However, there is also the story of ten-odd years ago. At the time when I was still not of age, there was a large-scale expedition.
The Lord ordered around 30 from this village as well to participate in the expedition.
The granduncle of the Lord, who was assigned as junior leading private-sama wore a heavy armor. I remember from my time as boy that he was riding a beautiful horse completely different from the farming horses.
But, as the expedition ended in failure, only 5 of the 30 returned to us.
Of course, that junior leading private-sama and his son’s, who were assisting him, didn’t return, I heard.
I remember all of the few survivors to be in a worn-out condition and having lost weight.
As they were starving on the way back, they killed the horses and ate them. Transforming their spears to walking sticks, they came back by walking for something like several hundred kilometers.
On their way back, their injuries grew worse, they became sick and were attacked by packs of wolves.
In the end they were even unable to leave behind mourning ornaments for their companions.
As there were 5 survivors, I recall them talking about it regretfully.
Furthermore, it doesn’t mean that you could call them uninjured either.
They were strangely afraid of darkness. And they panicked when they saw large bears or wild boars at the organized hunt during autumn.
The place they went to is apparently called 『Demon Forest』 and it seemed they experienced something considerable dreadful there.
Having become a problem afterwards, the fellow villagers antagonized these guys.
The official name for this reclaimed land is territory of the Baumeister Knight peerage.
The Lord is a knight-sama.
The territory is generously divided by 3 villages. The total population is just a little bit short of 700 inhabitants.
Although the territory of knight-sama seems to be large, our territory is poor.
With the failure of the expedition the population ended up decreasing greatly.
That being the case, for some reason at such time came the order from the Lord to participate in the work of expanding the agricultural land.
Naturally, our village chief-sama and the village chief-sama of the neighboring village protested against this.
Despite it taking all our effort to maintain the current agricultural lands with the decreased workers, why pushing the project of cultivating new land forcefully forward?
Also, apart from that, in preparation for the coming winter, the hunting had to be intensified.
In my opinion, our and the neighboring village’s village-chief-sama’s were right.
But even though it was correct, the Lord ended up following the opinion of the village chief of the original settlement, Klaus-sama, who had presented his daughter to the Lord as mistress.
Thanks to that, I was also busy.
In case one was 14 years old, they were considered equal to an adult and had to labor.
Even the children younger than this took occasionally a break in playing around and worked diligently to assist their families in cultivating new land for everyone.
Naturally, as the time to hunt and collect in the forest and fish in the river disappeared, the meals became thin.
As it is dangerous in this territory to leave when it becomes dark, there is no way to do something like hunting in the evening either.
During day time all of the time was used for cultivating new land and farming. Thus it was naturally harsh.
Even though the harvest of wheat had increased, everything besides the meals and the Lord’s taxes had to be bought. (T/N: Taxes in natural products)
Naturally this caused discontent. There was also a rumor that the funds acquired by wheat sale and part of the expenses for the cultivation of new land had been handed over to the bereaved families of the people killed in action during that expedition as one-off payment.