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

[J. Stephens]

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. 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. 


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.



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I'd think loyalty to the Region Lord who would then direct his knights to either support the Duke or the Marshal as was his/her discretion.  The RL should support the Duke or face direct consequences most likely but supporting the Marshal might gain the RL "bonus points" in the eyes of King should a higher ranking position come open.

I don't see why OOC would be involved at all...all the consequences for the knights choices should be handled IC only.

If I still had Ivore in Talerium, I'd go stab the judge for being a schmoe...plus Captain needs something else to do, right Brian?




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