[Discuss] Oaths of fealty and their confliction with other orders

[Robert Croson, Jr]

On 4 Mar 2008 at 19:20, Rob McDonald wrote:

> There is a debate and argument going on in Eston at the moment about a
> conflict of orders, and what supercedes what.
> 
> Basically, the army was ordered by the marshals to move out to somewhere or
> other, but at the same time the Head of some religion in Eston received a
> request for help along theological lines. He asked his followers for help,
> and a duke responded, ordering his region lords to respond. They in turn
> ordered their knights, who headed off to help. Now some of those knights
> were in the army that had been ordered by the marshals to move so of course
> accusations of treason abounded, and the argument became both IC and OOC.
> 
> To my knowledge, a duke's region lords owe their fealty first to him, and
> then to the king above him, and so similarly their knights owe fealty to
> their region lords above anyone else.

Correct.

> This means that if there was a
> conflict in orders, an order from your lord would trump any order from your
> marshal, correct? Since it is he who you have an oath directly to. However,
> the judge has just stepped in, and stated that an order from a marshal
> appointed by the king trumps any other order, since his power is given to
> him by the king.

The proper thing to do would have been for all the lords to pull their knights 
from the army. They could have formed a new army for the theological 
emergency, assigned all the knights to it, and given it a new marshal with new 
orders.

> This is wrong, isn't it? We are trying to become more duchy-dentric, so a
> knights loyalty is to his duchy above his realm, hence a king's marshal does
> not have more control over you than your lord does, as far as I understand.
> I want to step in and set things straight here, because confusions like this
> are only going to set up bad habits that need to be stopped. If I can get
> some consensus on this it would be much appreciated.

Here's how it works, from *my* point of view:

The region lord has ultimate authority over the knight. By assigning that knight 
to an army, he has given that authority to someone else: the marshal of the 
army. That knight now follows that marshal's orders.

If the region lord wants that knight to not follow the marshal's orders, he 
should remove him from the army. Basically you've set the knights up for failure 
by not doing so.

When this situation occurred, the judge/marshal/general/ruler should all have 
complained to the region lords and duke, and should not have been threatening 
individual knights.

-- 
Rob

Veni, Vedi, Visa: I came, I saw, I did a little shopping.




-- 
Unsubscribing and other list options:
http://news.battlemaster.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss