The Iron Compacts

Overview

The Iron Compacts are the first major named civilization of the Goblins.

They are the armed companies behind the medieval word Hobgoblin. Among Goblins, a compact is an armed community that does work the settled powers need done and would rather not do themselves: holding a road, watching a fort, keeping a ruin from falling on a town, supplying a garrison, or guarding a gate. A compact holds that work because it is useful and armed, and because the lord who tolerates it would pay more to drive it out than to keep it. The bargain is marked by a warrant, a written grant from the lord that he can take back whenever it suits him; the paper keeps nothing alive once the lord stops gaining from it. Compacts are local and separate, but they share drill, songs, and a common memory of what happens to Goblins who hold nothing anyone needs.

Three Losses Behind the Compacts

Goblin history is a sequence of ground lost, and the Compacts are built to answer all of it.

• The Enclosure of the Seams (c. 465,000-c. 420,000 BR) took the seam-warrens of the Ironspine margins, the first Goblin order, into early Dwarven holds.
• The Unlisting of the Warrens (c. 180,000-c. 150,000 BR) struck Goblins from the holdings they had kept under the elder archive-law world, by the will of the stronger houses that kept its rolls, and left a mark of lesser worth that later powers inherited.
• The waste-ground doctrine of the Human frontier, from the Headwater settlement through the Headwater Exchange Roads (c. 16,000-c. 8,000 BR), treated ruined and marginal ground as anyone's to take.

The Compacts answer all three with one lesson: ground is kept by those who are needed and armed. If Goblins could not keep what was theirs, they would hold what others needed held: a road, a ruin, a watch, with their own spears.

Civilizational Nature

A compact's usefulness is both its protection and its leash.

The duty is real and usually hard: holding a road that outlaws prey on, keeping a ruin and whatever lives in it from spilling onto a town, supplying a fort in a hard winter, watching a ford by night. In exchange, the compact keeps a hall, a share of the road's take or the ruin's salvage, and its own weapons, and it can refuse orders the lord lacks the strength to force.

Over generations, some compacts have become semi-hereditary, and steadier food, exposed work, and defensive discipline have made some of their members taller, broader, and more visibly martial than other Goblins. This is change within one people, not a separate species.

Historical Role

The Iron Compacts turned Goblin knowledge and Goblin spears into a place in the medieval world, and they remind anyone who listens that Goblins were pushed to the margins by others, not born there.

They also carry many medieval quarrels. A lord may drive a compact off a ruin to strip it for salvage. A new lord may tear up his father's warrant. At The Greyford Reach, Goblin side-ford keepers without warrants keep crossings open while the Bridge Hall calls it toll-cheating, and a warrant for the side fords is one of the outcomes Lowbank might seek. Underwall households in Dwarven holds, descended from those who stayed after the enclosure, sometimes ask the Compacts to stand behind grievances older than any compact.