[Dragaera] Vassals

[Ken Koester]

Philip Hart wrote:

>
> I kind of doubt that there is any reason for the orb to bother taxing 
> a hundred Teckla families on the edge of the empire who
> aren't under a noble or any other apparent administration - they
> would likely have to pay in kind, and what would that be useful for? 
> Vlad doesn't tell N-p anything about collecting taxes, or dealing with 
> the empire - he'll be able to keep working and to dispense advice as 
> he likes.  But Perhaps someone who is more familiar with feudal 
> societies than I am just from reading _A Distant Mirror_ twenty
> years ago can chime in about how such situations worked in Europe
> or wherever; maybe "manorial" is the right term.
>
Generally, there weren't taxes per se on the peasantry, or on the nobles 
either, in Europe.  Instead, there was a web of duties, privileges, 
rights, & obligations (& an obligatory tithe given to the Church).  
These would differ greatly from manor to manor, depending on how the 
fief/subfief came to be created in the first place.  However, a lot of 
communes wound up gradually buying their way out of obligations, which 
is one way taxes came to be assessed--towns escaped feudal control early 
on, but usually had to pay something to someone, be it king, duke, count 
or whatever.

As time went on, the fixed fees paid to the manor in lieu of other 
obligations couldn't keep up with long term inflation (which no one then 
understood anyhow).  Combine this with the gradual extinction of old 
aristocracy & replacement by new, particularly from successful merchants 
& there were several periods of "domain mining", where the new lord 
would hire people to search the old domain records for rights & 
obligations that had fallen into disuse, which could then be levied anew 
against the population.  (Not infrequently, this would lead to imaginary 
"rights" that could be successfully imposed on the people of the manor.)

As royal households transformed themselves into state apparatchiks, the 
same process began to operate on the kingdom as  whole:  obligations 
converted into monetary payments, some of which became widescale & began 
to be something more like actual taxes.  There were always royal 
monopolies that could be a rich field for taxes:  the salt tax in 
France, for example.  Or there could be taxes on trade--even more 
popular, as merchants had money, but little in the way of direct powers 
of resistance.  But the kingdoms generally lacked an administrator class 
sufficient to handle all this, so commonly tax collection was "farmed" 
out to private individuals; in fact, this was called tax farming.  The 
king would sell (for a fixed sum, usually) the right to collect a 
particular customs duty to a private person, who then had the power to 
collect (& the incentive to collect as much as possible to make back his 
boodle, obviously).  There were supposed to be limits on what could be 
done, but you can imagine how well they worked.

That's an *extremely* broad summary of a process that worked itself out 
over about 8 or 9 centuries.  You could write books on it, and people 
have made careers on researching it.  We haven't even touched on royal 
borrowing, Edward III, for example, who more or less bankrupted the 
Bardi & Medici when he defaulted in the 1340's.  And the process in 
England was quite a bit different from that in France, which was 
different again from that in Tuscany, etc.  But that's the basic idea of 
how things evolved.

How this applies to the Empire, I don't know.  The financial situation 
there is quite mature, I would say; at least Orca (& 500YA) shows us 
that.  It's at least comparable to the level of finance in Europe during 
the time of that same Edward III & probably more so.  but that doesn't 
really tell us what is happening in he countryside, & I don't recall any 
textev on that point.

Snarkhunter