Advowsons and Endowments

[piersb]

I've been taking a look at the Book of the Estate and trying to work out what the rules-as-intended are for Advowsons and Endowments.

My understanding is as follows. (I'm going to use an Abbey for the example, but it should still hold for Priories.)

Section: Abbey, p86

• Build an Abbey which can hold 20 monks for £54
• Endow a minimum of £9 worth of land to support those 20 monks
• Any extra endowment above that £9 comes back to me every year; so let's endow an extra £6 of land for easy sums

So I now have an Abbey which brings in £6/year

Section: Advowson, p87

• A lord who founds an Abbey "often" retains the right to the Advowson. 
• An Advowson requires building a Church or Abbey...
• ...but Advowsons can be bought and sold
• Purchase price for an Advowson is 20x the Endowment.

I can see two possible ways to read this:

1. I build the Abbey, and I get an Advowson through building it, for a total Glory of 15/year and no extra cost. If, on the other hand, someone else had built the Abbey then I could (assuming the GM or player who built it allows) buy the Advowson for a one-off payment of £300, and collect the glory each year for it. The original builder would keep the benefits of the Abbey itself, and would lose the benefits attached to the Advowson.
2. The Advowson does *not* come as part of the cost of building the Abbey, and I would need to pay for it separately (who to?)

I think it's the former, but was wondering if anyone else had any Advowson experiences, and how they'd interpreted it.

[Morien]

On the phone so a short response... 

Short version: Yes, you are right. 

Longer version:

Building the Abbey is just building the structure. You need to endow the land to support it. However, once you have done so and assuming it is a BC Abbey, then yes, you get the Advowson to it.

So for a cost of 54L to build and 15L endowment would give you that nice Abbey with 6L coming back at you and you having the Advowson. 

If you buy the Advowson, then you pay that 300L but I would argue that the Abbey effectively becomes yours at that point as you can appoint the abbot etc. I'd have to take a look that this isn't too open for abuse... But on the first blush it seems OK. Sure, you get an almost 60L Abbey by paying 180L (min 9L * 20), which would make it a bit cheaper but as the GM I can always hike the NPC endowment up a bit. Worth thinking about. 

Edited February 21, 2023 by Morien