Urban Drudges

(source) The bought-and-sold drudges for the urban manufactories of the Hegemony have a higher comparative value than farm hands, as of course do specialized semi-skilled House slaves.

It’s actually a bit better, in a city, to be a slave than to be a tradeless, Houseless, landless freeman. If you’re a freeman with a bit of land to rent, or a trade and a license to carry it out, you can do well. If on the other hand you’re a slave with skills worth buying, then you’re at least worth feeding, clothing, and sheltering.

But there are vast urban classes of “masterless folk” who have a social status barely above helot, and who don’t have a trade of their own. The urban elites won’t enslave these classes, because that would entail feeding them; it’s not clear they could  afford  to enslave them, even if they wanted to.

These “free drudges” do a lot of the worst, most menial work in and around Hegemonic cities on a daily wage basis. When they can’t get enough to live on from that menial work–which is pretty much all the time–they break the law. They steal, or smuggle, or traffick, or carry out illegal petty trades and crafts.

By the same token, every city of the Hegemony has plenty of Harrowers, which operate in some cases on a near-daily basis, providing for a good share of the city’s blood needs. Their fodder is criminals…rioters, seditionists, smugglers, bawds. Or in thirsty times, just vagabonds and practicers of unlicensed trades…the kinds of folk who might be pressed into the lowest ranks of the army and shipped to the Halassur front if they’re lucky (and the war’s on) or sent to the Harrower when they’re (or it’s) not.

This is true not just of provincial capitals like Grand Shayard, but of Aekos (whose menial classes are a polyglot blend from every province in the Thaumatarchy, as well as desperate Karagonds).

Their “liberties,” symbolized by freedom from ritual Harrowing, are still something the menial urban classes value immensely. A future government that tried to shift from the current widespread-but-unsystematic culling of criminals to a sacred lottery like the rural Harrowings would trigger massive urban resistance.