Eric Flint: 1634: The Ram Rebellion

“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 up-time 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 crop land. The rest of the land was forest for firewood and building needs, a carp pond and more grazing land than the village really needed.

The important thing, though, was that Sundremda was missing most of its tenant farmers. So, maybe he could buy the place, or at least buy that part of it that wasn’t rented to anyone. Maybe he could buy the rents, and pay himself. He might even be able to get some of the fallow fields as cropland. If he could arrange it, he would have over two hundred acres, maybe even three hundred acres. He would also have grazing rights, rights to a big share of the wood in the forest, as well as rights to the fish in the little pond the village had set up.

Birdie didn’t want to just rent his tractor, or his services, he wanted to buy into the village. By preference, he wanted to own his own land. If he couldn’t do that, he’d try to buy the rents. At a minimum, he wanted to have a fair say in what got planted where and when. He wanted a vote in how things went down. Now, if he could just figure a way to do it.

* * *

“Mary Lee!” Birdie yelled. “Where are you, woman?”

A muffled “Down here” led Birdie to the basement steps, where he heard Mary Lee clattering around. He descended, carefully. The light never had been that great down here.

“What are you doing?” he asked, when he saw Mary Lee was counting things, then writing something on a tablet of paper.

“Taking an inventory.”

“Taking an inventory of what? And why? This stuff has been around for years. It’s mostly junk.”

Mary Lee looked up from her counting with an annoyed expression on her face. “Junk like that old tractor of yours? Junk like those plastic bottles that are bringing about fifteen dollars each? There’s no such thing as junk anymore, Birdie, in case you haven’t noticed. Even rusty nails are better than no nails at all. There’s no telling what we’ve got in this basement, not to mention what’s in the attic. If stuff like plastic soda bottles can bring in that much money, we might get rich from this room. If you don’t want to help me here, go do your own inventory.”

Mary Lee had been a bit testy lately, to Birdie’s way of thinking. Still, she might have a point. He left her to her business and went to do his own inventory.

* * *

Birdie came up with a fair amount of stuff with his inventory. He had more than some of his fellow up-time farmers, but not as much as others. There was quite a lot of junk that simply hadn’t been worth the cost of repairing up-time, but turned out to be irreplaceable down-time.

With the help of Willie Ray and Danny McTavish, Birdie was able to gauge the down-time value of his stuff pretty well. It was a little frightening, in a way, the number of things that had a value ten or even a hundred times what it had been before. It really gave Birdie an appreciation of mass production. Mary Lee was right about the plastic coke bottles he had given Danny. They were selling for five to fifteen bucks apiece and the knife would sell for about a hundred bucks.

The real money was in the machinery, though. Birdie had two tractors, one that worked, and one that didn’t. The one that didn’t work wouldn’t have been worth repairing up-time. It was over fifty years old and had been sitting in one of his sheds for the last twenty of those years. Now, though, if the engine could be repaired, it was worth the cost of repair and more. Each of his tractors was worth as much as his truncated farm.

There was also the family car, which used gasoline, the farm truck that used natural gas from his well, and two junk cars. Birdie still didn’t know exactly what Mary Lee had found in the house. They had lived in this house for over twenty years, raised two children here, and rarely threw anything away. That was about standard, for a West Virginia farm.

* * *

Ernst Bachmeier looked at the men before him. The two up-timers he recognized. One was Willie Ray, who had bought the village’s crops while the crops were still in the field, and the other was Birdie, who had come out with his tractor and harvested those crops. The Scottish mercenary who was doing the translating made Ernst nervous.

Nervous or not, Ernst dragged his mind back to what the Scot was saying. “ Herr Newhouse is a farmer, but a part of his farm was left up-time by the Ring of Fire. He has the tools and equipment to support a farm much larger than he has now, and the skills of an up-time farmer. What he doesn’t have is the land to farm, or the knowledge of local conditions.”

“With his tractor he would be a great help, and the village needs more people, but we don’t have the houses rebuilt,” Ernst replied.

“His house is less than two miles from here. He says he can cut a way through the Ring Wall that will let him bring the tractor and other equipment back and forth.” There was a short discussion between the Scot and the up-timers, and then the Scot continued. “He does want to build a house in the village, and he wants to make something called a ‘septic system,’ so that he can have indoor plumbing, but that need not be done this year.”

“In that case, it would be very good if he leased a farm in the village. I just wish we could find four more farmers to do the same.” Ernst was a bit concerned about getting all the land rented.

“Well, actually, what he would like to do if he can is buy the land rather than rent it. Who owns the village?”

“Until January, the owner was Ludwig von Gleichen-Tonna, the count of Gleichen, but he died without issue and the ownership is in question. Herr Junker is running things because he holds the Lehen on the village. He got the Lehen from his mother. She was the illegitimate daughter of an uncle of Anna Agnes of Hohenlohe-Weikersheim, who was married to the brother of the count of Gleichen. Anna Agnes of Hohenlohe-Weikersheim is also the niece of William the Silent.”