Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX

[Calthropstu]

Well, I wouldn't quote anybody here in a research paper either . . . in general, I was always reluctant to use an internet source, but they could be useful in finding relevant works (in a library or maybe an online journal like jstor).

But, some of those linked, did provide their sources, so you could look them up, and get the information directly.

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Since you asked for more "grounded" information, this is one of the references I have to hand, but it's a little more narrow in scope:

Mercenaries and their Masters, by Michael Mallett, is considered to be the major "point of departure" for study into Italian Warfare and mercenaries from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries.* The focus is on the developments of the 15th century, so the earlier large communal levies aren't covered in depth. But this is what he has to say on militia levies in that period:


pg. 226.

Referencing a thirteenth century battle, he gives this breakdown:

pg. 12.


pp. 43-44.

These quotes reflect a shift in the system in Italy, although levies continued to be used throughout the period, they made up a smaller proportion of the armies than before and in some periods may have been omitted completely. Italy was fairly dense in population, and politically fragmented, so while some lessons could be applied to a broader scope, details would likely vary across Europe.

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*So of course most popular representations ignore it, and regurgitate outdated, debunked, 19th century writings of Sir Charles Oman.

So yeah, this kind of information directly refutes what was being claimed earlier. The specific army being called out was more than half levies. The original statement was that there was no levies or rounding up of people to act as soldiers. The information you provided directly refutes that.

[fusilier]

So yeah, this kind of information directly refutes what was being claimed earlier. The specific army being called out was more than half levies. The original statement was that there was no levies or rounding up of people to act as soldiers. The information you provided directly refutes that.

Yes. However, the issue wasn't just about whether or not levies were used, but what was the character (or make up) of a levy. And Mallet's work doesn't really go into that detail.

The popular image, that they rounded up all the peasants and forced them to fight with whatever farm implements they had on hand, seems unlikely. Although it may have happened from time to time, only in cases of extreme emergency.* On the other hand, peasants who had sufficient wealth might be expected to maintain arms and give service if levied. That's what the detailed response in this link covered:

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistoria...t_working_the/

In a two part response it described who was likely to be levied, under what conditions, what obligations they had, and also provided a bibliography so that the sources could be checked (note: I have not checked those sources). In this case, however, it is specific to Norman England (which, frankly, probably more people on this board care about than medieval Italy, but my sources are my sources).

I find it's often the case that a refutation of some part of a popular image: i.e. that peasant levies rarely, if ever, involved rounding up all able bodied peasants and forcing them into service, ends up being exaggerated: i.e. peasant levies weren't a thing. Nuance is lost, and a different, but also wrong, idea creeps into the popular imagination.

*Also consider that not everybody levied was necessarily expected to fight. Pioneers were mentioned, and many farm implements would be useful in that role. Furthermore, the logistical needs of an army could be quite large, and often each man-at-arms might have several people to support him. Those support personnel may also be armed and capable of fighting, but in a diminished capacity.

[Calthropstu]

Yes. However, the issue wasn't just about whether or not levies were used, but what was the character (or make up) of a levy. And Mallet's work doesn't really go into that detail.

The popular image, that they rounded up all the peasants and forced them to fight with whatever farm implements they had on hand, seems unlikely. Although it may have happened from time to time, only in cases of extreme emergency.* On the other hand, peasants who had sufficient wealth might be expected to maintain arms and give service if levied. That's what the detailed response in this link covered:

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistoria...t_working_the/

In a two part response it described who was likely to be levied, under what conditions, what obligations they had, and also provided a bibliography so that the sources could be checked (note: I have not checked those sources). In this case, however, it is specific to Norman England (which, frankly, probably more people on this board care about than medieval Italy, but my sources are my sources).

I find it's often the case that a refutation of some part of a popular image: i.e. that peasant levies rarely, if ever, involved rounding up all able bodied peasants and forcing them into service, ends up being exaggerated: i.e. peasant levies weren't a thing. Nuance is lost, and a different, but also wrong, idea creeps into the popular imagination.

*Also consider that not everybody levied was necessarily expected to fight. Pioneers were mentioned, and many farm implements would be useful in that role. Furthermore, the logistical needs of an army could be quite large, and often each man-at-arms might have several people to support him. Those support personnel may also be armed and capable of fighting, but in a diminished capacity.

It's actually fairly easy to reason out. My rejection was the "levies weren't used and that never really happened" however, those things did in fact happen from time to time.

I remeber reading something about gathering unwilling soldiers as levies during an incursion from another lord. I also remember looking for the exact law that allowed it. Never actually found it, but this was in high school before google. I basically just browsed library shelves and read random stuff.

[Brother Oni]

It's actually fairly easy to reason out. My rejection was the "levies weren't used and that never really happened" however, those things did in fact happen from time to time.

You really should go read the links. For example, this link has the question "I am a healthy male English peasant working the land for a minor Baron circa 1100 AD. One day the Baron comes and says the King has asked him to raise an army. Who is responsible for arming, armoring, and training me? If I have money saved up can I buy better equipment? Who decides?"

The top answer has the bibliography:
Alfred's Wars, by Ryan Lavelle
Military Obligation in Medieval England, by Michael Powicke
The Military Organisation of Norman England, by C. Warren Hollister
England Under Norman and Angevin Kings, by Robert Bartlett
Warfare Under the Anglo-Norman Kings, 1066-1135, by Stephen Morillo
"The Knights of Peterborough and the Anglo-Norman Fyrd", by C. Warren Hollister, The English Historical Review, Vol. 77, No. 304 (Jul., 1962), pp. 417-436
"Bookland and Fyrd Service in Late Saxon england", by Richard Abels, in The Battle of Hastings, ed. Stephen Morillo, p57-78
Medieval England: Rural society and Economic Change 1086-1348, by Edward Miller and John Hatcher
"The Knight and the Knight's Fee", by Sally Harvey, Past & Present, Volume 49, Issue 1, November 1970, Pages 3–43

This post quite clearly supports the levy system was in place.


In any case, your earlier answer to peasant levies was "This happened. Mainly Poland, Japan and China that I know of. I think other Eastern european nations as well. They did this to look far more threatening than they actually were."

Aside from the blip of the Yuan Dynasty, the other main Chinese Dynasty of the medieval era, the Song, didn't really go in for peasant levies and dealt with invading barbarians by paying off other barbarians to do their fighting for them (yiyi ziyi).
During the Yuan, the Mongols made up the cavalry, while the vast bulk of the infantry were Chinese and Korean conscripts or defected soldiers.


Japan is complicated. You had ashigaru who were the definition of peasant levy (ie peasants stripped off the land, given a spear and told to fight), but by the time of the Kamakura period, you also had the semi-professional ashigaru 'mercenary' bands who prowled the edges of the battlefield and were paid in loot. When the majority of your fighting is done by ashigaru, it's a far cry from 'making them look more threatening than they actually were'.

It's not until the Sengoku period (which is more Early Modern than medieval) that the ashigaru solidify into a 'professional' soldier caste, primarily under Oda Nobunaga. There were even samurai generals who specialised in leading ashigaru troops (Toyotomi Hideyoshi being the prime example).

[Calthropstu]

You really should go read the links. For example, this link has the question "I am a healthy male English peasant working the land for a minor Baron circa 1100 AD. One day the Baron comes and says the King has asked him to raise an army. Who is responsible for arming, armoring, and training me? If I have money saved up can I buy better equipment? Who decides?"

The top answer has the bibliography:
Alfred's Wars, by Ryan Lavelle
Military Obligation in Medieval England, by Michael Powicke
The Military Organisation of Norman England, by C. Warren Hollister
England Under Norman and Angevin Kings, by Robert Bartlett
Warfare Under the Anglo-Norman Kings, 1066-1135, by Stephen Morillo
"The Knights of Peterborough and the Anglo-Norman Fyrd", by C. Warren Hollister, The English Historical Review, Vol. 77, No. 304 (Jul., 1962), pp. 417-436
"Bookland and Fyrd Service in Late Saxon england", by Richard Abels, in The Battle of Hastings, ed. Stephen Morillo, p57-78
Medieval England: Rural society and Economic Change 1086-1348, by Edward Miller and John Hatcher
"The Knight and the Knight's Fee", by Sally Harvey, Past & Present, Volume 49, Issue 1, November 1970, Pages 3–43

This post quite clearly supports the levy system was in place.


In any case, your earlier answer to peasant levies was "This happened. Mainly Poland, Japan and China that I know of. I think other Eastern european nations as well. They did this to look far more threatening than they actually were."

Aside from the blip of the Yuan Dynasty, the other main Chinese Dynasty of the medieval era, the Song, didn't really go in for peasant levies and dealt with invading barbarians by paying off other barbarians to do their fighting for them (yiyi ziyi).
During the Yuan, the Mongols made up the cavalry, while the vast bulk of the infantry were Chinese and Korean conscripts or defected soldiers.


Japan is complicated. You had ashigaru who were the definition of peasant levy (ie peasants stripped off the land, given a spear and told to fight), but by the time of the Kamakura period, you also had the semi-professional ashigaru 'mercenary' bands who prowled the edges of the battlefield and were paid in loot. When the majority of your fighting is done by ashigaru, it's a far cry from 'making them look more threatening than they actually were'.

It's not until the Sengoku period (which is more Early Modern than medieval) that the ashigaru solidify into a 'professional' soldier caste, primarily under Oda Nobunaga. There were even samurai generals who specialised in leading ashigaru troops (Toyotomi Hideyoshi being the prime example).

Yes. The purpose of warfare in Japan was a lot different than elsewhere. Japan didn't battle other countries very often. Attacking Japan was difficult externally. Most of it was internal. So the use of peasants was a lot more useful. You were basically fighting your near neighbors and, assuming you survived, you could be back quickly. A lot of that happened in China as well. The use of peasant levies falling into disuse in Europe probably coincided with someone realizing how dumb an idea it was to deplete your work force for war.

But it was definitely in widrspread use for a long time. Not exactly sure why, since the Romans didn't use them and lasted a really long time.

[Pauly]

But it was definitely in widrspread use for a long time. Not exactly sure why, since the Romans didn't use them and lasted a really long time.

Before the Marian reforms the legionnaires were essentially levies. Citizens obliged to arm and equip themselves for war and subject to being called up. Same with the citizen hoplite in Greece.

The whole reason of why the Marian reforms were enacted is complicated, but one of the reasons was that the voters didn’t like it when friends and family, not to mention themselves, were called away for extended military campaigns.

[Martin Greywolf]

Definition of levy

This is our main issue, really. What even is a levy? Sure, you can say it's anyone who is going into a war unwillingly - but then, what about people who enlist these days into the army in times of peace for 5 years and are told just before they go out that a conflict started and they have to deploy? Are they levies?

With that in mind, we need to distinguish between not just un/willingness to fight, but also between an obligation to do so.

However, that obligation is also problematic - if it comes form voluntary enlistment, it's all well and good, but historically, they also come from social status, and even modern day voluntary enlistment can be driven by economic factors, i.e. you are so dirt poor and economy is so bad that is your only option. To say nothing of not reading what, exactly, you're signing.

What further complicates this is that while these days, we are all citizens with theoretically equal rights and liberties, this was not the case historically, and this divide goes much deeper than just nobles and paesants. For Hungary between 1000 - 1300, there are about four not quite distinct phases of development, where the number of social strata fluctuates between about a dozen to as few as five. Without accounting for monastic hierarchies, so the real number is probably double that at least.

And every social category has their own set of freedoms and obligations, and is some cases, a social category is umbrella term for a number of real groups. Take conditional nobles, for example, who had almost "full noble" freedom (called golden freedom), but that freedom wasn't tied to their social status, but raher to the land via royal grants that, while somewhat standardized, were issued on case by case basis. So, Spis/Zipser saxons had different conditional nobility rules than those of Transylvania, despite both being conditional nobles.

Spoiler: Social strata in 1300 Hungary

Show

EN	LAT	Military duty	Personal freedom	Land ownership
King	Rex	does what he wants	is freebird	all the land
Nobles	Nobiles	to the king	golden	full
Castle iobagions	Iobagiones castri	to the castle	yes	yes, cannot be stripped of it
Citizens	Cives	to the castle	yes	No
Castlemen	Cstrenses/Udvornici	to the castle	No	No
Villagers	Villani	none	no	no

Personal freedom = can get up and leave for brighter futures without telling anyone, those that don't have it must seek permission from their lord

Land ownership = only land tied to their social status, they all can own land if they buy it from the owner, although renting in exchange for a yearly tax was far more common

Note the lack of freemen paesants, by this time they were merged into the nobiles. Villani also have no military duty expectation, so legally they can't serve unless they want to and get their lord's permission.

There was also a church heirarchy separate from this, and Hospites was a legal status that could be tacked onto almost any of the above, save for the king, with some special privileges on case by case basis (so, that doubles our chart, really).

There were also privileged cities, that stratum was elevated from cives, castrenses and iobagionnes castri and was, again, case by case, so we get 3 more rows to that table.

What is the levy myth, and why Eastern Europe

There is this idea that medieval non-nobles were forced to go into battle with a single pitchfork. Both sides of the Cold War used it, for very different reasons, and so this myth infested popular culture and even academia to some degree.

This is most definitely a myth, barring extreme emergency situations. Even USSR-style conscripts, taken en masse from unwilling and untrained general population, weren't done very often, at least not until pre-modern era. Hell, even that Soviet example was born of extreme emergency.

Seeing as noth NATO and Warsaw pact said that Eastern European history had these, they are very much associated with Eastern Europe, and examples that are given of them usually include Hungarian paesant rebellions, Hussite uprisings and so on. All of these should be judged on individual basis, and the scope of that discussion is beyod me - I know a fair bit about Hussites, but Hungarian paseant revolts are not in my area of specializing.

That said, there are examples of these kinds of unrests in western Europe in equal numbers, what with several French revolutions, Froissart explicitly mentioning poor farmer slingers and so on. But, much like eastern cases, these are in medieval times (barring migration period), exceptions rather than rules.

Spoiler: Three hussite depictions across the ages

Show

15. century VIenna codex


Czech Jan Zizka movie, 1955


modern Osprey book

Spoiler: Froissart's Paesant revolt

Show

Illustration has them heavily armored, text says:

The commons of Spain according to the usage of their country with their slings they did cast stones with great violence and did much hurt

Who has to serve?

This is a complex question. The real answer is, look at the time and place of choosing, find out what all the social strata are, and figure out what their obligations happen to be.

Nobility, which is in itself a groups that likely has several strata in it (iobagiones regis, servientes regis, nobiles, hospites, cives etc.), usually have to serve, no exceptions. Under what circumstances they are obliged to show up (all, defensive wars only, etc) varies, but the expectations is there.

This sort of olbigation also applies to social classes we wouldn't call nobles, but are still privileged - burghers, iobagionnes, people who were given land on the border to settle in with the understanding that they will defend said border and so on. The obligation to serve is as baked into their social standing as it is into the nobles.

Problem is, are you required to serve personally, and what do you do in the meantime? Because if one family is required to give one fully armed soldier to the army if the call comes, you can run into issues. Small families, individuals that are badly needed at home for one reason or another and so on. If you aren't rich enough to afford a mercenary to go instead of you (which may or may not even be possbile, depending on time, place and social stratum), you have to go even if you don't want to - does that make you a levy?

And that is what most medieval levies are - raised from population that usually does some other thing (farm, craft etc) that is required to supply one soldier in X equipment per Y households. In theory, those soldiers are either mercenaries, or the population itself, and since they knew they will have to serve, their training is reflective of that.

In practice, some areas with martial culture (german Landsknechts, Hungarian border nomads in ~850~1100), you get pretty solid, even elite, troops out of them. In other cases... not so much. And if they aren't mercenaries on long term contracts, they will definitely want to return home fairly soon, to get back to their usual craft.

When you levy even more

Note that these levies are all legally required, and the king is the law. Meaning that if the king says so, the levy amounts can increase, much like issuing special taxes - both of which are almost foreign to us modern folks, but were par for the course historically, the city of Presov was paying 100 florins of special war tax in 1516, wich was a fifth of their usual taxes on top.

That means that all of that previous point? Yeah, it can get tossed right out the window if the king or other person capable of changing laws decides they need more soldiers. One can find himself in position of expecting to never have to serve on account of having paid for mercs, and then the laws change and he has to go.

And since this depends on how, exactly, laws are written and what the unwritten traditions are, we get even more chaos.

But should you levy?

This is probably the key point here - while a given lawmaker theoretically has the ability to call all men to arms, it's a really bad idea. There have been constant attempts to establish a standing army once migration period was over - in Hungary, we have: royal army, banderial systems, royal cities required to supply soldiers, royal army again, all supplementing nobles (just nobiles, not servientes regis, or... you get the picture) who should show up - how nobles should show up is regulated by two Golden Bulls and many more lesser documents.

All of that means that you try to levy as few people as you can, because famines and economic shortages are not fun. That said, you do have tha capability, so these sort of soft levies, where you increase some numbers in already pre-established laws, are done fairly often (as in, every time a really major war break out), if not every time.

Even monetary taxes for times of war were frequently abolished for a given city or person if they were in a bad spot.

Who pays for all that crap? And what about training?

Depends. Usually the guy who gets levied is expected to come prepared, gear and all.

How that expectation is managed varies, from "if you own X worth of stuff, you have to have at least Y equipment" to "you are required to serve, show up however you want", in the latter relying on the unwillingness of the person in question to be shanked and therefore investing in gear. Hungarian royal cities were required to supply one soldier "in full panoply of war" per about a hundred people. Since these were wealthy citizens, a popular theory is that this "full panoply of war" was in reality a knight-like combatant, with heavy armor and one or two squires.

That said, many cities and castles had armories that stored surplus weapons, in case they got attacked and had to arm their population. People who would be issued these were probably not the most capable combatants, and if you levied these regardless, you were about to run into morale problems. Incidentally, this is how Hussites were armed initially, by emptying these stores and then making more weapons out of whatever thay had on hand.

As for training, we know this was an issue no matter what level of society you were on. People like Ulrich von Lichtenstein (noble and a pro jouster) or Johannes Lichtenauer (probably burgher, pro swordsmanship teacher) did exist, but weren't all that common - devoting your whole life to martial pursuit was kinda rare, as you can glean from Fiore de'i Liberi's foreword to Flower of Battle, where he mentions not only teaching high-ranking nobility right before thay had to fight, but also (according to him) lesser, bad teachers he put in their place - on five occassion, with swords.

There are aslo many laws that suggest that the people in charge were aware of this and supported pastimes that would get you a pool f semi-trained soldiers. England's famous longbow laws, Balearic isles and their sling-oriented child rearing, general support of wrestling as a pastime for the lower classes and so on. You can find this even in modern times, with pre-WW2 countries supporting civilian shooting clubs to get a population with unusually high levels of marksmanship and weapon familiarity.

As for formalized training, run by the military authority, that was vanishingly rare before early modern era (Greek city-states militia and Roman armies being the major notable exceptions) - at least on a higher level. It is very possible, even likely, that, for example, some of those border villages in 900s Hungary had some sort of training regimen they went through, but it has been lost to time and illiteracy.

So did levies happen?

Short answer is yes, but they were more willing and better armed and trained than you imagine, and those unarmored, pitchfork-weilding paesant mobs were very, very rare.

[Clistenes]

Aside from the blip of the Yuan Dynasty, the other main Chinese Dynasty of the medieval era, the Song, didn't really go in for peasant levies and dealt with invading barbarians by paying off other barbarians to do their fighting for them (yiyi ziyi).
During the Yuan, the Mongols made up the cavalry, while the vast bulk of the infantry were Chinese and Korean conscripts or defected soldiers.

I would like to point than Sun Tzu mentions, in his book "The Art of War", the problem of conscripted soldiers running away and returning to their villages. He said that was one of the several reasons it was a good idea to enter enemy territory as soon as possible (so the conscripted soldiers were afraid of splitting from the army and wouldn't desert...).

[PhoenixPhyre]

Question relating to the 1300's Hungarian strata (and branching out from there): were there patterns in how land ownership worked in Europe at about that era? Only nobles could own land? Others could buy, but only under conditions? Everyone except landed nobles generally rented (maybe on long term lease?) from nobles?

I've got a party who wants to buy property that was formerly set aside (haven't decided exactly how the deed was set) to a church that ended up getting wiped out. They're not nobles, but are very wealthy and personally powerful.

Of course they think that there are strong laws about what others can do on their private property, thinking that this is the modern era. Heh.

[GeoffWatson]

Question relating to the 1300's Hungarian strata (and branching out from there): were there patterns in how land ownership worked in Europe at about that era? Only nobles could own land? Others could buy, but only under conditions? Everyone except landed nobles generally rented (maybe on long term lease?) from nobles?

I've got a party who wants to buy property that was formerly set aside (haven't decided exactly how the deed was set) to a church that ended up getting wiped out. They're not nobles, but are very wealthy and personally powerful.

Of course they think that there are strong laws about what others can do on their private property, thinking that this is the modern era. Heh.

I guess the king would ennoble them (or one of them?) and grant them the land, on condition that they pay taxes and work for him - having powerful adventurers in his employ could be very useful. Limited to a certain amount of time per year (or whatever you agree on).

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Thinking with my gamer hat on another option might be for them to get a pet noble. Some younger child from an impoverished line who is allowed to own property but doesn't have too much else going for him (or her) maybe. His name goes on the deed to the land, he gets a corner of it to himself to build a nice little cottage or something and he gets to brag about his large estate and maybe could get another title or a good match for marriage out of it if he plays his cards right. He signs an agreement with the party to lease the rest of the land to them indefinitely for the grand sum of nothing per year, and all the buildings on that land are owned by the party separate from the ground. The deal could even work without the noble living there. He just stays where he is now on the other side of the country, but he gets to brag about how much land he owns elsewhere.

I am not basing this on any actual historic situation, but deals like that must have been made around the rise of wealthy traders and such.

[Brother Oni]

I would like to point than Sun Tzu mentions, in his book "The Art of War", the problem of conscripted soldiers running away and returning to their villages. He said that was one of the several reasons it was a good idea to enter enemy territory as soon as possible (so the conscripted soldiers were afraid of splitting from the army and wouldn't desert...).

He also says 'Do not raise soldiers twice, nor food three times', implying that a skilled commander doesn't need to raise a second levy and by getting into enemy territory, you can live off their supplies rather than your own.

That said, the 5th Century BC is a long time difference from the medieval era, not least culturally (during the Warring States, almost everybody fought and soldiering wasn't as looked down upon).

[snowblizz]

Question relating to the 1300's Hungarian strata (and branching out from there): were there patterns in how land ownership worked in Europe at about that era?

Yes. The Kingdom held some lands (the exact intermingling with what is the king's demesne and more abstractly state land would vary a bit depending on how the king managed to operate). The Church held some lands. The nobility held some lands (the king's demesne would sort of land here). And peasants held some lands. These are the 4 major categories of landowning. However, there are variations to the exact status and rights and ownership over the lands.

State lands and peasant lands were the main taxable subjects. Nobles and church held someone their land tax free, but not necessarily all of it.

Only nobles could own land? Others could buy, but only under conditions? Everyone except landed nobles generally rented (maybe on long term lease?) from nobles?

That would depend a lot on where you are, Hungary and Poland e.g. were more strongly nobility controlled and as such tended to have laws that favoured them more. Other places had other rules. It should be noted, for the benefit of the crown normally. I'll take Scandinavia, mostly Sweden as my example. It wasn't for an overt concern of the peasantry the crown protected them. They were the only subjects that could easily be taxed so normally it was in the interest of the crown that as many free peasants existed. It was not uncommon that royal tenants were allowed to buy their land to become freeholding peasants. Usually because the crown needed quick cash.

Mostly it was perfectly fine for not-nobles to own land. The main exception I've seen was that land that had belonged to nobility could not be sold to a lesser social strata. This doesn't mean any land ever owned by a noble was out of bounds, just a more tightly limited inherited land considered essentially as your family estate. Usually this would also be the lands you were entirely exempted from taxation or had special rights on. e.g. from 1396 in the Kalmar Union a noble could only claim tax exemption one such manorial complex that was considered their place of residence. If a noble had received a land grant or bought land from other land owners they'd be generally free to dispose of it as they saw fit.
Similar rules could also apply to peasant land where your relatives enjoyed a legal first right to refusal on lands that has been inherited in your family. IIRC these rules were in part still around into the 19th century when rules on landownership became more modern and holders got complete rights to the land they owned. Again if you expanded by purchase or breaking new ground those lands were not necessarily considered part of your family's property and could be freely sold to others. Sometimes restrictions on nobles buying up land from peasants also existed.
The rules could also be applied to royal lands farmed by tenants that had been sold or donated to nobility or church or even the tenants themselves, usually retroactively to shore up the crown's financial difficulties.

Not all of these land revisions were successful ofc but as the state develops they do get more effective in controlling who owns what. In general thus we have a system that to a certain degree tries preserve ownership of land in appropriate categories (and medieval society tended to like their godly anointed social order, at least those benefiting from it). The most annoying actor for the crown was ofc the church from whom donated land could not easily be returned. Even land owned by nobles could eventually fall outside of inheritance or otherwise be returned.

I've got a party who wants to buy property that was formerly set aside (haven't decided exactly how the deed was set) to a church that ended up getting wiped out. They're not nobles, but are very wealthy and personally powerful.

Of course they think that there are strong laws about what others can do on their private property, thinking that this is the modern era. Heh.

A wiped out church would probably be claimed by the royal treasury and revert back to the kingdom. Conceivably also if land was donated to the church by nobles they might want to have it returned to them. Historically, powerful and ruthless kings sometimes managed a reduction on both nobility and/or church to restore lands donated, usually in a bid to strengthen the state and/or the secular rulership class. Normally under the guise that the land had not been properly turned over, which ofc might very well have been true.

In the context of a wider European mediaeval system there is nothing strange with your players being able to purchase land. There is no need for them to become nobles. The main issues I can see would be in the owning the property as a group and not an individual. Though mediaeval society did feature the idea of a group, a society of sorts, owning property. So e.g. would a guild work, or certain "social guilds" I don't really know what are properly called.

[Martin Greywolf]

Question relating to the 1300's Hungarian strata (and branching out from there): were there patterns in how land ownership worked in Europe at about that era? Only nobles could own land? Others could buy, but only under conditions? Everyone except landed nobles generally rented (maybe on long term lease?) from nobles?

It varies by time and place. Generally, there are these ways you can own land:

In perpetuity

The land is yours, can be passed down as inheritance and you can do whatever you want with it.

As holder of office

If the king chooses you to be the Ispan of a county, or magister tavarnicorum or any other function, low or high, you will get temporary ownership of said land with it. You are to take care of it and not defraud it for your own personal use, but you do get tax income from it. It is essentially a form of payment for your services, and in case of Ispans it also gets you the money you need to carry out said office of Ispan - closes Anglofrench title being a duke.

Since the land is not yours, you cannot sell it, but you can rent either it or profits from it to people - but the second you are stripped of that Ispan title, the land reverts back to the king, potentially leaving people you gave it to to pay off your debts dry - standard procedure is, it will lower your debt and they dutifully hand the land back over.

If you see a LOT of potential for misuse and conflict, well, you're absolutely correct.

Rented

You rent the land in exchange for one or more of: military service, cut of what the land produces, hard cash. This is often used to pay off large debts, by the by.

---

These three ways of owning land then further interact with your own personal freedoms and obligations.

If you are a farmer, you are tied to the land in the sense that you need to farm it and pay taxes from it and in exchange receive a cut from what you produce. The difference between a serf and a free farmer is in whether you can decide to just up and leave one day, a free farmer can, no questions asked, a serf has to have an agreement with the owner of the land (usually involving monetary compensation for his freedom, and such an agreement can either free the serf entirely or just transfer his services to someone else).

This sort of dynamic carries on through all social strata - if you are a conditional noble, the king ennobled you with the understanding that you will own a piece of land and give military service. But said ennoblement doesn't give you the land in perpetuity, merely rents it out to you from the king, meaning that while you can rent it, you can't sell it. And yes, this may result in chains of renting on occassion.

However, said renting is often regulated - see the post above where castle iobagions have land that cannot be taken away? Well, that land belongs to the castle, which will have a castellan appointed to it, and that stipulation means the castellan will get the castle's lands, some of which belong to the iobagions. The castellan cannot take this specific portion of iobagions and rent it out to someone, he has to let iobagions take care of it and merely tax them - he can only rent out the non-iobagion portions of the land.

You can probably see the huge mess this is (or to use the academic parlance "land ownership and relations tied to it are complex"), as well as a good potential for PCs being conditional nobles.

Buying land

Theoretically, everyone but slaves can do it, and slaves are almost or entirely gone from Hungary at this time. Problem is that actually buying a land in perpetuity isn't cheap, and renting is far more affordable.

Buying a piece of land does not grant you any privileges, if you were a serf, a serf you remain, but that land you bought is now yours and your lord cannot tax it, he can only tax the land he rents you, your own land belongs under either royal, city or church taxation.

So, you are still taxed, but taxes are lower. Usually.

Also consider that if you local lord rolls up with a few gentlemen and demands you sell him that land for a pittance, you - an unarmed serf - will have hell of a time refusing. Strongarming like this did happen, and on occassion even made it in front of the judicial system and was punished.

Land as means of upwards social mobility

While land doesn't in theory get you social status, having some will almost definitely see you move up the social ladder, usually by means of marriage, either yours or that of your children.

The jump will not be high, but moving from a serf to a burgher is a pretty good deal, and nothing is stoppping your children from doing another upwards hop the next generation - there are quite a few families that did very well for themselves in this way.

This is all in flux

Remember that this sytem is inherently unstable. Someone can come and claim the land he inherited came with the status of a iobagion or a cives and so he should be given said title, and all he needs to do to convince courts is get some people in good standing to vouch for him. A social status can be stripped, someone who was just a iobagion can be elevated to a cives for his services and/or bribes and so on.

Entire social strata can disappear, such as free farmers - they either climbed the social ladder up into nobiles, or down into villani, because one bad harvest can ruin you to a point where you have to sell your land to local noble and become a serf. And if you start to give a specific set of loosely related privileges to some people, you can end up with another social stratum appearing, that being the burghers of royal free cities that only started to apper in 1300.

Of course they think that there are strong laws about what others can do on their private property, thinking that this is the modern era. Heh.

If they get that land in perpetuity, they will have even more freedom than modern day, because only laws that will matter will be royal, none of those pesky local lord's laws. If they have it rented or as part of an office, more laws will apply and what they can do with the land may or may not be limited further by specific conditions.

Even then, a king can still stop them from doing whatever they want, there was a royal ban on building stone castles without permission in Hungary until Mongols came and almost wiped it out - after that, it was lifted, and a century later, there was a massive amount of noble magnates that destabilized the kingdom, showing us exactly why that ban existed in the first place.

All in all, there will be a contract to sign, and that should spell those conditions out, especially in DnD - using "they will own it in accordance with ancient customs" formula is kind of a low blow on DMs part, even though it is historical. And very annoying if you want to know what those customs were.

Edit:
One last chapter

Oh, right, one more thing. A piece of land has three components you can sell or rent: administrative and judicial control, actual land and profits. Let's take this for an example.

You, a noble, decided to rent a patch of land to a bunch of serfs to start a village. They will work the land, and you get the stuff - hell, you even gave them a break from your (but not oryal or church) taxes to help them start out. THis is actual land.

After five years, you decide that coming over there is too much of a hassle for every time two guys have a row and tell the villagers that they can elect a villicus, a mayor, from among them, and if you okay their choice, he will ahve judicial and administrative powers in your name. This is, obviously, renting a judicial and administrative power over said land. And yeah, it's usually not worth much by itself, since it's more of an obligation rather than gain.

Then, you want to arm up to do well in a coming war, and decide to take out a loan. You tell the merchant who gave you the cash that, until the time the debt is repaid, he will receive all the taxes due from the village mentioned above, he just has to collect.

After the debt is repaid and war won, and you gained a lot of land and status, you decide that one of your familiars (nobles in your service, not a magic raven) needs to be rewarded, so you rent him the administrative control and profits from that land, so long as he remains in your service.

Note that, unless you said otherwise in some contract, all of this renting is done at your pleasure and you can decide to rescind it at any time.

So, yeah, you can absolutely rent the same piece of land two times and be on the level.

Can a serf rule a village this way?

Theoretically yes, in practice, there would be a royal petition started to elevate him (with that much land, straight to nobiles), and it would amost certainly be granted. Or he would get strongarmed by the local lords to sell it to them.

You usually saw this land in personal ownership done in small bits by non-nobles, as a nice bonus to majority of what they had rented - thee exceptions being wealthy iobagiones castri and cives, whou would own sizeable patches of the countryside, and could be either elevated to nobiles, or remain as they were until burgher social stratum formed properly in 1350ish. And it was, of course, named cives, despite having very little to do with the preceeding cives social stratum, because this is medieval terminology and you can't have nice things.

[Catullus64]

Got a question that I don't think is exactly about weapons, armour, or tactics, but is definitely related to historical warfare.

I'm looking for insights and/or sources about 'modern' psychological phenomena related to warfare and their existence (or nonexistence) in pre-modern battle. To what extent do you think soldiers in pre-gunpowder periods experienced what we might now call post-traumatic stress? If it did occur in significant numbers, how might the people of those periods have thought about or treated it?

I have a loosely informed picture of how modern ideas of battlefield-related trauma and stress are tied into modern life and the conditions of modern war, but it's just that: loose. I know that formal scholarship into the phenomena is nearly all informed by experience of the World Wars and later. I would appreciate any good writing on this subject (either academic, popular, or amateur). Primary sources are the most welcome of all, even (or perhaps especially) if they don't use modern psychological jargon.

[Martin Greywolf]

If it did occur in significant numbers, how might the people of those periods have thought about or treated it?

The academic consensus is that while it probably did happen, it happened much more rarely.

The chief reason we see PTSD so often these days is that, in a warzone, nowhere is safe, what with artillery, rockets, snipers and inability to parry any of the above. A pre-modern warfare doesn't usually have that problem, if you're camping out in a field, you will be able to see the enemy coming and either get ready or run away. And while the melee battles are arguably more personal (albeit not more visceral, a bullet does a lot to a body), they also last a fraction of the time.

The longest battles in medieval times usually lasted about 3 or so days of intermittend clashes, now compare that to battle of Somme that was measured in months. Even occupying a small town properly will take weeks of fighting if the enemy decides not to pull back - battle of Berlin took two weeks, and that was with overwhelming Soviet advantage and a lot of Germans surrendering.

That said, there are rare references to people suffering from PTSD, most often quoted being Achilles, and I remember seeing references to knights retired to a monastery who had very loud nightmares about his time in war.

Finally, there is cultural aspect to it. We can't get too deep into it because it ties into religion, but the gist of it is that modern society places a high inherent value on human life, and we are told that taking it away is one of the worst things you can do from an early age. Take a society that isn't built around that notion, like ancient Rome, and you will have greatly lessened PTSD from that direction.

On the flip side, PTSD is not limited to wartime trauma only, so you will see it to develop from whatever that particular society has as a taboo - Spartans and covardice being an excellent example.

If it did occur in significant numbers, how might the people of those periods have thought about or treated it?

Can't discuss that as per forum rules, unfortunately, as most if not all of it is directly tied to religion.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Thanks everybody. That gives me something to start with. Of course, there are complications--the noble who owns that property[1] is a misandrist, adventurer-hating, hyper-religious-traditionalist. And the ex-mother-in-law[2] of one of the party members. And the people they're trying to ward out are actually covert agents provocateurs of the neighboring nation, who are trying to start a fight.

[1] A duke, technically. Because the "kingdom" is more like an umbrella group of dukes. The whole area is new to this whole "nobility/fantasy feudalism" thing, having formed as part of the explosive self-disassembly of a larger fantasy-communism-but-with-unions nation about a generation ago. The "king" really only controls one small area and has persuasive power over the Council of Dukes. The dukes were mostly[3] just the largest land "owners" or the highest-notoriety union bosses in a particular area. No serfs. The only other real noble rank is the yarl. And the direct power of the dukes and yarls strongly depends on which duchy you're in. Some? Nobody cares about rank except when dealing with people from other duchies. Others? Rank is very important. Sadly, they're in one of the latter types.

[2] Halflings are matriarchal, with men being quite rare (1/10 adults, the rest die in infancy due to genetic issues), are (functionally) sold off to another family. The party-member's wife was the adopted heir to the duke, before she got (rightfully) accused of being involved with the group that destroyed the church in the first place and fled from the law. But before this, the husband had run away from home with their son (a grave act against tradition) and become an adventurer (an even graver breach of tradition). Which leaves that particular party member rather in a bad odor with the duke. So he's not even going to the negotiations.

[3] 3 of the 6 anyway. One of the others was chosen by vote of the clans of the area that was going to be made a duchy--she lost the vote. She's only a notional ruler, and knows it. A second was chosen by a fair competition--he out wrestled the other contenders. But isn't actually all that harsh. In fact, he's one of the more progressive dukes. The last of the other dukes was somewhat of a pirate (ok, privateer) during the tumultuous end years of the fantasy-communistic government, although her daughter now runs the ship. All she really cares about is that the trade keeps flowing.

[Grim Portent]

Then, you want to arm up to do well in a coming war, and decide to take out a loan. You tell the merchant who gave you the cash that, until the time the debt is repaid, he will receive all the taxes due from the village mentioned above, he just has to collect.

This makes me wonder what legal recourse, if any, the merchant has if the lord who rented them the right to collect the taxes from a village loses their title over the village to another lord through any mechanism, like having their land stripped from them or being deposed in a war. Can the merchant sue for the right to keep collecting taxes until the original deal is paid off, do they have to chase up the former landholder for their dues, do they just have to eat the financial loss, does the new title holder have to pay off the debts accrued by the previous incumbent?

Presumably the fallout for the merchant, the village, the former lord and the new lord would all vary on a number of specifics, but it does strike me as something that has the potential to be an interesting scenario.

[snowblizz]

If it did occur in significant numbers, how might the people of those periods have thought about or treated it?

We can mention one way it would be "treated". Get yourself started on a hard case of alcoholism.

Without the knowledge of a clinical diagnosis you'd be falling back on traditional explanations such as being possessed, madness, etc etc etc.

[Martin Greywolf]

This makes me wonder what legal recourse, if any, the merchant has if the lord who rented them the right to collect the taxes from a village loses their title over the village to another lord through any mechanism, like having their land stripped from them or being deposed in a war. Can the merchant sue for the right to keep collecting taxes until the original deal is paid off, do they have to chase up the former landholder for their dues, do they just have to eat the financial loss, does the new title holder have to pay off the debts accrued by the previous incumbent?

Presumably the fallout for the merchant, the village, the former lord and the new lord would all vary on a number of specifics, but it does strike me as something that has the potential to be an interesting scenario.

The crucial point here is that the debt belongs to the noble who, well, borrowed money in the first place, it is in no way tied to the land. So, theoretically, once the land changes hands for any reason and you are no longer legally allowed to collect taxes, you keep going after the man, or after whoever inherited the debt. If who inherited the debt is in question, you will likely face hell of a legal battle to get your money back.

If a noble is stripped of his lands, well. That is extremely rare and usually happens because treason or some such (a case of attempted assassination that saw execution of family to third degree and stripping of titles to second comes to mind), but should that happen, the land reverts to the king. That usually means he will pay off any outstanding debts because, well, he's the king and therefore wealthy enough to make the bad rep from not paying up not worth it.

What tends to be more interesting is the exact opposite, where the merchant either claims the taxes weren't good enough to pay off the debt yet (it can happen with bad harvests, and proving it one way or another is tricky) or where the merchant is not merchant but rather another, more powerful noble, and he simply assumes direct control.

Turns out, if a powerful noble decides not to leave a castle when his rent expires, it can be pretty hard to make him do so. There were many, many cases of this, happening during Arpad-Anjou interregnum (and also land held as a result of an office being appropriated this way), including cases where nobles A and B were about equally influential, but noble B had backing of a powerful noble C. Fun times were had by, well, absolutely no one, it was utter chaos.

Fallout for the village itself was usually fairly mild - unless the country was in utter chaos (as during the Ottoman wars), they still just paid one tax. If the country was in utter chaos, well, there are cases from post-medieval Hungary of the same village being taxed seven times (by four sides of a two-sided war) for any number of claims, and looted if they refused to pay up.

[fusilier]

Got a question that I don't think is exactly about weapons, armour, or tactics, but is definitely related to historical warfare.

I'm looking for insights and/or sources about 'modern' psychological phenomena related to warfare and their existence (or nonexistence) in pre-modern battle. To what extent do you think soldiers in pre-gunpowder periods experienced what we might now call post-traumatic stress? If it did occur in significant numbers, how might the people of those periods have thought about or treated it?

I have a loosely informed picture of how modern ideas of battlefield-related trauma and stress are tied into modern life and the conditions of modern war, but it's just that: loose. I know that formal scholarship into the phenomena is nearly all informed by experience of the World Wars and later. I would appreciate any good writing on this subject (either academic, popular, or amateur). Primary sources are the most welcome of all, even (or perhaps especially) if they don't use modern psychological jargon.

There's a list of pre-modern examples here, but it's pretty short (more from the early modern period on). It does give some older terms for PTSD, but again they are from the early modern period.

http://traumadissociation.com/ptsd/h...-disorder.html

Actually took me longer than expected to dig up even that, but the history of PTSD has been researched, so there should be some useful sources out there.

This article is less detailed and technical than I would usually share, but it provides a few examples from the ancient world, and a "contrarian" view.
https://medium.com/lessons-from-hist...d-eb83752b7d4e

[Part (emphasis on "part") of the contrarian argument is that many modern PTSD cases are associated with concussions, which on a modern battlefield are mostly caused by explosions. Such explosions being absent from ancient battlefields would, so the argument goes, result in fewer cases of PTSD. But I wonder if ancient (and medieval warfare) would have involved many concussions from being bashed over the head with some weapon . . .]

More generally, you might want to look for how they approached "madness" throughout history. Mental disorders do appear in various popular representations, Orlando furioso comes to mind, but not often attributed to combat stress (even if it affected a "warrior").

Wikipedia has a fairly detailed web page on the History of mental disorders:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histor...ntal_disorders

(Religion features heavily, but so do some other ideas like humoral theory).

[Pauly]

Got a question that I don't think is exactly about weapons, armour, or tactics, but is definitely related to historical warfare.

I'm looking for insights and/or sources about 'modern' psychological phenomena related to warfare and their existence (or nonexistence) in pre-modern battle. To what extent do you think soldiers in pre-gunpowder periods experienced what we might now call post-traumatic stress? If it did occur in significant numbers, how might the people of those periods have thought about or treated it?

I have a loosely informed picture of how modern ideas of battlefield-related trauma and stress are tied into modern life and the conditions of modern war, but it's just that: loose. I know that formal scholarship into the phenomena is nearly all informed by experience of the World Wars and later. I would appreciate any good writing on this subject (either academic, popular, or amateur). Primary sources are the most welcome of all, even (or perhaps especially) if they don't use modern psychological jargon.

Lindy Beige has a video on it.
Short version is that it was rare in pre-modern times. Randomness seems to be a key element as being attacked by a bear or lion was seen as more stressful than being in battle.

Historically the first war that I am aware of that had large numbers of what we would now call PTSD was the American Civil War which featured long periods in trenches in the latte part of the war.
WWI had “shell shock” which we now consider to be PTSD. Armies learned that rotating troops in and out of the line, keeping comrades together and avoiding keeping troops in extended stays under fire were key elements to controlling the development of shell shock. By WW2 the British army was using tables to work out just how many combat hours a soldier could endure and withdrew soldiers with high number of battle hours from fighting units. With their systems of counting battle hours and keeping social and support structures for soldiers together they were able to get roughly double the number of combat hours out of each soldier than the US Army did with its repple depple system.

If you look back at Ancient warfare
1) There was a much lower degree of randomness.
2) Hours in combat situations were much lower
3) The social/support networks within the units were stronger than their industrial age counterparts.

PTSD obviously did occur, just to a significantly lower degree than it does in modern long distance extended timeframes warfare.

[PhoenixPhyre]

A question about building fortifications:

Assume you want to raise a US Civil War-style earthwork (with stone topping) wall around a relatively small area. But you need to do it before winter sets in--you have roughly 3 months. How much manpower would you need? Are there better (ie cheaper and/or faster) ways of doing this?

Assumptions:
* Technology level is pre-industrial (schitzo-medieval, with some Renaissance level improvements, plus magic described below). No non-animal power (water and wind power of course, but those aren't relevant here as much I don't think, as the site doesn't have much in the way of either).
* Area to be enclosed is roughly 2 acres, shape is free (does not have to be the star-shape, as no cannons), roughly a square 300'/90m on a side.
* Intent is for the earthworks to be ~8-10' high, with a stone topping.[1]
* Wood is available, but use of wood should be minimized[2]
* This is not intended to be a defense against a significant army incursion, and replacing it with a full stone wall is likely, but not currently in the picture. Speed is more important than defensive strength. Think that this is a replacement for a town's wood and stone palisade wall, not a primary military fort
* Only civilian, non-forced labor is available (this being a private enterprise), so cost matters.

Magic:
* There are specialist teams (groups of 5 specialized spell casters) who can move earth roughly at the rate of a modern excavator. They're expensive (~100x the cost of the same number of unskilled laborers) and limited--you can get no more than 2 of them on site at a time.

Terrain:
* Prairie, much like the Great Plains of the US before settlement.

[1] Stone is available, but the nearest good quarry is some distance (~5 miles) away and somewhat expensive. Most of the buildings in the area are packed earth (cob-style) or brick.
[2] Since there aren't significant local forests, all the major lumber has to be shipped from up-river and is thus expensive for large pieces. Small planks and beams are less so, but major timbers and logs are not readily available. Otherwise they'd use timber for the initial wall (palisade style).

[KineticDiplomat]

As a sort of historiography note for the PTSD question, it’s worth noting that during 2005-2020 period or so western militaries placed a substantial and expanded emphasis on de-stigmatizing PTSD and mental health issues. It might be the result of expanded research, it might be the result of making the grant source happy, but you’re going to find more than a few articles in that period that are going to be firmly on the side of “look - it’s been around all along, it just wasn’t reported for reasons x, y, and z”.

That said, anyone seeking to say otherwise is going to run into the fact that things like large scale peer reviewed statistical studies about mental health simply aren’t going to exist in many periods, making comparisons hard. And then we could get into conflated data - if a soldier has PTSD and a discipline issue, did the PTSD contribute to the discipline issue, did being disciplined contribute to the PTSD, are they unrelated, did the soldier falsify a PTSD claim in hopes of escaping consequences, did the chain of command end up disciplining the soldier over a legitimate mental health issue? If a drone pilot who never leaves the US reports PTSD, can it be laid against a Greek spearman breaking down with nightmares? We can’t possibly know, all we know is that any of those cases could be one more count in the data - and that the use of any of the above is likely to coincide more with the predetermined ideological bent of an author...

[fusilier]

A question about building fortifications:

Assume you want to raise a US Civil War-style earthwork (with stone topping) wall around a relatively small area. But you need to do it before winter sets in--you have roughly 3 months. How much manpower would you need? Are there better (ie cheaper and/or faster) ways of doing this?

Assumptions:
* Technology level is pre-industrial (schitzo-medieval, with some Renaissance level improvements, plus magic described below). No non-animal power (water and wind power of course, but those aren't relevant here as much I don't think, as the site doesn't have much in the way of either).
* Area to be enclosed is roughly 2 acres, shape is free (does not have to be the star-shape, as no cannons), roughly a square 300'/90m on a side.
* Intent is for the earthworks to be ~8-10' high, with a stone topping.[1]
* Wood is available, but use of wood should be minimized[2]
* This is not intended to be a defense against a significant army incursion, and replacing it with a full stone wall is likely, but not currently in the picture. Speed is more important than defensive strength. Think that this is a replacement for a town's wood and stone palisade wall, not a primary military fort
* Only civilian, non-forced labor is available (this being a private enterprise), so cost matters.

Magic:
* There are specialist teams (groups of 5 specialized spell casters) who can move earth roughly at the rate of a modern excavator. They're expensive (~100x the cost of the same number of unskilled laborers) and limited--you can get no more than 2 of them on site at a time.

Terrain:
* Prairie, much like the Great Plains of the US before settlement.

[1] Stone is available, but the nearest good quarry is some distance (~5 miles) away and somewhat expensive. Most of the buildings in the area are packed earth (cob-style) or brick.
[2] Since there aren't significant local forests, all the major lumber has to be shipped from up-river and is thus expensive for large pieces. Small planks and beams are less so, but major timbers and logs are not readily available. Otherwise they'd use timber for the initial wall (palisade style).

What exactly do you mean by stone topping? Basically an earthwork faced in stone? That's basically how most thick walls were made anyhow: two faces of stone and the interior is filled with rubble, earth, etc.

The "earth" to make an earthwork is obtained by digging the surrounding ditch, so the earth needs to be moved, but not very far. The ditch also serves to effectively increase the height of the wall that needs to be scaled. As you're not using the walls to resist artillery, then they don't need to be very thick, and the wood you have could be used to make "fraise" (a barrier of pointed sticks at the base of the wall).

However, if you have enough stone, you can make walls tall, while sacrificing width (again, no artillery to face), and so you could move less earth. Unfortunately I loaned my Civil War era engineer's manual out to somebody a couple of years ago, and never got it back -- so I don't have my estimates how much earth a man can move in x-hours, based on the hardness of the soil. Frankly I don't think it matters much. Unless you have a very limited number of workers, 3 months should be plenty of time to make a small fort. If you lack skilled masons, then field stone walls would probably suffice, although you need to be able to make mortar. 5 miles is not that far to haul stone from a quarry (you're not building Stonehenge, the stones don't have to be that large).

Oh, if you have source of clay and can fire bricks (this requires fuel), then bricks will work quite well as a replacement for stone.

Those are the musings off the top of my head. I do need to try to get that Engineer's manual back . . .

EDIT -- I was responding quickly and missed some key things. Again, I don't know how many man-hours it takes to move the required amount of earth, but also it's unclear how much you need to move. If simply piling up earth, then it will take more to get to the desired height. If making a composite stone(or brick)/earth wall, which will be thinner, it requires less earth, but more stone (and I don't think my manual covered that).

Also, 300 feet on a side is actually pretty big. A good sized camp could fit inside that enclosure, so that could house a fairly large number of soldiers. I'm not finding it quickly, but the roman legions would often make a temporary "marching fort" when they camped at night, the dimensions of that, and how many soldiers it contained, might be a useful guide.

[Grim Portent]

While not a wall, the motte for a small motte-and-bailey castle could take as little as 1000 man hours to make. The motte is basically a man made hill upon which you place a wood or stone keep, so it's not exactly a flimsy pile of loose dirt or anything. The whole thing, hill, keep and wall around the hill could take under a month to build, so using that as a general guide it should take just a few weeks at most to build just the wall and a trench.

[PhoenixPhyre]

What exactly do you mean by stone topping? Basically an earthwork faced in stone? That's basically how most thick walls were made anyhow: two faces of stone and the interior is filled with rubble, earth, etc.

The "earth" to make an earthwork is obtained by digging the surrounding ditch, so the earth needs to be moved, but not very far. The ditch also serves to effectively increase the height of the wall that needs to be scaled. As you're not using the walls to resist artillery, then they don't need to be very thick, and the wood you have could be used to make "fraise" (a barrier of pointed sticks at the base of the wall).

However, if you have enough stone, you can make walls tall, while sacrificing width (again, no artillery to face), and so you could move less earth. Unfortunately I loaned my Civil War era engineer's manual out to somebody a couple of years ago, and never got it back -- so I don't have my estimates how much earth a man can move in x-hours, based on the hardness of the soil. Frankly I don't think it matters much. Unless you have a very limited number of workers, 3 months should be plenty of time to make a small fort. If you lack skilled masons, then field stone walls would probably suffice, although you need to be able to make mortar. 5 miles is not that far to haul stone from a quarry (you're not building Stonehenge, the stones don't have to be that large).

Oh, if you have source of clay and can fire bricks (this requires fuel), then bricks will work quite well as a replacement for stone.

Those are the musings off the top of my head. I do need to try to get that Engineer's manual back . . .

EDIT -- I was responding quickly and missed some key things. Again, I don't know how many man-hours it takes to move the required amount of earth, but also it's unclear how much you need to move. If simply piling up earth, then it will take more to get to the desired height. If making a composite stone(or brick)/earth wall, which will be thinner, it requires less earth, but more stone (and I don't think my manual covered that).

Also, 300 feet on a side is actually pretty big. A good sized camp could fit inside that enclosure, so that could house a fairly large number of soldiers. I'm not finding it quickly, but the roman legions would often make a temporary "marching fort" when they camped at night, the dimensions of that, and how many soldiers it contained, might be a useful guide.

What I was thinking was that the wall would look like (seen from the outside):

1) ditch
2) small horizontal space to keep the dirt from tumbling in
3) packed earth (probably sodded with the heavy sod from the ditch to prevent rain from washing it away) slope, roughly triangular but with a flattened top several feet wide, about 8-10' high at the peak.
4) held in place with a field-stone + mortar retaining wall that also serves as the patrolling walkway.
5) (eventually) with a shorter regular stone wall, 5-6' tall, on top of the earth slope as as breastwork.

The point being to not need quite so much stone/stonework because all you're using it for is to support one side of the wall, not facing it.

I did some calculations and it seems doable just in earth-moving time assuming you have the equivalent of a mini-excavator + roller (in the ritual crew) and then most of the labor being building the retaining wall. Estimate was you have about 50 cubic feet of earth in a 1-foot-wide segment, or (roughly, with rounding) 6 m^3 per m of wall. From that and excavator speeds, I figured you could probably handle somewhere between 40 and 50 m of wall per day (just in earth-moving time), so I said roughly 1 month (32 days, in setting, as a round number) for a 200'x200' area (basically 1 acre) assuming you had one specialist crew and "plenty" of less-skilled labor. Shorter if you can hire another specialist crew (the real limiting factor here).

[KineticDiplomat]

You might find an instructive case in Fort McAllister, near Savannah (pop ~22k c 1861). Basically it’s little more than a dirt battery in 1861, because everyone thinks that the pride and joy masonry-based Fort Pulaski will hold the river. In April 1862, the union comes and proves brick forts don’t work anymore and all of a sudden the CSA needs a fort near Savannah, and they need it now.

Cue going from little more than a battery without any permanent quarters (the garrison lived in houses a bit down the road at the time), to a 30 acre enclosed earthwork fort with a proper ditch, bomb catches, traverses 10-15 feet high, shelters, firing points for six seaward and three landward guns, all made of dirt. It’s pretty forted up by July...so three months after the oh crap moment.

So, a two acre enclosure that’s basically just a tall berm? So long as you have the motivation, any town of decent size shouldn’t have an issue in three months.

[Fatefulforce]

Tod's Worshop -- circa 1400 BCE 960lb crossbow vs modern 150lb crossbow

Tod is awsome and runs one of the best Youtube chans

[TheStranger]

A question about building fortifications:

Assume you want to raise a US Civil War-style earthwork (with stone topping) wall around a relatively small area. But you need to do it before winter sets in--you have roughly 3 months. How much manpower would you need? Are there better (ie cheaper and/or faster) ways of doing this?

I know nothing about fortifications, but I know a little bit about moving dirt with a shovel so I'll weigh in.

First, let's use a circular enclosure for minimal necessary earth moving. A two-acre circular enclosure will have a perimeter of ~1,050 feet, which saves us ~150 feet of wall over your square fortification. So there's that.

Second, let's assume that you can maintain a 45 degree slope on your earthwork without the use of expensive wood/rock to stabilize a vertical wall. This has the disadvantage of being easier to scale than an actual wall, and the added disadvantage of needing more material because your wall is twice as wide at the base at it is high. But my intuition is that the labor to move dirt is going to be substantially cheaper than importing rock or wood, so let's go with that. Besides, building a good retaining wall takes its own labor and a bit more skill than hauling dirt, so you might not save anything in the end (but you do get a nicer wall out of it).

Let's also say that you want your wall to be three feet wide at the top. That means that a 10' high wall will have a cross-sectional area of about 130 square feet, and each foot of wall will require about five cubic yards of dirt. From personal experience, I'm going to estimate that one hard-working adult can move about that much dirt from Point A to Point B in a day. The actual amount might be a bit more or less, but that's probably close enough for our purposes and it makes the math easy. (If you go with an 8-foot wall, each linear foot takes about three yards of dirt.)

All of which means you need about 1,050 person-days of labor to complete your wall, or about 12 people working for three months. If you have three months, I'd suggest two crews, each with an ox-pulled cart to move the dirt from the ditch to the wall (two carts, actually - that way you can always have one being filled and one being emptied). Have your two crews work around the wall in opposite directions, with each crew having a few people in the ditch loading carts and a few people on the wall emptying carts, plus somebody driving the carts back and forth.

Since you have lots of time to do this, you can use that as a starting point but plan to take stock after a few weeks and hire more workers if needed. As for the mages, a little googling suggests that an excavator moves about 300 cubic yards in a day, so you save money having your mundane work crews and only bring in the mages if you start falling behind schedule or if you run into some hard digging.