From a Jack to a King

 "The guys who had to work the soil for the king when agriculture was being pursued were the lowest of the low." - Uncle Ken

Now it is Uncle Ken who is skipping some steps.  Before there were kingdoms, there were little villages of former hunter-gatherers, and even that didn't happen all at once.  Some Native American tribes practiced both hunting-gathering and agriculture at the same time, so it seems likely that other primitive people did something similar.  They might all get together to plant their crops in the spring, go hunting and gathering all summer, and then return at harvest time.  Maybe it was just the young men who went hunting and gathering, leaving the women, children and old people to do the hoeing and weeding while they were gone.  I'm not sure exactly how the nomadic herdsmen fit into this, but there are still mountainous regions where the livestock is driven to the high pastures in the summer and brought back down to the valley for the winter.  Somebody must stay behind to grow the winter feed for both livestock and people.  This suggests that there were transition periods where more than one kind of economy was practiced.  

Like I said previously, as these little settlements grew and prospered, they became tempting targets for vagabonds and thieves, which required the settlers to band together for their common defense.  The vagabonds and thieves must have banded together in response and, as both bands got larger and larger, they needed more efficient forms of organization, and government was born.  There must have been a lot of squabbling between bands, and the guy who could knock their heads together and make them play nice eventually became the king.  

As kingdoms consolidated and grew in size, the king needed a whole entourage of nobles to help him keep his people in line.  Sometimes these nobles squabbled among themselves as well, and feudalism was born. When one boss conquered another boss, he frequently allowed the inhabitants to remain on their land, only now they were working for him.  Since the boss actually owned the land, the farmers paid him a percentage of their harvests as rent.  Part of the deal was that the boss was supposed to defend them against vagabonds and thieves.  Sometimes the boss and his entourage became vagabonds and thieves themselves, which eventually inspired the second paragraph of our Declaration of Independence.

The Catfish stories are great.  Keep them coming.