#feudalism

"[Robin Hood] wasn't noble at all, but a yeoman, a rung above a peasant...and while he was perfectly nice to the poor, helping them was not his main purpose. His enemies were the corrupt clergy and the land-owning nobles who took advantage of their underlings."

[Warning: Fire & Blood book spoilers]

I always really liked the idea that Rhaenyra's eventual hostility towards Nettles is motivated by the discovery that Nettles has no actual blood ties to Valyria; she's just a regular-degular commoner who bonded with a dragon by stumbling her way into a crude form of blood magic with all those sheep she'd been feeding Sheepstealer.

This revelation, that any random schlub can technically become a dragonrider and that it isn't something determined by Targaryen blood alone, would pose a massive threat to the concept of Targaryen supremacy. Their monopoly on these biological superweapons is the foundation upon which they justify and maintain their rule. Furthermore, Nettles' identity as a dragonrider not only poses a threat to the concept of Targaryen divine right, it poses a threat to the feudal system as a whole. You cannot have the peasantry finding out they can become gods among men, that everyone's places in life aren't predetermined by bloodlines and gods. It'll upend society.

So Rhaenyra is obviously anxious to be rid of this threat to her power, but her actions are misinterpreted through a lens of misogyny by the old septons and maesters who document history, dismissing it as "Oh Rhaenyra was fat and 30, she must've been jealous of the hot younger woman her husband obviously preferred, chicks be petty like that". That kind of misogyny has plagued Rhaenyra her entire life, it'd be ironic if the Westerosi scholar class inadvertently did a cover-up of this insanely devastating information because they just couldn't see past their own sexism.

All of this would be so fucking thematically on point for the ASOIAF universe, it would've been SO interesting...but then the showrunners replaced her with a pre-existing character from Valyrian dragonrider nobility.

Of course unlike pirates, knights have had centuries of a good reputation mostly because of the whole (constructed) idea of Chivalry and the general idea in the past that war was good and virile (ACOUP did a good article about this, unfortunately I still don't have my PC so I can't comment on it). All those ideas of Chivalry and honor only applied between people of their similar status though, members of the landowner aristocracy. If you were a rebellious peasant, it was well within their right to murder you.

From our modern perspective a knight would be, and forgive me for using this kinda metaphor, a cross between a landlord and a cop.

I'm coming to DEFCON! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

Here's a weird consequence of our societal shift from capitalism (where riches come from profits) to feudalism (where riches come from rents): increasingly, your rights to your actual property (the physical stuff you own) are trumped by corporations' metaphorical "intellectual property" claims.

That's a lot to unpack! Let's start with a quick primer on profits and rents. Capitalists invest money in buying equipment, then they pay workers wages to use that equipment to produce goods and services. Profit is the sum a capitalist takes home from this arrangement: money made from paying workers to do productive things.

Now, rents: "rent" is the money a rentier makes by owning a "factor of production": something the capitalist needs in order to make profits. Capitalists risk their capital to get profits, but rents are heavily insulated from risk.

For example: a coffee shop owner buys espresso machines, hires baristas, and rents a storefront. If they do well, the landlord can raise their rent, denying them profits and increasing rents. But! If a great new cafe opens across the street and the coffee shop owner goes broke, the landlord is in great shape, because they now have a vacant storefront they can rent, and they can charge extra for a prime location across the street from the hottest new coffee shop in town.

The "moral philosophers" that today's self-described capitalists claim to worship – Adam Smith, David Ricardo – hated rents. For them, profits were the moral way to get rich, because when capitalists chase profits, they necessarily chase the production of things that people want.

When rentiers chase rents, they do so at the expense of profits. Every dollar a capitalist pays in rent – licenses for IP, rent for a building, etc – is a dollar that can't be extracted in profit, and then reinvested in the production of more goods and services that society desires.

The "free markets" of Adam Smith weren't free from regulation, they were free from rents.

The moral philosophers' hatred of rents was really a hatred of feudalism. The industrial revolution wasn't merely (or even primarily) the triumph of new machines: rather, it was the triumph of profits over rent. For the industrial revolution to succeed, the feudal arrangement had to end. Capitalism is incompatible with hereditary lords receiving guaranteed rents from hereditary serfs who are legally obliged to work for them. Capitalism triumphed over feudalism when the serfs were turned off of the land (becoming the "free labor" who went to work in the textile mills) and the land itself was given over to sheep grazing (providing the wool for those same mills).

But that doesn't mean that the industrial revolution invented profits. Profits were to be found in feudal societies, wherever a wealthy person increased their wealth by investing in machines and hiring workers to use them. The thing that made feudalism feudal was how conflicts between rents and profits cashed out. For so long as the legal system elevated the claims of rentiers over the claims of capitalists, the society was feudal. Once the legal system gave priority to profit over rent, it became capitalist.

Capitalists hate capitalism. The engine of capitalism is insecurity. The successful capitalist is like the fastest gun in the old west: there's always a young gun out there looking to "disrupt" their fortune with a new invention, product, or organizational strategy that "creatively destroys" the successful businesses of the day and replaces them with new ones:

https://locusmag.com/2024/03/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-capitalism/

That's a hard way to live, with your every success serving as a blinking KICK ME sign visible to every ambitious person in the world. Precarity makes people miserable and nuts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

So capitalists universally aspire to become rentiers and investors seek out companies that have a plan to extract rent. This is why Warren Buffett is so priapatic for companies with "moats and walls" – legal privileges and market structures that protect the business from competition and disruption:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-explains-moat-principle-164442359.html

Feudal rents were mostly derived from land, but even in the feudal era, the king was known to reward loyal lickspittles with rents over ideas. The "patents royal" were the legally protected right to decide who could make or do certain things: for example, you might have a patent royal over the production of silver ribbon, and anyone who wanted to make a silver ribbon would have to pay for your permission. If you chose to grant that permission exclusively to one manufacturer, then no one else could make it, and you could charge a license fee to the manufacturer that accounted for nearly all their profit.

Today, rentiers are also interested in land. Bill Gates is the country's number one landowner, and in many towns, private equity landlords are snappinig up every single family home that hits the market and converting it to a badly maintained slum:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/22/koteswar-jay-gajavelli/#if-you-ever-go-to-houston

But the 21st Century's defining source of rent is "IP" – a controversial term that I use here to mean, "Any law or policy that allows a company to exert legal control over its competitors, critics and customers":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP is in irreconcilable conflict with real property rights. Think of HP selling you a printer and wanting to decide which ink you use, or John Deere selling you a tractor and wanting to tell you who can fix it. Or, for that matter, Apple selling you a phone and dictating which software you are allowed to install on it.

Think of Unity, a company that makes tools for video-game makers, demanding a royalty from every game that is eventually sold, calling this "shared success":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Every time one of these conflicts ends with IP's triumph over real property rights, that is a notch in favor of calling the world we live in now "technofeudalist" rather than "technocapitalist":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Once you start to think of "IP" as "laws that let me control how other people use their real property," a lot of the seemingly incoherent fights over IP snap into place. This also goes a long way to explaining how otherwise sensible people can agree on expansions of IP to achieve some short-term goal, irrespective of the spillover harms from such a move. Hard cases make bad law, and hard IP cases make terrible law.

Gideon is very specifically described as living in a feudal system in the Ninth house. She is a Serf. She lives and serves under a ruler, she has specific legal, social, and economic obligations to the House and its ruler as a result of this system.

Feudalism exists within a specific sociopolitical context. It’s not equivalent to slavery, though it can appear that way to a modern audience. Muir wouldn’t have picked the term “serf” to describe Gideon if she didn’t mean it, or if she meant something else (such as slavery or indentured servitude)

Serfdom is not ownership of an individual, like in slavery. It’s more like an intense landlord/employee relationship, if we’re looking for a modern touch point. A serf is bound to the land they live and work on because they are a valuable source of labor. They owe labor, goods, or a payment in equivalency to, the lord who runs the lands they are bound to. If they want to go elsewhere, they have to pay back the lord for what labor/goods they won’t be providing anymore, and the lord could refuse them.

Because this is also a reciprocal relationship, the lord also has certain responsibilities to the serfs, including protection, the maintenance of the law, and maintenance of the lands. The lord runs their holdings as ruler, but also can’t just do whatever they want. This is a social, economic, and political system, if people didn’t like it or benefit from it and had the capability to do so, they would rebel.

(Sorry for this long tangent. It’s important to set context and also discuss this history. Feudalism/Manorialism looked different in different places and times, and originally came from Roman villa systems, but this post is already long enough)

So what does this have to do with the locked tomb?

Gideon is a serf, very explicitly. She is also a ward, which puts her into an interesting spot when it comes to legal and financial responsibilities. This means she owes labor and fealty to the Ninth, essentially in repayment for raising her.

When she tries to head to the Cohort, she would otherwise be allowed to do that as a free citizen of the Ninth House. But, she has prior responsibilities to the House as a serf, so she would need the Lord’s (Harrow’s) permission to do so. Despite these obligations, she is not required to do any particular jobs in the Ninth. She is not forced to be a nun, or to do labor. From what is described, it seems like she’s relatively left to her own devices.

In a system of slavery, Gideon would be forced to enact specific labor, to learn a specific trade, and to generally do whatever the fuck Harrow or the Reverend family wanted. But she’s not.

Again, Gideon can train to join the cohort as much as she wants. She can lock herself in her room and avoid people as much as she wants. She can avoid prayers or choose to go to them. She can do what she wants, but she is not allowed to leave to take her labor elsewhere without authorization, because of her legal and financial obligations in this sociopolitical system.

Ortus puts it very well in Harrow: he must follow her orders and fulfill the responsibilities he socially is obligated to fulfill, but when he lays his head down at night he is allowed to feel however he wants about himself and his actions, he is still a free person. Ortus is in a slightly different situation as his position at birth obligates him to be Harrow’s Cavalier, as opposed to Gideon who is in a lower social position and is the only option left, but he still owes a large amount of loyalty and labor to the Ninth House.

Medieval Christmas: Twelve Days of Celebration

Medieval Christmas wasn't just a religious observance—it was the longest, most anticipated holiday of the year, a time when everyone from peasants to nobles stopped work, decorated their homes with greenery, and celebrated together with feasts, games, and gift-giving. For two full weeks, from Christmas Eve through January 5th, ordinary people experienced a break from grueling daily labor and enjoyed luxuries like meat and fish that rarely appeared on their tables.

Historical Context

The medieval Christian calendar was packed with holidays tied to seasonal celebrations, many of which had roots in older pagan traditions.[6] Christmas stood out as the ultimate winter break because it coincided with a natural lull in farm work, allowing lords to grant their peasants the entire two weeks off. This timing made the holiday accessible to everyone, not just the wealthy.

What Made Medieval Christmas Special

Decorations were elaborate by medieval standards. Homes and churches were adorned with holly, ivy, bay leaves, and mistletoe—plants chosen for their symbolic power. Holly, with its glossy leaves and bright berries, was believed by ancient Celtic druids to ward off evil spirits, while mistletoe was thought to bring fertility and protection. Mistletoe hung in doorways became the centerpiece of home decorations, and couples would kiss beneath it, plucking berries with each kiss.

Food and Feasting transformed the medieval diet. While most people ate bread and vegetables year-round, Christmas brought meat, fish, and for the wealthy, exotic dishes like roast peacock. These feasts weren't private affairs—they were communal celebrations where families gathered around tables laden with rarities.

Entertainment and Merrymaking filled the twelve days with songs, dancing, pantomimes, games, and gift exchanges. It was a time of genuine joy and social bonding in communities where daily life was often isolated and monotonous.

Key Facts

Christmas lasted from December 24th to January 5th (Twelfth Day)

Peasants received two full weeks off from work

Holly and mistletoe were the primary decorations

Feasts included meat and fish—luxuries for common people

Gift-giving and entertainment were central to celebrations

Historical Significance

Medieval Christmas reveals how communities found joy and relief in shared celebrations, breaking the monotony of medieval life. These traditions—decorated homes, gift-giving, festive meals, and holiday decorations—laid the groundwork for how we celebrate Christmas today. The holiday was equally important for rich and poor, making it a rare moment of social leveling in an otherwise hierarchical society.