His mouth twitched into a smile. "They just have no flair. Last time, it was a work shoe."
"Last time?" David Petrini, the economic liaison, had majored in economics, not history.
"During the Great Peasant Revolt," Meyfarth answered.
"I didn't know you had any peasant revolts. I was sort of under the impression that European peasants just sat around being oppressed." That was Saunders Wendell. The political training that the UMWA provided to its members had a rather pro-American chauvinistic tinge, to tell the truth.
Meyfarth stared at him in utter bewilderment. "That was the one just over a hundred years ago. The big one. It was centered in Thuringia and Franconia—well, Swabia also, to some extent. The Bundschuh. Thousands of peasants gathered into armies. `Hordes,' the rulers called them. Haufen. They put down the revolt with no pity. But there have been many since then. Many smaller ones. Some quite large, such as the ones in Switzerland and Austria. Do you think the farmers you meet every day are mostly not serfs now because of the goodness of their lords' hearts? They have been so obnoxious during the past century that most lords decided it was just easier to let them lease the fields for rent rather than try to compel the labor services that are required to cultivate a large demesne. It is to the north and east, now, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, Pomerania, that the nobles have been trying to force the farmers back into servitude, so they can farm the lands the way that the Americans did the `plantations' before your Civil War."
Meyfarth paused. "It will be very interesting to see how the king of Sweden handles this in Mecklenburg and the two Pomeranias, since he has made himself duke in all three." He turned back to Petrini. "How come Herr Wendell has not seen this? You have been studying the tax structure as it affects the farmers. I have seen the reports."
Petrini, the economic liaison, sighed. "Yeah, I've been trying to get some kind of a general picture. Figure that taxes, to the government, whoever it is, run a man about eight per cent of the value of the harvest. Then the tithes or other church taxes, about the same or a little more—maybe up to twelve per cent if the landlord is a church or abbey or something of the sort. Most of those are paid in kind—in grain or woad or flax or whatever he's growing. The tax people insist on that, because it cushions them quite a bit from inflation. Plus local taxes. Figure about seventy percent of the harvest left for the farmer, after tax. But he's got to set aside at least twenty per cent for the next year's seed and running expenses. That's in an average year. In a bad harvest, the set-aside takes a much bigger chunk of the whole. So figure that maybe the farmer gets fifty percent of his cash-crop production to market. I'm not figuring in the stuff like a vegetable garden that they grow and use for themselves, even though they do have to turn in the `small tithes' on that. Those are so variable that it would be hopeless to try to track them without a mainframe and an army of data input clerks."
Johnnie F. nodded. He hadn't been collecting statistics, but from the seat of his pants as an ag extension agent, fifty percent sounded about right. "But . . ."
Petrini continued. "Oh, I know. Out of that fifty per cent, he's still got to pay his rent to the landlord. Whoever the landlord is. I know that Grantvillers tend to have nobles on the brain, so to speak, but one thing that's clear to me now is that an awful lot of the landlords are merchants and other fairly rich people in the towns who have picked up rural real estate as an investment. In a lot of places, more than half of the farmers aren't renting from nobles who have estates. They're renting from a cloth manufacturer or a lawyer who has bought up the Lehen. Well, he has to pay rent unless the terms of his contract are for a percentage of the harvest in kind and not cash. In that case, it's already gone before he gets his crop to market. That's not the same everywhere, either, not always even from one household to another in the same village. Sometimes, out of a dozen households, five will be sharecropping the rent and the others paying cash."
Petrini leaned forward, his face intent. "Either way, the farmers don't end up with a lot of margin for capital improvements like buying a new team or other equipment. That's going to be a big roadblock to introducing mechanization, even without Brandschatzungen leaving the villages burned or the forced contributions for the armies. Something's going to have to give."
Scott Blackwell interrupted. "That's long-range, guys. This is immediate. What are we going to do about the sheep?"
The staff meeting meandered to an inconclusive ending. Steve finally suggested that everybody go home and sleep on it. For his own part, Meyfarth gave him and Saunders Wendell a long tutorial about peasant revolts during and after supper. Partly the where and when of the most recent ones. "Recent" being defined in Meyfarth's mind, apparently, as the past half-century or so. "Current affairs" extended as far back as he himself actually remembered as a kid. For Meyfarth, born in 1590, "history" began some time before the great famine of 1594-1597, which had been followed by the big plague epidemic of 1597-1598.