What is the "career path" for a knight?

[Uthred]

So fresh new knights start out as Vassal Knight's with a shiny manor. But where do they go from there? Obviously feudal society is rigidly hierarchal with limited social mobility. But what can a vassal knight realistically aim for? Certainly for starting knights catching the attention of the king in battle and getting bounced up the ladder to Banneret or Baron. Is there a more reliable way to accrue land or rank? Can someone like Roderick raise a vassal to banneret status? Or is there no real planned "career trajectory" and its largely dictated by the campaign and GM whim? 

[Morien]

Vassal knights are relatively rare and in a sense, they gave already 'won'. Most would not advance further. PKs may be the exception, being often able to gather a lot of Glory and doing big adventures. Thus they may win more manors, either outright or via marriages to heiresses (albeit not at the beginning when they are fresh young knights) as rewards for their quests.

Roderick likely doesn't have enough lands to spare to elevate one to a Banneret, not to mention that in BotW, that title is given only by the King. Even an estate holder would be rare inside Salisbury.

Finally, there is always conquest, too. Anarchy offers challenges but also opportunities, as does wars against the Saxons, the French and the Irish.

So yeah, it depends a lot on what the GM has planned and what the players are interested in. By default, the PKs might earn a manor or two but not advance in titles.

Edited July 9, 2023 by Morien

[Morien]

Mind you, nothing prevents the GM and the players to play a high-powered game with the PKs becoming barons or even more by the end of the campaign. Indeed, there is something to be said about having baronial level PKs debating whether to stand with Arthur or Lancelot or gasp Mordred in the end.

While the Book of the Warlord implies that the baronial PKs ought to be retired from adventuring, you don't have to do that in your campaign. Plenty of kings and princes and dukes and counts and barons in the Round Table who adventure regularly and rely on their officers to keep things running back home.

[Uthred]

That helps to clarify it. I think I was a bit overwhelmed with all the sourcebooks and was mistaken thinking that one "had" to go through them as opposed to them being additional resources for different tiers of play. The default being that there isn't much "social climbing" is fine.

[Morien]

1 hour ago, Uthred said:

That helps to clarify it. I think I was a bit overwhelmed with all the sourcebooks and was mistaken thinking that one "had" to go through them as opposed to them being additional resources for different tiers of play. The default being that there isn't much "social climbing" is fine.

Yeah, you definitely don't HAVE to go through to become a baron. But if that is what you and your players are interested it, it is definitely possible.

In our first campaign (pre-GPC, started early 2000s), the PKs convinced their neighbors and the Earl of Salisbury that it would be useful to have a banneret (nowadays estate holder) overseeing the 'Levcomagus March', i.e. the border with Levcomagus. As this predated BotE, I had like 50/50 mix of vassals and household knights in Salisbury, so the Earl was not losing his land, exactly, just putting an extra middle management in place. One of the PKs became the banneret of about 10 vassal manors, even though he directly controlled only two (actually one, since the other was his wife's, who was also a PK).

Anyway, fast forward to the next generation, and the new banneret, an NPK (due to timeskip and inheritance shenanigans, ignore it for now) joined Sir Kay's new invasion of Normandy, as the King of the Franks had started reclaiming counties and duchies conquered by Arthur during the Roman War. (This was a rewritten French War about Guenever's cousin.) Thanks to some excellent rolling in an important battle as well as having sunk a lot of extra money for mercs (as the PKs did too), Sir Kay rewarded the Banneret with a minor Barony of Mortain, of about 40 manors, as long as he could claim it from the current owners, which he did with the help of the PKs. So yeah, they ended up with their banneret being also a Baron in Normandy, and of course with them having manors in Mortain, too. But there wouldn't have been anything to prevent a PK doing the same, although without the resources of a banneret, it would have been more difficult to impress Sir Kay. Another PK (an RTK) actually got offered the crown of Bulith during the Cambrian War, but that would have required his son to marry a tribal princess to seal the alliance, and the lad decided that she wasn't comely enough. So the war continued and the PK died in the fighting.

In our current campaign, two of the PKs married two younger daughters of the King of Ergyng, and are thus earmarked to gain small estates in there once the King kicks the bucket. Other past PKs have held estates from time to time, but lost them either due to war or because they were simply gifts rather than grants. Another PK has a 'pseudo'-estate, a collection of 5 manors, just scattered around Britain and not officially an estate. And since I am a big softy when it came to investments, they are currently living it big during the Pax Arthuriana. But little do they know... 😛

[SaxBasilisk]

I should add that the Book of the Warlord does present a potential path upward from vassal knight. It's not definitive by any means, but it might give you a way to think about it in addition to our conversation here.

[Uthred]

1 hour ago, SaxBasilisk said:

I should add that the Book of the Warlord does present a potential path upward from vassal knight. It's not definitive by any means, but it might give you a way to think about it in addition to our conversation here.

Cool, I'll check that out

[mj6373]

The default assumption of Pendragon is that vassals are rare and weak, because it treats the norm as "Liege keeps 80% of their land demesne and has a crapton of household knights."

 

This is pretty silly, to me; infeudation is IRL a vastly essential part of being a landowner in the time of knights because managing more than a bit of territory yourself is impossible and hiring someone to run it without leasing it to them is inefficient. The goal of feudalism is to maximize the amount of military power produced per unit of land, which is best accomplished by having vassal knights running their own manors in exchange for giving you military service; so most of a king's land is infeudated, and their larger vassals sub-infeudate most of their land, and so on for anyone who has more land than they could reasonably administer themselves (which is not much more than a single estate). Plus the successful perpetuation of the knightly class doesn't even really make sense with less than 20% of knights able to support families, of which each can only expect their eldest son to be family-supporting, and that 80% non-landed knight figure *really* doesn't gel with the proclaimed rarity of knighting anything past a second son.

 

So I just throw out the idea that a liege is hoarding demesne land because infeudation weakens them. Of course, while that removes the concern that a liege would be unwilling to reward service with land, it also means that they're *already* going to have infeudated most of their land, so they won't necessarily have much to give. This is, in essence, why marriage to an heiress is vaunted as such a rare and special reward - the liege likely has little to no land to spare from their demesne to reward overachievers, and certainly wouldn't snatch back land from other loyal vassals to do so (that's how you run out of loyal vassals in a hurry), but if it so happens that a parcel of already-infeudated land has gone to a maiden, it's essentially been freed up to "grant" to another knight without technically being stripped from the original vassal's family.

 

While I wouldn't be opposed to a liege granting land out of his demesne's reserves every once in a blue moon, I'd say the main paths to promotion should be 1) strategic marriage, 2) holding office, and especially 3) conquest. One of the reasons land ownership webs get so messy and geographically disconnected is precisely because the normal thing to do when you conquer an area, as a lord, is to reward your current vassals who just did the bloody work of conquering it for you with portions of the land in accordance with their station (and perhaps at this stage a little extra to some smaller vassals for stupendous deeds in battle, wink wink nudge nudge to the overachievers), and not necessarily in accordance with the geographic proximity of a given vassal to their new land. And once you have a bit of land to your name, you can of course conquer on your own time, and ask your liege to let you hold the new manor you captured in their name.

 

So for me, the PK families tend to accrue land particularly during the Anarchy, Boy King, and Conquest Periods, simply because that's when most of the territory-grabbing wars can happen (some even started by the PKs, perhaps, depending on their positions in Salisbury during the Anarchy), and indirectly by the increase in available heiresses with so many men dying. While this is an exceptional battle, this is mentioned directly as a consequence post-Badon with landless knights getting manors and landed knights increasing their holdings, and you can sort of use it for inspiration when imagining what reward an Anarchy-era party might get if, say, they managed through clever political maneuvering to have Salisbury conquer a large chunk of Essex (as happened in my only complete campaign). Then after that, the rest of the campaign features a pretty darn stable political map, barring the rare substantial marriage or somebody earning an estate for saving Guenever from a dragon or whatnot. Basically, the early war-heavy periods give the players a chance to earn, through stupendous martial deed and political maneuvering, the status that their family will carry for the remaining largely-peaceful periods.

 

(Of note is that I also tend to have Arthur essentially remain in charge of the land he gains during the Conquest Period rather than just kind of bailing from the continent, hence why I included that Period, but canonically you don't need to give your knights further land rewards at that point if you don't want to, because by GPC default Arthur is just like "meh, they called me Emperor, all the spent lives have been worth it now, I'm going home" and everything goes back to before he got there. Personally, I like the idea of him essentially bringing feudalism to the continent by raising up local leaders who side with him into lords, and otherwise bestowing continental territory to his greatest supporters. He even conquered further east than in canon, in part so I could reclaim some years I'd shaved off the Uther Period to make Arthur younger at the start of Boy King, and so I could justify him making a gesture of restoring and granting Judea to the Jewish RTPK.)

Edited July 11, 2023 by mj6373

[Morien]

1 hour ago, mj6373 said:

so I could justify him making a gesture of restoring and granting Judea to the Jewish RTPK.)

That must have made the Byzantine Empire overjoyed. 😛

[mj6373]

1 hour ago, Morien said:

That must have made the Byzantine Empire overjoyed. 😛

Look, I love Pendragon's extensive anachronism as much as anyone, but the Byzantine Empire is definitionally a successor/continuation state to Rome's fall. Just 'cause the continental character options said Byzantine characters are an option doesn't mean it actually makes any sense for it to coexist with Arthur conquering a still-existant Roman Empire. The Western Roman Empire just lives a little longer than it did historically (honestly it's only like 50 years anyway which is way less than the usual anachronisms) to fall to Arthur instead.

[Morien]

2 hours ago, mj6373 said:

Look, I love Pendragon's extensive anachronism as much as anyone, but the Byzantine Empire is definitionally a successor/continuation state to Rome's fall. Just 'cause the continental character options said Byzantine characters are an option doesn't mean it actually makes any sense for it to coexist with Arthur conquering a still-existant Roman Empire. The Western Roman Empire just lives a little longer than it did historically (honestly it's only like 50 years anyway which is way less than the usual anachronisms) to fall to Arthur instead.

I get out of that simply by saying that Arthur conquered the WRE (or if I am feeling really peckish, the Kingdom of Ostrogoths with their vassals and allies), and the Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople is doing just dandy.

[mj6373]

12 hours ago, Morien said:

I get out of that simply by saying that Arthur conquered the WRE (or if I am feeling really peckish, the Kingdom of Ostrogoths with their vassals and allies), and the Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople is doing just dandy.

Awesome! Lots of great ways to Pendragon. I was just explaining my logic for my own campaign, with Arthur taking a role in the fall of Western Rome and subsequent establishment of the Byzantine Empire (and taking a bit of extra territory that happens to be easily reclaimed when Arthur's reign shatters), rather than postdating it. Having him war with the Ostrogoths is its own very cool take if you're big on having the Byzantine Empire be a thing already for whatever other plot interests you've got going.