#knight's fee

[healerqueen]

🐬 Sutcliff Ask Meme 🐬

Happy 105th birthday to beloved author Rosemary Sutcliff (born December 14, 1920). @verecunda put together a Q&A for Rosemary Sutcliff fans. Thanks for these great questions!

Rules: answer the questions, tag anyone who you think might want to play along, and - if you like - add a question of your own.

1. Your favourite work by Sutcliff. The Eagle of the Ninth, followed by The Silver Branch. Runners up are The Lantern Bearers, The Shield Ring, Frontier Wolf, Knight's Fee, and The Armourer's House. I love them all so much.

2. Your favourite bearer of the dolphin ring. Marcus Aquila. I admire him and identify with him (for his disability, not his personality).

3. A supporting or background character you love. Rosemary Sutcliff writes the best supporting characters. I'm going to go with Aunt Honoria. She is everything, with her strong, quirky, plucky personality, unfazed by any crisis. Not to mention her flamboyant makeup.

4. Your favourite animal companion. Cub from Eagle of the Ninth. Adorable wolf puppy turned loyal friend.

5. Is there any setting you find especially memorable? Maybe the abandoned signal tower where Marcus and Esca have their final showdown in Eagle of the Ninth.

6. Wild geese flighting and striped native rugs: is there a classic Sutcliff motif that never fails to warm your heart when it appears? I love Sutcliff's mentions of the curlew and plover.

7. The natural world is a vivid presence in all her work. Is there any particular nature description that sticks in your mind? The sunset just before the world falls apart in Eagle of the Ninth. "Before their feet the land swept away southward over ridge after ridge into the blue distance.... Far below them, among dark ranks of pine trees, the northern arm of a great loch reflected back the flame of the sunset; and Marcus greeted it as a familiar friend...and yet there was a queer superstitious feeling in him that it had all been too easy—a queer foreboding of trouble to come. And the sunset seemed to echo his mood. A most wonderful sunset; the whole western sky on fire, and high overhead, torn off, hurrying wind clouds caught the light and became great wings of gold that changed, even while Marcus watched them, to fiery scarlet. Stronger and stronger grew the light, until the west was a furnace banked with purple cloud, and the whole world seemed to glow, and the upreared shoulder of the mountain far across the loch burned crimson as spilled wine. The whole sunset was one great threat of coming tempest; wind and rain, and maybe something more. Suddenly it seemed to Marcus that the crimson of that distant mountain shoulder was not wine, but blood." —The Eagle of the Ninth, Rosemary Sutcliff

8. Biggest tearjerker. (Happy or sad tears!) I have cried rereading the bit when Marcus's friends come to support him before his big surgery.

9. How did you first discover Sutcliff? It must have come home from the library in the family's stack of books, but I wasn't the one who chose it. Once I read it, at age 15, I was hooked for life.

10. What is it about her work that appeals to you the most? The characters, I think. She's a master of characterization, and I care about them so much. But the writing style itself is masterful, and she also excels at writing plot, setting, themes, character relationships, tension, and so much more.

11. A book that deserves more love. Knight's Fee and The Shield Ring. I also love the last third of Blood Feud.

12. A book you haven’t read yet, but want to. I think I've read most of the ones I want to read, but there are a few I should read. I finally read Black Ships Before Troy in 2025, and I'd like to read The Wanderings of Odysseus.

13. Which book(s) would you love to get a film or TV adaptation? I don't usually like adaptations, so I usually hope my favorites will not be adapted. But I'd love a perfect book-accurate adaptation of Eagle of the Ninth that captured everything I love about the book. I know it has a movie, and that's great, but it's not accurate to the book, even if they did some things well.

14. Is there any historical period, incident, or figure you wish she’d written about? Ooh. I think she wrote most of the ones I love! I am obsessed with Roman Britain because of her. She has a couple of medieval books. She wrote about Vikings. I think I'd have liked to see more Viking novels from her, cause I love Vikings so much—but the ones she did write are excellent (I can think of at least three).

15. Rec a Sutcliff-themed fanwork (fic, art, vid, etc.) to share with fellow fans. This is my favorite piece of fan art. I have not seen enough fan art for these wonderful books.

I had fun answering these questions.

I tag: @thejoyousjester @freenarnian @idratherdreamofjune @dimsilver @septembersung and anyone else who wants to do this.

[we-are-knight]

The 'Knight's Fee'

From 'Realm Divided' by Dan Jones, Chatper 4 ("Lords and Masters"), pp. 106-107. 'Great lords' lands were measured by the unit of the knight's fee: an in exact unit, depending on location, but which was reckoned to provide enough income to sustain a single knight for one year. The 'knight's fee' was a crucial measure of political, feudal and fiscal accounting, which is why the term is prominent in Magna Carta...' The book also makes note that the term "Feudal" is itself derived from the term "fee", referencing the importance of the landholding system.

[racefortheironthrone]

I’m a bit confused about Knights as a social class. Were they all younger noble sons trying to make a living? How did they pay for their equipment? Could they own land or were they dependant on a master for their finances?

No. Knights were a particular section of the nobility, below the level of lord but above that of esquire. Indeed, one could argue that they were the foundational element of the nobility, since fiefdoms were made up of knight’s fees.

They paid for their armor usually in cash from the feudal taxes and rents that they extracted from their knight’s fee. 

And knights usually did “own” land - the aforesaid knight’s fee - although there were household knights or tourney knights or the like. 

[racefortheironthrone]

In a pre-modern society how many people need to be farmers to support a non-farmer? Like whats the percentage? More than the 99 to 1 for soldiers, would 9 farmers for 1 non-farmer make sense?

9 to 1 is way off. 

A knight’s fee was a common metric used for fiefdoms - larger estates were usually calculated in multiples of knight’s fees, smaller estates in fractions that led to the imposition of scutage - which is meant to represent the size of land needed to support one knight. 

A knight’s fee works out to five or more (I’ve seen 12 cited most often) hides, and a hide of land was supposed to support ten families. So a knight’s fee would have around 50-120 families living on it, and given an average household size of around five people during the Middle Ages, that works out to 250-600 people to support a knight. EDIT: Sorry, I don’t know where I got ten families from, it should be one. So that works out to 5-12 families per knight, and 25-60 people to support a knight. 

[racefortheironthrone]

Is the three hides of land offered to each of Gregor's men by Ser Bonifer a fair reward for their military service?

Three hides of land is a good bit - it’s a bit below a “knight’s fee” which was usually five or more hides, but a single hide is enough to support one family, or 30 modern acres. So each of Gregor’s men gets 90 acres of land, which would put them solidly in the ranks of the yeoman - below the knight but above the knave, as it were.