Stickpicker

[Squaredeal Sten]

I note that the term "stickpicker" as a social and economic status has few official references, but is firmly embedded in most of our Gloranthas including mine.  Now  I am asking you whether you define it the same way I do:

Members of the clan or tribe who have no land to work and no skilled trade. No land means they are neither primary landholders (carls) nor tenant farmers. including not being among the clan's  herders and not having a hide-equivalent of herd animals, and maybe no grazing rights. They have a destitute standard of living.

They will ordinarily have some seasonal agricultural employment, for example as harvest hands.  They pick up odd jobs.  But "stickpicker" comes from their picking up things of negligible value, tkat is windfall branches. from the clan's wooded areas. and selling them either as firewood or as charcoal (thus they are charcoal burners, a dirty job).

 

References:

The first pace I saw it was In the King of Sartar game.

Recent discussions in these forums that use "stickpicker" include:

and

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited Sunday at 04:59 AM by Squaredeal Sten
added second link, bad typing

[John Biles]

In Sartar:  Kingdom of Heroes for Heroquest, the worker group is described as:

There are also the workers: Makers, who build and craft; Cabbage-folk, who scrabble in gardens; Traders, who count money; Stickpickers, who gather fallen wood in the forest; jugglers, and other vulgar poets; beggars, everyone a thief if your back is turned; and slaves, animals.”  (Page 210)

 

 

 

[jajagappa]

13 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

I note that the term "stickpicker" as a social and economic status has few official references, but is firmly embedded in most of our Gloranthas including mine.

First place I saw the term was in King of Sartar, which is the same reference later used in Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes. Also p.58 "There was a god named Eurmal who did not have much going for him. He was less than a stickpicker, because he had no kin, no friends, and no place to live." And on the back cover of the revised edition: "Listen! This is the Saga of Argrath, Lord of the Seven Directions, High King of the World, who was the son of a stickpicker"

@Nick Brooke made a nice tale about "Argrath the Stickpicker" which you can find here: Argrath the Stickpicker (albionsoft.com)

 

[EricW]

Beware the Stickpickers - Beat-Pot Aelwrin was a kitchen slave. Argrath is the son of Stickpickers. Trickster gives terrifying magics to those whom the rest of society despises and ignores. One day they will rise! 🙂 

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, EricW said:

Argrath is the son of Stickpickers.

But less of an Ambedkar and more of a Feric Jaggar?

[Memestream]

On 6/30/2024 at 4:11 AM, EricW said:

Beware the Stickpickers - Beat-Pot Aelwrin was a kitchen slave. Argrath is the son of Stickpickers. Trickster gives terrifying magics to those whom the rest of society despises and ignores. One day they will rise! 🙂 

On this note, and I could just be plain wrong by virtue of a wealth of examples to the contrary that I simply haven't run across...

... but I tend to construe the social status of stickpicker as more commonly being ephemeral within Orlanthi society than not. It seems more akin to being presently disenfranchised rather than indicative of anything like hereditary servility. It also seems to me that given prevailing social attitudes(informed by myth no less), a lot of them would be particularly prone to pursuing desperate feats of derring do, and thus either move up or die trying.

Edited 13 hours ago by Memestream
Typo

[Sir_Godspeed]

2 hours ago, Memestream said:

On this note, and I could just be plain wrong by virtue of a wealth of examples to the contrary that I simply haven't run across...

... but I tend to construe the social status of stickpicker as more commonly being ephemeral within Orlanthi society than not. It seems more akin to being presently disenfranchised rather than indicative of anything like hereditary servility. It also seems to me that given prevailing social attitudes(informed by myth no less), a lot of them would be particularly prone to pursuing desperate feats of derring do, and thus either move up or die trying.

I'm not sure. I wouldn't put "heroism/adventurism" up as a big factor in social mobility in any society, I doubt the demographical numbers would add up, though I suppose endemic warfare might be used to weed out population surplus and/or capture slaves. 

I agree with the others above that stickpicker is a description for the lowest social rung in Orlanthi societies, but with the discardment of the old vernacular of thane, carl, cottar, etc. you sorta have to map the old ideas onto the new vernacular. So you have the nobility, the free, the semi-free and the unfree now, iirc (correct me if I'm wrong here). It probably bears reminding ourselves that these are ideal classes - something the Orlanthi tell themselves to make things seem more orderly than they really are. 

Then we get into the issue of land allocation. One of the things that made me really interested in the Orlanthi clans was how their land-ownership was supposedly collective, with the individual families being granted land use rights rather than ownership. This is roughly still canon, I believe, but I think there was some clarification with how this allocation is ultimately derived not from the clan itself, but from the local earth temple institutions, as Ernalda is seen as the primarily "landowner". 

Anyway, it still ends up as a stratified society, where the nobility/thanes are those who are allocated the largest and most choice pieces of land, with carls/free farmers being given lesser plots and rights, and then you have the semi-free/cottars being those who apparently either directly given their own land at all and must effectively "sub-let" from nobility (or wealthy free/carls) OR, the plots they're allocated are so deprived that they must supplement their income with work on nobles or free farmer's properties, I guess. I can't help thinking of Scandinavian husmenn or Scottish crofters, where you essentially have smaller garden-plot houses who must otherwise partake in work on the larger property to either pay for their plot, or to simply get enough to live. It's both a case of the plot/property being too poor to farm on a large scale, as well as the family in question lacking the resources (oxen, manpower, plow, etc.) to do so even if they were given a better plot, at least in the foreseeable future. 

So where does this leave stickpickers? They might simply be synonymous with semi-free/cottar farmers in the is case. I don't see signs of most Orlanthi societies having an even more downtrodden social class, like serfdom, so I'm hesitant to propose that. Stickpickers might be semi-free farmers on the poorer end of the scale, or they might be completely disenfranchised family members who are seen as superfluous. Maybe sent off by their parents or other guardians to do seasonal work, or be day laborers, or otherwise supplement the household's income with whatever activity they can (hence the stick-picker or charcoal burner epithet).

But what about entire "stickpicker households"? Again, they might just be really deprived semi-free/cottars. Their own plot so poor that not even it combined with work on their landlord's farm is enough to make things go around. Or they might be people with outlying plots where going to work on the landlord's plot regularly isn't feasible. Them being outlying and them collecting fallen branches for charcoal burning does sort of go together. It might also apply to itinerant families, entire households who do seasonal work as a group, sleeping at the entryway to the "longhouse" (Ernalda square house) or in the barn (or whatever the iron age equivalent is). This kind of living must truly be a hard, grim existence, especially with snowy winters, and people like this might rely as much on customs of hospitality, better-off relatives and temple institutions as they do on simple employment relations. 

Social mobility in Orlanthi societies is more fluid than in some other Gloranthan societies, but the classes mentioned above appear to be pretty reliably inheritable. Noble families have a tendency to stay noble, and so on. I like to imagine the Orlanthi to generally allocate suitable land to as many households as possible, simply because it means less social turbulence in the long term, but in all honesty, I suspect the nobility are fine with some paupers struggling as long as it means they get the choicest plots and easy access to farmhands. Plus, there's always the question of immigrants. You can't easily just carve out a new plot at the drop of a hat, so newcomers to another clan's tula or another tribe's lands must expect to live off landless labor for a while, if not for life, I'd imagine. 


These are just meanderings, I suspect they're at least somewhat based on me misunderstanding Jeff or other stuff I've read here, lol. Apologies if so.

[Squaredeal Sten]

3 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

..........
I agree with the others above that stickpicker is a description for the lowest social rung in Orlanthi societies,

........

 I can't help thinking of Scandinavian husmenn or Scottish crofters, where you essentially have smaller garden-plot houses who must otherwise partake in work on the larger property to either pay for their plot, or to simply get enough to live........

......., or they might be completely disenfranchised family members who are seen as superfluous. Maybe sent off by their parents or other guardians to do seasonal work, or be day laborers, or otherwise supplement the household's income with whatever activity they can (hence the stick-picker or charcoal burner epithet).

But what about entire "stickpicker households"?.......

'''''''. Plus, there's always the question of immigrants. You can't easily just carve out a new plot at the drop of a hat, so newcomers to another clan's tula or another tribe's lands must expect to live off landless labor for a while, if not for life, I'd imagine.

My own personal non-canon thoughts on these matters are

1) The lowest rung in Orlanthi societies is not stickpickers, but thralls / slaves.  and we are told that some clans keep thralls.

2) Stickpickers are free - but dispossessed.  No one owns them but they have less economic security than a thrall.

3) There  are probably several ways to be dispossessed (become stickpickers): 

The most likely seems to me to be a refugee taken in by the clan, but not given land  .Many such refugees will be tenant farmers / cotters, but it may not be good to subdivide the hides of land into smaller and smaller pieces,  Nor to change land ownership during the growing season:  If there's a sure way to generate resentment it is to let Tom plant the land but say Jerry gets to harvest it.  

A slightly rarer way to stickpicker status is to be an unskillful, unlucky, or ill cotter and be fired from the position because your crop is insufficient.  

A third way is to be outlawed for a period of years, then you come back - but that doesn't mean you automatically get land. 

A fourth way is to simply fall out with your family and be unwelcome at the longhouse.

And as you suggest, if a cottar family's gardens etc can't support all of them, someone has to be sent out to do seasonal labor and whatever else will bring in something to live on.

Edited 6 hours ago by Squaredeal Sten
spellng

[Joerg]

Most cottars (tenant farmers with an assigned hide to work for a thane of the clan or the tribe, with "hide" possibly being a flock of sheep) receive some means of income from the clan, but stickpickers usually don't have any livestock or gardening plot to their (household's) name and get by with what they can trade for their work or what they gather and produce from the commons. They might practice a "low craft" like basket weaving, they might collect raw material for other crafters (e.g. clay), they might collect fuel or winter fodder for a meal and somewhere to sleep, they attend as many worship services as possible for another bowl of food, they "pick up the rice where a wedding has been" or rather scour the fields after the harvest for anything the harvesters may have dropped, and they collect wild fruits, nuts, and roots. They might brew intoxicating concoctions.

At times of harvest or haymaking or for other communal works (e.g. on roads), stickpickers will receive tasks from the clan and be rewarded with better food and possibly temporary quarters.

When no such tasks are on the horizon, stickpickers are free to leave the clan and roam neighboring areas. Some may hunt on the side - what would be poaching in a feudal society is fair means of survival among the Orlanthi.

 

Marriages are arranged between clans, and while "landed" cottars do get marriage partners assigned, few stickpickers would. But Orlanthi society doesn't require marriage as a prerequisite for intercourse. Makign themselves representable would be a challenge, though. They will seek the company of low ranking guests.

Charity cases in the clan are effectively stickpickers, too, but they may have received an invitation to join house and table with other clan folk, where they help out to their capacity, even if that is minding the fowl or scaring away crows after the sowing.