Westerland Administrative Divisions

This article pertains to Administrative Divisions, specifically Source Land Administrative Divisions in the nations and societies of the Westerlands and nations that follow similar or identical cultural norms. The Westerlands are part of the Source Lands Setting. Understanding how Administrative Divisions function in a given setting is key to understanding how their society operates.
 * Note: For information about the specific types officials and rulers in the Westerlands, see the article on Westerland Peerage.

History
The Westerlands were not the first to come up with an idea of a system for bureaucratic and geographical division of residency and jurisdiction - naturally the Elves had their own system and the Dwarves have, perhaps the oldest known system to remain largely unchanged and unaltered, and the Westerland Empire originally took inspiration from both of these Elder-Races in the making of their own system of Administrative Division, and actually, the first draft of the Imperial Model (what the Administrative Division of the Westerlands is generally referred to as, though as part of a larger package of cultural norms and basic rights and expectations) was distributed by the Storm Callers some time around ~1030 BCC and is a major part of Source Land History.

Dwarven Involvement
The Dwarves played a major part in the uprising of the humans against their Elven over-lords, and though they loathed all that was elven, they recognized that humans were strangers to dwarven customs and did not live very long.

A Dwarven student of the law and of bureaucracy would typically study for over a hundred years before even assuming the position as a mere intern in the delicate systems that kept the smooth Dwarven Machine running, and humans could not be expected to succeed in such a manner, and it went directly against the Dwarven Principles to enslave the humans and simply rule over them, despite being convinced that the Dwarven Model was superior to anything the humans could possibly come up with.

The Dwarves, having detailed intelligence of how Elves ran things on the surface, devised a simple system that they believed the humans could follow, which appealed to the excessive levels of human ambition and their tendency to obsess over legacy - they essentially invented feudalism.

Birthright
Dwarves were also strong believes in legacy and Birthright, build their system upon the notion of "birth-right", something that greatly appealed to the members of the Storm Callers, who were largely motivated by darker emotions, such as greed. So the Dwarves based their Feudal system on the idea of Birth Right. The original Storm Callers (the leaders, not the rabble) were the original champions of mankind, and they had a birth right to rule over the lands that were retaken from the Elves.

This was hugely successful, as it was largely believed to be true by the lesser humans, but it was also tremendously supported by other factors;
 * To cement a bond of alliance with the first free humans and the Dwarves, marriages were arranged. As humans had never met mountain Dwarves, the marriages were between the generally tall surface Dwarves and humans that still had fairly high traces of Elven lineage in their veins, resulting in generally long-lived and very physically appealing and adept individuals - but in addition to that, roughly every third Storm-Caller leader or so, was a Nordmarian, and at the time, the Nordmarians had very mixed ancestry already with quite a few supernatural tendencies running in their genetics.
 * Marriages were arranged between the children of the different Storm-Caller Leaders, causing alliances to form naturally, between the leadership of the humans.
 * The Dwarves proclaimed that they recognized the birthright of the Storm-Caller Leaders, and would side with them against any usurpers - this turned out to be a empty promise, because not even Dwarven bureaucrats could keep track of the violent and chaotic human world, and its ever changing political scene, but in the beginning, it meant a lot that the Storm-Callers were recognized by Elder Mountain Kings.

Elven Involvement
It has long been suspected that Elves were somehow involved in the formation of the Westerland Empire, though it appears that it was not the Elves as a united people that decided to take involvement in shaping the way mankind turned out, and the Elves suspect that it was the Eldarin, the "proto-elves" who still "live" among High Elves in some instances, that decided to attempt to shape mankind into something functional, for reasons they kept to themselves.

The Empire formed in ~1019 ACC, after ages and ages of human city-states warring against each other. The Pre-Imperial Era is the most poorly documented period of human history, with even the history of humans prior to the uprising being more well-documented. When the Empire formed, directives were issued that ordered a return to certain Elven Traditions, specifically adopting certain Elven Administrative Models, and thus the Imperial Model was largely born, which turned out to be much more effective than anything the dwarves could ever have made, as the Dwarves were simply not conquerors of the surface world, and had no real idea of how to effectively allow humans to tame their wilderness.

The Imperial Model
When referring to the Imperial Model in this article, it exclusively refers the Administrative Divisions that came about through the Imperial Model.

Fief-Holding
The ruler of a Administrative Division (later in history, the Administrative Divisions largely became regarded as entities in their own right, and were self-owned) technically owns all land within the that Administrative Division, but not directly. Rather, the Administrative Division or the ruler thereof, holds this land in fief, meaning that those that actually own the land are obligated toward some sort of duty in return for their land ownership, typically in the shape of military obligations and having to pay taxes. When talking of ownership, it quickly becomes confusing whether one is referring to Private Ownership or simply what falls within the jurisdiction of the Administrative Division, often also referred to as a sort of ownership.

Capitals
Everything in the Imperial Model flows from some sort of designated point of origin - a settlement (in this case, a settlement is defined as an urban settlement of some sort). In the beginning, the Empire had only one capital per continent it spanned, but this quickly changed for practical reasons, and soon, each Province had its own Provincial Capital and then each Principality within each Province had its own Principal Capital and so forth it went. Capitals are sometimes referred to as "seats", to avoid giving the implication that a given capital is somehow a capital in the modern sense.

Roads
The important part about Capitals, was that every settlement that was laid under a given Capital, had to be connected to its capital by roads. Roads were the backbone of the Imperial Model, permitting effective travel by wagon and horse, as well as unimpeded foot-travel.

The first Imperial Roads were magnificent constructions, known as the Imperial Highways, and were raised up from the ground by roughly a full yard, were 10 yards wide, cobbled over and protected from flooding by means of a raised granite curb. Even at the end of the Colonial Era, most of the Imperial Highways still remained intact, having been built with the help of Dwarves, before the Dwarves grew estranged from the Empire.

It was a fundamental idea within the Empire, that a person had the freedom to travel, and seeing as humans were naturally inclined to walk, it became a staple of Imperial culture that a man had to be able to walk to a place, for that place to be regarded as a part of the civilized world.

It was assumed, in the Empire, that an average untrained and unburdened middle-aged human could walk 30 miles per day - this assumption was made, assuming the human would walk for roughly 8 hours during that day. Due to the tradition of road-building that Imperials strictly followed, this resulted in a web of roads leading from a given regional capital and out into the countryside, and every 30 miles, a new administrative division began.

Imperial Inns
Imperial Inns existed on Imperial Edict, and were tax-free establishments that provided security and places to sleep on the Imperial Roads, every 30 or so miles of foot travel. All Inns had stables and barns and were typically small hamlets in their own right, with a small tower and armed guards protecting it. Anyone who traveled on the roads could lodge their husbandry and their company for free at an inn when they first came around, but it soon became a paid service.

The Imperial Shire
Ideally (though often not the case), a shire consists of somewhere between 2500 and 3000 square miles of land, or roughly a radius of 30 miles from the center of the Shire, where the shire capital is found, and a road would lead to any adjacent Shire, from the capital, forcing anyone traveling, who wishes to stay on proper roads, to go through, or at the very least past the Shire Capital when traveling through a shire - thus naturally guiding commerce in the direction of the urban populace.

The Imperial Model held that roughly 30 miles from a the center of the administrative division that stretched from a capital, the next administrative division would begin, and roughly thirty miles from the border would be the center of that administrative division - but obviously it was both impractical and unlikely to have another proper capital city a mere 60 miles away, though urban settlements were the very hearts-blood of the Empire, and so Shires were essentially invented to facilitate the spread of the Empire's ideals.

Obviously Shires cannot follow a strict model, simply because lands differed from each other. Coastal shires were often much smaller, if not actually half the size of a regular shire, and some shires were effectively reduced in size, because part of the shire was uninhabitable due to dense forests, water-bodies or mountains etc., and further more, rather than building a settlement exactly 60 miles from the previous settlement, naturally settlements were build where it made sense, and so, quite often, the rules above were not really observed, but merely used as guide-lines for planning shires.

The Imperial Parish
A Parish exists within the boundaries of a shire and is a further Administrative Sub-Division. Unlike a shire, a Parish isn't required to connect to another Parish, and instead, the space between Parishes are filled in with Imperial Townships. There was no set decision on where in a shire, that a Parish could be situated, and they tended to appear naturally, at places where people congested for various reasons.

A Parish is typically somewhere between 100 and 300 square-miles of land, ideally centered at its seat, being a village, a hamlet or an important recognizable structure, such as a fortress, a religious structure or a site where natural resources are being harvested. Again, the Imperial ideal, that everything must have a "Capital" that people share a sense of belonging to, is a governing key factor in how the Parish works, with the Seat of a Parish being this capital.The size of a parish was determined by the very rough notion, that those that lived more than two-hours away from the Parish seat, on foot, couldn't truly belong to the same local community.

Obviously a Parish would typically come to exist when someone is granted the rights to being construction of a fortress, a manor, a resource site or some sort of religious structure, and the whole Parish then falls under the authority of the that new figure, but that doesn't mean that this entity owns all of the land, or even that they were granted all of the land in the Parish to begin with - rather, the ruling entity of a Parish typically only directly owns a third of the Parish, with the rest having been added to the Parish merely as an extended jurisdictional reach.

The Imperial Township
Townships are basically loosely defined regions in between Parishes throughout a Shire. Townships exist mainly for tax-reasons, and those that live in Townships are almost always the actual owners of their own land, whereas Parishers are just as likely to rent.

Townships are more frequent in less-populated regions, when there are fewer parishes, and uniquely, Townships sometimes extend outside of a given shire's actual reach and functional jurisdiction, and can become precursors to an entirely new Shire.