Slavery and Serfdom, why, how?

How did slavery develop on Safehold. What happened to make some Adams and Eves slaves? Same question for serfs. How would the COGA have been involved. It seems to have happened too quickly.

EdThomas wrote:How did slavery develop on Safehold. What happened to make some Adams and Eves slaves? Same question for serfs. How would the COGA have been involved. It seems to have happened too quickly.

Economic happens. Langhorne may wish the best, but economics are always superior to the ideology (our Russian proverb "in battle between the empty fridge and full TV set, the fridge always won"). Safeholdian society was pre-industrial, especially in early era, and in pre-industrial society slavery quickly became economically effective. And rise of feudalism helped to establish the serfdom, since it's just more economically effective for group of peasants to supply one professional warrior (their lord) than for them to waste time and efforts on militia training's.

Through out societal development here on earth we have always had groups of the strong subjugate the weak, It starts by the rulers gathering an armed force and preventing the other groups from being armed. "Listen you are a farmer, there is no need for you to worry about protecting your crops, we have a professional army that will look out for you" Eventually becomes you are a serf

I am wondering where the knowledge of Noble titles was preserved, as it does not seem to be writ declared, but grown after the day of creation.
The one snipped we have about the Adams and Eves just has a Mayor of the town.
On the other hand english nobility titles and their ranking are unlikely to be common knowledge in the federation, so they had to be reinstated, likely by the church given the harmonization in titles across Safehold.

bigrunt wrote:Through out societal development here on earth we have always had groups of the strong subjugate the weak, It starts by the rulers gathering an armed force and preventing the other groups from being armed. "Listen you are a farmer, there is no need for you to worry about protecting your crops, we have a professional army that will look out for you" Eventually becomes you are a serf

Not exactly. This started with heavy cavalry dominating the pre-firearms battlefields, and heavy cavalry MUST be professional to be effective. Peasants militia in general situation stand very little chances against heavy cavalry attacks, so basically it is safer for peasants to have a knight (who would protect them in exchange for their work), than to waste time, training to form a militia (which would NOT work well against enemy knights who may invade the land). And with monopolization of armed powers in hands of aristocracy led to social divide simply because peasants have no real way to go without aristocracy, and kings need aristocracy to maintain their military power.

Dilandu wrote:Not exactly. This started with heavy cavalry dominating the pre-firearms battlefields, and heavy cavalry MUST be professional to be effective. Peasants militia in general situation stand very little chances against heavy cavalry attacks, so basically it is safer for peasants to have a knight (who would protect them in exchange for their work), than to waste time, training to form a militia (which would NOT work well against enemy knights who may invade the land). And with monopolization of armed powers in hands of aristocracy led to social divide simply because peasants have no real way to go without aristocracy, and kings need aristocracy to maintain their military power.

I think an important point is missed here, and that is the absence of a professional army, the absence of banking and a weak state. A powerful ruler could raise taxes directly to pay and maintain a standing army of heavy cavalry without giving away land.
The enclaves of Safehold however were spread out, and rulers had to pay their forming aristocracy with land, promises and privileges.

Slavery still exists now, so it's not like it hasn't been apart of society since the beginning.

I think people are missing a basic point.

Safehold has no slaves or aparent nobility before the war of the fallen, and not only slavery, serfdom, and nobility but changes to the holy writ and the churches after it.

I'm betting slavery was introduced after the war by Chohiro (sp?) quite possibly as a form of punishment.

Nobility, as a form of control.

Annachie wrote:I think people are missing a basic point.

Safehold has no slaves or aparent nobility before the war of the fallen, and not only slavery, serfdom, and nobility but changes to the holy writ and the churches after it.

I'm betting slavery was introduced after the war by Chohiro (sp?) quite possibly as a form of punishment.

Nobility, as a form of control.

How do we know it had no slaves or nobility at the beginning? Is there any textev that specifically states that? More likely it started out as indentured servitude and progressed further from there.

Dilandu wrote:

bigrunt wrote:Through out societal development here on earth we have always had groups of the strong subjugate the weak, It starts by the rulers gathering an armed force and preventing the other groups from being armed. "Listen you are a farmer, there is no need for you to worry about protecting your crops, we have a professional army that will look out for you" Eventually becomes you are a serf

Not exactly. This started with heavy cavalry dominating the pre-firearms battlefields, and heavy cavalry MUST be professional to be effective. Peasants militia in general situation stand very little chances against heavy cavalry attacks, so basically it is safer for peasants to have a knight (who would protect them in exchange for their work), than to waste time, training to form a militia (which would NOT work well against enemy knights who may invade the land). And with monopolization of armed powers in hands of aristocracy led to social divide simply because peasants have no real way to go without aristocracy, and kings need aristocracy to maintain their military power.

Exactly how humanity spread out from its original enclaves and developed the different societies it did is an important part of the subtext of "current" Safehold but not really germane to what's happening going forward. A lot of this, however, stems from the expansion of the human footprint from the original sites prepared by Shan Wei and her technicians into the howling wilderness of the rest of Safehold after the War of the Fallen and the withdrawal of the Archangels. A lot of it was in the form of individual bands, each led and financed by one or a small group of individuals, who (in essence) was granted a fief by the Church (which "owned" all of Safehold). For the most part, the fief holder had a very high degree of authority, and the farther away from the original enclaves and the more isolated the new freeholds were, the greater his authority was. Even before the end of the War Against the Fallen the Church had begun recognizing an explicit aristocracy in most places, in no small part because the Archangels wanted that sort of hierarchical social structure to help winnow out the possible Fallen hidden in those isolated communities. And, post Armageddon Reef, the Church became much more specifically authoritarian, thanks in no small part to the need to crush the Fallen, which made aristocracy a much more comfortable fit. The differing natures of the various societies of Safehold are a factor of geographical separation and, in some cases, due to what you might call "mindsets" which survived the reprogramming process which tailored their memories. The psych types responsible for it did the least reshuffling they could do to create the new memories Langhorne and the others needed, so a lot of preOperation Ark societal values survived and the various enclaves tended to be seeded with colonists from similar backgrounds. That means that despite the memory meddling anf the Writ, each population node had its own beginning "personality," and those personalities then evolved in isolation from one another to produce what in many cases were radically different societies.

As far as Dilandu's observation about the armored knight and feudalism goes, he's right. There have been other societies in which land was held in return for service, however. One could even make the case that that was true of the early Roman Republic when the legions were staffed with citizens performing their obligated service. It didn't take all that long for war to reemerge as a human pastime on Safehold, especially with the example of the Fallen before its people, but the need for military service went even deeper than that. Safehldian predators are scary, people (you actually meat a great dragon in TFT, which should help make that point clear, and the "unconsecrated" lands have all sorts of nasty threats to human safety. The need to provide "armed forces" to deal with such a threat was very much a part of the early settlement history of places like Harchong, and a three-tiered system evolved. The "standing army" or "quick response" force often was mounted (and the heavy knight/cavalryman did emerge as as the queen of battle in most Safeholdian societies), and the notion quickly grew that the people who worked the land in an area owed service and support to the nobles who were ready to respond to the great dragon of the king wyvern or the slash lizard at the drop of a hat. (Please do remember what Cayleb was doing the afternoon he and Merlin met.) Next were the "ready reserve," the militia who could be called up to assist or to provide are security while the knights hunted down and dealt with the threat. Most of them were small freeholders --- peasant --- who worked their own land for themselves, but paid taxes to their overlords and protectors as well as their tithed to the Church. And lastly, emerging in places like Harchong and Desnair, especially, were the serfs, who were bound to the land and provided their labor to the mounted lords and knights in order to let those mounted lords and knights train and be constantly ready to respond to threats. Slavery emerged later (although not all that much later), initially as a legal punishment for criminals (the need for labor was to great to waste convicted felons by letting them just sit around in cells, so they wound up either indentured or, later, simply sold to people who needed labor) and then as the fate of those who failed to pay their debts. War captives were added to the pot and, eventually, some of the "nobles" began fighting campaigns which were basically glorified slaving expeditions. The Church didn't like it, but some of its theologians --- especially in Harchong --- had found passages in the Writ which could be construed to endorse (or at least permit) the institution. Obviously, different parts of Safehold dealt with that in different ways, and in Charis, outright slavery was pretty much a nonstarter frm the beginning.

Other events and processes during the expansion across Safehold helped to create these and other foundational differences between, say, Charis and North Harchong, but that's probably enough to be going on with here.