In the times of Viking invasions in the British Isles and other parts of Europe, farmers abandoned their farmhouses and came under protection of knights.
They swore that in return for protection, they would work on the land that knights owned. Their safety guaranteed better and more predictable harvests with immediate access to other specialized help from blacksmiths, bakers, and others.
On the other hand, freemen had to stake out on their own, handle their protection against Vikings by themselves, and in many cases had to risk living with far meager harvests than those of peasants who had pooled together and who could buffer food for bad harvests in the future.
What would you have been?
A peasant?
Or a freeman?
Interesting but it seems a bit over-simplified. Can you provide a link that explains this in more depth?
Clayton -
Duh - I would have been a knight.
a king. Sorry, couldn't resist.
(english is not my native language, sorry for grammar.)
Well, this depends- would I have been born with the cardiac condition that had I not been born in Boston (or Philly, New York, Dallas and 1 city on the west coast of the US) I would have died before my first brithday? That had the technology and surgical technique had not been around to fix my Pink Tetralogy of Fallot, and I would have been neither- as last at WWII I would have died, as late as the 1980s I could not have done anything but a desk job, if I was lucky and lived.
It depends. If you're talking about early/developmental feudalism, and I believe you are, you could probably make that choice. Late Roman/early medieval europe wasn't nearly as rigid a caste system as late feudalism, where you were almost certainly not going to change from whatever your parents were.
My family is Irish, so I would have probably been a slave or an iron age warrior farmer.
In States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it. ... In short, a law everywhere and for everything!
~Peter Kropotkin
wizard
aka economist.
I'm going to have to agree this is a bit too abstract and situational to really make any worth while decision out of the info given.
Though I thik I have a few inklings at what you are getting at. If so it's the same question, at least in part, as "would I rather be a small business owner or sell my labor to Megacorp", correct?
Or is this something more specific about externalities?
No, William, no allegory about modern times. Just what you would have done in those times.
Well I guess all things being equal, and based off of just what you wrote it would seem far more sensible to choose peasant. I don't see much reason to choose freeman on that one.
Any anwser would be meaningless. In medieval times I would have been a highwayman (I like to think). But that is because by "placing" myself in medieval times I am cutting the ties to all my surroundings. By the same token I should be a bank robber in our time, but I am not seeing that there are a bunch of people who would be dissapointed if I landed in jail and whom I don't want to dissapoint like that.
So further qualify the question. Would I be an "atomic individual" no diferent from someone instantanously transported into the middle ages from here, or would I and everyone I know here be organic to that time?