I don't appreciate the straw man, especially since under my context of reasoning, it actually uplifts them to the next social class.
*shrug*
This is outright fundamentally wrong. Urban Poor will not become farmers. They will become Rural Poor - a group so marginalized even in our society that they don't have a faction to represent their interests.
I'm basing it off of what the class system is based on in our current era, which is that the farmers are really really rich. I don't have any support other than this though which is true. If it turns out that this is not the case then ah well.
There is a
massive difference between being a farmer, and being a Yeoman. Yeoman are only a small subset of all 'rural farmers'. Most rural dwellers are Rural Poor, they are not Yeoman and life is very bad for the Rural Poor. They have nothing, they'll never get married or find a stable career, they are move between seasonal farm work and government mandated corvee labour without hope of advancement. Rural Poor are so bad off that they go to the cities in order to become Urban Poor!
Yeoman are really rich. Yeoman are also highly skilled workers. It takes a lifetime of learning in order for someone to become a highly skilled Yeoman under our system. Yeoman are trained from birth and are either the existing first sons of yeoman, or the second sons that happen to get lucky when a new plot of land opens up. The Yeoman in Txolla are not going to roll over when you try to push Urban Poor into the coveted roles that their sons could take. We know what happens when yeoman are pissed at people; they turn bandit and murder them.
What do you think is going to happen? The entrenched Yeoman giving up the chance for their second, third, and fourth sons to be a Yeoman just so some smelly Urban Poor can get it? Not only is that going against every selfish human instinct, but it is
literal heresy. Urban Poor do not have the skill to be small land holding farmers. They've never learned how to do it, they will be bad at it. Considering how much we hate bad farming, giving them the job would be profoundly offensive to Ymaryn sensibilities.
What's going to happen is that the Urban Poor are going to become rural poor. They cannot be Yeoman because the will always be worse at being farmers than the second sons of Yeoman who have trained for the role their entire life. If they are assigned as Yeoman, they will quickly be removed once it's proven that they are incompetent; they would be since they didn't know better and persecuting incompetence is how people get ahead in our system.
So once the Urban Poor have suffered the massive downgrade in life to Rural Poor, what do they do? After all, no longer being Urban means they can no longer maintain their unique culture, their way of life, families will be split up, support networks and friends fragmented of hundreds of miles, traditional jobs are lost to them, luxuries they once enjoyed are no longer easily bought, even the basic Grain Dole they received will no longer be there. Everything that made them special and distinct in Ymaryn society will be destroyed as they're forced into (worse) poverty.
This is when the Urban Poor start to get angry. Did they fight their entire lives so that they could then be forced to slave away for some Yeoman's second son? No! That's when old crossbow, old iron helms and knives start to make their way out of closets. Sure, they were supposed to be returned, but do you think we'd get all the weapons? Then, these marginalized former Urban Poor lash out, going bandit and killing and fighting and looting in order to get what they deserve.
Your plan makes things worse. The Urban Poor do not want to be displaced into (shitty) Rural Poor work. They want to go back to their lives as they knew it.
