Villages
Layout
Section titled “Layout”
A village has 10 to 20 buildings. It is either a heap village of wandering lanes, or a street village of tidy rows along a straight track with field strips behind. Houses, farmhouses and barns stand on their plots round a well, with the reeve’s house nearest it.
| Building | From |
|---|---|
| Small temple | Any village |
| Green | 8 buildings |
| Bakehouse, dovecote | 10 buildings |
| Temple, alehouse | 14 buildings |
| Tithe barn | 16 buildings |
Behind each house is a garden of raised beds, often with a fruit tree, a hen house or a pigsty. Every village has an orchard. The green has a big old tree, a maypole, stocks and a pound, and most have a duck pond. A village’s gates never shut for the curfew. Fishing villages stand by the shores of the biggest isles.
The fields, meadows and commons round a village are on Harvest.
People
Section titled “People”Each house has a household: a man and a woman, sometimes a third grown one or an elder, and up to three children. Half the folk are women. Every grown one works: at the mill, the bakehouse, the smithy, the alehouse or the temple, or in the fields, about one in six herding.
They wake an hour before sunrise, work from sunrise to half an hour before sunset with a break from noon to one, and are asleep three and a half hours after sunset. In winter they thresh in the barns.
When an army hostile to the village’s kingdom, or out raiding, comes within 1.5 km, everyone runs indoors, to home or the temple, and the flocks are driven in.
What a village gives
Section titled “What a village gives”- Harvest: grain to its barn, with tithe to the Temple and dues to its lord. See Harvest.
- Goods: wool, flax, barley, herbs, and timber, stone or fish where it has a woodcutters’ camp, quarry or fish weir. See Goods.
- Levies: a pool of 30 spearmen, 12 archers and 6 horsemen, refilling 6, 2 and 1 a day. Nobody hires at a village. Its men go to war as levies when their kingdom calls the banners, and a lord’s army of its own realm may press them into service unpaid.
- Jobs: the reeve posts jobs. Press R by a village for its job board.
Goodwill
Section titled “Goodwill”A village remembers what is done to it. Killing its folk, raiding it or burning its fields costs its goodwill.
Buildings
Section titled “Buildings”Alehouse, Bakehouse, Barn, Charcoal clamp, Dovecote, Farmhouse, Fish weir, Green, House, Lime kiln, Pound, Quarry, Reeve’s house, Temple, Tithe barn, Watermill, Well, Windmill, Woodcutters’ camp.