Hey folks, this week is a bit of a gap week as I am heading out to the annual meeting of the Society for Military History (and, indeed, by the time you read this, I will be there). Normally, I post the abstract of my conference talk for these sorts of things, but since I am moderating a roundtable, I don’t have an abstract or paper to share.
However, I have been able to play the upcoming medieval city-builder-strategy hybrid Manor Lords as they let me have a review-code, so I thought I might share some of my quick first impressions of that. We are in that magic window where the embargo on impressions is lifted, but before the embargo on reviews, so I can tell you about my experience playing the game, but I cannot yet answer if it is worth buying or good or not or that kind of thing. Also, I should note that the build I am playing is a pre-release build of a game that is releasing into early access later this month, so this is the pre-pre-release build. Large parts of it are unfinished, because that’s how early access works.
What I can say is that Manor Lords has an interesting angle on the medieval town and the city-builder genre. Like Farthest Frontier (the main competition in this space) there is a lot of Banished DNA in the game, but neither game is a Banished-clone. Both of them push off in different directions. If I had to simplify, I’d say that Farthest Frontier is about building a medieval town – an urban center with a civic government mostly notable for its economic production – whereas Manor Lords is, as the title implies, about building a castle-town, a settlement nucleated around the private house (the manor) of a military aristocrat (the lord) who owns the land and which can be primarily understood as a settlement primarily military in character.
You can see the pull those two different focuses have on mechanics. Both games have seasons and crop rotation, but Farthest Frontier‘s system is rather more complex. Manor Lord‘s agricultural system isn’t bad – you can already do two-field rotation systems and given that they let you schedule out three seasons per field, I have to imagine the addition of legumes to enable the classic medieval European three-field rotation (cereals then legumes then fallow; repeat) is coming. But it isn’t as much a focus. By contrast, both games have military aspects, but here Manor Lords already has much more development, allowing fairly fine command of your forces in battle and including a distinction between levies villagers and professional retinue troops. It’s focused on small-scale warfare – appropriate for the medieval-inspired setting – with Total War-esque mechanics.
The modeling of the game’s economy is also quite interesting. As with many city builders, there are some big simplifying assumptions here. Rather than, say, dozens of households managing their own production and consumption, the player (as the Lord – and the game is very explicit that you are playing as the landholding noble here, you can even walk around town in third-person close-up) assigns folks to their jobs and all resources go into a common store. That does make for some economic simplification, as you aren’t dealing with individual seigneurial contracts with individual households, though there is a system in place for a portion of your village’s wealth to be converted into money-resources, presumably representing dues owed the lord.
What is really neat is that you don’t assign individual workers to jobs, you assign families. And that’s actually a really interesting idea that opens up a lot of neat design space. As moderns, we often think about individuals as the basic unit of labor in a society, but as we’ve discussed before, in pre-modern societies, the household, generally but not always built around a nuclear family, was instead the basic economic unit, with labor roles in the household often (but not always) gendered. Different households might have different economic roles in the community and those roles were ‘sticky,’ with expectations that a given family did certain things, often replicated through systems of apprenticeships and so on. For production where the end product is supposed to be distributed to people, these families in game will set up little stalls in your central market where other families can acquire the goods. Interestingly, leather and textile goods are sold as raw fabric (‘leather’ ‘linen’ ‘yarn’) rather than finished clothes and I wonder if this is meant to imply household production on gendered lines.
Right now, this mechanic isn’t super-developed, but the organization of the game into households rather than individuals opens up a lot of interesting space. Liability for military service abroad, obviously an interesting factor for a game like this, was often based on households rather than individuals, which obviously would have very different impacts on a family with four sons than a family with only daughters! Likewise, households were not always efficiently sized as units of labor for their economic role, either with too many or too few members, something the game could easily represent. That said, as it stands now, all families are of a standard size (three individuals). The game doesn’t yet fully utilize this design-space, but I really hope they do, confronting the player with all sorts of awkward family units and interrelationships as development progresses.
The other exciting element of production here is household production. When freshly built, houses are just houses and the player could, if their goal was to maximize population over space, keep them that way, packing them in relatively small lots. But you can also give the housing lots (‘burgage plots’ because they’re renting from you, the lord) more space, which can be used for various kinds of household production, like small-scale horticulture and animal rearing (to give you more food variety), but also artisan production. So instead of having some purpose-built ‘blacksmith’ somewhere in town, you have the blacksmith’s house, which has his forge as part of the building, which is of course very frequently how small-scale production would indeed be organized. I rather hope as the game develops, the player increasingly has a choice between household production at a relatively small scale and larger centralized production. Do you want, for instance, a single household tailor in town, or a larger-scale tailoring workshop with a single master and dozens of hired laborers engaging in a lot more production. For right now, I think the only production that crosses over is baking (either a communal bakery or a household baker) and, somewhat oddly, it is the household baker that is more efficient.
Of course the other neat thing about the structure of these burgage plots is how they look, with the main structure sitting on a lot with a small open space (which you can, at the cost of some resources, turn over to these household production sites) and a fence around it. For a game focused on villages and castle towns, which is to say about more rural settlements than Farthest Frontier (where your village rapidly becomes first a town and then a city), this really captures better what the houses in a manor’s village or a castle’s town might look like, often multi-purpose structures which combined housing with storage (barns, etc.) and production.
The game is also interested in livestock as a form of agricultural capital in a few interesting ways, though again a lot of these features are, at this point, quite skeletal. Horses, sheep and oxen are all livestock you can get (but they have to be acquired). Sheep obviously produce wool, but there is also an option on the ‘tech tree’ to be able to pasture them in your fallow fields to improve fertility, a factor in agriculture we’ve discussed before. One wonders if we’ll see human waste availability also become a favor in the game (as it is in Farthest Frontier), since human waste was often one of the things which might ‘belong’ to the lord in these sorts of arrangements. Oxen move certain heavy goods around (mostly timber) and there’s an option to upgrade farms with plow-teams, which would have been a very important bit of agricultural capital, likely under the lord’s control.
Of course since the game is interested in warfare, all of these economic elements in turn make for tempting targets of attack. Local bandit camps, right now, if not engaged, will steal small bits of your agricultural production, but there’s a lot of groundwork here for a more complex diplomatic and military system, engaging not just with bandits but with ‘peer’ aristocrats. Often the way these fellows competed in the small-scale warfare the game is clearly focused on was through raiding agricultural resources. The fact that the game is actively tracking livestock makes me hope for cattle-rustling as something that, say, a squad of mounted nobles might do to inflict damage on an opposing lord (using their speed to get in, wreck stuff and get out before the opponent’s larger militia could be mobilized). Likewise, your personal manor comes with modular (but still at this point, very basic) castle-design tools and I hope we see a lot of development on fortifications, with the player being strongly incentivized to move anything really valuable inside at least basic defenses to avoid being counter-raided in exactly the same way.
To summarize then, this is a game still in its early days (as implied by ‘early access,’ but I do want to stress this is an early early access build, many promised features are not yet implemented) but it fits into a trend I’ve noticed where the medieval or medieval-inspired-fantasy space is where the innovation is right now with city-builders (while ancient-oriented games stagnate, alas!). I’m really quite excited to see this innovation and the neat hybrid games they are producing, as developers seem to be iterating on what a historical city-builder (or castle-town-builder!) can be and how it can work.
You mention the utility of human waste, was that used as fertilizer as well? My understanding is that carnivorous and omnivorous waste in general and human waste in particular isn’t good for fertilizer because of the potential for disease. Did they have a method of treating it to be safe? Or was it more for other purposes like urine for leather tanning?
I strongly suspect the answer is “Yes it is a health hazard, but there’s nothing to be done, you just accept the casualties.”
Before modern sanitation and medicine, around 50% of all children died before age 5. Disease spread by human waste fertilizing the fields was probably a big part of that.
In the Bad Old Days they’d accept a lot of risks and dangers in life that we consider unacceptable, because there was no good alternative.
Newspaper reports over the years have indicated that (i) human waste is still used in North Korea as fertilizer and (ii) as a result, much of the population is worm-infested. I guess the government figures that having enough food and worm infestation is better than starvation and no worms.
Modern sanitation is also resource-intensive, and the DPRK may choose to expend scarce resources on other projects. Like ICBM silos.
Not the decision I’d make, but I’m not running the DPRK.
and there was *going* to be human waste to deal with, as it was, erm, produced on a daily basis. So you can throw it in the river, or throw it on your fields, but it’s gotta go somewhere. (pits being labor intensive and thus not an option for most commoners)
Not a historian, but I believe that at the represented time period, the concept of disease was still in the ‘miasma’ stage- so as long as the night soil didn’t smell strange, it would be ‘safe’.
I know my rural ancestors would plant cherries and plums over former outhouse pits, but they would prefer chicken, horse or cow feces as a vegetable fertilizer.
Human waste was widely widely used in China, and was an important part of their gigantic yields per land area. There’s an amazing book called _Farmers of Forty Centuries_ from _just_ before artificial nitrogen fixing was invented in which an American agronomist preaches the gospel of poop as a solution to the coming malthusian fertilizer catastrophe.
It’s one of the reasons raw vegetables are so uncommon in Chinese food as well – the use of human fertilizer meant raw vegetables were more dangerous
“Waste” includes both urine and fecal mater. Urine was used as a cleaning product (the ammonia) and in textiles (dye fixing and bleaching), among other things. The idea of someone tossing their chamberpot into the street is post-Medieval–that was valuable stuff you had there, likely stuff that didn’t belong to you!
Feces can be used as fertilizer. It’s not ideal–it can carry diseases–but it’s unlikely that in the Middle Ages the deaths caused by such things were a noticeable thing in the population. They both lacked the sophistication to identify cause of death in many cases, and had such a high background death rate among the populations most likely to die (infants and old people), that no one would have noticed. They were also using human feces for medicinal purposes. You can also mix it up with other stuff to make plaster for your walls (though I think animal waste is superior in this application as well).
Further, you can mitigate a lot of these issues. You can mix the muck with the muck from the animals (though not dogs–that went to the tannery). You can dry it–probably something you’re already doing with manure because wet manure is heavy (it’s surprising how often helping my grandfather with his hogs has come up in my life…). You can put it with other organic material in a compost heap, something we know they did back then, and which would have negated at least some of the ill effects (human waste can be composted).
Waste is a sign of affluence. Waste is merely resources you choose not to use, after all, and only the affluent can afford to leave resources on the table. The average Medieval peasant lived about two meals away from starvation, and their lives reflect that. This includes their excrement.
Or: Only the affluent can waste effluent.
So… Medieval peasants used every part of the human?
That’s more true than you’d think. Like, teeth were used for dentures from time immemorial. And fake relics (including bones) were a cottage industry in some areas. But you have to remember that “waste” is a socio-economic term, so things like rituals associated with burial and demonstrative justice (leaving bodies to rot as an example to others) weren’t waste in those societies.
I’ve also heard that idleness was considered a sin. Unless you were super-wealthy you were expected to be doing something productive at all times. Women would spin and sew, men would have something to work on (carving spoons, or fixing some small thing, if nothing else). Downtime was a wasted resource in a time when most power came from human muscles. I think this is one attraction for the monastic lifestyle–your productive time included prayer and quiet contemplation (necessary for the salvation of various gentle souls), something that normally was reserved for the pointy-hatted crowd.
Waste is a sign of affluence.
And, indeed, of effluence.
@Dave You are indeed correct, that human shit is a dangerous vector to introduce loads of parasites and the like into your food-chain. However lets not forget that this is a time where it was sometimes *advised* to put literal shit/excrement on your wounds, because people thought pus was a good symptom.
The definitive reason why we dont use human shit as fertilizer is not that its so dangerous, but rather we developed a method to synthetically generate fertilizers without any risk of parasites, etc..
Regarding pus: while it’s gross, they were actually quite correct. There are a couple different kinds of pus that can occur in a wound. As it turns out, the form identified as “laudable pus” is generally recoverable and a decent sign that the patient will survive.
Also, many cultures far beyond medieval Europe have had ways to use excrement on wounds or as medical treatments. I can’t honestly tell you which, if any, of these are worthwhile.
It was certainly used in China. One downside of so much land being arable is that it crowds out pasture and therefore animal manure.
Japan used night soil fertilizer up until the 1960s. In the Tokugawa era, it cost around 19-25 mon per 30 liters during spring, 14-19 mon in autumn, and 14 mon in summer or winter. For comparison, a children’s book was 5 or 6 mon, a liter of sake was 15 to 20 mon, 37.5 grams of tobacco was 8 mon, and a boiled egg was 20 mon.
When the Meiji Restoration sent its Inspection Mission to Europe and the United States in the 1870s, they noted that human excrement was used on agricultural fields in Europe. By this point it was probably “desiccated night soil,” which mixed solid sewage with quicklime, or “poudrette,” which was powdered desiccated night soil. S. Sakai’s 1986 work “People paying tribute: Livelihood of peasants in the modern west” claimed that near Tubingen (in Baden Wurttemberg), farmers were still using human excrement as fertilizer in the 1950s.
What options are there for playing this type of game for players who hate and despise Steam?
They often end up on GOG. Not this one, but maybe it’ll go on GOG later on. Farthest Frontier and Banished are on there, at least.
Manor Lords is listed on Gog, which probably means it will launch on the platform. It may launch at the same time as the full release on Steam.
https://www.gog.com/en/game/manor_lords
For anyone who may read this, it has been released on GOG and Steam for $29.99 (25% off). Although still early access the game looks fairly solid as-is.
I’ll give Banished a lot of credit for creating this design space of the small-scale city builder, where you have to assign and manage a small number of workplaces and workers with more care. But I feel like a lot of these games get lost in micromanagement weeds and break down as soon as you try to scale up. It’s not yet a quite perfect game structure, but then again, the Impressions city-builder also had to do a lot of evolving to refine its approach, so I’m certainly in a “watch this space” optimism about the genre.
Concerning ancient city-builders, I wonder if the matter is that with the current trend towards more individual simulation and assignment, the just more abundant source material is a major factor. Historians can tell you about the structure, labor distribution and economy of a medieval village with more confidence than about that of an Ancient Egyptian village.
In addition, I think the medieval political model (especially manorialism like here) fits the philosophy of the city-builder, in which the city is the biggest political unit and you as player are in charge of it, better than the ancient states, which lack such a small independent unit – the absurdity of always having a “Palace” central building in the Impressions games, or the royal family present in Children of the Nile (even at the start of the game, when the city is just a bunch of hovels along a road) does not do the immersion any favours. (Interesting aside: Because the Chinese wuxia and xianxia genres have a convention of the world being full of mostly independent sects of martial artists, they can quite readily and neatly use these for the city-building and adjacent genres)
I think for a return to the ancient empires, some developer will have to figure out a way to simulate the hierarchy above the city magistrate in a way that doesn’t feel like pure punishment, which I think is what the historical reality would feel like: Once a year, the tax gatherer comes by and carries off your surplus, once every few years, some of your citizens get drafted into a war and might not come back, and if you’re really unlucky, an army comes by and does some foraging. To me, it sounds about as fun as the random disasters from Banished, meaning not at all.
I kinda feel like the obvious thing there would be the greek polis: It’s already a city-state so no real need for a higher-state layer.
I think for a return to the ancient empires, some developer will have to figure out a way to simulate the hierarchy above the city magistrate in a way that doesn’t feel like pure punishment, which I think is what the historical reality would feel like: Once a year, the tax gatherer comes by and carries off your surplus, once every few years, some of your citizens get drafted into a war and might not come back, and if you’re really unlucky, an army comes by and does some foraging. To me, it sounds about as fun as the random disasters from Banished, meaning not at all.
An obvious way of solving this problem would be to make it so that the king (emperor, pharaoh…) can do things for you. For example, if an enemy army’s attacking you, you can ask for reinforcements to help defend yourself; if your crops fail, you can ask for extra grain; and so on.
Pharaoh doesn’t have any mechanism for this; you can be asked for goods or soldiers, but you can’t ask for them (though you do sometimes get gifts from other cities as a scripted event). Emperor does, but the reputation cost of asking other cities for things is often so steep that it’s not worth doing so. Zeus also allows you to ask other cities for things, but I can’t remember what effect it has on your standing.
I’d commented on that post that Rome/Greece/Carthage/etc. period Mediterranean that we all know and love, Classic Maya, ancient Mesopotamia make sense as setting for city building games for the politics reason, they are periods with city states as the main unit. Downloaded the Songs of Styx demo maybe plan out how to much that game into this sort of setting, but like a lot of these possible projects never went further with it. (I like the idea of making such a game, but have lost a lot of interest in actually playing them, and this sort of thing would take a lot of time.) There were also enough differences in what I’d imagine (I’d imagine using houses rather than individuals as the key unit, to avoid having to simulate tens to hundreds of thousands in detail that a classic period Mediterranean city state could reasonably have.) that it could take a lot of work.
…Stronghold seems more of a candidate for creating that space.
Regarding “once every few years, some of your citizens get drafted into a war and might not come back”, in the ancient world *sucessful* wars could be very profitable, so it could be a “gambling” mechanic that the soldiers might not return, or they might return not only with their (expensive!) gear but also with loot and slaves; and the likelihood of that would be somewhat influenced by the level of gear provided.
Not to mention, “It is better to stable our horses in the enemy’s towns than in our own.” Sending off your citizens to fight in foreign wars should reduce the chances of both enemy and friendly armies entering your territory, as all the fighting will hopefully be done Over There.
“(Interesting aside: Because the Chinese wuxia and xianxia genres have a convention of the world being full of mostly independent sects of martial artists, they can quite readily and neatly use these for the city-building and adjacent genres)”
Interesting, where’s my city builder/fighting game hybrid?
Here’s a City Builder / Vampire Survivors hybrid: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1963040/The_Lost_Village/
I always remember my economy textbook talking about the balancing act you had to do with fertilizer: Pastures is a lot less efficient in terms of production than cereal, but you *need* to do pasture or you won’t get fertilizer and your soil quality will degrade… So there’s always a push and pull with a short-term incentive to over-focus on cereals because that will feed you *right now*.
This is the traditional reason why you used land that wasn’t much good for pasture. In the US, in the West, grazing rights are often very cheap per acre because you need a LOT of acreage to support cows.
How do we know you’re actually attending the Society for Military History & not, say, using this time to listen to the new Taylor Swift album?
Can we synthesize that into the Tortured Historians Department?
That’s a redundancy, given the nature of academia.
Hey Bret, have you ever had a look at the Hegemony series of games? Their combat tends to be rather simplistic for its genre, but it has you actually think about logistics and feeding your army, has solid raiding mechanics and generally very “localized” resources in one form or another (this takes various forms over their three games).
Oh, I loved the Hegemony games as well! They were really good at showing *why* you cannot ignore that castle in your rear. Yes, you can absolutely move your units beyond it to attack softer targets in the rear. However, especially if you’re a new player, your units will run out of food before you’ll be able to accomplish much, and your whole army will be gone. The seasonal pattern of warfare is neat as well. And the focus on river crossings as natural defenses is neat as well. Overall, I really like how the game makes you play campaigns instead of battles.
From reading this blog, I can imagine some criticisms you could make. Firstly, and most importantly, supply lines have unlimited throughput. You can have a massive stack of units sitting in a camp, but as long as there is a land supply route and you have enough food available, it will get to them. Secondly, the fact that sea supply routes are 50% cheaper instead of 95% cheaper. And finally, it still very much overfocuses on cities over rural areas. You can raise over 150 recruits (in game scale, several units, or around half the army you need for a limited but intensive campaign) from a mid-sized city without negative effects on its production. But this whole city can be sustained by 40-60 farmers plus some lumberjacks or maybe some miners. That’s… Not an urbanization rate that was possible before the mechanization of agriculture.
Oh, I loved the Hegemony games as well! They were really good at showing *why* you cannot ignore that castle in your rear. Yes, you can absolutely move your units beyond it to attack softer targets in the rear. However, especially if you’re a new player, your units will run out of food before you’ll be able to accomplish much, and your whole army will be gone. The seasonal pattern of warfare is neat as well. And the focus on river crossings as natural defenses is neat as well. Overall, I really like how the game makes you play campaigns instead of battles.
I especially like the way how, if you attack a city without adequate logistical support, your army can end up disintegrating even without the enemy doing anything. That was a common way for sieges to end historically, and I think it’s a big weakness of, e.g., Total War that it doesn’t model such concerns at all.
From reading this blog, I can imagine some criticisms you could make. Firstly, and most importantly, supply lines have unlimited throughput. You can have a massive stack of units sitting in a camp, but as long as there is a land supply route and you have enough food available, it will get to them. Secondly, the fact that sea supply routes are 50% cheaper instead of 95% cheaper. And finally, it still very much overfocuses on cities over rural areas. You can raise over 150 recruits (in game scale, several units, or around half the army you need for a limited but intensive campaign) from a mid-sized city without negative effects on its production. But this whole city can be sustained by 40-60 farmers plus some lumberjacks or maybe some miners. That’s… Not an urbanization rate that was possible before the mechanization of agriculture.
I don’t know if you’ve played it, but the first game in the series (Hegemony: Wars of Ancient Greece) doesn’t have these problems so much, probably because it’s much simpler compared to the later games. All sea supply routes can transport up to 100 food/month, whereas only the shortest land routes can match that, unless you spend money upgrading them. If you send your armies to more sparsely-populated inland areas, therefore, you need quite a big supply train (in the form of food-carrying slaves and/or flocks of sheep) to keep your units fed. The game doesn’t really model different kinds of citizen, either; instead, each city has a recruitment pool based on its overall size, and you can’t recruit over this.
Now you have my really curious — Any recommended reading or search terms on the history of family-focused employment (and its general reduction in modern societies)? I’m really curious now how common it was in different areas and times or how rigidly enforced.
– “Putting-out system” (commercialized but household-based) vs. “factory system”. Nowadays visible (but rarely named) in “company uses child labor” scandals, where they contract for very light manufacturing work (paid by the piece) to be done in people’s homes (basically, at the kitchen table) and obviously the kids participate.
– Compulsory mass schooling, which in the 19th and early 20th century had the primary battle of enforcing “no you can’t keep your children at home to help on the farm, send them to elementary school or we will punish you in various ways”. I strongly suspect that the summer break exists as a concession to the harvest, since no enforcement could have prevented attendance from cratering at that time. (Many of the school staff would also have been in the fields.) Tangentially, boarding schools were much more common than they are today. Less relevant to your question are the child labor laws, since those mainly affect out-of-home employment.
– In parallel, the “production” of healthcare today happens in hospitals. Earlier, it would have happened at home. Separately, mostly during the 19th century there had been something of a turf war between midwifery vs. ob/gyn doctors.
– Look in zoning reform advocacy for descriptions of how often, even in the early 20th century, people built family businesses onto their front yard/driveway, until zoning banned them from doing so. And even today, various low-footprint businesses (hair/nail salons, law offices, etc.) are not infrequently operated out of basically the owner’s living room, where allowed. Likewise, keeping animals somewhere in the backyard was very common (if someone, usually the housewife or a “retired” grandparent, could look after them during the day, not being engaged in out-of-home work), with particularly physically demanding work (if any) done by the husband before/after work. Large labor peaks (mostly: slaughtering a pig and processing it all into the traditional shelf-stable forms, i.e. various wurst-/haggis-analogs, smoked hams, etc.) were organized with the extended family and/or friends showing up for the day.
– Speaking of zoning, tangentially related to the question: boarding/rooming houses, or quite simply the family renting out a spare bedroom (contemporary UK term: HMO, House in Multiple Occupation) were common until the early 20th century, when the practice was largely made illegal in the US (by regulating the number of unrelated people who can live under one roof). However, many of these laws contain cutouts for live-in staff (mostly maids and nannies in practice) because those were still reasonably frequent at the time, and counted as members of the household. In other countries, subleasing a room remains reasonably common, particularly among college students and other young adults. These people would almost always work (or study) outside the home, but being the boarding house operator was often the livelihood of older women (universal old-age pension systems not being introduced until quite late).
– Nationally varying terms, from “dacha” to “weekend house”, were used for large garden plots located somewhere outside the city. Spending a good part of the weekend there, to grow comparatively value-dense vegetables or fruits (NOT cereals or legumes) was common. See also “victory gardens” in the World Wars. These should be seen as the continuation of the land use patterns described in the “the lonely city” posts of our host.
– Fairly late into the 20th century, retail consumers often bought sheet textile by length, cut from the roll. Lots of families had a sewing machine (used occasionally; maybe a few hours per month?) or perhaps asked a relative, or a neighbor who made themselves known as a (part-time? self-employed?) seamstress to do the tailoring for them. This favor was not necessarily paid for in money, either.
– Doesn’t belong anywhere, but before the invention of the washing machine and before people stopped using coal-fired stoves for cooking and heating, thus getting soot (and coal dust) over everything indoors, laundry and cleaning consumed rather more labor than it does today.
> I strongly suspect that the summer break exists as a concession to the harvest, since no enforcement could have prevented attendance from cratering at that time.
I’ve often seen this presented as plain fact. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it presented as speculation before.
I heard or read some article once where they claimed that the “child labor for the harvest” was a just-so story. That the historical reasons for summer vacation were murky and there was a lot more variation at the start.
And the whole “labor for the harvest” … but harvest is in the fall, not the summer, and planting is in the spring. So summer is when you least need the extra labor. You’d want to to take off April and September, not July and August. And you’d get a lot of variation based on climate and weather patterns.
Web searching found me this PBS article, which may be what I was thinking of, or some other article based the book:
Kenneth M. Gold, School’s In: The History of Summer Education in American Public Schools. New York: Peter Lang, 2002
It depends on the crop and planting time and location, too. I don’t think there’s any single “the harvest”. This page has a table for wheat, where it shows some of the variation for 6 types of wheat in 2 parts of the US. I wish the table gave some indication of the quantities involved, and their distribution over time, but it’s a start. Also, I think some places can get multiple harvests in a year.
https://www.uswheat.org/wheatletter/u-s-wheat-seeding-involves-careful-planning-and-varietal-selection/
Depends what you’re harvesting- wheat, rye, and other winter annuals are harvested in the early summer.
The main school holidays in (temperate) Australia are around Christmas (I think December-January or January-February).
Peak labour time for sheep is shearing*, which is late December on the farm I grew up on, though I believe it varies a bit.
*The other peak would be lambing and lamb marking, which is usually in hot weather but I don’t recall exactly when
At least in 90’s northern Maine school started and then just a bit later there was a two week potato harvest break.
During the mid eighties on my family’s farm around the Finnish arctic circle, the hay making for cow fodder definitely happened during the summer break. Lot of my dad’s siblings brought their families for summer vacation during that period and participated in the hay making. I was around six years old and my job was to drive the tractor while the adults gathered the hay to the trailer, earlier from stacks and later small bales.
“And the whole “labor for the harvest” … but harvest is in the fall, not the summer, and planting is in the spring.”
But summer holidays used to start and finish much later, at least in parts of the UK. My father’s summer holidays started in early August and finished in mid-October.
And in the UK, wheat and oats are harvested in August, and potatoes from mid-August to early October.
Scotland actually has legally enforced school holidays for the potato harvest! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tattie_holidays
The practice of having long summer breaks goes back at least to the middle ages, as far as I’m aware, so it probably wasn’t about freeing people up to help with the harvest (before the introduction of universal education, students would generally come from families rich enough to hire labourers to do all the farm work for them). I suspect it was more about avoiding the spread of disease during the unhealthy summer months; the “dog days” of July and August have been associated with illness since Homer.
I always thought flu season was in winter.
I always thought flu season was in winter.
‘Flu season is winter; summer was more associated with fevers and malaria.
Are we sure it’s not just because summer is hot (citation needed)? Seriously, try to get a group of school kids to sit still and pay attention in a sweltering classroom during the middle of summer with no AC. Or even adults, for that matter. Really hard to sit at a desk and focus on letters when you’re dripping sweat and on the edge of passing out from heat stroke.
Are we sure it’s not just because summer is hot (citation needed)? Seriously, try to get a group of school kids to sit still and pay attention in a sweltering classroom during the middle of summer with no AC. Or even adults, for that matter. Really hard to sit at a desk and focus on letters when you’re dripping sweat and on the edge of passing out from heat stroke.
That could be it as well.
Possibly relevant that much of the medieval education system was first developed in Italy, where summers can get very hot indeed.
Singapore’s ruler Lee Kuan Yew attributed much of the nation’s success to air conditioning. From an interview he gave for New Perspectives Quarterly:
“Air conditioning. Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics.
Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.”
AC was also important to the development of what is commonly referred to as the “Sun Belt” in the US.
Know that i have heard discussed an break week in autumn, referred to as potato break for that harvest.
Aren’t crops typically harvested in autumn, once school is back?
See above – in the UK wheat and oats come in in August.
‘Nationally varying terms, from “dacha” to “weekend house”, were used for large garden plots located somewhere outside the city. Spending a good part of the weekend there, to grow comparatively value-dense vegetables or fruits (NOT cereals or legumes) was common”
this is apparently still pretty common (or at least was, as of maybe 15 years ago when I read about it) in Latin America, and complicates the distinction between urban and rural people. there are (or were, fairly recently) a lot of people who live and work in the city but go ‘home” to the family farm on weekends to help out.
Many of the things you mention are in living memory here (Slovakia), or still taking place. I suspect that it’s similar in poorer regions of western countries too, as it’s a natural order of things to know and help each other, rather than simply do business with strangers.
Summer break doesn’t coincide perfectly with harvest, especially depending on location (recall the Med has fertile winters and scorching summers), which is why as late as the ’70s here, schoolkids were permitted to go home for potato harvest in late september-early october and such. It was good for the communist regime’s image to the populace, and agriculture was very much centrally managed anyway, so there was no need to exert additional control to prevent it, and in the end, it’s not a long time away from school. I suspect that being home for labour-intensive periods was only a smaller reason for *summer break* specifically, but rather, people recognised that children needed a longer break from mentally intensive activity, not just shorter ones.
@xellos:
what are some good sources i can read on the history of Czechoslovakia, or for that matter some of the neighboring countries, during the communist era? I’m really fascinated by how planned economies/societies worked on a day to day, nuts and bolts level, and I’m really more interested in Central-Eastern European societies than in Russia itself, partly because they seemed, from all the statistical indicators, to function quite a bit better.
On a different and less serious note, a lot of schools in Michigan have the first day of deer hunting season as a holiday, since they know that many students would be absent anyway. (The deer hunting season in Michigan, with guns at any rate, is quite short, I think only two weeks, so everyone goes out the first day hoping they can get their deer before the rest of them are scared into hiding for the next two weeks).
Getting review copies! Exciting times. Did the developers ask you for a pull quote or any of your expertise, or was this just “play it and tell folks about it”?
Bakeries? One wonders if they gave them anachronistic perpetual ovens.
Because in the medieval times, and much of modern, you built a fire in your oven and got it good and hot. Then you scrapped out the ashes and put in your bread to bake. When it was done, you put in something that didn’t need it quite so hot. Then something requiring even less heat.
This is the sort of thing that massively rewards economies of scale.
Yes – which is why you preferably took your unbaked bread to a baker, or used the communal oven once a week to bake with the rest of the village.
Easy explanation for perpetual ovens: they ate pizza!
Hey Bret, have you played Terra Invicta? Not exactly history but from the kinds of games you’ve talked about it seems very up your alley. Pretty niche but for those whose niche it fits there’s nothing else quite like it- one of my favorite games these days. If you do check it out I’d love to read your thoughts, either here or on Twitter.
Not yet.
Ah I welcome the long awaited game article! I need to play Banished one of these days, the only thing I heard about the game is gargantuan and eldritch constructions that one can make in that.
At this point, I think there’s enough games who have picked up Banished’s DNA and do the whole thing better that going back to the first game isn’t worthwhile (I say that with 148 hours spent in Banished – you spend time on it, but don’t get a big return of investment).
Also, I think you must be mixing things up: Banished itself doesn’t allow free-form building of any kind, you are limited to a small number of buildings with fixed blueprints.
What is the grounds to hope for a choice between household production and large centralized workshops?
As for collecting all resources…
This would maybe, maybe not, be realistic in the framework of early Medieval villages. 11th century and before.
Because we have a lot of literary evidence for the presence of slaves. The evidence indicates that (unlike in Roman times) slaves lived in huts with families. Apparently they were developing from slaves towards serfs – but were not quite on the serf end yet (and serf is still unfree). How much literary evidence do we have for exactly what the dues of Dark Age slaves were, and how a small scale private lord would have been running his household and attached village of slaves?
What written evidence we do have refers to church institutions who were better at keeping obsolete parchments. Like Carolingian polyptychs of, for example, Saint Denis monastery. I recall a survey of one French village finding 37 peasant households and emphasizing that half of them, don´t recall if it was 18 or 19, were slaves and the other half were free. 3 of the free peasants owned some lands for which they owed the monastery nothing but also rented land – rented more than the other peasants did.
There would be a lot of need to keep track of exactly who owed what to whom if a village had peasants of different status living intermingled – slaves and free living in huts that looked the same and ploughing their respective fields; pieces of land owned by several lords intermingled in the same village (common in the period), maybe several lords´ slaves and tenants living alongside yeomen who had no lords… And when the lord was absentee, he had more reason to write things down to check on his bailiff. But on the other hand, when you had a whole village owned by the same lord, and equally fully dependent, and the lord is resident small squire, less reason to formalize the dues.
About converting resources into money as dues for overlord – are you sure that it is a correct presumption? That would imply it is the only thing the squire needs money for!
IMO, a far larger need is specialized imports. For, yes, dues, but also other things.
The lord has to show up for duty with a warhorse, mail hauberk and a good quality longsword? None of them can be produced by the villages. Horses breed in the village, but only small nags. Our squire needs a warhorse not Rocinante, so he has to get enough pence or solidi to buy them. Hauberk? The village has a smithy and blacksmith. But that´s good for some axes and plowshares. Mail shirt takes too much skill. Again buying it. Sword? The village smith can make an axe or knife, but not an Ulfberth sword. Again, cash to buy.
Finally, about 1 master and dozens of workers? Well, it was NOT treated as a serious option through high middle ages! A town that did have tens of artisans in one field tended to have a guild, with a large share of artisans on the master level in the guild – and guild regulations specifically forbidding any single master from having more than a couple of workers!
sad, I was so looking forward to finishing the series, it feels like half the posts this year have been the freaky Fridays or gap weeks
Good things come to those who wait: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYyOxoN-QS0