Flipping the Honorable Amount of Infeudation

[mj6373]

Hey guys! Just trying to figure out some good ratios here. I made a post a while back trying to use a high cost of material transportation to justify why infeudation would be cheaper than maintaining mostly household knights, in order to undo the idea in Book of the Estate that lords would keep the vast majority of their land as demesne, but it was pointed out to me that my system made land nearly a non-reward since it was basically impossible to get any without immediately subinfeudating it, even just going from one manor to two as a vassal knight.

 

So, instead, I wanna go with a social solution. Book of the Warlord gives rules to massively penalize Glory and cause Honor bleed over time if a lord spends too little on his standard of living; I want to adopt that idea similarly to having too little enfoeffed land for your station, treating vassals as an absolutely essential part of one's status, in opposition to the current rules which hold that having too *much* subinfeudated land causes disrepute and dishonor.

 

However, I'm not sure what good ratios would be. It should clearly only start above a certain point, maybe once you have ~£50 or so in landholdings, and should probably scale so a higher proportion of your land has to be enfoeffed the more you have. As an initial think-as-I-write spitball, maybe anybody who accumulates £50 or more in manorial holdings is liable to have these legally compiled into an estate, and anyone with an estate is only supposed to keep 10% of their land outside that central estate as demesne. So if you're an average baron with £300 of total holdings, of which £100 is the caput major, then you have £200 of outliers, of which you're expected to keep no more than £20, or two average manors, as additional demesne land, and the other £180 should be enfoeffed.

 

Honestly my history gland says it should be harsher than that, but probably if I did go any harsher then gaining new landholdings for great deed or conquest would barely feel like it matters. And anyway, subdividing estates makes the paperwork annoying, and this does at least accomplish my goal where the percentage of demesne held goes down the more land you have (since caput major size is fairly static and represents a larger portion of smaller holdings).

 

What do you guys think?