Before this place became Lord Lance's fief, poverty and hunger often hung over it. The grain harvested each year was nowhere near enough to eat, and the people in the nearby villages often went hungry one meal and had food the next because there simply wasn't enough grain.
Few of the villages had any elderly people who lived long lives. They couldn't eat their fill or keep warm, and without enough nutrition, the old people couldn't survive the winter.
For the sake of their children, the young people couldn't leave to find work. They planted in spring and harvested in autumn, then went into the mountains to hunt during winter, killing rabbits, birds, and even small wild boars.
When they encountered a full-grown wild boar, they might survive if they were lucky. If they were unlucky, they could lose their lives in the mountain forests.
Because there were wild boars in the nearby forests, they would destroy the crops during the autumn harvest. There was barely any grain to begin with, and then the wild boars would trample what little remained. It wasn't enough to eat. It was nowhere near enough. The former viscount had seen that there was no profit to be made from this fief and had applied to be transferred elsewhere. The other noble lords also knew how poor this place was, so none of them wanted to add it to their own fiefs.
After coming here, they wouldn't only fail to collect taxes—they might even have to open their granaries to provide relief for the people. That was completely unacceptable to those noble lords.
In the eyes of those noble lords, these people were all lowly commoners. If they couldn't create profits for them, they had no value.
Even recruiters wouldn't come here to enlist soldiers.