Hi. My question: how did people recognize each other as “nobility” worked, both in history and in ASoIaF? I mean, there weren’t IDs, and I doubt all the nobles in the country knew each other. I started wondering about it when Manderly referred to Davos as “lord Davos” in Dance of Dragons. I mean, he SAID he was a lord and the Hand of the King, but he neither sounded like lord, looked like a lord, and he came withour retinue etc. Wouldn’t Manderly think he was just shitting him?

Good question!

So heraldry is a big part of it, hence why we see highborn children drilled to recognize sigils and house words. The immediate practical benefit is knowing who’s who on the battlefield, but it works as well off the battlefield, so that you can avoid awkward social scenarios by making sure that nobles can tell the social status of other nobles, because a key part of noble identity/culture was being very touchy about their status being recognized. (Hence why a lot of conflicts in medieval literature come about when someone’s hiding their identity and thus isn’t treated with the deference due.)

Another part of it has to do with more subtle signs of class distinction, the things that a social climber would have to learn to fake. Accent and diction, dress and fashion, manners and mannerisms, the soft and hard skills taught to nobles, and so on. 

As for Davos, he’s a different case because he is somewhat famous – breaking the siege of Storm’s End, Stannis knighting a smuggler and taking his fingers, etc. Wyman Manderly would have heard about that and added Davos to the roll of known nobility.