Stasheff, Christopher - Rogue Wizard 01 - A Wizard in Absentia by Stasheff Christopher

Author:Stasheff, Christopher
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

131

Christopher Stasheff

Allouene nodded, her face hard. "Occasionally/ a bastard might result from a lady's inviting some strapping, handsome young serf in for the night, but far less frequently than the lords' by-blows -- it was a rare noblewoman who wanted to go through nine months of pregnancy ending in labor, for a peasant man. Far more often, the ladies, like the lords, only wanted pleasure, not more children. The lords could have used birth control medications of their own with their peasant wenches, of course, but they wanted to increase the population. Why not? The more there were, the more servants they had."

"After all," Magnus murmured, "a lord's valet should be a gentleman, not a serf, should he not?"

Allouene frowned, even as she nodded. "You sound as if you know. Gar. But you're right -- and the steward of the estate should be better-born than the average laborer, and there was a need for lawyers, and for clerks to handle the drudgery of the trickle of trade, and to oversee the building of new houses and the laying out of new gardens, and to act in the theaters. ..."

"So a class of petty aristocracy came into being,"

Ragnar interpreted.

Allouene shook her head. "Gentry aren't noble,

Ragnar -- the lords make a very big point of that.

They're a middle class, between the serfs and the nobility. In Europe, they came from the knights and the squires, and from the merchants; on Taxhaven, they've been given the same jobs, if not the titles.

But they've developed their own pedigrees and mores anyway. They've never owned land legally, but 132

A WIZARD IN ABSENTIA

when the same family of gentry has been in charge of the same hundred acres for three generations, it creates the illusion of ownership, and certainly a tie to the land. They're allowed to earn money and save it in their own right, and are comfortably well-off, even sometimes wealthy in a small way. They resent their neglectful parent class, of course, but nonetheless, they side with the lords against the serfs, more or less automatically -- they have something to lose, after all. Of course, there are always new gentlemen coming into being, not of the established families, and they're scorned and looked down upon, and only allowed to marry one of the new gentlewomen -- but their children are accepted, so the class keeps increasing in number. They're the middle-rank officers in the army, the mid-level managers on the estates, the tax collectors and magistrates and squires.

They're resented by the serfs, and resent the lords in their own turn -- but each class knows its place, and knows the painful, even lethal, penalties for stepping out of that place, so the society endures, though not happily."

So they were bound for a planet governed by grown-up spoiled brats who intended to stay that way, lording it over a population of serfs dressed in medieval simplicity and filth, with an intermediary class of gentry to take care of the day-to-day adminis-tration and the direct contact with the serfs.

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