The Franchise Should Be Limited

[HoreTore]

Being a peasant in any pre-industrail civilization would have sucked major gonads to our modern sensibilities. Context of the serfs lot in society is FAR more important. Would the lot in life of a serf be worse than that of a freeman farmer or a burgher? Or, until the black death, was the loss of freedom of movement (and others) plus the requirement to work the lords lands for free worth it for the protections and benefits that came with serfdom.

I do put it into context. I don't compare a serf/tenants life to my modern life, rather I compare it to the lives of those in power back then, ie. the nobility. Which means their lives were crap.

Fortunately for us all, the serfs thought the same as I do and proved to be an unruly bunch which forced the powers that be into making concessions, making my own life a comfortable one.

[lars573]

I do put it into context. I don't compare a serf/tenants life to my modern life, rather I compare it to the lives of those in power back then, ie. the nobility. Which means their lives were crap.

Fortunately for us all, the serfs thought the same as I do and proved to be an unruly bunch which forced the powers that be into making concessions, making my own life a comfortable one.

Which is totally the wrong way to go about it. Compare the lives of working people today with the lives of the CEO types. The workers lives are still crap.

Lars - Marx was wrong, because he, like you, assumed a static hierarchy and unchanging relationships. The serf may have been "owned" by the baron, but the baron was not equivilent to a 19th Century industrialist and in fact Marx actually compared the industrialist to the Guildmaster and the Proles to the Apprentices and Jorneymen in his historical works. That understanding is essentially flawed because the Journeymen became​ the Guildmasters.

I assume no such thing. Of course the hierarchies weren't static. But once the economic changes had finished we ended up with similar dynamics over time.

[Sir Moody]

Which is totally the wrong way to go about it. Compare the lives of working people today with the lives of the CEO types. The workers lives are still crap.

yes but not AS crap as the same comparison to the Serf's and their Elite class (the Nobility).

Our "working class" enjoys far more freedom and our "Elite" have far less (they are mostly not above the law now for example)

that said I am sure horetore would agree that while we have made progress and lives are not as crap we still have a ways to go...

[Tellos Athenaios]

I do put it into context. I don't compare a serf/tenants life to my modern life, rather I compare it to the lives of those in power back then, ie. the nobility. Which means their lives were crap.

Fortunately for us all, the serfs thought the same as I do and proved to be an unruly bunch which forced the powers that be into making concessions, making my own life a comfortable one.

Actually, with the exception of Czarist Russia: nope. It was the citizenry which proved the unruly lot. This is of course a matter of definitions, since by and large the original Serf status no longer existed when that happened...

Anyway you are probably right that the lives of Serfs were by all accounts, crap. PVC is wrong here: it is the crappiness and the difficulty of upward social mobility (especially when the best farmlands were exhausted and plots became very small due to generations of subdivisions via inheritance) which led to the mass exodus from France, Flanders and England to settle in- and cultivate the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Ireland, Wales... Nobles would recruit in France and Flanders for instance, and provide upfront loans to pay for the serfs to up sticks, grant them the right to settle on some plots of land in their domains, grant them tax waivers for years until the new settlements were projected to be sustainable, grant them freeman status ... All to get them to come and cultivate their land, which they knew would in due time yield massive ROI even if it meant not being able to exercise as much power over your peasants.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

What date are we talking about here?

[Tellos Athenaios]

Well High Medieval and to a lesser extent Late Medieval, more or less. Eventually of course the newly settled places became starting points for launching ventures further away. As a rule of thumb anything in Germany called -dorf (or -dorp in Dutch) is very likely the result of this expansion, all the old Dutch polders were built this way, for instance.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Well High Medieval and to a lesser extent Late Medieval, more or less. Eventually of course the newly settled places became starting points for launching ventures further away. As a rule of thumb anything in Germany called -dorf (or -dorp in Dutch) is very likely the result of this expansion, all the old Dutch polders were built this way, for instance.

Well, before or after the Black Death?

Even so, the fact that serfs could be tempted away from their lords' estates doesn't make their lives "crap" it just means they were at the bottom of the tree and there was room to move up.

I'm not saying it was a wonderful life in rural idyll, but I would think medieval serfs were better off than people during the industrial revolution. For one thing, they appear to have lived longer - Church records for most of the Middle Ages show people marrying in their early to late twenties, 26-28 being the most common irrc. That tells us that people weren't in a desperate hurry to breed and get their children to adulthood before they died.

[Kralizec]

The multi-party system is not the cause of the (few) stalemates you have seen in Europe.

First, we have Belqium. The issue in Belgium isn't due to multiple parties, but rather the countey being split in two, with the two sides unwilling to work with each other. Not because of politics, mind you, but because of the flanders/wallon-thingy. The other source of complications arises when it is a requirement for a new government to have a majority in parliament. In more refined democracies, like Norway, a new government doesn't need to have support, it just needs to not have opposition. Ie. it doesn't need 51% of the representatives to vote in its favour, it just needs to avoid having 51% voting against it.

Is it like Germany's sytem? Meaning, a vote of non-confidence can only succeed if it also appoints a successor at the same time?

Otherwise I don't think it's really different at all, and you're describing a "minority government". Which is perfectly workable until a majority in parliament is fed up and accepts a motion of no-confidence. In many countries (mine included) there's some sort of compulsive taboo against the idea of a minority government though, despite that there are plenty of precedents.

Well, before or after the Black Death?

Even so, the fact that serfs could be tempted away from their lords' estates doesn't make their lives "crap" it just means they were at the bottom of the tree and there was room to move up.

I'm not saying it was a wonderful life in rural idyll, but I would think medieval serfs were better off than people during the industrial revolution. For one thing, they appear to have lived longer - Church records for most of the Middle Ages show people marrying in their early to late twenties, 26-28 being the most common irrc. That tells us that people weren't in a desperate hurry to breed and get their children to adulthood before they died.

Probably so, because the industrial revolution was in some ways a revival of serfdom in its most awful sense.

Serfdom is usually understood as being a form of slavery or semi-slavery without the formal label. If we go back to Rome, the legal details of both institutions were different (most importantly, serfs were not "propery") but de facto they were quite similar. The word servi was used to refer to both slaves and serfs with no distinction. In the middle ages the legal specifics differed from place to place and time to time, but the similarity is that the peasants are not inherently unfree like slaves but still have no realistic opportunity to escape from their current social standing, or even their place of residence.

In the industrial revolution it was common practice for a factory owner to monopolise all the goods and services that the common man from the region would need. The laborers were dependent on him for income and were obliged to buy goods and services from him as well. These people, despite being under no restrictions under the law, did not have the means to just pack up and leave try to make a better life elsewhere. This pretty much continued until the late 19th century until laws were passed against this business.

Granted, that just proves that during the height of the industrial revolution life was really really bad. I admit that I don't know a lot about the daily life of commoners in the middle ages. Allthough my impression is that they suffered far, far worse under wars because the slaughter was more local and more indiscriminate.

[HoreTore]

Is it like Germany's sytem? Meaning, a vote of non-confidence can only succeed if it also appoints a successor at the same time?

Otherwise I don't think it's really different at all, and you're describing a "minority government". Which is perfectly workable until a majority in parliament is fed up and accepts a motion of no-confidence. In many countries (mine included) there's some sort of compulsive taboo against the idea of a minority government though, despite that there are plenty of precedents.

It's different from the Belgians, who have to have a majority vote in order to get things started, which was the point.

And no, the vote of no confidence is just that - no confidence. It doesn't include anything else. The succesor is appointed by the booted PM, and his choice isn't restricted legally, but rather by tradition, meaning that the leader of the strongest bloc gets the job. If that leader doesn't want it, he'll recommend the leader of the second strongest bloc(which is what happened when Bondevik I was appointed).

[Tellos Athenaios]

Even so, the fact that serfs could be tempted away from their lords' estates doesn't make their lives "crap" it just means they were at the bottom of the tree and there was room to move up.

Yes it does not automatically mean their lives were crap, but the second part of the sentence deserves qualification: their prospects were so bad they were willing to migrate quite a distance with nothing to go on but a gamble. It was their big bet.

I'm not saying it was a wonderful life in rural idyll, but I would think medieval serfs were better off than people during the industrial revolution. For one thing, they appear to have lived longer - Church records for most of the Middle Ages show people marrying in their early to late twenties, 26-28 being the most common irrc. That tells us that people weren't in a desperate hurry to breed and get their children to adulthood before they died.

That is true. Skeletal remains alone suggest quite strongly that the Industrial Revolution was by far the worse catastrophe ever to befall the common man, as the 19th century Industrial Revolution people are the shortest by far. But you know where this leads to, by the same token (skeletal remains) Medieval peasants are worse off than their Hunter-gatherer ancestors too...

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Yes it does not automatically mean their lives were crap, but the second part of the sentence deserves qualification: their prospects were so bad they were willing to migrate quite a distance with nothing to go on but a gamble. It was their big bet.

That is true. Skeletal remains alone suggest quite strongly that the Industrial Revolution was by far the worse catastrophe ever to befall the common man, as the 19th century Industrial Revolution people are the shortest by far. But you know where this leads to, by the same token (skeletal remains) Medieval peasants are worse off than their Hunter-gatherer ancestors too...

Well - poor people have always been surprisingly open to upping sticks, be it from France to Germany, England to the Americas, or from the East Coast to the West Coast across the Great Plains. Those are just the most obvious examples - the same impetus is behind the Viking and Mongol expansionism as well.

Consider what our own skeletal remains will say about us - endemic obesity and muscle wastage, ravaged by cancers, heart disease, diabetes... You'll be hard pressed to find most of these in medieval peasants, and not because they died young.