Also just in general wrt “the king wants the same things as the peasants but the barons don’t”, I’m really skeptical of the amount of faith that monarchists tend to invest in that relationship because it seems like it has at least as much to do with the idea of kingly purity (e.g. “if only the Czar knew”) as with the actual relationship. But even where that relation exists, it’s not a statement that rulers of larger domains are more likely to agree with the peasants. The way the “king and peasants vs. the aristocracy” setup works even when it works is that the king is playing the two factions against one another and using the perceived legitimacy of his mandate – something lesser aristocrats lack – to defend himself against the faction otherwise most dangerous to his rule. If you fragment that kingdom and now every barony is a tiny kingdom with its own court, the political class relations change completely; you can’t extrapolate them from how the region functioned as a province of a larger entity.
Honestly, having to read the phrase “the king wants the same things as the peasants” with my actual eyeballs….@balioc often writes interesting things but this one makes me wonder if he’s dropped in from a parallel universe.
The king wants peace in the land, and a good harvest that will result in him getting lots of taxes rather than lots of excuses. Sounds pretty good from a peasant perspective to me. Certainly better than the baron’s “I want to build up a massive army so I can beat my rival and maybe overthrow the king” or “I want to sleep with your wife.”
…I mean, yes, this is a gross oversimplification, sometimes the king also wants you to go fight and die in a war in some country you’ve never heard of, or he wants to spend a ton of gold on a giant statue of his father. But as a rule of thumb…