Steven, do you think the Westerosi have a social or legal concept of private land ownership? I’ve noticed that nobody in Westeros is ever referred to as owning land, only “holding” it. Even powerful lords have limited rights in their own demesnes; Lord Manderly cannot dam the White Knife without leave from Winterfell. Petyr Baelish owns ships, businesses… but he doesn’t own land. At most, it seems possible to buy a business or a house in a city, but it is unclear if that grants land rights.

opinions-about-tiaras:

This implies that I actually asked the wrong question; it shouldn’t have been “do the Westerosi have a concept of private land ownership” (clearly they do; people think of their fiefs as belonging to them and part of the patrimony they’ll pass onto their sons) but of “private land transfer,” that is, the idea that land is a commodity that can be traded among people in the same way you might trade a horse or a suit of armor or a cartload of grain.

Gotcha. No, not really. As I discuss here, there’s only one mention of land being sold for money, in the extended Westerlands chapter:

racefortheironthrone:

It’s somewhat complicated, but this is actually quite accurate to medieval societies. While there were a bewildering number of different kinds of land tenures under feudal law – everything from knight service and serjeanty to scutage, socage, copyhold, and quit-rent – it was extremely rare for land to be owned outright without any form of obligation or traditional responsibility to anyone. What is known in common law as freehold ownership was very rare, and in most cases until quite recently were actually “customary freehold,” which was itself a kind of copy-hold lease. 

This is why Polayni argued that state action was necessary to bring into being a free market in land, to turn it into a fungible commodity that could be bought and sold, that could be turned into futures and other forms of derivatives, etc. The vast vast majority of those feudal tenures were all based on custom – rents and rights and obligations were usually fixed either by some document held at local manorial courts (copyhold for example is a form of tenure where tenancies were written down in the rolls of the manorial court and tenants were given a copy to ensure that the terms of their tenancy couldn’t be altered), or by tradition (in the common law, a property or benefit that had been held since “Time whereof the Memory of Man runneth not to the contrary” did not need any record other than the memory of the oldest man in the parish), and could only be changed with great difficulty subject to challenge in court. 

However, this doesn’t mean that people were not possessive of land – ask any number of medieval kings who faced aristocratic rebellions when they tried to transfer fiefdoms or “innovate” their way to some new revenue – but rather that they didn’t think of possessing land as being free from all other claims. If a given manor had “belonged” to a family for hundreds of years, they thought of it as theirs, even if they had to pay traditional rents to a liege lord or give three pheasants a year to the local bishop. 

“At
[Ellyn Rayne’s] urging, Lord Tarbeck expanded his domain by buying the lands of the lesser
lords and landed knights about him… and taking by force the holdings of
those who refused to sell.

Some
of those thus dispossessed went to Casterly Rock for justice, but Lord Tytos
shrugged off their complaints, or else refused to see them…three landed
knights who had lost their lands to Lord and Lady Tarbeck had made their way to
King’s Landing, to lay their grievance before King Aegon.”

Given the context, buying people’s land seems to be a dangerous innovation, a rather thin pretext of legality covering what is actually extortion with menaces.