Yep, it did happen! We know, in part, because there were laws passed establishing penalties for impersonating a member of the nobility. 

It tended not to be rich merchants who did this sort of thing, since they had the option of just buying their way in legit-like, but more often medieval confidence men and other tricksters who were keen to profit off the social mores or status of the nobility. 

Yeah, you could, and you can find people complaining about up-jumped merchants buying their way into the gentry and the squirarchy and then into the ranks of knighthood as the 12th and 13th century. 

But as one professor whose lectures I listened to described it, it wasn’t like medieval England was marked by huge amounts of upward social mobility. Rather, what you had were spurts of ambitious social climbers and monarchs/nobles in need of cash, and then a good deal of social anxiety about what was happening to the old noble houses, and then people would redraw the boundaries, and there would be a pause – and then you’d have another spurt. 

The irony was that, because these social climbers were desperate to fit in, they often ditched any signs of their bourgeois pasts (including getting out of trade and into land) and fully assimilated into the value structure of the nobility, so that after a few generations (especially with intermarriage) you really couldn’t tell them apart. In this fashion, the professor argued, what you had was a ruling class that refreshed itself every so often with new blood but with very little change in ideas or social structure, and a very small amount of upward social mobility into the ruling class but a good deal of fluidity within the ruling class. 

Absolutely, you could become a celebrity tourney knight, and there were quite a few famous tourney knights in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. 

But in career terms, it was probably more likely for a tourney knight to find patronage (royal and otherwise) and from there gain estates or titles as a courtier. 

First, I wouldn’t call Stannis’ political thought as representative of the noble class – he’s got some pretty unusual views about the nature of the monarchy.

Second, the reason why Stannis viewed it as a “hard choosing” is that, as a pretty strong legalist, he felt particularly torn between fidelity to his king and fidelity to his family. 

Third, I don’t think it does have an implication there. There’s too much evidence going in the opposite direction. 

I hate to speak ill of the dead, especially Maester Aemon, but either “kill the boy” is one of the most misunderstood pieces of advice in the series or it’s one of the worst. 

Because if you look at how the advice shapes Jon’s actions in ADWD, it mostly leads him to push away his friends, ultimately weakening the support structure around him until there’s no one to protect him when the knives come out. 

Well, the Reach is being invaded by King Euron, and the Stormlands by Aegon and the Golden Company, Stannis is besieging Winterfell, the Vale is on the verge of rebellion, and the Riverlands isn’t far away either. 

So no, I would not say the War of Five Kings ended in ASOS.

Here you go. 

I didn’t say it was a good example of prejudice being done away with – one of the things Moore does rather well is to show how prejudice changes and mutates over time. 

Rather, I said it was a good example of a setting in which you still have dramatic potential despite everyone being superpowered.