The Ram Rebellion(3)

"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 someone 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 uptime 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 cropland. The rest of the land was forest for firewood and building needs, a carp pond and more grazing land than the village really needed.