Author: stevenattewell

A world building question in regards to your knightly orders. Would each of these orders having an valyrian steel weapon passed down from each grand master to the next work?

So with my knightly orders I tried as much as possible to make them different from each other as opposed to just “reskins” to use a video game term. 

Having each order with a Valyrian blade feels a bit too samey – that they all were rich enough to buy one in the first place, that they had the same access to merchants from the great empire to the east, and so on. 

Moreover, I think there’s something about the way that Valyrian blades work ini the setting, the way that they engender this obsession to have them, to take them, to never sell them, to pine after their loss, that would make it extremely difficult for a corporate body to own one. The temptation would be too strong for each man to try to claim the blade for their own House rather than let it pass later into the hands of a man from another House. 

Another question from the riverlander AH guy. Throughout its history, the kings of the riverlands have used 3 different titled. King of the Trident, King of the Rivers and Hills, and simply River King. After millenia of rule under house justman, Should i have only one of these remain, or should i have all three still in use(similarly to how house stark is still known as the kings of winter) at the same time?

Here’s my thinking…

King of the Trident is probably the oldest title, a bit like Kings of Winter. It represents a claim to the defensible interior of the Riverlands, the part that would have been the hardest for the Westerlands or the Vale or the Reach etc. to conquer. 

King of the Rivers and Hills is a more expansive title. The Hills portion represents a claim to the hill country that runs from Pinkmaiden to Harrenhal, the portion I’ve described as the “southern Riverlands,” which is the vulnerable underbelly of the kingdom because it’s not sheltered behind the riverrine walls of the Trident. The Rivers portion is not only a repetition of the claim to the Trident, but also a maximalist claim to all the rivers of the Kingdom, including the God’s Eye River and the Blackwater Rush, and thus might well represent a claim on the northern Crownlands, since King’s Landing and Rosby (and Duskendale, conquered by Benedict II, who may have been the first to use that title) are quite close to the Rush, Cracklaw Point is quite close to Maidenpool and borders on the Trident as it opens into the Bay of Crabs, etc. 

River King is the colloquial term. If the two above are the titles that a Justman monarch’s court would use, I imagine River King would be the term used by the smallfolk or by foreigners to differentiate these kings from the many other kings of Westeros. 

How does tax works in westeros? Lets say im a Beesbury. How much do i pay for the Hightowers? Do i pay in coins or in honey? Then how much do the Hightowers pay for the Tyrells? Money or goods? Finally how much do the Tyrells pay for the King? Again, money or goods?

warsofasoiaf:

Typically taxes work both through goods in kind and coin, and like everything, depends on the time period. There are always exceptions that prove rules, but typically, the further back you go, the more taxes were paid in kind rather than in coin. The typical rate was 10% for the lord and 10% for the Church and based on property holdings, this was established as early as the 8th century. There was a poll tax of one shilling per head proposed in 1380 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, but poll taxes formed the Islamic jizya tax levied on Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians in the caliphates. Swedish taxes were assessed in equivalencies, such as coins or 16 kg of butter.

Medieval peasants often paid taxes as percentages of goods in kind, unfree labor, and coin which again, depended on the era and where you were. You would pay for using the lord’s mill to mill the grain with a percentage of the take, similarly you would press wine at the lord’s wine press and pay a percentage of the wine. There were certain amounts of days that peasants had to labor in the lord’s fields (24 in Sweden during the Late Middle Ages). You would also have your holdings assessed to see what the value was, and then contract out to tax farmers who would raise that amount of money via tax collection, and whether it was the Byzantine pronoia, the Muslim iqta, or the Western European fee-farm, the process was the same. The farmer would pay the crown (typically competing for the privilege similar to an auction) for the right to raise taxes from a particular area. The incentive was, once the farmer reached the desired amount, any extra was his to keep, which encouraged tax farmers to squeeze taxes out of the peasantry, first to make up the bribes and fees he paid to gain the revenue farm and then to profit. Kings in the 14th century, with the growth of centralized bureaucracy, came to rely more upon direct taxation.

Nobles typically had their obligations set out by the feudal contract and royal writ. In early feudalism, the tax was not monetary, but military service, just as the peasantry owed service to their lords. The vassalage contract stipulated what was owed on behalf of the vassal, and kings might forego the traditional feudal service of levies for a scutage, set by the king, this became true in the later Middle Ages. Emergencies would cause for additional taxes, such as the Saladin tax that King Richard the Lionheart levied for the Third Crusade.

@racefortheironthrone, anything to add?

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

You’ve covered most of it (very comprehensively, I might add), but I would also add some important sources of revenue:

  • Customs duties: very important source of both revenue and trade policy. The English wool tariff of a mark (2/3 of a pound) per sack of wool dates back to 1275, and it was a major driver of English economic policy, as the state now had a vested interest in encouraging the production and sale abroad of wool to the Lowlands. Later on, for example, a tax called the “maltolt” was added on top of the tariff and then exempted for English merchants (after a fight with Parliament about whether, as a tax on English merchants, it violated the legal statutes that stated that domestic taxes had to be consented to by Parliament) in a clear bid to try to crack into the merchant side of the wool trade. Eventually, there would be different tariffs for wool vs. raw wool cloth vs. finished wool, in an attempt to climb the chain of value-added.
  • Ship Money: another royal privilege that managed to escape the Magna Carta, this was a requirement that towns and counties (historically those towns and counties along the coasts, but Charles I got himself in a lot of trouble by taxing all towns and counties) pay for the construction and maintenance of the Royal Navy.

Also, to elaborate on some things mentioned in OP: in England, the poll taxes of the 14th century were highly unpopular for several reasons. The war with France wasn’t going well, John of Gaunt wasn’t popular, there was massive resistance to paying a regressive tax, and enforcement involved (in an act of historically impressive bureaucratic stability) checking the virginity of daughters to see if they counted as dependents. Hence the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 was sparked by an attempt to collect poll taxes, and they were basically thereafter dropped until Charles I tried them again, and then when Maggie Thatcher went for a third round. 

Second, the 10% tax on property levied by Parliament had a couple wrinkles. First, it was historically set as a tenth for towns and a fifteenth for rural counties because when have rural areas not tried to shaft urban areas. Second, after the mid-14th century, the tax was collected collectively rather than individually: a given town or county would be given the responsibility to raise a certain amount, and then the local notables would raise the money from among themselves and from the commons. 

This is more of a historical question than strictly about ASOIAF–since the people of Westeros aren’t interested in higher learning outside of the Citadel’s–but I recently found out that feudal rulers would grant charters to form Universities in medieval times. What would such a charter typically entail? Since I know you’ve talked about city and town charters before, I figured you’d be the guy to ask.

Good question!

image

So here’s how university charters worked (and incidentally, they could be Royal, Imperial, or Papal): an organization that met certain criteria* would be granted a charter that offered three key privileges known as the “studium generale” following their introduction at Salerno, the first degree-granting institution in Europe (hotly debated):

  1. The “jus ubique docendi” meant that a master who had been educated at and then registered by the Guild of Masters of the University could teach anywhere without going through an examination to prove their bona fides, whereas all universities with this right would examine all teachers who didn’t have this privilege. (Reminds me vaguely of Harvard’s attitude to Harvard PhDs vs. non-Harvard PhDs…) Originally, this privilege belonged only to the Universities of Salerno, Bologna, and Paris, but it spread elsewhere thanks to Pope Gregory IX’s sponsorship of the University of Toulouse, and then the Holy Roman Emperor doing the same for the University of Naples just to show the Pope that he wasn’t in charge.
  2. An exemption (granted by Pope Honorius III) from the residency requirements of benefices, as set down in canon law. See, at this time pretty much all university positions were also religious positions, so becoming a teacher meant becoming a priest. However, because professors weren’t usually paid well, you needed a benefice (i.e, a piece of church property, usually tied to a church or monestary or cathedral) to give you a (usually tax-free) income stream. However, professors have always been more interested in research and teaching than pastoral commitments, so the exemption meant that you could stay in your cosy university post and not have to do pastoral work among the riff-raff. 
  3. The major source of “town and gown” conflict since at least the 13th century, a “studium generale” university would be granted the “privileges of Paris,” which gave them autonomy from local civil or diocesal authorities. This means the universities didn’t pay taxes, it meant that students were immune from local law enforcement (beginning the long tradition of students getting drunk and rowdy and trashing some place in town and then running like hell for the campus dorms which are off-limits to town police) and the university had its own judicial system, and it meant that the university wasn’t under the direct control of the local bishop. This last part became incredibly important when it came to the Protestant Reformation, because it meant that there wasn’t a censor of printed materials, people could debate theology openly without being arrested for heresy, and so on. There’s a reason why almost all of the major Protestant figures all came out of the university systems of Europe…because the ones who didn’t often got burned at the stake.

* In order to qualify for the charter, a university had to meet certain criteria:

  • First, it had to have a “universal” student body, open to students from all nations. (This is especially ironic given how universities are being pressured on foreign and out-of-state students) Student organizations were organized by nationality and sub-nationality, and originally were the main financial organization that hired and paid for teachers – anyone complaining about entitled students trying to run the university should count themselves lucky! 
  • Second, the university had to teach more than just the Seven Liberal Arts (grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy formed the Trivium and Quadrivium respectively). There had to be a faculty of either Law, Theology, or Medicine, showing that even in the Middle Ages the liberal arts are still not treated equally with the law schools and the medical schools (the schools of theology have lost a lot of their influence these days). Eventually, there would be pressure from the students, starting in the Renasisance, to add the Humanities (history, greek, moral philosophy, and poetry) to the curriculum. 
  • Third, a major part of the teaching had to be done by Masters, i.e a teacher graduated from one of the “studium generale” who held not only a bachelor’s degree but also a masters in a given field. Goes to show that even in the Middle Ages, we see boundary-setting fights about credentialism, specialization, and the quality of instruction.
  • Fourth, the whole “jus ubique docendi” thing. 

Another question from the Riverlands Alternate history guy. in regards to not wanting there to be toll levied when crossing the many bridges one wants to build in the riverlands, would it be a good idea to perhaps grant these forts as personal fiefs from the king, to members of the local knight order, to be returned to the king and given to another member upon the sitting knight’s death? or would the forts simply not be good enough prizes with only the forts and the lands around it without toll?

Well that was kind of my idea for the Knights of the Trident. Less personal than collective property, as it were.