I have no idea. I read a rumor once which says those things don’t actually stop bots anymore, but they’re used to help train self-driving car AI, which is why the questions are always about roads and street signs.
Author: stevenattewell
How are feudal contracts negotiated and what would they cover and what would the terms be like generally? What about renegotiations of the contract?
See here and here for previous writings about the feudal contract.
Feudal contracts weren’t frequently negotiated, because tradition was considered incredibly important and breaking the traditional terms of the contract was frowned upon in the extreme, and innovations like scutage weren’t always thought well of either. Generally, if they had to be changed, it was usually done by trying to find some sort of ancient precedent, or if that couldn’t be done, by inventing one out of whole cloth and doctoring the records.
They varied tremendously, but usually they involved a bilateral exchange: the liege lord offers rights over a certain piece of land (not an absolute right to the land itself, but that’s a bit tricky given the difference between pre- and post-enlightenment conceptions of property rights) in exchange for stuff. It usually included military service (hence the practice of dividing fiefdoms into knight’s fees), although if a fiefdom was given to the church this was usually commuted, but it could also include various traditional forms of taxes (so many pheasants or so many butts of wine, etc.) or personal service (holding someone’s stirrup when they came to town, being their cupbearer, etc.).
Who would you say is a better general Tyrion or Robb?
Robb.
Would Garth “the Gross” Tyrell’s position as Lord Seneschal of Highgarden be as Mace’s treasurer given his consideration as Master of Coin, or more general administrator as a Hand equivalent, or something else?
Garth Tyrell is listed as the Lord Seneschal in the appendix. I was curious as to what exactly that means. And why is house Tyrell the only ones mentioned as having a Lord Seneschal?
Since I got a couple different asks on this subject, I thought I might as well tackle it in one place, as apparently I haven’t before.
The answer is that the text isn’t very clear about what the office entails. Nor does history eludicate matters, because the term can mean a number of different things:
- Seneschal can mean “steward” (in the sense of official in charge of administration of the household) although that term doesn’t necessarily mean a high-ranking member of the servant class.
- Second, “seneschal” was also an officer of a French (or more specifically Norman and Languedoc) administrative unit known as a seneschalty: seneschals governed the unit on behalf of the king but also acted as a chief justice or bailiff.
My guess, without much to base it off of, is that when the Tyrells replaced the Gardeners as Lords of Highgarden, they abolished the office of High Steward of Highgarden so as to prevent any comparisons being made between the incumbents and their predecessors. However, the work still needed to be done, so they created a new title for the old office so that they could use it as a cushy job for junior male relations.
As to why the Tyrells are the only ones, I think it’s because everyone else sticks with just stewards and doesn’t see a need to give servants ideas by giving them lofty titles.
Why do you think so many Reachmen fought against the Greens during the Dance, when they all seem to line-up in full behind Renly in TWot5K?
That word “seem” is very important there. It seems that Renly has the support of alll the Reach, because he’s trying to win the War of Five Kings through that precise bluff.
On your answer on Barbers Dustin & providing men in a feudal system. Does this mean that there’s a multiplier from success? The better you do the more men you have, and failed (the fewer)?
It’s not a straight arithmetical thing, but rather more of a trend.
If the war(s) are going well, vassals want to be on the winning team (because it’s a good way to get land, ransoms, loot, etc.), so they’re more willing to bet big on success by bringing every warm body they can lay their hands on.
If they’re going poorly, then you’ll start to see vassals getting truculent about sending men off to fight and finding ways to beg out of it (because ransoms are expensive, supplies are expensive, and burying your men is a dead loss).
Barbey Dustin says that she contributed as few of her men to the Stark host as possible. Would the Starks not be aware of how many men she can raise, and questioned this disloyalty?
Well, this gets us to the twisty nature of the feudal contract. As bilaterally-negotiated documents, feudal contracts could vary dramatically in terms of what kind of service was negotiated – how many knight’s fees your land was valued at, how many days’ service you were required to provide, how many men you had to bring, etc.
What this could often result is that there was a difference between the minimum a lord was required to kick in and the maximum they could actually bring to the table, and how many men actually showed up would depend on politics. If the king is popular and/or powerful, if the war is going well and there’s a good chance of winning loot/land, you bring extra men above your minimum requirement so as to gain royal favor. If the king is unpopular and/or weak, if the war is going badly and the risk/reward on participation is bad, you send as few as you can get away with.
We see this very early on in the War of Five Kings with Bran VI of AGOT: the lords who show up in full force to Winterfell are looking to gain something in return, whether it’s a military command, or Robb’s hand in marriage, or for him to give them some land or some use-rights, or to side with them in a dispute or what. Barbrey Dustin is making much the same political calculation, but in reverse: what’s the least amount of men she can get away with sending without incurring a felony?
How do you think the show handled Littlefingers Death do you think something similar will happen in the book?
While certain elements will be the same – Littlefinger getting killed by the Catspaw Dagger is thematically appropriate, Sansa being the one to uncover his lies, and maybe even Arya getting to kill the person who’s actually ultimately responsible for her family’s misfortunes – I think GRRM will execute far more deftly.
What sort of desert nomad culture would best fit with a hypothetical group of people living in the red waste?
There are many different desert nomadic, semi-nomadic, and non-nomadic cultures, so I don’t know if I’d say there’s an A->B between environment and culture necessarily.
How does Aurane find and train thousands of sailors and crew in only a few months, when there is no way he could with prisoners alone? Fellow survivors of the Blackwater? Redwyne recruits? Commercial seamen? Randoms from the city? Men from Driftmark? Some combination of the aforementioned? Some other way?
I think Aurane largely recruited from the ranks of trained sailors, rather than taking the time to train landlubbers. Keep in mind that King’s Landing is both a royal naval base (lots of sailors whose ships went up on the Blackwater who need work), and a commercial harbor (with a lot of the piers and wharfs by the Mud Gate destroyed, those civilian sailors are also looking for work).
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