Lautrec

Lautrec is a village in the Belfimbre Plateau, located near the eastern mountains and within Rilean territory. It is a mining village, with many of its people employed in the mines not far away dug into the mountains. There, they mine for silver ore, which the area is rich in, and which will be powdered, smelted into blooms, and shipped back to Talence to be sold on to merchants heading back into Rilea, or in lesser quantities to Adenau, from where it passes on to Marraberg. Some small quantity of the silver is smelted into bars in Lautrec then sold within the region, and it is possible that that town will eventually develop its own processing and crafting industry for the metal. Iron and tin are also extracted here, but for now efforts are concentrated on the extraction of silver with those other metals as byproducts. Most iron ore brought out of the mines is in the form of magnetite.
Miners are not the only profession in Lautrec; like any village, many of the residents are subsistence farmers, although the proportion is far, far lower here than it would normally be. After miners, the most common occupation in Lautrec is woodsmen - smelting the ores requires an enormous amount of wood to burn as fuel, and logging is a constant activity. Much of the wood used as fuel is shipped in from Talence, where the guild employs even more woodsmen, as the nearby Bergwald belongs to Signeur de Morrimont and he permits only a limited amount of it to be cut each year.
Many of the people here are employed by silver merchants from the Talence Merchant's Guild, an organisation composed mostly of silver, cloth, honey and mead merchants, the town's major exports. The village depends so much upon the guild for its economy, most of the money coming from wages paid by guild merchants, which is mostly spent on buying food from guild merchants, that it is effectively controlled by it. While the village has an alderman, appointed by Ser Estienne who owns the land the village sits on, the will of the guild is unchalleneged when it contradicts him. Thus far, the miners have not formed a guild of their own, and the merchant's guild ensures the idea does not spread far when it crops up - if the miners did, they would be able to demand better wages and conditions, after all.

Type

Village