Because oarsmen aren’t fighting soldiers, they don’t fall under the same rule of thumb. They don’t need arms and armor, they don’t need training in hand-to-hand, you just round up people who know how to pull an oar in time. And the Redwynes live on an island, so there’s going to be lots of them.
Can you go into this in more depth, Steven? Because it seems… weird?
Like, an oarsmen doesn’t need arms or armor or anything, you’re right, but you still need to produce an able-bodied man who, more critically, can be taken away from other productive work in order to pull an oar in your fleet.
It seems like, functionally speaking, there is almost no difference between “we’ve pulled this man away from the tilling of his field or the practice of his craft and stuck a spear in his hands” and “we’ve done the same thing, only substitute ‘spear’ with ‘oar.’” In both cases you have removed someone from their other activities to engage in warmaking.
And that’s a big huge deal in a feudal society and economy, isn’t it? We see constant worrying throughout the books (and, you know, in real life in comparable periods) over “how many men are too many men to take away from the fief?” Even the Ironborn worry about this. In the north, you see that some of the fiefs have called so many able-bodied men away to war that they’re literally, not figuratively, literally left with nothing but old men and children to form fighting forces. I have trouble believing that if you can haul that many people out to war, that the requirements for an oarsmen are so much “looser” it makes a significant difference.
The Arbor is undoubtedly a vast, rich fief, a kingdom in its own right once upon a time, blessed with a congenial climate; it is no doubt extremely productive. But… “we can yank out 55k+ men to serve in our navy” productive? That’s… immense.
I might submit humbly that this is one of those “GRRM didn’t actually do the math here; he gave the Redwynes a big island and a big fleet because they’re The House What Has A Fleet, but didn’t actually run all the numbers re: the logistics of crewing a fleet.”
I mean, when in doubt, GRRM is bad at math is usually the best bet.
However…IMO, the 1% rule was much more about logistical difficulties – does your society have the resources to arm, armor, supply, and train X many people –
than strict manpower limits. (Moreover, keep in mind that GRRM’s math can go wrong when it comes to nothing but old men and children too…) Hence why you can have the early modern military revolution increase the size of armies by 13x or 15x when the population growth was far, far more modest.
Oarsmen involve fewer logistical difficulties – you don’t need to arm or armor them, they’ve already been trained because this is what they do for a living anyway, they move around a lot faster than ground infantry – than fighting men. That’s not to say they’re a free resource – fishing will decline, civilian commerce will decline (I would imagine that a good bit of the Redwyne navy oarsmen are borrowed from their merchant vessels) – but the opportunity cost is different compared to the time-sensitive nature of the harvest.
And we have examples of these disparities in history: Edward III of England at one point had 700 ships in his navy during the Siege of Calais in 1346, but his land forces only numbered 35,000 men (which was still the largest army England had ever assembled).
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