Early June, 275 AC
This early June was the happiest the farmers had ever been. Some even carved simplified symbols of the Dragon God Faith onto their walls and began worshipping them. This was gratitude in its simplest form!
Over the past few months, many farmers had switched from the Faith of the Seven to the Dragon God Faith.
Of course, if Su Qin ever began imposing exorbitant taxes, that faith would quickly fall away! At present, the Dragon God Faith had not even been formally established. It did not even have a church, and the courtroom at Gull Manor was being used as one!
For the free farmers, this year brought a bumper harvest. Most importantly, their lord collected no taxes!
What delighted them even more was that those usually arrogant noble lords really had not forced the commoners to sell their grain at extremely low prices!
They all knew that the lord who followed the Dragon God Faith was keeping the nobles in check!
But what delighted the 400 local farming households even more was that their lord bought grain at the extremely high price of five copper coins per jin.
Copper coins were actually quite valuable!
Quite a few farmers and other people used farming tools and the like made from copper!
Of course, the lord would not buy all the farmers' grain. He would leave them enough to eat for a long time!
The 400 local farming households were scattered across the area. According to the survey, each household cultivated roughly ten mu!
How much grain did a household need to survive for a year? For a family of four, roughly 1,500 jin!
How much did one mu produce? Two hundred jin on average!
A large mu of 1,000 square meters, and only 200 jin? The yield was fucking pathetic! Each household produced around 2,000 jin!
It would have been one thing if a wheat crop like buckwheat yielded 200 jin per mu! The problem was that, according to the information, even potatoes yielded only 200 jin!
Something was wrong! Very wrong! The grain yields were so bizarre that Su Qin did not dare think too deeply about them yet!
Back to taxation.
Although the Earl of Runestone stipulated a tax of 40%, the local nobles usually collected 60% in secret. Each farming household handed over 1,200 jin, leaving 800 jin for themselves!
How far was that from having enough to eat? Half short!
So Su Qin was saving lives! And he only bought 400 jin of grain from each household. Leaving the farmers some breathing room was necessary!
The other nobles had to pay at least three copper coins when buying grain, and they could only choose to buy after Su Qin had finished!
As for anyone who dared force the farmers to sell at low prices?
Five minor nobles had already been beheaded! Their heads were still hanging on the wall in Gull Square!
Did they think the minister of intelligence sat around doing nothing? Although Kelun represented merchant interests, he knew whom he served!
Deterrence was necessary!
This way, Su Qin could acquire roughly 160,000 jin of grain. At thirty jin per unit, that was around 5,000 units, enough to feed 800 people for half a year!
Then there was Gull Manor's production. Why was it called a manor?
Naturally, it had productive holdings!
Six hundred mu of fields, some cattle and sheep raised in ordinary times, and some young warhorses being reared-that was a manor!
The manor's fields produced 4,000 units of grain, plus the 7,000 units left after this quarter's consumption!
A total of 16,000 units.
Could that support nearly 600 refugee households?
Absolutely!
Of the 600 refugee households-including those who later came after hearing of the place-200 households joined the army! The men from the remaining 400 households were basically all taking turns building houses! And constructing large smithies!
Some of the women cut leather, punched holes, threaded cords, and made leather armor! Or did lighter physical work. For the younger children, Su Qin could not yet arrange educational facilities such as schools.
The territory was not yet fully developed, and even the all-important army could barely defend Gull Manor! But most importantly, the people were willing to follow orders and strike wherever he pointed! Their morale was also not easily dampened. Morale was extremely important!
Could he support the nearly 200 households-the two or three hundred local households without farmland in Gulltown outside the manor?
He could do that too!
Gulltown alone had 200 fishing households working in Crab Bay! Their catches were more than enough to support them! In this era, were you comparing the price of protein with starch?
What a joke! Fishermen were wealthier than farmers!
With the tax exemption as well, most commoners could catch their breath!
One tax-free year could give everyone several years of breathing room!
Back to making leather lamellar armor!
Why not make iron lamellar armor?
Where would all the iron ingots come from for that kind of extravagance? The price of iron ingots brought in from various places for sale each month had risen to twenty copper coins per jin! A full doubling of the original price! But it looked as though the price could rise no further! Many merchants had come from Featherwood and begun competing!
Two more large smithies had been built at the end of May! There were now four! They were called Smithies One, Two, Three, and Four, and so on. Once the number exceeded ten, the names would be changed!
Each smithy had twenty craftsmen! All eighty had now been summoned!
But it had cost quite a lot of money. Only 1,100 gold remained in the private treasury!
The leader of each smithy was called a master craftsman, while the others were called artisans. Naturally, the master craftsmen were all capable individuals with intelligence above five! All had been granted a miracle (blue)!
They had been ordinary people, and overnight they became craftsmen earning one or ten gold a month. They were among the most loyal people!
And just as with learning, everyone's attributes were not fixed. Through study and practice, they could gain vast amounts of experience. Gery, the crafting officer, already had eight intelligence!
He was smarter than most people in this era! His attributes had already reached the level of a minor noble.
Once everything was ready, Smithy One began making redwood spears as weapons for ordinary soldiers!
Smithy Two made hundred-forged scale armor for Su Qin. Ten people could only produce one suit of scale armor (blue) a week, and even that required the assistance of twenty apprentices!
The master craftsman directed the artisans in forging the scales, while the apprentices wove the armor together with ox-sinew cords!
By the end of June, Su Qin, Aila, and a captain of a personal guard squad already had knight's scale armor! Although it might fall short of plate armor in some respects, it was sufficient to defend against arrows from a certain distance and some melee weapons!
Smithy Three made farming tools for the level-two farms that would soon be built. Farming tools were easy to make and did not even require a hundred rounds of forging. Ten were enough!
Smithy Four guided women and some children in cutting cowhide, deerskin, and the like, then spared a few people to make redwood longbows!
Longbows were more common in this world. Of course, few people in Westeros practiced mounted archery. Longbows were too cumbersome on horseback!
This work had begun in mid-May, after the rainy season ended!
So by early June, Su Qin had already obtained 300 redwood spears (white, ordinary)! Three suits of fish-scale armor (blue, exquisite), 400 sets of ten-forged farming tools-hoes, inverted triangular plows designed under Su Qin's guidance, sickles, shovels, pickaxes, axes, hammers, and so on-ten redwood longbows! And thirty suits of leather lamellar armor!
As everyone knew, leather lamellar armor only offered a little protection, but it was certainly useful! Light cavalry would use leather armor!
Also, in early June, while the financial staff were busy buying grain, formal planning began for the construction of the Lower Gull Village agricultural settlement, separately designated within the square-ring canal!
Gull Manor, main keep.
Su Qin sat in his study, while Aila stood beside him and watched him carefully consider the engineering plans on parchment.
"The square-ring canal enclosed thirty-six square kilometers. The eighteen square kilometers near the riverbank will be used for ranches or industrial towns in the future, so half the space is suitable for clearing and farming."
"One level-two farm can house twenty people in five stone houses, but divided by household, that means five households per farm."
"How much land can one household manage?"
"Once yields rise, five large mu at most. That gives us the basic ratio of housing to farmland! Ideally, residential area to farmland area equals one to five."
"But reality certainly won't be that ideal. We'll need arrow towers and wooden walls for some defense against bandits and wild beasts, roads for getting around, and a little beautification is necessary too. Then let's use an extreme allowance: residential area to farmland area equals two to four!"
"Then the agricultural zone will have twelve square kilometers of farmland and six square kilometers of farmers' residential areas."
"Divide it into three small villages, each with two square kilometers of residential areas and four square kilometers of farmland. How many households?"
"Roughly 5,000 households. Then how much land does each family get?"
The more Su Qin calculated, the grimmer his face became. He even began sweating.
Yira picked up a handkerchief and carefully wiped the sweat from Su Qin's face.
Su Qin smiled at her, then continued calculating.
"With 5,000 households, in practice, each household gets roughly four mu?!"
Su Qin shook his head.
"No, how is that a small village? That's already a medium-sized town! No, there are too many farming households!"
In this era, a few hundred households could be called a small town, and a few dozen could be called a village!
"We must reduce the number of households. Four thousand households per town! Put the residential area freed up by those 1,000 households in the town center and build an inner town!"
Soon, Su Qin settled the plans for the agricultural towns.
Four thousand households per town! Eight hundred farms!
Three agricultural towns could accommodate 12,000 farming households!
The system refreshed with new items in June, including seeds!
There were only two choices among the seeds!
[Corn: 1,000 gold coins per set of seeds, sufficient to plant 1,000 mu! Currently, these can only be planted within the system-protected territory-Gulltown (directly administered). Outside this area, the seeds will be unable to germinate for special reasons! The system calls them (system-line seeds) Sheltered Seeds!] [Chili seeds: 5,000 gold coins per set of seeds, sufficient to plant 1,000 mu! Sheltered Seeds!]
He actually really wanted wheat and rice!
In the end, he gritted his teeth and bought the corn seeds! For the seeds to be called Sheltered Seeds carried far too many implications!
But for now, he could only take things one step at a time. Looking too far ahead could scare him to death!
Afterward, with some miscellaneous money added in, Su Qin had only 200 gold left in his pocket! He did not know how many five-household farms he could build!
Because each farm contained housing for five households, they were called five-household farms!