Across the Water Margin: Officials of Ximen

Among the victims, Yu Baosi accidentally met Li Xiaoer, a wine-born son who once opened a tea hotel outside the Cangzhou City Prison Camp.

Li Xiaoer was originally from Bianliang, Tokyo. When he was in Tokyo, he was often looked after by "Leopard Head" Lin Chong.Later, the fellow stole money from the shop owner's house and was caught. He wanted to send him to a lawsuit for questioning, but Lin Chong offered to accompany him to save him from the lawsuit, and he accompanied him with some money to escape.

Li Xiaoer's reputation was ruined, he couldn't live in Beijing, and because Lin Chong sent him to spend money on him, he defected to others on the road, and wandered to Cangzhou, entrusted him to a hotel owner, and stayed in the shop to sell.

After all, Li Xiaoer had worked as a wine child in a big restaurant in Bianliang, Tokyo, and he had some means of selling wine.The owner of the hotel recruited Li Xiaoer as his son-in-law because he saw that Li Xiaoer was diligent, arranged the vegetables well, and blended them well, and the people who came to eat applauded him.The villain and his wife opened a tea shop in front of the prison camp.

Later, Li Xiaoer met Lin Chong who was assigned to Cangzhou outside the prison camp. In order to repay his kindness, Li Xiaoer served Lin Chong diligently.

When Lu Yuhou, Fu An, and Guanying of Laocheng Ying secretly discussed how to harm Lin Chong in Li Xiaoer's hotel, Li Xiaoer overheard and quietly informed Lin Chong.

As a result, Lin Chong became wary of Lu Yuhou and others. Later, Lin Chong killed Lu Yuhou and the others in the mountain temple and fled Cangzhou after setting fire to the forage field.

Li Xiaoer has so many friendships with Lin Chong, and has always been concerned about Lin Chong's whereabouts.In the future, when he heard that Lin Chong went to Liangshan Po Luocao, Li Xiaoer remembered it in his heart.

In this year's major flood, Li Xiaoer's tea shop was also flooded. Unfortunately, his wife was swept away by the flood and disappeared.

Li Xiaoer struggled to escape for his life, seeing his family ruined and no relatives, he didn't know who to turn to.After thinking about it, Li Xiaoer remembered that there was a benefactor Lin Chong on Liangshanbo, so he decided to join him and live the legendary life of "eating meat in large pieces and drinking in large bowls".

On the way, Li Xiaoer met Yu Baosi and his group. Seeing Yu Baosi's majestic appearance, he must be a hero in the world, so he wanted to lure him to Liangshan to join the gang as a gift for Lin Chong.

After getting to know each other and chatting with each other, Yu Baosi and Li Xiaoer, who had nowhere to go, hit it off immediately, and immediately decided to go south to Yunzhou and seek refuge in Shuibo Liangshan.

Chapter 261 Recruiting Soldiers to Prevent Chaos

Yu Baosi and Li Xiaoer crossed the prefecture and entered the territory of Yunzhou.On the way, Yu Baosi recruited some rascals from among the victims, gathered hundreds of people, and fought hard along the way, using the name of the disaster to eat rich people, and came to the bank of Dongping Lake with delicious food and drinks.

Yu Baosi had never been to Yunzhou, so he mistook Dongping Lake for Liangshanbo at this time, and also took Dongping Mansion on the south bank of Dongping Lake as Jezhou Mansion to the south of Liangshanbo.

Li Xiaoer went up to find someone to inquire about, then ran back and said to Yu Baosi: "Brother, I have arrived at Dongping Mansion! This lake is Dongping Lake, not Liangshan Lake. I still have to go south to reach Liangshan Lake. "

Yu Baosi touched his big belly, frowned and said, "Then why is Liangshan so far away? Master, I have been walking for half a day, and I haven't seen the water in Liangshanpo! The brothers are all hungry and thirsty, so I have to find a Eat and drink enough, and it won’t be too late to go on the road.”

Hearing Yu Baosi's words, a confidant behind him suddenly pointed to a row of wooden sheds outside the city wall of Dongping Mansion and said, "Brother, look! Isn't the government in front of us distributing meals for disaster relief? Why don't I go there to eat too?" ?”

Yu Baosi took a closer look, and sure enough, many victims of the disaster came out from the wooden shed holding bowls, and squatted at the base of the city wall to eat. It seemed that he could lead his group of people to eat for nothing!

……

Outside the west gate of the city wall of Dongping Mansion, the government has newly built a row of tall wooden sheds.However, this wooden shed is different from the porridge shed outside Yanggu County. This is the recruiting shed used by Dong Ping, the military commander of Dongping Prefecture, to recruit the Jin and Xiang troops.

In the Northern Song Dynasty, after Zhao Kuangyin proclaimed himself emperor and founded the country, the system of recruiting soldiers was mainly implemented.Most of the recruits are famine and hungry people, and a system of raising soldiers is implemented in disaster years to recruit hungry people as soldiers.The purpose of doing this is mainly to prevent the refugees affected by the disaster from gathering crowds to make trouble, rise up and shake the rule of the imperial court.

Song Taizu Zhao Kuangyin once concluded: "The only thing about my family is to raise soldiers for the benefit of a hundred generations. Because of the famine year, there are rebels but no rebels. Unfortunately, there are rebels but no rebels."

Zhao Kuangyin believes that such a system of recruiting hungry people as soldiers in disaster years is conducive to consolidating the ruling foundation of the imperial court and eliminating the source of turmoil.

In the Northern Song Dynasty, in addition to recruiting hungry people as soldiers in disaster years, they also encouraged the children of the battalion to take over from their fathers and brothers to serve as soldiers, or to recruit criminals into the army.Once you apply, you will join us for life.

According to the regulations of the Northern Song Dynasty, the recruiting of all roads was carried out by the chief official or the capital supervisor, and the "soldier like" or "wooden stand" was used as the standard, and the strong and strong were selected as the imperial army, and the weak and weak were selected as the Xiang army.

When recruits join the army, they have tattoos on their faces or arms to mark their military numbers, so recruiting is also called stabbing.Their family members can live with them in the barracks.

The Song army implemented a selection system, and conducted training and assessments according to the three standards of upper, middle and lower every spring and autumn.Those who are strong and have martial arts skills can be promoted from the Xiang army to the imperial army. Those who are outstanding in martial arts skills will be given rewards and can make up for the ranks of officials.Those who are inferior in martial arts skills will be demoted to the infantry army, and will be demoted to the Xiang army if they are not as good.The old and weak may be lowered in rank, removed from the military, or reduced to "remaining members" and served as miscellaneous servants in the army.

The Forbidden Army, Xiang Army, and Turk Army generally retire at the age of 60, and their food and clothing supplies are halved.There are pensions for the families of soldiers who died in battle, and provisions for resettlement for the disabled.

The recruiting system established by Song Taizu Zhao Kuangyin showed strong vitality in the early Northern Song Dynasty and had a positive impact on social development.

First of all, under the recruitment system, soldiers are professionalized and lifelong.Soldiers became professional soldiers, and they no longer went home to farm in peacetime. The burden was reduced, and the phenomenon of evading military service was alleviated to a certain extent. Military service burden.

The separation of soldiers and peasants enabled civilian households to avoid life turmoil and separation of husband and wife caused by military service, which was beneficial to both the development of production and the lives of the people.

Secondly, under the recruitment system of the Northern Song Dynasty, the Xiang Army established to accommodate the old and weak who had been eliminated by the Imperial Army undertook most of the corvee, thus freeing the peasant households of the Northern Song Dynasty from the burden of hard labor.

The absence of military service and corvee provided a stable environment for the development of agriculture and handicraft production in the Northern Song Dynasty.The relaxation of laborers' dependence on the feudal government also created conditions for the development of commerce in the Northern Song Dynasty.It can be said that the laborer's less military service and the burden of forced service played a decisive role in the economic prosperity of the Northern Song Dynasty.

However, there is no panacea in this world. In the early Northern Song Dynasty, the recruitment system was miraculously effective in maintaining the rule. Over time, problems such as bloated army numbers and heavy military expenditures also occurred.

After the mid-Northern Song Dynasty, the "poor and weak" caused by the "three redundancy" has always plagued the Northern Song Dynasty government.Among the "three redundant", especially "redundant soldiers" is a serious problem.

Cai Xiang, who served as the third envoy during the Zhiping period of Emperor Yingzong of Song Dynasty, said: "The big problem today is the army... It is six percent of the world, five for the soldiers, one for the temples in the suburbs, and the country's expenses. How can the country be poor? , why are the people not sleepy?"

The large number of troops became the main reason for the heavy financial burden of the Northern Song Dynasty.The number of soldiers raised by the Song Dynasty increased day by day. Whenever the country encountered a famine, the Song government recruited soldiers in famine areas to eliminate the hidden danger of "if you don't recruit them as soldiers, you may become robbers".As a result, the number of soldiers has increased year by year, and military expenditures have become larger and larger.

Especially after the large-scale war with Xixia during the Song Renzong period, the military expenditure was even greater.The state's fiscal revenue is limited and the cost of raising troops often accounts for [-] to [-]%, so that the Song Dynasty was always financially empty, and fell into a state of "accumulated poverty" that could not be extricated.

Theoretically, professional soldiers in the recruiting system do not have to do production and have more time to pay close attention to technical and tactical training, but in practice this is not necessarily the case.

Training also costs money.After all, training will definitely cause the loss of weapons, equipment and horses, and soldiers need to strengthen nutritional subsidies.For recruits, both training and combat require rewards to be motivated. If money is not enough, the training of recruits will naturally be greatly reduced.

By the late Northern Song Dynasty, the imperial court’s daily military expenditures for raising soldiers had accounted for [-] to [-]% of all financial expenditures. Naturally, there was no extra financial resources to ensure the intensity of soldiers’ training, and the combat effectiveness of soldiers became even lower.

This is why there are so many officers and soldiers in Jeju Prefecture, Dongping Prefecture and other places around Liangshanbo, but they can't wipe out the gang of robbers on Liangshan.These forbidden soldiers, who couldn't even beat the robbers, later encountered the elite Jin Kingdom army that was in full swing, how could they not be beaten to the ground and defeated?

And at the end of the Northern Song Dynasty, under the erosion of corrupt politics, more disadvantages of the recruitment system were exposed.

Although peasants are no longer subject to military service, they can devote themselves to farming, which is conducive to the development of production, but they have to pay more taxes to support soldiers, especially to support the more than 100 million redundant soldiers in the country, which makes the peasants overburdened and poorer. intensified social conflicts.A few years later, the Fangla Uprising in the south of the Yangtze River was not unrelated to excessive taxation.

Even though the recruiting system has many disadvantages now, Dong Ping, the military supervisor of Yunzhou, is still handling the matter with great fanfare.Just because according to the usual practice, the imperial court will reward and promote him if he has done a good job in recruiting soldiers in the disaster year.

Chapter 262 Yu Bao's Four Misunderstandings Break into the Recruiting Barracks

Sitting in the wooden shed outside the city gate at the moment, an officer who is instructing his subordinates to recruit soldiers is not Dong Ping, the superintendent of soldiers and horses, but one of his generals, Wang Jun, the eighth general of Dongping Prefecture.

Wang Jun is a native of Dongping Prefecture. He is about 27 or [-] years old, seven feet five or six in length, fair-skinned, with sharp eyebrows and big eyes.Because of his proficiency in spears and sticks, after joining the army, he was promoted to the eighth general of the Xiongwei Imperial Army of Dongping Mansion after several teaching reviews.

This Wang Jun also read books when he was young, and he is not the kind of vulgar person who can only wield swords.Therefore, Dong Ping, the supervisor of soldiers and horses, asked him to be responsible for recruiting elites from the victims, and enrich them into the imperial army and Xiang army.

Being reused by Supervisor Dong Du, Wang Jun should have been happy in his heart, but at this time, Wang Jun was looking sadly at the disaster victims who lined up for inspection and selection.These people are too thin!

Outside the recruiting shed, several sergeants were using wooden poles to measure the length of the recruited victims.If the body length exceeds the standard, it can be counted as passing the first level.After measuring the body, another sergeant took the qualified strongman to the nearby field to check the jumping movements of the recruits, let them see far and test their eyesight.Those who pass all three items will be recruited into the Forbidden Army.

It's a pity that not to mention the three levels, not many people can pass the first level.Among the disaster victims queuing up to be selected, it is rare to see a taller and stronger disaster victim.

Wang Jun sat from early morning to noon, but he didn't recruit many qualified sergeants, so he couldn't help feeling troubled.In desperation, he had no choice but to command the sergeants in charge of inspection and selection to lower some standards.For those who are slightly shorter in height, let them try shooting bows and arrows. For those who are one or two inches lower than the scale on the wooden stile, they are ordered to shoot the Eight Dou Li Bow; those who are three inches lower are ordered to shoot the Nine Dou Li Bow.As long as these victims can shoot bows and arrows, they are considered qualified and recorded in the imperial army.

After listening to Wang Jun's arrangement, everyone was busy again. After the standard was relaxed a little, the number of people who met the requirements to enlist in the army increased a little.

This is also a helpless move!Wang Jun sighed, lay down on the chair, fanned his fan and closed his eyes, thinking about the news he got from the victims today.

According to several victims, they all came to Dongping Prefecture from Yanggu County.Most of the able-bodied victims who fled with them stayed in Yanggu County.

It is said that in Nayanggu County, there was a wealthy man named Ximen Daguan who spent money to recruit soldiers from the village.The Ximen officials not only provided clothing, food and money to the selected young and strong, but also provided newly-built houses for the families of victims who passed the selection, and promised to provide them with food and clothing for the winter and materials needed for spring farming in the coming year, so that they can Live and work in peace and contentment in Yanggu County.

Since the conditions given by the officials of Ximen Qing were more generous than the treatment offered by the government to recruit the imperial army, most of the able-bodied people among the victims chose to join the officials of Ximen Qing.Only those victims who could not be selected stayed outside the county seat to wait for the government to give them porridge to survive.

Yanggu County couldn't support so many victims, so they told them that the Imperial Army and Xiang Army were being recruited outside the city of Dongping Mansion, and let the victims who were not selected in Ximen Fort come to Dongping Mansion to try their luck.