Hi! You said you could help talk me through feudal worldbuilding, and I’d love to pick your brain!
Absolutely! Probably easiest to hit me up over discord (I'm _gremble) and then I would be happy to talk your ear off. 🤣 My wheelhouse is very narrowly focused on mid 9th century England (re: what Anglo Saxon society/military/governance looked like when the vikings rolled up), and iirc, some of the features you mentioned being interested in are more the product of later medieval political structures. I cannot help you with those, but I can probably help with some of the overall mental shifts, because a lot of the things we take for granted in the modern era were just............ not the way things worked back then.
In particular, the word "general" in your initial ask jumped out at me, because it brought up one of the exact issues that I'd run into. The character I was working with had been presented in canon as "the king's top general" -- not those words, but definitely those vibes -- that he was The Guy In Charge Of The Army. Except as soon as I started researching military structures in that period, I found out that that's not how armies worked. When the king needed to go to war, he would call on all his top landholding nobles to round up a bunch of their dudes -- which would be a large number of armed peasants, and a smaller number of fulltime warriors -- and bring their portion of the army to bear.
But these various segments of the army remained under the command of their various lords, marching under separate banners. The lords, in essence, were the generals -- there's not one guy commanding the entire army as a single unit (except for the king, sort of), and there's certainly not any non-noble who doesn't own any dudes getting to call the shots and dictate strategy. Talented and successful warriors might well get rewarded for their service, and given land grants that would generate tons of money for them and put a large number of conscriptable peasants under their control -- and might have the ear of the king if they're known to be good at tactics -- but they don't have authority over anyone else's forces.
The politically neutral, career military guy that we think of when we hear the word "general," who has no independent power of his own but receives a paycheck from his higher-ups to command their men for them, didn't exist yet.
It's a bit of a paradigm shift, because we're used to the military as something separate, that's subordinate to civilian leadership and works in service to it, not for those to be one and the same. We're also used to a norm of strong nation-states with one centralized army, which was very much not the case throughout feudalism/manorialism -- at least in the Anglo Saxon period, power was decentralized and delegated, and being king involved a lot of herding cats wrangling your nobles, not exercising direct control. The king was the guy who could get the most other guys to back him up.
(In the same vein, early kingdoms also tended to be a patchwork of other, smaller kingdoms that retained a great deal of their own autonomy and identity. The modern nation-state that we're so used to, with a single national identity, is an astonishingly recent invention.)
Anyway, hands-down the most useful and eye-opening book I've read on the subject is Clifford J. Rogers' Soldiers Lives Throughout History: The Middle Ages. It's like $80 to buy (😭) but the pdf is on Anna's Archive, and it's invaluable. It is, essentially, a social history of medieval warfare -- most military histories focus on the politics of a particular conflict, or the technology and tactics involved, but this book is all about what life on the ground looked like. A+++ resource for anyone writing war and military logistics in a medieval (or medieval-flavored) setting.
