Your Magic Guild Lacks A World View

Let's start by understanding feudalism itself.

Now I have made some videos on this topic and you can check out those videos in the information card but today I want to zero in on the three-order ideology that supported feudalism.

Now, I have to emphasize, those three classes described in that worldview is not a description of the society.

Medieval Europe was a million times messier than this very clean worldview.

But the elites, the high clergy and the nobles, found it useful to use this three-legged image of those who pray, those who fight, those who work, to keep the large class of peasantry under control and reinforce the pyramid scheme that is feudalism.

This ideology's earliest fully formed articulation appears around 1000 to 1030 CE and it's credited to Eyal Freke of Aynsham in England and bishops Adelbero of Lyon and Gerard of Cambria in northern France.

they use it to reinforce the mutual legitimization that makes feudalism work.

Essentially the clergy sanctify the warrior's violence and rule as being correct and appropriate and the warriors protect the church property and clergy and both of them together live off the peasant surplus And peasants get to suck lemons and do all the farming.

Actually, lemons might be too expensive for peasants to suck.

But anyway.

The worldview of oratores, bellatores and laboratores was propagated through sermons and manuscripts and imagery.

For example this image right here.

And it's also important to note what this worldview left out and whom it silenced.

Towns, merchants, jews and women barely appeared in this ideology.

almost like they just didn't exist.

Serfs, the bulk of the people who labored on the farms, appeared only in a feeding function.

Their only role was to supply food to both those who prey and those who fight.

Whenever the excluded people asserted themselves, when there were peasant revolts, or when the third estate emancipated itself, or merchants demanded rights, well, the whole tripartite image suddenly came under attack.

And I cannot emphasize this enough.

This was an ideology, not reality.

Serfs fled to towns, knights occasionally farmed, clergy went to war, merchants were busy in towns rewiring the whole economic basis of the world, moving it away from agriculture and toward money and commerce.

The power of this worldview lay in making a chaotic, changing society legible and divinely sanctioned.

It lay in the simplicity of its idea.

It took a very complex society and flattened it down to these three layers and then sold that to the masses who were producing the food for the elite.

But that does not change this worldview's usefulness to us as world builders because if you are going to build a feudal society with magic, somewhere in that ideology you need to fit in how they would have dealt with magic, how that ideology would incorporate magic or flatten it to treat with it.