Anon Asks:

What exactly is ‘royal land’? how is it run? is it all directly ruled by the king or does it have petty lords/landed knights on it? if it does have petty lords/landed knights, how does it differ from other land in the realm that isnt ‘royal’? Like what is the difference between a great knightly house like templeton sworn to arryn or a powerful masterly house in the north and landed knights, besides size/lineage? Or would such territory be considered royal land rather than vassalized land because they aren’t lordly houses or sworn to one between them and the royal house? 

>_> Feudalism is way more confusing than people like to think, though it does make things more interesting and its nice that GRRM can catch that sort of political incoherency for his setting.

Welp, shoulda known I’d opened up a can of worms.

Royal land is land that the monarch holds themselves, rather than giving out as a fiefdom to any of their vassals. So it probably wouldn’t have petty lords or landed knights on it unless the monarch had decided to give away that land to said lord/knight as a reward for some service. (There’s an exception to this that I’ll discuss in a bit.)

In terms of how it is run, it would be run quite like other land. Typically, territory would be divided into various manors – manors being an economic and judicial unit run by the manorial court. Manorial courts both were the main source of records on and made the legal decisions on just about everything: who had rights (primarily tenant’s rights) to what bit of land (but also usage rights to the commons or to the water or hunting rights or wood-gathering, etc. etc.); who owed what in rents, taxes, and feudal obligations of labor and to whom; what would be grown, where and when, and who would labor; and crucially, the court also dealt with contract law and torts in the manor, so when you loaned your best milk cow to your neighbor and it died, everyone knew where to go for adjudication. 

That manor would be run by various officials:

• at the top was the steward, who oversaw the manorial court and who was responsible for the overall condition of the manor. 
• immediately below them was the reeve (adding to the complication, this is the Saxon term; Normans called them bailiffs and then started using the word for all kinds of judicial offices and then started using reeve again) who was the chief overseer of the peasants and was usually a peasant himself (sometimes appointed, and sometimes elected, subject to veto by the lord). The reeve’s job was to make sure that the crops got planted and harvested in line with the manorial court’s decisions and to carry out the marketing of the manor’s produce; to collect rents and debts (if a given tenant was late on their rent, for example) but also to make disbursements; and to make sure that the peasants performed their feudal obligations. 
• And then there were assistant reeves and assistant stewards and under-bailiffs and all kinds of minor functionaries.

So the main difference, as far as the peasants were concerned, between royal land and fiefed land really was just who appointed the steward and signed off on the reeves. Now here’s where it could get tricky, because sometimes the King would lease out their lands to their friends and people who gave them money (sometimes not the same people!) without giving them away.