handle it?”
Eldo hemmed and hawed, “How else could it be handled? I was the one who had the right of way, but it was that Godwin who casually recruited into the workshop without looking at what kind of person he was. Ridiculous that guy still talks about personal freedom in front of the mayor, hahaha!”
The crowd laughed along with him.
Shank clapped or laughed and said, “I think that Godwin was fooled by Dean Morrison’s preaching team!”
Morrison is Paul in the elimination of the pirates entrenched in the port of Frankland Shark Gang met the priest, promised to help him hide forced to participate in the pirate gangs of dishonorable experience, stayed with Paul as a military priest, to engage in some of the “ideological” aspects of the work, in Father Anderson replaced his teacher as the dean of the North Shore Abbey, Paul arranged for Morrison to go to “help”. After Father Anderson succeeded his teacher as the abbot of the North Shore Abbey, Paul arranged for Morrison to “help” him, and Father Anderson, who was obsessed with research all day, pushed the large and small affairs of the abbey onto Morrison, and gradually, Morrison was called the abbot.
Before in Paul’s authorization, Morrison organized a few preaching teams, in the name of the Church to the countryside to attack serfdom, but the effect is well ……
“That what preaching team came to my land not long after the gray slipped away! They didn’t talk about the Holy Scriptures, they talked about JB equality, and the peasants had farm work to do, so they didn’t have the time to listen to their bullshit! Besides, they don’t understand!”
“Me too, these people really don’t know what’s good for them, and they’re all about heresies.”
Listening to the talk at the banquet, Valen on the main seat grunted, “We work with our brains, the peasants work with their bodies, those who work with their brains rule over those who work with their bodies, this is the truth since the beginning of time, it hasn’t changed even in the millennia since the establishment of the church that shouts the slogan of equality.”
Someone beside him immediately agreed with him, “That’s right, the mud legged men with elm wood like brains, can’t even work properly, can’t work at all away from the control. And the noble lords are honored beyond measure, how can we let them personally take care of these messy things in the fields, naturally we have to be the agents to control the peasants.”
A group of people yelled.
“This group of merchants in Fulan Harbor, relying on the fact that they have made a few stinking bucks in the past two years, have the audacity to put up a front in front of us.”
“I think they’ve been brought down by their counterparts over in Horn Bay!”
“A bunch of vampires!”
……
The conversation at the party drifted to berating the merchants, and Fergus shook his head at how it had come to this when he was just trying to drink in peace and quiet.
(End of chapter)