Publisher S. John Ross describes
Fief as a one hundred-page primer on medieval life from the perspective of the ordinary farmer, priest or landed knight. I was mildly disappointed to then discover that
Fief limits its focus to the 9th through 13th centuries with only some digressions into the 14th and 15th centuries. Thus, there is very little about towns and cities and nothing about the associated rise of craft guilds. Of
Fief's one hundred (letter/A4-sized) pages, eighty comprise its body; the cover, table of contents, publisher's foreword, appendices and index make up the other twenty pages.
What Fief is about, author Lisa J. Steele, for the most part, does very well. Steele starts with an overview of the feudal manor, which is described as comprising 'one or more villages, a fortified dwelling for its holder, a church or chapel, mills, ovens, fields, forests, and at least one water source, preferably running water.' She then details the manor's buildings, what the manor grew, the forests and wastelands surrounding the manor, how the manor was run; its occupants---serfs, peasants, crafters (carpenters, smiths etc), servants, clergy, nobles, travelers, stakeholders (the crown, the manor-holder's liege, the local bishop)---and aspects of their society: children, clothing, diet, inheritance, marriage, plague, tournaments, and travel. The concluding chapters discuss economic (taxes, trade) and military concerns (armies, manorial obligations, bandits, mercenaries, foraging parties and sieges).
Good things about Fief include the breadth (and mostly the depth) of its coverage, its embellishments and organization. The breadth of its coverage conveys a nice feel for what life was about, from a rural perspective. There are lots of interesting observations and anecdotes that a GM could selectively use to convey the color and detail of times. For example: '...the holder of Hemingstone [Manor] in Suffolk was obligated to leap, whistle, and fart for the king's amusement on Christmas Day.' Fief's organization, sub-headings and index make it easy to absorb, find and look up stuff.
I am somewhat neutral about Fief's lists of historical wages and prices, which include citations for year and country. Steele does not elaborate much upon the context of the figures given which makes it hard to gauge relativities among wages and prices. For example, a daily wage for a laborer, in 1369-70, is given as thirty dernier per day. By contrast, there is an earlier listing for an oxherd, in 1366-67, of sixty dernier per year. The roughly 100:1 differential in earning power, for broadly comparable jobs, is remarkable, but unexplained. There appear to be only two useful entries for sword prices (mid-8C, and 1324).
Fief could be improved with the addition of better accompanying illustrations, the filling-out of some matters of detail, and the inclusion of endnotes. Fief has over seventy illustrations but only one---a map of Farnham Castle---directly illuminates its accompanying text, and barely adequately at that. There are no illustrations of, for example, the layout of a manor (say, from an aerial perspective), the floor plan of a manor house, or the components of medieval dress. The absence of some matters of detail is puzzling. For example, the term 'villages' is used a lot but there is no discussion of village population sizes. There is no (or little) information about medieval life spans, hours of work, diseases (aside from the Black Plague), sickness and treatment, sanitation, time keeping, naming conventions, traveling speeds, or Roman roads. Fief's lexicon of specialized terms could be usefully expanded to pick up other terms and expressions for which no clear explanation is proffered, such as 'grange'; 'murrain'; 'stickled for a black pudding'; 'cotter'; 'pursuivants'; and so on. Fief's value as a reference work would benefit enormously from the inclusion of numbered endnote citations. A list of some seventy sources is provided but these are not cited within the main body of the work. Thus, without knowing where to look, obtaining further information about, for example, the aforementioned 'Hemingstone Manor' factoid (?) would be very difficult.
Fief is emphatically not, as another reviewer described '...something along the lines of the Holy Grail of reference works for adventure games in the medieval setting.' Rather, it's a look at medieval society from a rural perspective, focusing mainly on the 9th through 13th centuries. And it does this, for the most part, quite well. At $US20 for a pdf file I couldn't honestly say Fief represents outstanding value. But it could usefully supplement the library of a discerning GM.
Fief is available via Cumberland Games (http://www.cumberlandgames.com/) as a downloadable Acrobat/PDF file (or on a Windows CD). You can snag a downloadable 'try-before-you-buy' freeware sample from the same site.
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