No Law, and Fists Hurt
Long ago.
In the days when poor, half-naked primitive humans wandered the whole world in search of abundance.
One primitive, hunting for a substitute for heavy, stifling leather clothes, put his craftsmanship to work and unveiled an original invention.
"Guys, check this out—if you weave threads together, you get fabric."
"Oh, how long did that take to make?"
"Four months."
"Bullshit. Stop talking nonsense and come skin some mammoth hide."
But that invention had a fatal flaw: it took far too much time to produce…
Countless primitive geniuses fretted over how to fix that shortcoming, and the result of their efforts was the basic loom.
Well.
I'm no primitive myself, so I can't say for certain, but I figure it went something like that.
Anyway, that was how the concept of weaving was born, and all sorts of looms were devised for more efficient work.
"The core function of a loom is fixing the warp threads and automatically separating them. Having a person hold and move each one by hand takes far too long."
I gave a brief explanation of the loom's structure, drawing on memories of my volunteer work at a folk museum.
Of course everyone here already knew this, but the procedure was still necessary to prove that I understood the work thoroughly.
Asty was only eleven years old, after all. In the modern world she would still be in elementary school.
"Then you pass the shuttle between the separated threads, crossing the warp and weft. Repeat the process and you get cloth."
This investment briefing had drawn ten times as many listeners as before.
Moreover, many of them were experts who already knew the loom's operating principles in detail and fully agreed on the need for improvement.
Allow me to introduce them.
The aunties who ran the household affairs of this boring backwater village.
"I thought to myself: isn't there a way to make this process simpler? If the loom could weave the cloth on its own, Mother would have more time to play with me…"
A light joke tailored to the audience's age and tastes.
The married women, average age forty, cast envious glances at Lady Agnes, who had such an adorable daughter.
Suddenly the center of attention, Lady Agnes gave me an embarrassed smile and a little wave.
Sorry, Mother. I wasn't really asking you to play with me.
"So I made this."
With a confident expression I lifted a small mechanical device.
The secret weapon that would revolutionize the clothing industry.
A miniaturized version of the semi-automatic loom fitted with the Flying Shuttle invented in eighteenth-century England.
Even Asty, who was on the small side for her age, could just barely lift and carry it.
The cloth it produced was only handkerchief-sized, but since it was built purely for technical demonstration, the size didn't matter.
A proper semi-automatic loom was about as big as a grand piano, after all.
In a period when I needed to invent one thing after another and grab attention as fast as possible, I couldn't afford to waste time building a full-sized loom.
"The semi-automatic weft reciprocating device—the Flying Shuttle."
The threads used in weaving fall into two types.
The warp threads, arranged lengthwise to form the skeleton of the cloth, and the weft threads that travel back and forth horizontally to bind it together.
The loom's job is to divide dozens of warp threads into odd and even sets so that every thread can be woven at once.
The neatly aligned threads are hung on two rods; step on the treadle and the rods move up and down.
You pass the shuttle carrying the weft between the separated warps, pull it taut, then lift your foot from the treadle, and a single line is formed naturally.
The Flying Shuttle is the tool that automates the weft's back-and-forth travel.
Simply step on the treadle and the machine weaves the cloth by itself.
Thus you can produce far wider, higher-quality cloth much faster and more easily than before.
"Just stand still and work the treadle… and like this, the cloth is made automatically."
Of course, from the viewpoint of a twenty-first-century modern person it was still painfully slow.
Watching the aunties gasp in astonishment at this advanced technology, I turned over my conversation with Rebecca in my mind.
She had said that making enemies of the weavers on top of the spinners was far too dangerous.
But I didn't think so in the slightest.
Because it wasn't only this loom that was slow.
This was the Middle Ages.
An age when lords with their own domains and private armies clashed with the royal court over every little thing, and knights who had sworn loyalty to their liege slaughtered enemy soldiers to display their valor.
There was still no mercantilism, no capitalist class. The bourgeoisie in the modern sense would not be born for at least several more centuries.
Even the free citizens of the cities were only a notch above serfs; they were not a class that could wield the power of capital or the violence of numbers.
Which also meant that even if the clothing-industry workers joined hands to try to kill me, their limits were clear.
Besides, this was a fantasy world where magic and miracles truly existed.
And my bodyguard, Sister Rebecca, was the Vesta Order's strongest human weapon—someone who had trained in martial arts from childhood as if it were eating meals.
Asking whether that order hadn't already collapsed and vanished was not an appropriate question.
In any case, the fact that she was strong was undeniable.
No matter how much those penniless, powerless brats fretted, breaking through her guard and harming me was absolutely impossible.
So I could simply focus on technological development with peace of mind.
As long as the lords who sucked money out of the cities didn't hear about the artisan guilds shutting their doors and start moving—
"Saintess! Saintess! Disaster!"
"What is it? And I told you to speak comfortably—why do you keep—"
"Count Montpellier has summoned the Saintess!"
Huh.
This was not the reaction speed of the medieval lords I knew.
Count Montpellier was certainly a capable man.
And at the same time, a merciful one.
He collected only fifty percent tax from the farmers, after all.
Fifty percent from freeholding peasants rather than serfs was not exactly a low rate, but we need to remember that the Vesta Order—the mainstream religion of the Europa Continent—had been delisted.
Medieval Catholicism had handled administrative duties for the lords and prevented harsh exploitation.
In exchange for a mere tithe, it took charge of all administration and livelihood management.
Of course that was the principle; colluding with lords to exploit peasants or outright shaking them down was common enough. But assuming it functioned normally, the Church was an organization with excellent cost-performance.
Yet on the Europa Continent the Vesta Order, which had filled Catholicism's role, had disintegrated with the goddess's absence… and the feudal lords suddenly found themselves saddled with the task of rebuilding administrative networks.
In an age when paper was classified as a luxury good and literate personnel were as rare as stars in the sky.
So here is the question.
How do you suppose the lords raised the enormous funds needed to operate administrative services?
Option 1. Dig into their own family fortunes to cover it.
Option 2. Shift the burden onto the subjects who no longer had to pay the tithe.
You've already guessed: the answer is 2.
The lords chose tax increases under the pretext of filling the Church's empty place.
Naturally they did not stop at merely raising the amount of the tithe.
However corrupt the Order's priests might have been, they at least made a show of caring for the people's livelihood; the ignorant feudal lords, by contrast, squeezed their subjects mercilessly with indiscriminate hikes and additional levies.
Some even sold off the tax-collection rights outright, finding it too bothersome to hire collectors themselves.
In any case, the average tax rate produced by this medieval method of fundraising was sixty-five percent, and for serfs it frequently sailed past eighty percent without difficulty.
The collapse of the Order had reduced the subjects' lives to rubble.
Therefore Count Montpellier, who even in the middle of that lawless tax-hike rush maintained the "sensible" rates of fifty percent for free peasants and seventy percent for serfs, was a truly merciful lord.
The fact that his territory's location was so advantageous he never needed to raise rates much was a big part of it, of course.
At any rate, Count Montpellier was an extremely capable lord, and he took a keen interest in the free city of Montpellier that lay within his domain.
Having France's largest city inside your own land and not taking an interest would have been the stranger thing.
Unfortunately the city of Montpellier had been granted autonomy by the king and the Church, so it paid the count only a fixed amount of tax; but more than forty years after the Order's collapse, an opportunity might still exist.
An opportunity to coax the city's leading figures and reclaim that autonomy.
So the count always kept an ear to the city's public opinion.
With the citizens' wholehearted support, swallowing the city whole was not entirely impossible.
And just then word arrived that the spinners' guild was straining every sinew to eliminate a powerful competitor.
The count immediately declared he would take measures to protect the spinners' business rights, and ordered his eldest son to bring in the little inventor in question.
As politely as possible, just in case the situation might change.
And so Asty's first visit to a medieval castle came to pass.