Lady of the Lord From the East - Chapter 191

After dealing with the piled up official duties, entertaining distinguished guests, preparing banquets, inspecting the autumn harvest, hunting wild animals and preparing for the new civil service exam, after returning to the territory, the duke and his wife were almost so busy.

Felix, in particular, has accepted a new territory. Naturally, these new territories should be added to his autumn parade. Although he can send competent subordinates to help him share the work of cruising and hunting beasts, the couple feels that this is the first time. It is better to go in person for the inspection, so Felix, who had only returned to Sardinson for a few days, greeted the other nobles who came to visit after the banquet to celebrate his promotion as Duke, and hurriedly led the team and left Sardinia. Dinson, went to inspect everywhere.

One thing to mention here, the standard area of ​​a duchy is thirty times that of a standard earldom, while Sardinson was originally the area of ​​two standard earls, that is to say, all the noble counties received by Felix after he became a duke The size is as big as fifteen Sardinsons. Of course, because he himself has a standard-sized earl of Slot, so his new fief is fourteen standard earls, according to the size of the surrounding county of Sardinson. In the end, the new territory that the king assigned to him was six counties, the largest of which was 25 times the size of Sardinson, and the smallest one was smaller than the standard earldom, but it was still considered an earldom.

So many counties are connected together, with a total area of ​​more than 2.58 million acres and a total population of more than one million people, accounting for nearly one-eighth of Prady’s population. There are more than 200 nobles in the territory. The right to rule that a duke can enjoy is no worse than that of the monarchs of some small and medium-sized countries.

Of course, the total area of ​​these territories does not represent the area of ​​land they have developed. In fact, Prady’s forest coverage rate is not low, and animal husbandry is as prosperous as agriculture, so many aristocratic territories occupy forests and grasslands. The area is the largest, and the farmland is more determined by the population. The poorer the area, even if the territory is large, the farmland will be less.

And the population in Felix’s new fief, to be honest, is really not too much, who made them originally beside Sardinson, and in recent years with the development of Sardinson, and the duke and the couple decided With various policies to benefit the people, more and more free people came from other areas with their families and their families. The lords couldn’t stop them. After all, they couldn’t be as generous as Felix, although their own development also had their own advantages. Some improvement, but still not enough to attract the freedmen to stay, and Felix’s acceptance of the freedmen’s behavior will damage everyone’s interests, but it is in line with the regulations. Nobles can protest if they want, and he and the nobles of the surrounding counties There is cooperation, and in the face of interests, no one really dares to protest, and it is not even good to block the choice of those freedmen – even if it is blocked, the freedmen can sneak away without even their belongings, and some nobles try By taking people back and turning them into serfs in other names, the result is that the remaining free people are all in danger and run faster. Some people, but now there are no free people in his territory at all, and the free people in other places don’t dare to come to his fief after knowing this, and people who don’t have free people are not willing to go there, and the final result is an economic depression. The population has plummeted, and the aristocrat has almost no other income except the taxation of the fields. The land in the territory can only be cultivated by purchasing serfs. If it hadn’t been for the increase in the yields of the fields over the years, the family would have fallen into bankruptcy. .

After the other nobles saw his results, they naturally did not dare to mess with the freedmen. They could only helplessly learn from Sardinson County and improved the treatment of some freedmen, and reluctantly kept people behind.

Fortunately, this year, the population of Sardinson County has reached a certain degree of saturation. In addition, the birth rate and survival rate of newborns have increased significantly. Sardinson has no longer accepted foreign freedmen, and other freedmen have no way to move to it. Satinson, let the other nobles breathe a sigh of relief.

However, many free people still choose to work in Sardinson, earn money and take it back to support their families to pay taxes, so many nobles in many territories have empty population, but in fact the number of farmers is still less, and because these people have less fields , the land tax they can collect has also decreased a lot. Fortunately, these places have cooperated with Sardinson. Everyone sees that their pockets are not getting more and more empty because the people go out to work and do not farm, but because the fees In order to make up for the concessions given to them for the loss of labor, Lix looked for more gold coins, and turned a blind eye as if nothing happened.

And now that Felix was promoted to Duke and became their immediate boss, these people even dared not fight against him because of this.

Even, for Felix to become a duke and take over their territory, most of the nobles can be said to be very supportive and happy.

After all, their immediate boss was nominally the king, but in fact the king didn’t care much about them. Usually, as long as the taxes were in place, the king would not think of these people, and the aristocrats in the east were shunned by the west because they were far from the capital, the center of power. The nobles are called the countrymen. They just can’t hold their thighs. Even when the empire needs to fight, they give priority to the nobles in the west. This makes the nobles in the east not only poor in fiefs, but also unable to rely on military exploits to get rewards. , so life has been very bad compared to other nobles.

After Sardinson developed, they also made a lot of profit by drinking soup, but their status did not improve. The only eastern nobles that the king remembered were the Felix family, and other nobles had to be reminded to remember them. The nobles agreed to cooperate with Felix, and they earned more than them. The little interests of the eastern nobles were disdainful, and when Sardinson developed, the big nobles expected that Felix would meet sooner or later. Get up, then the eastern part of the empire will be his base camp. If other people want to intervene, they will be enemies with him. For such trivial interests, it is not necessary to do so. A wise noble will not offend such a powerful collaborator, so many people Invariably, they chose to ignore the eastern nobles as before, accepting the gifts as they were, and the relationship could be pulled, but it was still a matter of receiving their subordinates.

It has always been a pity for the eastern nobles to not be able to hold their thighs. Now the thickest thighs are automatically delivered to the door. How can they be willing to let go, and they cannot directly become leg pendants.

And Felix’s ability to govern fiefs is obvious to all. At the same time, his kindness is as famous as his financial resources. Look at the people who have gone beyond the better, and look at those who have offended him but were forgiven regardless of the past, and now they are obediently shrinking. The barons who didn’t make trouble in their own territory, who didn’t make a lot of money to eat and drink spicy food, have now become loyal supporters of the duke. Every time they attend a banquet, two of the three sentences praise the duke and his wife.

Although everyone knew that Felix didn’t like seeing the five baron families very much, they didn’t feel down because of it. On the contrary, it was enough to make other nobles understand that as long as they followed Duke Williams, there were definitely many benefits.

Therefore, they took advantage of being called vassals. Now, the Duke leads a team to inspect. Everywhere you go, you can receive a warm welcome from the local lords. Team hunting, he only needs to accept their warm hospitality. Of course, it would be better if he can talk about other cooperation.

And when he was out on tour, the autumn harvest was almost over, the food had been collected, and the nobles who received him had already prepared the food to be handed over before he came, loaded the cart, and just waited for the duke to show him when he came. , send it to Sardinson.

Some of these grains do belong to their upper-level nobles, but according to one-level management, one cannot skip the aristocratic system under the middle management. In fact, the barons in various places do not need to pay taxes to Felix, only those earls They had to pay a portion of the tax in lieu of their own military service, but the barons still prepared the same food as the earls, and it was completely different from the amount of food they needed to pay.

So, in fact, apart from the small part of the grain that they themselves have paid for their military service – the baron does not have this part of the expenditure – most of the other grain is actually the tax paid by the common people to the king and the tithe of the church. .

The tax that the nobles have collected over one-third or even half of the land output does not belong to them alone, and part of it is collected by the king.

In addition to this, everyone has to pay the tithe to the church.

The king’s tax and the church’s tax, taken together, are the total amount of the grain that is about to be sent to Sardinson.

I said before that Prady doesn’t like the church, but they still collect tithes, because they can collect taxes from the citizens in this name, and then the food they collect can enter their own granaries and give them to themselves. Add an income.

As for the church, don’t expect to get all the taxes. It would be nice if the nobles could give them a part. Some people don’t even give it at all, and just let the church be self-sufficient. Therefore, the monasteries in various places are far better than the churches. Many, because the monks in the monastery farm their own land to support themselves.

And since they dared to swallow the tithe, the nobles didn’t care whether they swallowed more taxes for the king. Anyway, as long as they bribed the tax collector sent by the king, concealed the amount of fields, and lied about this year’s harvest, they would be able to Save a lot of food, why not do it.

Especially since they are originally rural areas, isn’t it normal that the land is not good and the yield is not high?

And it’s not just them, but all the nobles are basically like this, so the nobles are all righteous, and the previous kings didn’t know it, they just pretended not to know, otherwise how can they take them? After all, the king doesn’t have much dominion over those territories. If he does anything to the nobles for a little tax, it is likely that most of the nobles will endanger themselves and end up standing together against him.

This is the restraint of the monarchy system on the royal power. If it was replaced by the Chinese emperor system, these nobles would have been cut off batch after batch.

That’s why the king likes Felix very much, because he is the only aristocrat who doesn’t lie about tax evasion and tax evasion. Every year, the land tax he pays is not a single grain of wheat. Even if he doesn’t give food, he will make up enough gold coins , so every time Felix pays taxes, the king will give various rewards when he turns his head. As a reward, in conversion, it is actually no less than the part that other people have evaded tax.

This time Felix came to inspect as a duke, and the nobles gave him all the food that should be turned over, and asked him to take it back and give it to the king. Now, there are a lot more to the king than in previous years, which is a hint that Felix can pocket this part himself and bribe him aboveboard.

Naturally, Felix accepted it unceremoniously, but he did not intend to pocket it himself, so he asked someone to calculate the annual cost of the tithe by the local church and sent it to them, and the rest was sent to them. Then convert it into coins, let the subordinates write it down, send someone back to return the money to the nobles, and then tell the serfs and freemen in their respective fiefs that the returned money is to replace part of their land tax next year, So the tax they have to pay next year will be relatively lower.

When he did this, he had already agreed with the nobles in advance. After all, he said that officials would be sent to supervise and review the matter, so the nobles could not violate the agreement and collect excess taxes to exploit the subjects.

And the part of the king is naturally taken up intact and sent to the capital.

The nobles are still obedient. They are now under the control of Felix. At the same time, because they are worried about the escape of the free people, they have to restrain their previous behavior. It’s a lot less, and now Felix has handed over part of it for them, and said that he will send someone to supervise them. Naturally, they don’t dare to mess around.

Of course, what really convinced them to cooperate like this was because Felix learned about the situation in various places during the inspection process, and said that he would discuss with his wife how to deepen the cooperation between the two sides and help them develop their territory after returning home. With radishes hanging in the front, which aristocrat still thinks a little bit of land tax.

As long as cooperation can be carried out, even if they are allowed to reduce taxes like Sardinson, they are all willing!

So when Felix left, not only the territorial people were grateful to him, but the nobles were also reluctant to part, and at the same time expected him to go and return early, so that the cooperation would be implemented as soon as possible.

It’s really confusing.

When Felix inspected the territory, Wei Wei was in the territory to handle the accounting of the autumn harvest accounts and the assessment of civil servants, but the latter was no longer under her control. Dingle’s small government has been functioning well in recent years It is very stable, and government officials have been able to take charge of themselves. They know what kind of talents each department needs and how many new people they need, so Wei Wei has already handed over the civil service assessment to them, even the examination papers. What she needs to do is to gather the examiners together before the exam to discuss the exam content for a period of time, not to let the content of the exam questions be revealed, and to visit the exam venue again.

It’s not an option to always let them take open-air exams, so this year the venue for exams has been changed from the castle square to a school, but although several schools in Sardinson County have been built and started to use, these schools are not large in scale. There are more and more people coming to Sardinson to apply for the civil service exam. A few schools with primary and secondary education levels can’t accommodate tens of thousands of candidates, so after thinking about it, Wei Wei put the new city that has already been built. The future University of Sardinson gave them out for temporary use.

The school, which is about to become an institution of higher learning, has not yet arranged any teaching staff, and the school is empty with nothing at all, but its decoration has been completed. Wei Wei’s own university is Huaxia University. Inconsistent, so in order to unify the style of Xincheng, when she was designing the school, she naturally chose the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry that she had seen and wanted to receive an invitation letter.

The prototype of Hogwarts is Oxford University, which started teaching in 1096. Now it has been established in Europe for nearly two hundred years. It is very famous throughout Europe. Many universities built later basically refer to it, so For the design drawings Wei Wei came up with, neither the architects nor the workers made any sense. Even because it was a relatively familiar style, they saved a lot of time when building it.

Of course, because the project of this university is very large, it is said that it has been built. In fact, only some teaching and residential areas have been built. After the facilities are laid out, formal enrollment and classes can be started. Therefore, there are still many areas that are still under construction.

Of course, even in the classrooms of this university, it is impossible to accommodate tens of thousands of people for exams at one time, so in order to arrange candidates well, in addition to classrooms, other things such as the library, staff offices, and student dormitories that have not yet been built The indoor area of ​​​​the test room has also temporarily become an examination room, and the test has to bring the table and chairs used for the test into the test room, and finally arrange everyone in.

Of course, because there are too many people, a lot of invigilators are needed, and it is not an open area. The original examiners are not enough, so in the end, a lot of soldiers need to be dispatched to help. They are guarding the door, and there are invigilators patrolling from time to time. They also dare not cheat.

Even during the exam, there was a soldier with a weapon staring at him. The pressure was a bit high. Although there were soldiers guarding during the exam in the past, the candidates were all gathered in the past, but it was more likely than in a small dormitory today. It’s easier to just have a few candidates stared at by a soldier.

However, no matter how much pressure you have, you must take the exam well. In the past, the civil servants of Sardinson were very attractive to ordinary people. Now that Felix is ​​a duke, his subordinate officials will definitely be assigned to work in all the territories in the future. There are also more and more opportunities for officials to be promoted, not to mention climbing the position of nobles. If relying on the current government system, capable people are likely to become the mayor of a certain area or even the city lord of a city. Ordinary nobles can’t resist, so the number of noble children among the people who took the exam this year has increased, and many people are here for a bright future in the future.

Of course, there are many people who come, but there are not many civil servants who can show the need. Moreover, in the past few years, the civil service examination has become more and more difficult than before, so how many people can pass in the end depends on their own strength. .

But for Sardinson, the problem that needs to be solved is the exam venue.

This year, it has been very difficult to arrange people. If the number of people increases in the future, even if the university is fully established, it will not be possible to accommodate everyone. Moreover, after the school starts recruiting students, they can borrow classrooms, but it is impossible for others to borrow them. , especially in offices and dormitories.

But it was a waste to build a special examination room specially for one exam. In the end, Wei Wei clapped her hands and decided that starting next year, the civil service exams of each department will be assessed separately.

“It used to be a unified exam. In the future, let them take the exam separately according to the department they signed up for. Each department decides the content of the exam. There is no need to make a comprehensive paper as it is now.” On the day of the exam, Wei Wei will of course appear. Son, she was patrolling the university with a group of examiners and invigilators, and stopped by to visit the school.

There was also Crown Prince Edward, who was very interested in their civil service system, so he came to visit.

With the Crown Prince there, those examiners and invigilators were a little bit helpless, but they also remembered what Wei Wei said.

“We also planned to take separate assessments before, but most candidates will apply for exams in several departments at the same time. Even if the separate assessments do not reduce the number of participants in each exam, it will increase the difficulty of marking, so we are also discussing countermeasures. .”

As soon as Wei Wei heard it, she asked them, “How was your discussion?”

Examiner “We are thinking about whether to limit the subjects that candidates apply for.”

If candidates can only be restricted to take the exam in one or two or three departments, then the number of candidates can definitely be reduced during the exam, but they used to allow those candidates to apply for all departments. Dissatisfied with the students.

So this matter has to be supported by the lord, and now that the duke is absent, it is naturally up to Wei Wei to decide.

“Yes, just limit a candidate to apply for the exam in one department at most, let them choose what they think they are best at, and do not register repeatedly.”

This is even stricter than the upper limit of three they originally set, but since it was the Duchess who said it, then of course she listened to it.

“Also, the exam time can be changed.” Wei Wei pondered for a while and said, “It’s not very good to always set the time for the autumn harvest. Some exams are born in commoner families, and they have to help the family harvest food in the autumn. It’s easy to affect their early preparations, you go back to study and change to a more suitable test time, preferably in spring or summer, and then set those days as the annual test day.”

Wei Wei wants to directly set the time for the college entrance examination, but every June is close to the time for the summer wheat harvest. If it is a civilian candidate from other areas, the way to return will easily delay their own harvest. , but they are all young workers.

The examiners nodded and took note.

“In addition, the proportion of female candidates should be increased as much as possible. I saw that almost all candidates are male now, which is not good.” She turned to look at the students in the classroom, “Don’t forget that we still Some departments are best run by women, if you don’t increase female civil servants, are you going to be the women’s director yourself?”