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.

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.