It doesn’t seem strange to me. The size and population of the Crownlands hasn’t changed hugely, so the number of soldiers it can raise hasn’t changed much either.
It may or may not be worth noting again that the Westerosi don’t conceive of economic and social development in the same ways that those of us who live in powerful and robust post-Westphalian post-industrial late-stage capitalism nation-states and take for granted the fact that the government has powerful tools for spurring development at its disposal do.
I am reminded of… about a decade ago, myself and a number of people were playing a TTRPG called Pendragon, one of the grandees of tabletop roleplaying. As the name implies, you play knights in the time of King Arthur, and one of the things that could happen is you could become a landed knight, with peasants and incomes and suchly. The game had systems supporting that.
And almost universally, everyone at the table began managing those manors with an eye towards investment and development regardless of if it was period-appropriate or character-appropriate or not. My seven foot tall, one-eyed, illiterate Irish axe-wielder became very concerned with the international wool market and how long it would take him to amortize out his investment into horse-breeding.
It just didn’t occur to any of us to act any other way, because although our characters were ostensibly from a medieval warrior/noble caste WE were all 21st century Americans and so acquiring capital and using it to generate MORE capital was so second nature to us.
But that didn’t exactly fit the setting we were operating in. To bring it back around… Westerosi don’t think like that. They’re not capitalists (yes, yes, Petyr Baelish; a clear exception) and their government, while very real and exercising very real power, is anemically weak and next-to-nonexistent in many ways by modern standards. If it even occurred to them to try and deliberately increase the population of the Crownlands somehow, the various folks who have sat the Iron Throne might not know how to go about doing that or even if they did lack the policy tools to make it happen.
Also, because I’m a giant pedant: Lords Paramount, Anon, not the other way around. 🙂 Like Attorneys General or courts-martial.
Excellent point! Hell, I’m hardly innocent of this – my first instinct when I see Westeros is to start drawing up plans for economic development.
I’ll go one step further and say that we have an unrealistic expectation of change itself. I see this all the time when people bring up Westerosi “stasis” operating under the mindset that the rates of economic change we’ve seen since the Industrial Revolution are the norm.
(Incidentally, the “hockey stick” graph of global warming maps neatly onto this one above…)
But this simply isn’t the case. For the vast majority of human existence, change was extremely gradual to the point of imperceptibility and long periods of stasis were not unknown. One generation being born, growing into adulthood, taking up the work that their parents’ generation did, and living essentially identical lives to those who came before them, over and over again, was the norm and the idea that each generation would experience a new, radically different world than the previous was unthinkable.
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