Living Arrangements

By law, no farm may be smaller than five acres and, by default, if the farm is ten acres or more at the time of its owners’ demise it is split between the children in five-acre portions with any remaining land going to the eldest child. 

Most peasants have a one or two room hut with a thatched roof to call their own.  Farmers tend to build their barns onto the back of the house (accessible by a doorway in the back wall) while crafters may or may not build a workroom on the side.  Very few village homes boast a barn of any sort as there are comparatively few livestock kept in town.  If chickens are kept, the coop is normally between three and five yards from the hut.  Every house has a garden patch where vegetables and some cooking herbs are grown, tended by the older children still living at home. 

On a farm, the privy is an open-air latrine, lined by baked and glazed clay.  The contents are mixed with animal waste and used to fertilize fallow fields.  In villages, the privies are enclosed outhouses, dug out on the opposite side of the house from the village well.  About once a month to once a season the old hole is filled in and a new one dug some distance from the old, with the frame of the outhouse moved over the new hole.  One outhouse may serve as many as four homes in a village.

A healer (sometimes a hedge witch and often a Llyraskit), a black smith, and a potter can usually be found in even the meanest of villages.

The city laborers are the poorest folk in Corrum.  Most are not Guild members (except, perhaps, of the Thieves Guild).  They earn their keep with physical labor or drudgery.  Housing for them consists mainly of tenements where families live in about half the space of their country cousins.  The buildings are often held together with tar paper and “spit”, a limed-mud coating baked on to the building surface during the heat of the summer months.

Where ever possible, these families try to grow extra food in discarded pots.  Chamber pots are emptied into the gutter, along with miscellaneous garbage.  Most children born to city laborers have never seen a healer up close.  While most cities have public wells, those that don’t have rain barrels on every corner.

The city laborers tend to be an illiterate lot, scrambling too hard to get by to spare the energy to learn ciphering and letters.

The middle class is mostly made up of merchants and city crafters.  Their homes usually have between two and four rooms, with enough room in the back of the home for a kitchen garden.  If the city is large enough to support a related Craft Hall, the crafters will generally work from the Hall.  City merchants tend to live over their stores.

Minor nobles are untitled clan members, Warders, or minor Baronies.  Untitled clan members may each only hold up to fifty acres of land.  Warders, the newest (barely two hundred years old) and lowest rank of titled nobility, may only hold up to three hundred acres.  New Warden-ships are usually established with land grants of one hundred acres.

The Baronies may hold up to five hundred acres, but are also one of the oldest forms of inherited nobility. Some Baronies do not have any land left while some have gained the eminence of Moderate Nobility with their full allotment and the power of their clan.  New Baronies are rarely established, but generally are granted about two hundred acres.

The Minor nobles who do own land generally prefer to remain on their land, as the cost of maintaining a residence in the capital can be extravagant.  Their home estates generally are single or two-story manors, with between ten and twenty rooms.  Most nobles keep their wealth in goods, such as fine dinner ware, weapons, and cattle.

Gentry, though not noble by definition, are clan relatives.  While they are legally freemen, they have managed to keep close enough ties to their noble cousins that unions between gentry and nobles are not frowned upon.  Their ties to the nobility also allow them to get away with a bit more than most freemen would dare.

A Count may hold up to six hundred acres.  Their fiefs are known as earldoms and the last one established, of Glenismede, is over four hundred years old, with a grant of four hundred acres.

The more prominent Baronies, such as Clan Horrim, and all the earldoms are required to maintain a residence in the Noble’s Quarter of the capital.  The least of these homes holds fifteen rooms upon an one acre plot while the greatest are as many as five acres, with one or two acres given over the to the floor of mansion.

Most of the moderate nobles prefer to summer at their estates.  The entailed estate may be anything from a modest manor to a thirty room mansion.

There are a total of twelve dukedoms, with seven outside of the royal family.  However, close blood ties exist, with the farthest Duchy being a third-cousin to the Queen Consort.  No dukedom has less than seven hundred acres, and no more than eight hundred.  The great houses of the Duchies are right by the Winter and the Summer Palaces.  Only two of the Duchies spend any notable amount of time at their estates, but all of the entailed estates homes are mansions with at least forty rooms a piece.

The greater Counts ape the Duchies.

All royalty, those within a conceivable line of inheritance to the throne, reside in the palaces. Princes & Princesses may own less land than a Baron, a “mere” 400 acres.  However, if they hold any other title they may own as much land permitted to that title in addition to their royal rights.  In fact, three of the Royal Duchies are granted to the three primary heirs, with the grandest going to the First Heir and the least to the Third Heir.