Impact of Druids on Medieval Fantasy Society?

Question

There was progress made in the Dark Ages, but it wasn't much compared to later ages (and especially today, when it comes to computers) and I'm sure we can agree this was because people were struggling to survive; when I posted a question about the role of Druids in fantasy society, nosajimiki gave me this insight:

"You would want them to be farmers, first and foremost

I know this sounds boring, but being able to magically grow crops would be a HUGE advantage in a medieval setting. Normally 90% of most pre-industrial civilizations are farmers, but if your druids were farmers, they could produce the same amount of food as many normal farmers. This would in turn free up a massive portion of your population to pursue other endeavors like large scale construction projects, higher education, municipal services, luxury goods and services, and all those other modern comforts you get when you reduce how many people you need to meet your substance level needs."

Druids can speed up, enhance, and alter the growth of animals, plants, and fungi. "Altering growth" means altering the genomes of a organism; either causing a suppressed trait to surface, or causing a mutation of an existing trait. This allows Druids to replicate the results of years of selective breeding and genetic engineering on our crops and livestock, and even exceed those results.

In other words, one Druid, through enchantments, breeding, and agricultural practices, can multiply regular farmer's yields by 50 if not more. They can even counteract soil nutrient depletion by growing beans and mushrooms! However, Druids can also heal others, "speak" to an animal's mind and heart, shapeshift, and as stated above, they can speed up, enhance, and alter an animal's growth. Humans are animals.

Besides that, while I decided that there would be a population of 81 million and only 810,000 Druids, that's still a lot and these Druid's children will have a 70% chance of inheriting the Druid Class (for more on that and a Druid's abilities, look at Role of Druids in Fantasy Society).

Considering all of this, my question is What Would Be the Impact of Druids on Medieval European Society?

Also Consider:

1. Druids are balanced; the Druid Class is a magical blessing, and its power increases by Levels as a Druid grows and gains experience. At Level 1, a Druid can only heal minor wounds (paper cuts, blisters, slight burns) and can only speed up or enhance an animal or plant's growth by a negligible amount; think 0.01%. However, a max-level (Level 500) Druid can heal life-threatening injuries (short of beheading, skull crushing, or being cut in half), quadruple an organism's growth rate, and cause, say, a horse to grow a unicorn horn.
2. I don't know exactly what Druids were IRL, my perception of them is people who are both mystical and attuned to nature. Sort of a nature shaman.

As always, I appreciate your input and will add any other needed details ASAP.

Answer 1

"Altering growth" means altering the genomes of a organism; either causing a suppressed trait to surface, or causing a mutation of an existing trait.

What would stop druids from dominating everything?

Maybe you will need to balance druid's power so that a single druid wouldn't be able to cure every disease, grow a gigantic 'perfect' farm and spread diseases everywhere. [OP already adressed this issue]

Why not health/medical assistence?

Some possible scenarios:

1. Imagine a king who will never be ill because he has a personal druid taking care of his health?
2. Preventing future diseases on the elite classes
3. Eating "perfect" food that druids would be able to create/cultivate.

Suddenly some people would live many more years than they would eating normal food and using the standard medical assistence ( if any, at all ) while others who didn't have the same "druidic" benefit would be dying earlier.

They can also do bad things

Imagine a druid which is submissive to a certain powerful king and his king demands that the druid spread disease and kill all crops from some other kingdom.

Answer 2

Stability and Military Boost

Your druids are 1% of the population. The current agricultural population of the United States is 1.3%. Now this doesn't QUITE port, as the US exports a ton of food but also imports a ton. But I think we can use is as a rough guesstimate that, all else being equal, 1.3% of your population farming can support the other 98.7%. Except not really. Because while your Druids are great at GROWING stuff, they're not any better at HARVESTING things. If you raise 100 acres of real good drought/pest/disease resistant wheat in medieval times, you still need to HARVEST said wheat. By hand. Which is hugely labor intensive. As is planting, for the most part. (though conceivably you wouldn't need to hand-plant things like rice if you could just mod them to plant well after hand-scattering.) But you have cut down on the amount of land it takes to feed people because you're increasing the yield on each acre. What does this end up doing? Well that depends on just how far down the "gene-mod" rabbit hole you want to go. But I would hazard that, while you'd have fewer full-time farmers, you'd still have huge demand for extra help during the planting/harvesting seasons. Fun!

The biggest advantage to all this though isn't that you've freed up a lot of your population to do other things most of the time. The advantage is you GET RID OF FAMINE. Wars have been fought, Kings overthrown, and civilizations have collapsed because of bad harvests. With Druids your Kingdom/s just won't have that problem. With the pressures of food-insecurity rendered largely obsolete, you might find your countries behaving much more like "modern" societies. Fewer existential reasons to go to war generally leads to fewer (or at least more limited) wars. Think about the small professional armies of post-black-death Europe compared to the huge armies of Rome, or the modern casualty lists for the US Army in Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan compared to losses in the World Wars.

The BIG change though would be warfare. Suddenly your army is riding carnivores or bigger, nastier herbivores into combat because your Druids "spoke to the hearts" of the mounts so they'd take commands. With your improved agriculture/animal husbandry you could even support these mounts in the field! Enemy have great cavalry? Your druids breed giant, obedient, camels. Camels got your cavalry down? Ta-dah! Your druids "speak" to your horses so they don't instinctively run away. (Real thing, cavalry will NOT engage Camelry becaue the horses can't stand camels.) King want something more... prestige? Giant stags. Or Rhinos, or some suped-up giant wolf. The sky's the limit! Of course if you have animals like that you'll need to modify your logistics and army supply train to feed them, but if you can make 8-foot-at-the-shoulder wolf cavalry surely you can make large obedient goats to follow the army around and be their rations.

You can also get super-soldiers if they can in fact modify humans. But I think your bigger concern would be "designer babies" as it were. Suddenly if your pregnancy didn't involve a druid your kid comes out distinctly shorter/uglier/dumber/weaker than those moms who went to druids during pregnancy. It could create a permanent underclass. It could be banned for everyone but the Imperial Family by Royal decree because the King wants 99.9% of Druids doing agriculture. It could be that your agriculture isn't any better than any historical medieval agriculture because almost all your druids are busy making sure every baby born is Best Baby. The results vary, but they'll all be A Big Deal!