Author: stevenattewell

“If the Starks want gold, they can melt down Jaime’s armor” Would you care to speculate about the probable value of Jaime’s gilded sword & armor, and since he never gets them back, we can assume maybe something like this happened, so would liquidating it have made a dent in the expenses of the Kingdom of the North & the Trident? It’s made clear just what an asset armor is in the parts dealing with tourneys. Also, would a winning jouster get to charge higher ransom for nicer armor, or was it set?

Tyrion was making a joke – gilded armor does not contain a significant amount of gold, the no doubt master-crafted armor would be worth far more in its original state than melted down, and in either case would not have been worth enough to fund the Northern war effort. 

And since you’re not the first person to ask me about jousts and ransoming armor:

Were tourney ransoms generally a form of collateral, to ensure prompt payment? In order to be of any use, armour needs to be a perfect fit, so another man’s armour would be of no use to the victor himself and would have very limited resale value. 

As we see with the Mystery Knight, ransoming armor is not about being worried that someone else might sell it, although horses are a different matter, obviously, and the armor thing is not 100% (chainmail can be resized and human body shapes aren’t so wildly different that it’s always unusable). Rather, because a knight’s armor and horse are essential tools of their profession and prerequisites of their social class, no knight would willingly forfeit them and thus they are perfect collateral for a debt – the medieval equivalent of leaving your credit card for a deposit.

The other thing to keep in mind is the class expectations of the people involved – as noblemen, knights are supposed to be A. men of their word of honor (so being too pushy about repayment calls that into question), and B. not concerned about money (which means being too pushy about repayment is an issue, but so is not paying your ransoms). At the same time, noblemen also like cash to fund their magnificent lifestyles, so you need to make sure that you get paid.

Ransoming armor or horses, like handing over your sword when you surrender, is a way of resolving this tension: it allows both sides to pretend that this isn’t about money and that everyone trusts everyone else, while making sure that ransoms get paid on time. 

Not that I’m denigrating your essays, which are wonderful, but aren’t a lot of the conclusions predicated on the assumption that the author knows this stuff, and bothered with the math, too? You’ve mentioned math mistakes, & I remember one error about relative weight of armor types. What if your theories on populations-to-troops ratios are based on facts GRRM simply has not thought through? Maybe GRRM doesn’t KNOW it’s impossible for Robert to have spent so much? Or do you his sources?

A lot of my essays (math or otherwise) are assuming a certain level of internal consistency with the worldbuilding, but as much as GRRM does make mistakes, it hangs together better than people often give him credit for. 

As for the population-to-troop ratios, since that stuff started with Elio who’s in a better position than anyone else to check with GRRM about whether his estimates were right, I feel more confident about that. 

Re: Robert’s spending, I would be more worried about that stuff if GRRM hadn’t written the Tyrion chapters which strongly hint that LF committed fraud. 

A question about Littlefinger. Do we know when exactly he became the master of coins, besides that it was after 289? Also, I know that Westerosi don’t know a lot about finance so that’s a reason for Lord Arryn not noticing anything, but how did people not get suspicious? The crown was probably doing well and wasn’t in a debt until Littlefinger became the master of coins. How did no one connect the dots, was he that good at covering his tracks?

1. “Ten years ago, Jon Arryn had given him a minor sinecure in customs…Within three years of his coming to court, he was master of coin.” So the earliest it could have been was in 292 AC.

2. No, the crown probably had taken on some debt, but Littlefinger magnified it.

3. Littlefinger absolutely committed accounting fraud (”trying to track some golden dragons through the labyrinth of Littlefinger’s ledgers. Petyr Baelish had not believed in letting gold sit about and grow dusty, that was for certain, but the more Tyrion tried to make sense of his accounts the more his head hurt. It was all very well to talk of breeding dragons instead of locking them up in the treasury, but some of these ventures smelled worse than week-old fish.”) but it’s also the case that the nobility of Westeros are not trained in finance. 

How does bastard feudalism allow bannermen to have more troops then the obligation to supply troops? I mean that money is what was being used to train and equip the troops being supplied so how does that translate to more troops? is it just that they have more troops under their direct command but not really more overall? Also if the money is instead of obligation to supply troops, shouldnt the king also have more troops because the money goes to him?

1. To quote an earlier post:

Under the normal rules of feudalism, military capabilities were limited by the terms of the feudal agreement – you get so much land, you agree to raise so many men, the number of men per unit of land is fairly standardized – and it was hard to alter that, because the vassals’ vassals know their rights in law and get pretty litigious about it.

It’s really more when you get to what’s known as “bastard feudalism” that things start to go off the rails. Under bastard feudalism, instead of relying on those feudal agreements to raise soldiers, you convert military service obligations into taxes paid in cash and then use the cash to put fighting men on the payroll, who wear your livery and are counted as members of your “affinity.”  So now you have a system where noblemen can raise and maintain private military forces above and beyond their feudal rights – and the only limit to how many of these guys you have on the payroll is your ability to make payroll on the first of the month.

By way of an analogy, traditional feudalism conceives the relationship of lord and soldier as an ongoing contractor-client relationship with terms that are fixed by written agreement and tradition. Bastard feudalism reconceived the relationship as one between an employer and a salaried, uniformed employee, which allowed the terms to be dictated by the means of the employer and the current conditions of the military labor market. 

2. Members of an affinity were paid in cash, not in land, so while a noble only had a certain amount of land to give away to make up knight’s fees, if they could improve the productivity of their estate, then they could employ more men per acre of land then they had in the past.

3. The money doesn’t all go to the king. What makes you a noble is the right to extract rent and taxes from a given area of land, a portion of which you’re supposed to kick up to the king and the rest you get to keep. And if you were a powerful nobleman with a big private army, you might be able to get away with not paying your taxes, especially if the king you were dealing with was weak. 

Hi, I love your Economic Development series! I was wondering about one thing. Would building a fishing fleet on the east coast be beneficial for the North? Basically we know that Shivering Sea, from Skagos and the Grey Cliffs to the delta of the Sarne is the richest fishing ground in the world. That would help them feed the people and if they focus on that I think that they would be able to get a big competitive advantage. Thanks in advance!

The North has fishermen, they just haven’t for a long time had a significant navy.

this is not a terribly interesting question. But, on the asoiaf wiki it says House Poole is a noble house sworn to the Starks then Bolton. Then why isn’t Vayon a lord or Jeyne a lady? Because as we’ve seen in westeros even those of the most meager of houses are still called lords and ladies? Unlike say, british nobility which has clear distinctions of rank all over the place, westeros doesn’t seem to at all. It just bothers me so I wondered if i’m missing something.

House Poole is identified as a noble House in ADWD (”The arms of House Poole were a blue plate on white, framed by a grey tressure.”) 

As to why Vayon and Jeyne are not so identified, there isn’t a textual explanation, although to be fair they appear very infrequently on the pages of ASOIAF. My “No Prize” explanation is that House Poole is a masterly House in service to Winterfell, and so aren’t lords. 

Or it could just be a case of Early Installment Weirdness.

Do you think that maegor offering a bounty for faith militant members would have led to the passing off of non members as actual members to cash in on the bounty, like that story of british officials in india putting a boutny on snakes led to snake farming to profit from it or people passing off any dwarf they could find as Tyrion?

The text suggests that sort of thing did happen in no small amount:

Then, late in 45 AC, King Maegor entered a new campaign against the rebellious Faith Militant, who had not put down their swords at the new High Septon’s behest. According to an inventory from that time, the next year the king brought back two thousand skulls as trophies from his campaign, which he claimed to be from outlawed Warrior’s Sons and Poor Fellows, though many thought they were more likely the heads of smallfolk who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.