The Cottage War
Lowgal, The Neck of Tiris and the Coralon Canal (larger map below)
The Cottage War, A Brief History
Introduction: The Cottage War is the historical setting for the characters in the Vines deck. It takes place in the world of Carrisor, between the years 755-780 of the common era. This document was written to inform the character designs in that deck, and it also provides some context for what is happening 40 years later, in the current Carrisor storyline (the Dragon Wars).
Carrisor is a fantasy world created by James Ernest for the development of original card games. The characters of Carrisor’s “modern era” are described at World Anvil. You can find more world maps and other supporting information at World Anvil.
Note: For more details about the characters in the Vines deck, check out the second half of this info dump.
About the Cottage War: What started as a standoff between small community farmers in Lowgal in CE 762 became a nearly continent-spanning conflict by 767, touching off one of the many historical struggles for the Crown.
In the late 750s and early 760s, the Principality of LaForêt came into newfound wealth with the increased cultivation of cash crops including tobacco, coffee, and coca. With their added wealth came more political power, and the Lord Baron in LeBâton sought to use this power to strengthen his holdings in the South and to gain more independence from the court in Iona. But conflicts among their own citizens, and economic pressures from across the world, ultimately brought LaForêt back to heel, and the growing wealth of the region fell back under the control of the Crown.
Pre-755
For decades, the Principality of LaForêt produced little of value to the rest of the world. With few large cities, and poor investment from its capital in LeBâton, the southern region of Lowgal was a collection of struggling farming towns, exporting a few cash crops including lentils, sorghum, and wheat.
LaForêt’s most lucrative non-agrarian industry was freight hauling, notably between the twin cities of Sera and Corvide, across the neck of the desert isthmus of Tiris. This overland trade route defined the rough border between Lowgal and Tiris, and both principalities claimed some ownership of the land. Corvide, on the Middle Sea, was controlled by Lowgal, while Sera, on the Siblin side, was controlled by Tiris. In practice, The Neck was a very gray zone.
In many ways, the Sera-Corvide region constituted its own fragile city-state, owing allegiance to both neighboring principalities, but operating mostly under its own auspices. It was the second-wealthiest region in Lowgal, and the richest in Tiris. Neither LaForêt nor Tiris were strong enough to control the Neck outright, and so Sera and Corvide stood in a delicate equilibrium with both regions.
Aside from Sera-Corvide, the three major cities in LaForêt/Lowgal were Niland in the east, and Dogbottom and LeBâton in the west. The coast was dotted with small fishing villages, but no major ports. Tiris was governed by the capital at Enn, and its coastline was dotted with dozens of small villages that served as waypoints around the peninsula.
The Early War, 755-763
Lord Baron Gerun Jiles Prudhomme, third son of Prince Nave Geral Prudhomme of LeBâton, and nephew of Lord Baron Dufont LaForêt, spent two seasons traveling across the Siouet to the east. He returned to LeBâton in the Spring of 755, his head swimming with notions of cultivating new high-value crops in Lowgal.
In his travels, Lord Gerun learned new techniques for growing coca, cocoa, tobacco, and coffee. LeBâton City was the continent’s largest importer of these goods, but now Lord Gerun believed that in ten years, they could become their principal exporter instead.
To convince farmers to invest in these new crops, and in the hopes of capturing more of their profits, Lord Gerun introduced a novel franchise system. Unlike the existing vassal farmers, who owned their land within a system of fealty and taxation to LeBâton, these new “cottage” farmers would live and work on land that was owned outright by the Principality. They would draw guaranteed wages from the state, but held no claim to the land itself. They would be the only farms allowed to produce the new crops.
Lord Gerun’s cottage farms began production in 756, and the franchise system quickly became a source of friction between the two classes of farmers. In Seeles, the short years, the Cottage farmers prospered, their wages and costs provided by the state despite low yields. In Wenders, the long years, the vassal farmers prospered, earning more than their wage-collecting counterparts. And so it went for several years, with each class of farmer righteously defending their own rights to profit, while simultaneously jealous of their neighbors.
The years 759, 760, and 761 were three Seeles on a run. So by the Spring of 762, the Cottage farmers had the clear advantage. Many landed farmers had grown violently furious about the disparity, and a group of them petitioned the capital for permission to convert to the new system. Keen to avoid a war, the Principality rejected the proposal, but also awarded twice the usual cottage farm contracts for 762. At the same time they changed the wage rules, resulting in an overall drop in pay for all cottage farms, including the original contracts.
762 was a Wender, though not a rich one, and hardly any farms prospered. Most of the profits were in ranching, a business mostly spared in the Cottage War. Both the landed and cottage farmers felt the pinch of a poor season, and each blamed the other for their misfortune. This was more or less acceptable to the aristocracy, as long as the farmers didn’t blame them also.
Meanwhile, Lord Gerun and the ruling families in LeBâton were making a fortune. As tobacco and coffee crops matured into steady production, Gerun’s franchise scheme became a money maker, both for the Principality itself, and for their financiers in Baronet. The Lord Baron guarded this wealth tightly, as one might expect, spending a good deal on soldiers and arms.
LeBâton City
The Principality of LaForêt grew fat in the early years of cottage farming. Taking the long view, they set aside a significant cash reserve, hoping to build a strong army and gain independence from Iona. This presumed that the system wasn’t about to come crashing down, although the cracks were already starting.
At the heart of the farmers’ conflict was the law forbidding vassal farmers from planting the new cash crops. Of these, tobacco and coffee were the most successful; the others (coca and cacao) met with less success, and they would continue to exist primarily as imports. Other spices and vegetables were also involved in this confusing web of regulation, under licensing rules handed down by the Principality, but none were as significant as coffee and tobacco.
In the summer of 762, a group of landed farmers in the Senna region attacked a tobacco farm called High Hill, burning fields and curing sheds. In retaliation, a band of cottage farmers kidnapped and killed the leader of the High Hill raid, martyring her in the process. The attacks on people and property escalated for months, until a harsh winter forced both sides to rest.
During the winter of 762-63, a young cottage farmer named Berel Molari brokered a fragile truce between the factions. Berel preached that the farmers’ true enemy was not each other, but the aristocrats in LeBâton. Her truce lasted for several months, and for the most part, the farmers of Lowgal were united under Berel’s leadership. They plotted in the shadows to avenge the injustice at its source, though they could not agree on what form that vengeance would take. Some wanted legal reform, some wanted the heads of the LaForêts, many wanted both.
Meanwhile, the other world powers watched the Cottage War closely, trying to understand their place in it. By the summer of 763, the new cash crops had enriched LeBâton even more than Lord Gerun predicted. His franchise system had produced a huge windfall, and regional freight handlers and shipping companies were also growing fat on the trade. LeBâton knew that a sustained period of growth on this scale would make them a major military power, poised at last to push back the influence of the royal family.
It behooved the powers in LeBâton to quash any unrest among the farmers, even when they were only fighting with each other. The rulers were blindsided when the farmers joined forces under Berel Molari, and rose up in open revolt in the summer of 764. In a desperate attempt to forestall outright rebellion, LeBâton tried with some success to undermine the alliances and to turn the farmers back against each other.
Baronet
Wealthy as they were, the Lords in LeBâton could never have paid for the franchise program on their own. This enterprise required investors from the West, in Baronet City, primarily the Simoleon and Riĉa families. These were the principal backers of the cottage farm experiment, and they reaped huge profits from this enterprise.
In 764 the program had yet to earn back its capital investment for Baronet, having paid out guaranteed wages in three difficult years. Nevertheless, the plan was working as expected. The cottage farms created steady profits, despite some short-term losses. The LaForêts, and Lord Gerun specifically, were now cash-rich, but owed significant long-term debt to Baronet City. Baronet, for its part, was pleased to own the debt.
However, Baronet City was not a unified supporter. The bulk of Lord Gerun’s initial backing came from a single individual, his friend Ser Duce Filus Buckwort Riĉa. Filus Riĉa was an unreliable scoundrel, the youngest child of a Sieran merchant dynasty. He spent his days gambling and carousing in LeBâton, and had befriended Lord Gerun in the gambling halls of Sailor’s Row.
Filus Riĉa reached deep into the family coffers to finance the cottage farm enterprise, taking another in a series of long-shot gambles which the family despised. Even his success in this instance came with obligations that did not endear him to the family matriarch, Eale Caseworth Gertrod “Gottie” Riĉa. Gottie Riĉa had frequently warned her family never to make deals that could be nullified by war. For the moment, Filus’ investment was paying off, but there was still a long period of risk before the debt was made well.
As the franchise program grew stronger, it gained the attention of other investors in Baronet, These most notably included Carlisle and Anda Simoleon, who provided much of the second wave of capital, via LaForêt partners including Vincen Fereil and Barona Frie deGuy.
Aside from the Simoleons, most other merchant families in Baronet were none too thrilled with the ascension of the Riĉas. Some families did what they could to undermine the enterprise in secret, while others jockeyed to become a part of it. The major Sierin families divided against each other and themselves, half struggling to dismantle the cottage farming system, and the others striving to get a piece of it. Some supported the rebels, while others worked with the politicians in LeBâton to mediate disputes and rewrite laws. By the height of the conflict in 767-769, Baronet’s influence could be felt on all sides of the Cottage War.
Some Sierin families took a more practical approach, with various attempts to replicate the franchise system elsewhere in the world. This had little relation to whether they supported the system in Lowgal, since of course everything in their world was about profits. However, no other cash crops fared as well as coffee and tobacco, because none provided margins steep enough to guarantee wages in lean years. And Lowgal was by far the best place to grow these crops.
Iona Castle
To the aristocracy in the North, a surge in wealth and power in LeBâton was never good news. The Crown’s first priority was to prevent the cottage farms from being profitable, and to prevent any insurrection against the monarchy that would follow from an enrichment of their enemies.
LaForêt had always been an unwilling and insufferable subject of the crown. They played the role of the “weak brother,” never self-sufficient, and always incapable of protecting their own borders. For the most part, they were subordinates of Iona because of their poverty, which Iona worked openly to sustain.
From the North’s perspective, this new wealth meant long-term independence for LeBâton. Iona was not entirely sure what to do. Should they try to make the system fail, or try to join in the profiteering, and thereby rise with the same wave? Was it better to encourage the farmers’ rebellion, or to summon other allies now, and capture LeBâton while it was still weak?
In the short term, Iona’s decision was to quietly support those farmers at the vanguard of the rebellion. This meant providing covert assistance to leaders like Berel Molari, in hopes that she and her allies would do the hard work of weakening LaForêt. Perhaps, through such allies, Iona could plant allies in the farmlands of Lowgal and win the territory war by proxy.
This was the decision of the young Queen Seren Gallumet Chanson Lionnar. Her cautious strategy was too subtle to succeed, and the people of Lowgal would remain proud subjects of LeBâton despite their squabbles over contracts. Throughout the Cottage War, Queen Seren made several similar moves that were a little too cautious, or a little too late. Despite her efforts, LeBâton City gained ever more strength. But they would not gain their independence.
Mikoren
The Burning Tower also had something to say about all of this. Prelate Bartolomeu Straithmoor Covens, Pontiff of the Burning Tower and High Exalted of the Feast of Leeds, was a longtime supporter of the Lionnar family, and Lady Bishop Osla Nials Chaste Lionnar CoeurDeboeuf (sister of the Queen) served as prime advisor to the Pontiff.
The Burning Tower worked in shadows to maintain a balance of power throughout the continent, so that no single force became too strong. This policy, in turn, gave the church the influence they needed to bring in new recruits, enrich their elites, and protect them from harm.
Within the church, there were doubts over allowing the Principality of LaForêt to gain more power. Were they to profit enough to threaten Iona, most in the church considered it a step too far, since the Prelate’s strongest allies were in the palace. But Iona’s powerful dominion over the Principality of Lowgal meant that Iona’s influence stretched too far south, threatening to undermine the church through the consolidation of royal power.
The young Queen Seren’s covert interference in the Cottage Wars, prosecuted without permission from the church, was a snub to the Burning Tower. This naive end-run of the Tower’s influence signaled that Iona was rejecting their yoke, and that they should be reigned in, despite the Pontiff’s ties to the Lionnar family. This was the position taken by most of the highest-ranking bishops, in contradiction to the Prelate’s wishes. So, as has happened many times in the history of Carrisor, the church’s worst enemy was itself.
The Coralon Canal
The artificers of Meere became players in the Cottage War when, in 767, they proposed the creation of a canal across the Tiris Neck, to connect the port cities of Corvide and Sera, and to provide LeBâton City with a faster trade route to the West. The proposal was spearheaded by Dockmaster Gordel Coralon, and was backed by investors from Meere, Baronet City, and the Fire Hand of Fris.
Long considered impractical, a sea-level canal connecting the Siouet and Middle Seas would cut through almost ninety miles of mountainous terrain. But the Fire Hand offered to provide an effective means of demolition, for the right price. Their explosive “fire sand” could liquefy solid rock, with force that had never been used on this scale.
The Fire Hand and the engineers of Meere believed that the new wealth in LeBâton signaled an opportunity to propose this canal project, and this is how Fladdock and Fris would take their share of the spoils from the cottage farms.
In the autumn of 767, Gordel Coralon made an expedition to the mountains south of Corvide, with a team of Fire Hand demolitionists. He gave a demonstration of stone-cutting power at a remote mountain quarry called Seheleres, pulverizing a ridge beside a limestone pit. His crew took down, with one massive explosion, a wall of stone that would have taken a hundred stonecutters twelve weeks.
In attendance at Seheleres were representatives from the Bank of Baronet, the Principality of LaForêt, the Principality of Tiris, and the Kingdom of Iona. The canal would require financing from Baronet, legal sanction from Iona, and manpower from LaForêt and Tiris. After proving his methods at Seheleres, Coralon waited nearly three years for his answer.
At first, Queen Seren protested that the existence of the canal on the Tiris border made it too easy for the southern Principality to overtake and control it, and she vetoed the project on this basis. Her actual and not-so-secret concern was that LaForêt would profit too much from the canal, no matter who controlled it. With profits from the cottage farms, the LaForêt family were already growing too strong for Queen Seren’s comfort, and this was her way of downplaying that concern while still thwarting the project.
Queen Seren’s ruse backfired. In secret negotiations brokered by the Burning Tower, the merchants of Baronet City convinced Tiris to formally cede control of Sera-Corvide and the Coralon Canal to the Congress of Merchants in Baronet, a five-family corporation formed specifically to enact this arrangement. Tiris gained a 99-year drayage concession, in exchange for rights in the borderland. This effectively moved the Tiris-Lowgal border almost two hundred miles southwest, to the villages of Aleka and Hours.
Since this treaty satisfied Iona’s only public complaint, that the canal might fall into the hands of Tiris, Iona could no longer protest the canal on those grounds. The Sierin Congress of Merchants convened a second canal summit in 769, this time at the University at Niland. Through other complex back-channel politics, Iona and Tiris finally signed off on the deal. The Queen was still not pleased, but she was assured that the canal itself would really be owned by the merchants in Baronet, and not by the upstart Lord Baron in LeBâton.
LaForêt did, however, gain uncontested control of Corvide and Sera, so LeBâton expected to make a tremendous profit from the canal zone, despite the tolls and concessions to Tiris.
Construction of the Coralon Canal spanned nine years, from the spring of 770 to the late summer of 779. The canal required more than sixty thousand laborers, including ten thousand prisoners from the Transport Fleet. More than five thousand workers lost their lives from extreme heat, disease, bandits, and hazardous work conditions. The project was plagued by cost overruns, political struggles, sabotage and raids from the south, and various interruptions from the ongoing Cottage War.
The first ship to transit the canal was the Los Tienes, a 30-gun Royal Fleet galleon, in the early fall of 779. It was a training ship en route from Caliça in Low Senna to the University at Niland.
The Aftermath
By far, Tiris came out the worst in this deal. The small port cities dotting the peninsula lost most of their revenue as fewer and fewer merchant ships rounded the horn. In the years before the canal, there had been ample traffic to sustain those cities, but that traffic fell by more than half as soon as the canal was complete.
At the Niland summit, the Sierin Congress had convinced the Masters of Enn that their generous canal fees would more than replace the taxes they lost from these port cities. While that was technically correct, the death of Sierin’s port cities would eventually create a long-term deficit far greater than the value of those lost taxes. Over the following decades, this economic contraction gave rise to a refugee crisis that was exacerbated by the Dragon Wars of the early 830s. Tiris faded in power and suffered its own bloody civil war over the results, and may even have been complicit in waking the ancient monsters.
The shipwrights of Meere and the monks of the Fire Hand were paid handsomely for their expertise throughout construction. Gordal Coralon became fantastically wealthy from the canal that bore his name. As the financiers of the project, the merchants of Baronet City gained significant ongoing revenue. And Lowgal gained a boost from Sera and Corvide, not to mention an influx of laborer’s wages from the canal project itself.
Throughout the canal project, the Fire Hand of Fris were careful to guard the secrets of fire sand. Nevertheless, a good deal of the stuff was stolen, and Coralon fire sand became a rare and valuable black market commodity.
The canal project drew laborer forces away from Lowgal and Tiris, starving the landed farms of their strength. The project also drew heavily on the royal prison labor system, ultimately resulting in the dissolution of the Transport Fleet, which was once more than 100 prison ships under the command of Meere’s Worden Niall Belleporter.
During roughly the same period as the canal project, the Cottage War ramped down slowly, changing tone and shape, losing muscle due to an exodus of hands to the south, but never quite fading until the Spring of 780. Throughout the period, neither landed farmers nor their cottage counterparts could hire sufficient labor to draw the full value from their lands, much less to fight a civil war.
In 774, LeBâton City once again reduced the wages they offered to cottage farmers, introducing an incentive system to supplement them. Encouraged by factions in Baronet City, they made the argument that since their profits were down, the farmers should share some fraction of that cost, despite this being wholly contrary to the spirit of their original arrangement. There were still plenty of profits in coffee and tobacco, of course, and the cottage farmers saw this change as pure theft.
Shortly after the new incentives, nearly all of the cottage farmers who were not already involved in the rebellion now formally joined it, having little faith in their contracts. They burned storehouses, attacked land offices, and destroyed markets. This situation spiraled as LeBâton continued to reduce wages, blaming the changes on the costs of the unrelenting attacks.
In 776, LeBâton redrafted the incentive system to offer cottage farmers a “peace commission,” paying significant bonuses based on productivity but also introducing harsh penalties for associating with rebels. Each step along this process was taken with interference from investors in Baronet City, who may not have had Lowgal’s best interests at heart.
“Return to the Land” became the rallying cry of the cottage farmer, now fed up with being the poorly-compensated tools of the Principality. If they were to be landed farmers in all but name, they argued, then they should be allowed to buy their own land, choose their own crops, and bring their goods to a fair market alongside their landed counterparts.
Eventually both the landed and franchise farmers put enough pressure on the Principality that LeBâton relented on one core rule: in 778 they began allowing landed farmers to plant the high-value crops. They assumed this change meant that landed and cottage farmers could shift their competition into the marketplace.
For the most part this maneuver was successful, with landed farmers soon marketing their goods as “labor,” and labeling the others as “state.” “Labor” and “state” became the de facto political factions, though by 780 the franchise laws had changed enough that both modes of practice were nearly identical in all but name. The last remaining difference was who owned the land, though even this was slowly becoming a gray area, as the state levied higher and higher taxes on the landed class, and allowed franchise farmers to buy their land outright.
The camps of “labor” and “state” became well-defined parties, persisting long after the Cottage War. “State” believed in community through distributed resources, while “labor” revered the values of individualism and free enterprise. The core tenets of state are that government can provide a leveling influence over the exigencies of the chaotic marketplace, while labor argues that only the hardworking should reap the benefits of their labors, and that an egalitarian “mother state” strips its citizens of the will and opportunity to gain advantage. These political parties later became better known as the “mother” and “father” parties.
Meanwhile, even more than Tiris and Iona, the biggest unseen victims of this era of change were the farmers and tradesmen of Siné and Bok, across the Siouet. They had lost fortunes with the relocation of tobacco and coffee trades. In fact, those most vengeful among them may have worked with agents from Tiris to touch off the Dragon Wars. But that is another story.
Larger map of the region, the continent of Carrisor
The Cottage War is a slice of the Carrisor storyline. You can read more about this place and its characters at the Carrisor pages at World Anvil.