Like the Freys, I think you’ll be quite surprised about what Barbrey Dustin cares about, in the end:

“Night work is not knight’s work,” Lady Dustin said. “And Lord Wyman is not the only man who lost kin at your Red Wedding, Frey. Do you imagine Whoresbane loves you any better? If you did not hold the Greatjon, he would pull out your entrails and make you eat them, as Lady Hornwood ate her fingers. Flints, Cerwyns, Tallharts, Slates … they all had men with the Young Wolf.”
“House Ryswell too,” said Roger Ryswell.
“Even Dustins out of Barrowton.” Lady Dustin parted her lips in a thin, feral smile. “The north remembers, Frey.”

It is not the Lannisters. Cersei may hold the Throne by force on the show, but she has no legal right to it. 

As to which of the collateral relations would count, I think there would be a variety of competing claims. The Florents would press their proximity through Shireen, the Estermonts would probably argue for a claim proceeding from Robert, some might back a Targaryen as a way to get back to a clear line of succession, etc.

GRRM’s talked about this with reference to Robert, basically saying that it was Robert’s choice as to whether he kept the Stormlands or gave it to either of his brothers. 

racefortheironthrone:

Yes, but not in the way that most people think. 

Ok, apparently my gnomic utterance confused people. 

All too often, when people ask about how Lincoln would have done Reconstruction differently, they’ve usually operating under the false assumption that it would have meant a more “lenient” Reconstruction and that the real problem with Reconstruction was those extremist Radical Republicans punishing the South by…giving black people and poor whites voting rights, establishing public schools and hospitals, making the tax system more progressive, and investing in infrastructure. (The horrors!)

But the reality is that Lincoln was replaced by Johnson, whose policy was to pardon the Confederate leadership, let the South pass Black Codes that tried to re-establish slavery in all but name, and obstruct Congress to the point where they impeached him, so that’s what would have been avoided had Lincoln lived.

As scholars like Eric Foner have pointed out, Lincoln’s Reconstruction policies were extremely flexible and largely aimed at trying to end the war quickly by enticing the Confederates to surrender already. So while Lincoln did fight with the Radicals over the Wade-Davis Bill, he also worked with Radicals to establish the Freedman’s Bureau and pass the 13th Amendment, and he was moving in the direction of black suffrage, another point where he had common ground with the Radicals.

I think this phenomenon would have continued in a second Lincoln administration, with him backing some Radical measures and opposing others, and changing his positions as facts on the ground changed (the Black Codes, the emergence of the Klan, etc.); likewise, I think Radical policies and politics would be quite different if they didn’t have to deal with Andrew Johnson vetoing everything they did. 

Yes, but not in the way that most people think. 

opinions-about-tiaras:

racefortheironthrone:

Half-swording is the practice of gripping the blade half-way down in order to deliver a more accurate and powerful thrusting attack or to use the sword as a club, as seen below: 

Given the prominence of plate armor in Westerosi warfare (46 results for plate armor across ASOIAF), I would expect half-swording techniques would develop in order to deal with opponents in full plate. 

Incidentally, GRRM, if you wanted a better way to depict the Bronn/Vardis Egan fight, you should have gone with half-swording rather than the old canard about the weight of plate armor…

Is that a canard tho? Didn’t a full suit of plate wear about forty pounds?

That’s a non-trivial amount of extra weight to haul around during a period of intense, adrenaline-pumping, life-or-death activity.

The protection it provides is worth it in many situations, of course; I’m not sure Vardis Egan would have done better against Bronn without his armor simply because it seems likely Bronn is simply a better swordsman. So the armor actually probably kept him alive longer.

Yeah, I think it is a canard. 

Yes, a full suit of plate weighed a bit (although it could go as light as 33 pounds), but it distributed the weight much much better than chainmail, and so it wasn’t as tiring to wear. I can testify from my own experiences here: chainmail feels way heavier than it actually is, because the metal is hanging down off you from every point. By contrast, plate armor that’s been properly fitted is distributing the weight across your entire body. 

Look at the video I’ve linked to here, or the video linked to in the Catelyn VII chapter essay – you can be very agile and active in plate armor, especially if you put in the kind of training that someone like Vardis Egan would have done from an early age. 

opinions-about-tiaras:

This implies that I actually asked the wrong question; it shouldn’t have been “do the Westerosi have a concept of private land ownership” (clearly they do; people think of their fiefs as belonging to them and part of the patrimony they’ll pass onto their sons) but of “private land transfer,” that is, the idea that land is a commodity that can be traded among people in the same way you might trade a horse or a suit of armor or a cartload of grain.

Gotcha. No, not really. As I discuss here, there’s only one mention of land being sold for money, in the extended Westerlands chapter:

racefortheironthrone:

It’s somewhat complicated, but this is actually quite accurate to medieval societies. While there were a bewildering number of different kinds of land tenures under feudal law – everything from knight service and serjeanty to scutage, socage, copyhold, and quit-rent – it was extremely rare for land to be owned outright without any form of obligation or traditional responsibility to anyone. What is known in common law as freehold ownership was very rare, and in most cases until quite recently were actually “customary freehold,” which was itself a kind of copy-hold lease. 

This is why Polayni argued that state action was necessary to bring into being a free market in land, to turn it into a fungible commodity that could be bought and sold, that could be turned into futures and other forms of derivatives, etc. The vast vast majority of those feudal tenures were all based on custom – rents and rights and obligations were usually fixed either by some document held at local manorial courts (copyhold for example is a form of tenure where tenancies were written down in the rolls of the manorial court and tenants were given a copy to ensure that the terms of their tenancy couldn’t be altered), or by tradition (in the common law, a property or benefit that had been held since “Time whereof the Memory of Man runneth not to the contrary” did not need any record other than the memory of the oldest man in the parish), and could only be changed with great difficulty subject to challenge in court. 

However, this doesn’t mean that people were not possessive of land – ask any number of medieval kings who faced aristocratic rebellions when they tried to transfer fiefdoms or “innovate” their way to some new revenue – but rather that they didn’t think of possessing land as being free from all other claims. If a given manor had “belonged” to a family for hundreds of years, they thought of it as theirs, even if they had to pay traditional rents to a liege lord or give three pheasants a year to the local bishop. 

“At
[Ellyn Rayne’s] urging, Lord Tarbeck expanded his domain by buying the lands of the lesser
lords and landed knights about him… and taking by force the holdings of
those who refused to sell.

Some
of those thus dispossessed went to Casterly Rock for justice, but Lord Tytos
shrugged off their complaints, or else refused to see them…three landed
knights who had lost their lands to Lord and Lady Tarbeck had made their way to
King’s Landing, to lay their grievance before King Aegon.”

Given the context, buying people’s land seems to be a dangerous innovation, a rather thin pretext of legality covering what is actually extortion with menaces. 

Well, both Germany and Italy did, but they just did later…

A lot of it does come down to luck. There were a lot of states that are currently part of France – the Duchy of Burgundy, the Duchy of Brittany, the County of Flanders, the Duchy of Acquitaine, etc. – that had a long tradition of independence and didn’t think of themselves as belonging to the French nation-state, and had some wars and some dynastic marriages gone differently, they might have stayed out of the French nation-state. 

I also think the very persistence and bitterness of the Hundred Years War helped. By creating a singular evil Other who the nation could be defined against, the War helped to create a sense of national identity on both sides, creating a centripetal force that counter-acted the previously dominant trend of regional separatism. 

By contrast, if you look at Italy and Germany, you had a lot of states that managed to dodge absorption for a long long time, and the wars that wracked those countries tended to be far more complicated struggles that made developing a national identity more difficult. Take Italy for an example: maybe you could find a proto-nationalism within the Guelphs, but they had to contend with a kind of pan-European proto-nationalism among the Ghibellines, and even then the Guelphs were backed by the French to check the Holy Roman Empire. Then when you get down to the Renaissance, and Italy is being simultaneously claimed by the French and the Spanish and there’s nine feuding city-states that were all claiming to be the true rulers of Italy and then you have to deal with the fact that the Papal States which were probably the best positioned to be the nucleus of an Italian state were owned by the Church and the Pope wasn’t always Italian, and then chunks of Italy get given to the Austrians, and it’s really difficult to get your feet under you politically.