Warlock's Heirs 01 - A Wizard in Absentia by Christopher Stasheff

Author:Christopher Stasheff [Stasheff, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy, General
ISBN: 9780441515691
Google: KaUDYWF8SJYC
Amazon: 044151569X
Publisher: Ace
Published: 1993-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

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 mo-res anyway. They’ve never owned land legally, but

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