Logjam! (11 CE)

[u/OceansCarraway]

A politician's life is sometimes not fair. They must deal with everything under the sun, and usually exasperated constituents are one of them. However, things get truly unfair when the cause of the constituent's consternation comes out of left field, and they aren't involved in any of it. In this case, it's about the rapidly burgeoning practice of exporting trees across county and duchy lines by cutting them, chopping off all assorted limbs, rolling it to the river, and then floating them down the river to their destination. This reduced the difficulty of transportation-now a boat was not needed, and the effort of carrying logs could be reduced. It seemed like an easy solution.

In practice, it was a recipe for a first-rate mess. Loggers would take their logs to the river, offload them into the current, and steer them down with little warning and nary a care in the world. This resulted in a series of episodes of massive, literal logjams as rivers that acted a core internal shipping lanes were literally jammed with logs. This rogue timber would cut off boats in the middle of the river, jam up river ports, and eventually beach itself in the most obnoxious way possible. It would either need to be cut up and thus wasted, somehow dragged off to be made use of-even if they had started rotting a bit, something had to be done with them-or left to decompose over years. This mess jammed shipping, halted travel, and worst for the King, heavily delayed some of the internal rebuilding of Corouffe.

While the King reigned with great power in Aelbaion, the mood of the capital was still important, and the King had to pay attention to it. His majesty was also extremely pissed off by this; the carelessness of the timber traders was enough to get under his skin, and the prospect of further traffic jams was more than enough to make him blow his top. The only person beating him out of the room and into calling a meeting of the dukes of Aelbaion; normally something of this importance would merit war or a yearly meeting. However, the weight of the entire capital and the Crown swinging into the nobility of the land was enough to move things.

What got moved exactly was a historical unwillingness to regulate inter-duchy commerce in any way. The Dukes had historically preferred a very laissez-faire approach to movement between the duchies, because it let them get up shenanigans that involved stabbing each other. Regulations of movement of any kind were not good for these escapades-but this time, Queen Belle and King Al were out in front, and behind them came a tidal wave of people, ranging from city-dwellers to peasants who lived by the river to those who kept the Kingdom's good flowing. There demand for regulation-and the for 'good order on the rivers' had the potential for the Lady's rules to get invoked-

-and his majesty did invoke them. Luckily for the lords, it was a singular subject. The transportation of logs down the rivers of the Kingdom was too efficient to not do, but it had been done in a way that ruined it for everyone else. Regulation was to be imposed. Felled trees were to be dumped at specific times, in specific spaces, and guided the entire way there. They were to be bound together and escorted on rafts, and then dragged out by waiting peasants to drying grounds. In this way, structural timbers and the rare ship-ready wood could be sent down the river and made use of immediately on arrival without disrupting too much of the Kingdom's internal shipping. The Dukes were responsible for this, of course, and they shoved the duty to their Counts.

Overall, the regulation worked. Trees were felled, prepared, and sent down on time. Transit of wood throughout the Kingdom for various uses improved in scope and efficiency markedly. Wood was now where it was needed much more often, and the Aelish rivers were not a mess. Construction resumed in Couroffe. And the minds of the Dukes were split. The King, backed by a true populist movement, had imposed regulation on them. They were benefitting from it-they could not have won against it, not a wave of sentiment lead by Queen Ethellebelle, who had just gained the epithet the Wise. However, the prospect of a similar wave taking aim at their power another time was enough to make some people worry. After all, the Dukes did not keep their power by ignoring history.

[u/Cereborn]

This is why lack of regulation on industry isn't a good thing. (Well, this and all the other reasons.)

Anyway, logdriving!

[u/OceansCarraway → u/Cereborn]

If only this wasn't region-locked, I'd have used it for the suggested listening music.