Being a lord in another world begins with farming

Chapter 3 Countless Questions
After carefully locking the warehouse and putting away the iron bars, Owen came to the open space in front of the castle. There were three longhouses built against the earthen wall, where soldiers usually lived.

Longhouses built of logs are very strong, covered with bark and hay, enough to keep out the wind and rain.

As for the inside, because there are no windows, it is a bit dark, but for the colder Northland, keeping warm is the most important thing.

There is a well on one side of the longhouse, and a thatched shed used as a kitchen, where is a large pot stand, and half a bag of grain. Obviously, soldiers eat and live here on weekdays.

Due to the lack of manpower, two soldiers are responsible for guarding the city gate every day, two are patrolling the castle, and the remaining four are resting. As for training, I train once when I think of it. It is impossible to train every day because there is not enough food and no physical strength. Forced training is fatal.

When Owen came, four soldiers were leaning against the wall and basking in the sun under the longhouse. After all, there was only one thing to do in this bloody place.

The soldiers are all in the prime of life, because of the food provided by the castle, they are stronger than the serfs, at least they can't count how many ribs they have at a glance.

"Come out with me." Owen didn't dare to go out alone, so he called four soldiers.

To say that the only good thing in this world is that the rights of the nobles are really great. Regardless of how miserable Owen is, these four soldiers are still loyal and even risked their lives to protect his rights. This makes him a little clueless. What is good, after all, I am the beneficiary.

After hearing the lord's order, the four soldiers immediately put on their leather armor and picked up their spears. Two fronts and two backs, with their chests raised and their heads raised, guarded Owen out of the castle.

The leather armor and the spear have seven new layers. They were bought by Hydera II through the Hai Rui Chamber of Commerce. This not only exhausted the small savings of the territory, but also owed a lot, in order to arm the only three people in the territory. Ten soldiers.

Thirty soldiers are not too small. Counting the serfs, the territory can pull out more than a hundred people to fight in groups at any time. Unfortunately, the wolf disaster caused more than half of the soldiers in the front to be killed or injured, which made Owen feel a little lacking in confidence.

To put it bluntly, the power of the nobility comes from land and force. It is not enough to have land without force. Owen is having a headache. After all, eight soldiers cannot provide him with enough sense of security.

The problem is that the background of the Hydera family can be seen at a glance. They have no money and no one.

Not everyone can be a soldier, and they usually choose free farmers because they have a certain amount of freedom and wealth. In order to ensure that they can always have these, they will desperately protect the rights of the lord, otherwise once they change the lord, they will lose everything.

But the territory of the Hydera family has no citizens at all, that is, the so-called free farmers, all of whom are serfs without personal freedom. Most of them are refugees who have lost their land, as well as criminals and speculators. To survive, they sold everything they had.

Because they have been struggling with hunger all their lives, the serfs in front of them have no energy at all. Apart from numbness in their eyes, there is only fear of the lord and soldiers. As for communication, Owen has tried, and their vocabulary is so poor that it makes people speechless. Many serfs could only use twenty or thirty sentences, because they could only use these in their monotonous life, and any more would be beyond their comprehension.

It's like saying Coke computer to people in primitive tribes in Africa, they can't understand what you mean at all.

A serf living almost like an animal, a soldier who only knows how to obey, Owen has already given up the idea of ​​burning glass to make gunpowder and cement, because unless he can do everything himself, without a helper, any project will be impossible. It started with a five-year plan, not to mention that Owen himself couldn't figure out the theory and process of these things. After all, no serious person would learn how to refine these things.

Thinking about these bad things, Owen continued to inspect, focusing on the farmland.

The land in the Northland is a bit barren, and the weeds are all clumps here and there, and they are rarely connected together. Therefore, even if they are busy all year round, the harvest is not much, and many people who barely maintain the territory will not starve to death.

In fact, if the current number of soldiers is not too small, soldiers will also have to work in the fields during busy farming seasons. Only big nobles can afford to support large-scale soldiers who are completely out of production. of.

Not far from the castle, Owen discovered countless problems.

He has never farmed land, but he has never raised pigs. How can he eat pork?
The farmland here is not the square he is familiar with. Maybe round farmland is popular, but there are no ridges or ridges. The so-called spring plowing is to simply clear the shrubs with a stone knife, and then use a sharp wooden stick to pierce a hole in the ground. Throw two or three seeds in and cover with soil to keep birds from eating it.

If you think about it with your butt, you can know how stupid this planting method is. So far, the people in the Hydera territory have not starved to death. It is really God's blessing.

Owen's face was green and white, but he also had nothing to do about it, because if he was really asked to do it, he would not be as good as these serfs who buried the ground, because he didn't even know when to plant and when to harvest. He simply cannot bear the consequences of commanding. As long as there is no harvest for a year, he will have to take everyone in the territory to beg for food.

After wandering around the castle, I finally got some good news.

Although the Hydera family is not good at anything, the territory is very vast. It takes about a day or two for ordinary people to go around the territory just by walking. Unfortunately, the land is not fertile enough, there are no special products, and the manpower is not enough. The territory is huge. What's the use, it can't be developed effectively at all.

However, increasing the population of the territory is not an easy task. The best way is to rely on the people to reproduce naturally. Such people are more loyal, and it is also the background of those nobles who have passed on for more than a hundred years. With these, they even have the words of the emperor. Listen to what you want to hear, and don't listen to what you don't want to hear.

Of course, the Hydera family, which has changed three generations in less than 20 years, does not have this capital. Would you worry about having him?

As for other ways, it is to buy serfs or take in refugees.

Serfs are not expensive, because many of them are desperate refugees, and basically they are willing to sell themselves as slaves if they stutter.

The problem is that their bodies are depleted too much, even if they eat and drink, they can't make up for it, let alone no lord will do this.

The latter has too many uncertainties, because many refugees are often bandits with their faces covered, and taking them in at will will become an unstable factor in the territory.

Countless questions weighed heavily on Owen's heart, so after returning to the castle, he cried silently in his room, not even daring to speak out, because now he was only left with a layer of nobleman's shell, Once it is broken, what is the difference between him and those serfs? A soldier can easily kill him and take away everything from him, not to mention that his grandfather's family may also be thinking about the Hydera family. Such a situation of internal and external troubles Now, even he, a traveler with a middle-aged soul, couldn't bear the pressure and fell into collapse.

If life has given him anything, it is that as long as he doesn't have the courage to face death, he can stand up and carry the pressure and continue walking, even if he can't lift his head up and his waist is bent, but he has to walk, because even if Stop, and no one will pity you, let alone give you a hand.

(End of this chapter)