1634: The Ram Rebellion

by Eric Flint

  “What it boils down to, is the bank is going to cut all the farmers some slack. Considering the circumstances, what with the Ring of Fire and all, we’re giving you a year to get caught up.”

  Birdie was pretty sure that Edgar wasn’t telling him everything. Bankers always acted like it was their own money you were asking them for.

  “Suppose I need some more money? Bank gonna be good for that? There’s a lot that needs doing, and it ain’t getting done for nothing.”

  “We might loan you more money, Mr. Newhouse. If Willie Ray agrees that what you need it for is important to the town, it’s more than likely that you’ll get what you need.”

  All this support came as a bit of a surprise to Birdie. Grantville had never been farming country. The hills were just too steep and the valleys too narrow. The focus had always been on industry of some sort, natural gas, coal mines, even the toilet factory. Just before the Ring of Fire, a fiber optics plant was being built. Farmers had never been a big part of the local economy.

  * * *

  “Poor bastards,” Willie Ray remarked when he and Birdie reached Birdie’s tractor. Willie Ray had been introducing Birdie to the local farmers. The introduction had been accomplished with gestures, for the most part, with a few badly accented words of German thrown in here and there.

  “What happened to them?” Birdie asked.

  “From what I gather, Sundremda, that’s this little village here, used to have fifteen farming families plus a few folks who had houses and gardens in the village but weren’t farmers. There was a blacksmith, a carpenter, and the like. This last year has been rough though. Now there are six farming families and four of those families are part time farmers. Halbbauer the Germans call ‘em. ‘Half farmers,’ that would be in English.”

  Birdie knew what that was like. He regularly had to work odd jobs to keep the farm going.

  “They also lost a bunch of their livestock,” Willie Ray continued, “which made getting in this year’s crop just about impossible. Some of it was lost to the mercenaries that hit the place a few months back, and some to Remda, a little town that way, a ways, where they ran when the village got hit.

  “Ernst, that fella you shook hands with, called it theft when I was out here before with Miss Abrabanel to translate. From what I understand the folk in Remda are saying they took the stock for rent and fines. Then, some bug came up about the same time, and quite a few folks died. So everyone’s blaming everyone else and there are law suits goin’ both ways. Meanwhile, the folks in Remda seem to figure possession is nine points of the law, so they’re holdin’ the stock till everything’s settled. I’m guessing they’re also holdin’ the oxen to force the Sundremda villagers to settle their way.

  “You clear on what’s needed?” Willie Ray asked when he had finished his explanation.

  Birdie nodded. He and Willie Ray had walked the fields with Ernst and defined what was needed where. Willie Ray headed back to town and Birdie got to work harvesting and thinking. His farm was just over the Ring Wall, less than a mile away. If he could cut some sort of gap in the Ring Wall this would be the perfect farm for him. He didn’t want to put anyone out of their homes but it looked like they needed him as much as he needed the land. Maybe he could buy this place or most of it anyway. Once he got done here he’d go see if Willie Ray would support him with the bank.

  July 1631

  Willie Ray had agreed that buying a farm outside the Ring of Fire and near Birdie’s place, what was left of it, was a good idea. However; he didn’t know much of anything about how Birdie would go about buying a farm here. Birdie had talked to MacKay, who had recommended one of his troops who spoke English and German and knew a bit about farming.

  Danny McTavish was willing enough to act as translator and guide, for a fair payment. Fair payment, in McTavish’s eyes, was five one-liter plastic soda bottles, complete with their lids, and a gutting knife. Birdie threw dinner into the deal, so they could eat while they talked over the plan. Birdie liked McTavish, anyway. The scruffy Scot sure could use some dental work, but he spoke German and knew the area fairly well.

  “Won’t work, what you’re saying,” McTavish said. “You won’t be able to buy a farm for the working. Farmers around here are mostly tenants. They don’t own their farms the way you up-timers do.”

  “I didn’t really expect them to,” Birdie answered. “I was just glad to find out that things aren’t as bad as I thought they would be. I never paid much attention to history, back in school. I figured that just because they didn’t own their farms, there was no reason I couldn’t buy one though.”

  “You understand, I’m no expert.” Danny tugged his goatee, apparently to help organize his thoughts. “You don’t exactly buy land here, at least not to use it yourself. What you do is rent a piece of a farming village. Along with the rent you pay, you get some specific rights, all of them written down proper, in the contract. You get a house, or the right to build a house. You get the right to gather or cut a given amount of firewood, and to pasture so many head of cattle or sheep or whatever. It’s all specified in the contract. Finally, you get a strip of field to plant.

  “Mostly you lease a piece of land for ninety-nine years or three generations, whichever comes first. Now, you don’t always go to the laird for this. The laird might have sold off some part, or all of the rents. When that’s happened, and I’m told it happens most of the time, there might be a whole bunch of different people, and each one of them owns a part of the rent.”

  “What does the lord own after he’s sold the rents?” Birdie asked “Mining rights?”

  “Mining rights belong to the ruler. The laird never had those. Timber rights, probably. Maybe hunting rights. It could be. It depends on how he sold the rents. Sometimes, a laird would even give the rents to someone, like as a dowry or for the support of a relative. Sometimes, all that’s left to the laird is the right to control who cuts down how much of the forest. Or, other times, he might have nothing much. It could just be a leftover from when the ‘von Somewheres’ really were lairds with rights and duties to the folk under them. Back when only a ‘von Somewhere’ could own land and owning land meant you were a noble. Maybe back then you couldn’t sell your land and still have ‘von’ in front of your name.” Danny shrugged. “The truth is I don’t know why it’s that way. But, I’ve talked to a lot of farmers since I came here with Captain MacKay, and that seems to be the way it is.”

  “Do we have to track down everyone that owns a part of the rent if we want to rent a farm in one of the villages around here?”

  “If lots of people own a piece of the rent, they generally hire someone to handle the rental. You have to deal with who ever that is, and it’s usually a lawyer. The Germanies are a lawyer’s paradise.”

  “What about just going to the guy that owns the land and buying it?” Mary Lee asked.

  Danny was shaking his head. “Even if he hasn’t sold the rents, the village is probably rented. If you bought the land, you would be the new laird, but the rent contracts would still be there. You couldn’t use the land yourself. All you could do is collect the rents. If he’s sold the rents, I don’t think you’d be buying more than a piece of paper, or maybe hunting rights. If you want to farm, you pretty much have to rent a farm in a village. Then, after you got the rent worked out with the landlord, you have to be approved by the Gemeinde.”

  “The Ge... Gem..., the what?” Birdie asked.

  “The Gemeinde,” Danny explained, pronouncing the word carefully. “All the people who rent land in a village get together to decide what to do and when to do it. I’ve heard Mr. Hudson say it’s sort of a village co-op. Everyone plows, plants, and reaps together, and your ‘strip’ is your share of the profits. They’re usually a bit careful, the Gemeinde, about who they let rent the farms. Can’t really blame them for it, I suppose. You wouldn’t want to share the load with someone who wouldn’t pull their share, now would you?

  “The Gemeinde has a right to refuse s
omeone if they can find a reason for it. Usually, they use ‘moral turpitude’ of some sort. Mostly, the only people they allow to buy in to a village are someone they know, relatives or friends of people that already lived there. What with the war, and all that sort of thing, people are being a bit less particular about who they take on, lately. You’d have to have the animals to plow your fields, and you’d have to have the start up money.”

  Come to think of it, the farmers around here are a bit more independent than I would have guessed, Birdie thought. Kind of interdependent, too. He sat quietly and considered all this new information for a while and tried to apply it to what he already knew. The farmers in the area had turned out to be different from what he would have expected from his vague memories of high school history classes. They were a lot more like American farmers than the downtrodden serfs he’d thought they’d be, in most ways. The one big difference, which McTavish had just explained, was that seventeenth century German farmers worked and thought in collective terms, where up-time American farmers were used to operating as individuals.

  That meant . . .

  Sundremda had about two thousand acres of land but only about three hundred and fifty or so acres were crop land. The rest of the land was forest for firewood and building needs, a carp pond and more grazing land than the village really needed.

  The important thing, though, was that Sundremda was missing most of its tenant farmers. So, maybe he could buy the place, or at least buy that part of it that wasn’t rented to anyone. Maybe he could buy the rents, and pay himself. He might even be able to get some of the fallow fields as cropland. If he could arrange it, he would have over two hundred acres, maybe even three hundred acres. He would also have grazing rights, rights to a big share of the wood in the forest, as well as rights to the fish in the little pond the village had set up.

  Birdie didn’t want to just rent his tractor, or his services, he wanted to buy into the village. By preference, he wanted to own his own land. If he couldn’t do that, he’d try to buy the rents. At a minimum, he wanted to have a fair say in what got planted where and when. He wanted a vote in how things went down. Now, if he could just figure a way to do it.

  * * *

  “Mary Lee!” Birdie yelled. “Where are you, woman?”

  A muffled “Down here” led Birdie to the basement steps, where he heard Mary Lee clattering around. He descended, carefully. The light never had been that great down here.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, when he saw Mary Lee was counting things, then writing something on a tablet of paper.

  “Taking an inventory.”

  “Taking an inventory of what? And why? This stuff has been around for years. It’s mostly junk.”

  Mary Lee looked up from her counting with an annoyed expression on her face. “Junk like that old tractor of yours? Junk like those plastic bottles that are bringing about fifteen dollars each? There’s no such thing as junk anymore, Birdie, in case you haven’t noticed. Even rusty nails are better than no nails at all. There’s no telling what we’ve got in this basement, not to mention what’s in the attic. If stuff like plastic soda bottles can bring in that much money, we might get rich from this room. If you don’t want to help me here, go do your own inventory.”

  Mary Lee had been a bit testy lately, to Birdie’s way of thinking. Still, she might have a point. He left her to her business and went to do his own inventory.

  * * *

  Birdie came up with a fair amount of stuff with his inventory. He had more than some of his fellow up-time farmers, but not as much as others. There was quite a lot of junk that simply hadn’t been worth the cost of repairing up-time, but turned out to be irreplaceable down-time.

  With the help of Willie Ray and Danny McTavish, Birdie was able to gauge the down-time value of his stuff pretty well. It was a little frightening, in a way, the number of things that had a value ten or even a hundred times what it had been before. It really gave Birdie an appreciation of mass production. Mary Lee was right about the plastic coke bottles he had given Danny. They were selling for five to fifteen bucks apiece and the knife would sell for about a hundred bucks.

  The real money was in the machinery, though. Birdie had two tractors, one that worked, and one that didn’t. The one that didn’t work wouldn’t have been worth repairing up-time. It was over fifty years old and had been sitting in one of his sheds for the last twenty of those years. Now, though, if the engine could be repaired, it was worth the cost of repair and more. Each of his tractors was worth as much as his truncated farm.

  There was also the family car, which used gasoline, the farm truck that used natural gas from his well, and two junk cars. Birdie still didn’t know exactly what Mary Lee had found in the house. They had lived in this house for over twenty years, raised two children here, and rarely threw anything away. That was about standard, for a West Virginia farm.

  * * *

  Ernst Bachmeier looked at the men before him. The two up-timers he recognized. One was Willie Ray, who had bought the village’s crops while the crops were still in the field, and the other was Birdie, who had come out with his tractor and harvested those crops. The Scottish mercenary who was doing the translating made Ernst nervous.

  Nervous or not, Ernst dragged his mind back to what the Scot was saying. “Herr Newhouse is a farmer, but a part of his farm was left up-time by the Ring of Fire. He has the tools and equipment to support a farm much larger than he has now, and the skills of an up-time farmer. What he doesn’t have is the land to farm, or the knowledge of local conditions.”

  “With his tractor he would be a great help, and the village needs more people, but we don’t have the houses rebuilt,” Ernst replied.

  “His house is less than two miles from here. He says he can cut a way through the Ring Wall that will let him bring the tractor and other equipment back and forth.” There was a short discussion between the Scot and the up-timers, and then the Scot continued. “He does want to build a house in the village, and he wants to make something called a ‘septic system,’ so that he can have indoor plumbing, but that need not be done this year.”

  “In that case, it would be very good if he leased a farm in the village. I just wish we could find four more farmers to do the same.” Ernst was a bit concerned about getting all the land rented.

  “Well, actually, what he would like to do if he can is buy the land rather than rent it. Who owns the village?”

  “Until January, the owner was Ludwig von Gleichen-Tonna, the count of Gleichen, but he died without issue and the ownership is in question. Herr Junker is running things because he holds the Lehen on the village. He got the Lehen from his mother. She was the illegitimate daughter of an uncle of Anna Agnes of Hohenlohe-Weikersheim, who was married to the brother of the count of Gleichen. Anna Agnes of Hohenlohe-Weikersheim is also the niece of William the Silent.”

  Birdie wondered who William the Silent was. Someone important, obviously.

  Ernst was tempted by gossip and yielded to temptation. “They say Lady Anna Agnes bought her cousin a marriage using the leases on Sundremda and some other villages. Herr Junker’s mama, she was high strung.”

  Ernst wasn’t really sure about these people from the future buying his village. True, the up-timers had been fair, so far, but how would they treat the villagers if they owned the village? Would they have any need for tenants?

  He decided to evade the problem, for the moment. “I really don’t know who you would see about buying part of the village.”

  The soldier talked again to the up-timers then asked about buying the leases.

  “That would be Herr Junker, but I doubt he would sell. He sets great store by the villages. They were his mama’s dowry.”

  The soldier didn’t bother to consult before asking: “Is he the one to see about renting the parts of the village that aren’t rented now as well?”

  “Yes. But, I have a question. We do more than plow, sew, and reap. Does Herr Newhouse have tools and mac
hines that will do the other work the village needs?”

  There was more discussion back and forth between the Scot and the up-timers.

  “Some of it, yes,” the Scot finally said. “For the rest, he believes the village could support more non-farming families to help with the other work. Also, the Ring of Fire means that many things that would have to have been made locally can now be bought in Grantville. Brooms and such things could be bought, instead of being made here. Also, people can be hired as needed from Grantville.”

  Ernst considered that for a while then nodded. “He should talk to Herr Junker then.”

  More discussion took place. Then with a wink: “He also wanted to find out the rents. Herr Newhouse prefers not to bargain blind.”

  Ernst wasn’t supposed to be in charge and he knew it. Mercenaries had hit the village a few weeks before the Ring of Fire and he had been sent off to Remda, while others had tried to delay the mercenaries. The delay had worked, but at a high cost. Most of the delaying force was dead. The village had been burned to the ground, and any animal they had been unable to evacuate or hide had either been butchered or taken by the mercenaries. Two days after their victory, the mercenaries had left, and the survivors had returned soon after that.

  Ernst was convinced that the sickness that had afflicted the survivors was a result of their stay in Remda. During the next two weeks, disease had killed almost half the survivors.

  Ernst had the village’s contracts with Herr Junker and the records of who was owed what. He knew about The Battle of the Crapper and believed it would be good to be connected to people that could defend the village. Still, Ernst was a bit nervous about the up-timers. He did show them the record books and helped to explain what each clause meant, but he didn’t tell them everything. For instance, he didn’t mention what Herr Junker had said about offering new tenants a break on the rent. The break would only be good for a few years, just to help the tenants to get started.