Hit it in one with the English Civil War Protestant sects. The Ranters, the Diggers, the Muggletonians, the Fifth Monarchists, the Familists, the Grindletonians, the Philadelphians, the Socinians…such an amazing ferment of ideas and beliefs in a period of immense social and cultural upheaval. One of my favorite books that I read while an undergraduate was Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down, and it has stuck with me to this day.
I also am quite interested in historical Zoroastrianism and Manichaenism, two great world religions, both of them strongly dualist in nature, and both almost completely wiped out.
Just to show how much I care…I did research on numismatics for you, and that’s something I once swore I would never do.
Medieval coins were “cold-struck” which means that the planchet or blank were allowed to cool before they were imprinted. They were made by hand, by sticking a planchet in between two dies (the one on top called the trussel die, and the bottom die called the pile die) upon which the design of the coin had been engraved and then hitting the trussel die with a hammer to imprint the planchet with both the obverse and design side at the same time.
The coining was actually the simplest part of the process. Producing the dies took up a lot of time, because the action of smacking them with a hammer inevitably damaged them – to take the Venetian mint as an example, they had to make one trussel die every day and one pile die every other day, because when you’re punching out 20,000 coins a day, the dies are going to get damaged in a hurry. Making the blanks was also a rather complicated process and took up a huge amount of time:
melting and casting the ingots,
annealing, or heat treating, the ingots to soften them,
hammering the ingots,
another annealing,
cutting the ingots into blanks,
annealing the blanks,
hammering the blanks thinner,
another annealing,
another hammering of the blanks,
another annealing,
another hammering of the blanks,
rolling and
hammering the edges to make the blanks rounder,
another annealing,
blanching to clean the blanks
and then finally coining.
In terms of how often the coins were made and why…part of it had to do with custom: new coins would be minted to celebrate the coronation of a new monarch in order to spread the word about who the new monarch was, new coins would also be minted to celebrate major military victories or weddings or the birth of royal children, or certain religious holidays. But a good bit of it had to do with supply and demand: i.e, when the monarch needs cash to buy stuff or when various vendors bring in royal ious and request payment in cash or when the royal paymasters need to make payroll for the army or the navy, etc.
Speaking of supply and demand, one of the long-term problems with metallic currency is that, over time, they have a deflationary bias – as people hoard coins, money falls out of the system, and prices start to drop in ways that become very dangerous to profit margins and thus economic viability. Thus, you have to mint coins just to make sure that there’s enough coins going around for economic transactions to take place and for the economy to grow. And the problems don’t end there: because metallic coins are easily counterfeited by clipping or sweating or plating, mints were constantly battling Gresham’s Law, which is one of the reasons why medieval punishments for forgery and counterfeiting were so legendarily brutal.
Ultimately it came down to how well things were going for the state. Remember, the coins are made of precious metals, which means you need the raw stuff on hand to mint. When things are going well economically and politically – trade is flowing, the harvest is good, people are paying their taxes – the king mints lots of coins both because he can and to show off his royal splendor and majesty. But when things are going bad – when the harvest fails, trade dries up, people are refusing to pay their taxes, foreign armies are rampaging up and down the countryside stealing everything shiny – first you start to adulterate your coinage with baser metals, then you cheat on the weight of the coinage, then you just stop issuing coins for a while. One of the ways that historians of the ancient world or the medieval period try to assess the strength and stability of various dynasties is just by looking at how frequently coins are being minted, how the weight and purity of the coinage is changing,
“Well, let’s take Henry II’s judicial reforms as a jumping-off point: he’s perhaps best known for the Assizes of Clarendon (which in addition to asserting exclusive royal jurisdiction over criminal cases and royal jurisdiction over land disputes, also created some of the first grand juries) where he established the justices in eyre – six judges from Westminster who divided England between them and would travel in a circuit from county to county, covering their entire circuit every two years. He also established permanent judiciaries in the capitol which would eventually be known as the Court of Common Pleas and the Court of King’s Bench. And this was pretty much how things went from about 1166 to 1285-1360, where the system of local justices of the peace began to replace the justices in eyre in terms of who does the majority of judicial work.
So if we were talking about providing a judiciary for Westeros, I think you’d probably start with a system of itinerant justices who could cover a good deal of territory between them, and you’d probably stagger the numbers by the size of the territory involved: Iron Islands are pretty small geographically so you could get away with one, Stormlands and Crownlands could probably be covered by two justices each, Westerlands and Vale maybe three or four each given the difficulty of mountain travel, the North and Dorne would probably need 5-6 given the long distances but also the lower population density, and the Reach would probably need 10 or more given the size and high population.”
So the first step is to set up itinerant royal justices so that you have a mechanism by which royal judicial authority is transmitted to the provinces outside of the direct overlordship of the King, and to establish in law that these courts have jurisdiction over certain crimes.
Note that Henry II targeted criminal cases – murder always gets people het up, and given the tendency of private wars between nobles to end in murder, it’s a good excuse to get the lords under warrant – and land disputes, because in a society where land disputes are going to be the majority of legal matters, that makes the royal courts very attractive.
The second step is to establish firmly in law what is already precedent: that the king and his ministers have appelate jurisdiction over judicial disputes between lords, with an eye to extending this into appelate jurisdiction over the judicial decisions of lords. This can also be important for royal authority down the line, because it allows you to overrule local lords and gets the ordinary subject to see the king as an interposing power they can appeal to.
The third step, as suggested by the second, is to maneuver yourself into a situation where A. the king gets a veto over local judicial decisions through appelate jurisdiction over all judicial decisions, and B. local lords are held legally accountable for violating the royal justice code in either action or decision. Perverting the course of justice, embracery, obstruction of justice, misprision of felony, mis- and malfeasance in public office, compounding a felony – there is a long list of old crimes from the Common Law that could be used as a cudgel against lords trying to maintain their tradional privileges.
It means that whoever owns the ship, and it could be the captain or it could be a merchant or a consortium of merchants or a nobleman (although that’s less likely), is based out of Oldtown.
In terms of taxes and fees, you’re dealing with two things. The first is that the owner/s pays taxes to House Hightower by virtue of being a resident of Oldtown, but that’s no different from any baker or blacksmith who also is a resident of Oldtown. The second is that when the ship is in Oldtown, it pays tariffs and excise taxes, harbor fees and warehousing fees, the same as any other ship in the port (although it’s quite likely that the Hightowers charge a lower rate to resident merchants as a way of stimulating local commerce).
Looking at the sources, it doesn’t seem like the Hightowers have a proprietary trading fleet in the same way that the Redwynes do – rather, the Hightowers’ navy is meant to “to protect his trade.” Nor does King’s Landing have a proprietary trading fleet; they have a lot of ships based out of that port, but the crown doesn’t own them directly, although Littlefinger probably bought quite a few of them using embezzled royal funds.
Building off of a discussion that I had with @goodqueenaly, I thought I’d share some thoughts I had about the expulsion of the Manderlys from the Reach. We don’t know much about what precipitated this event other than that Perceon III “feared their swelling power in the Reach.” Now, this could be pure feudal politics, with Perceon III wanting to take down an "over-mighty vassal.”
However, I think it’s notable that when the Manderlys fled, “the wealth that the Manderlys had brought with them from the Reach” was enough to build both the New Keep and the city of White Harbor. It takes an enormous amount of money to do that. This makes me think that the conflict was over money.
Now there are a couple ways this could happen. One possibility is that, as the Mander is named after the Manderlys, they probably had a dominant position on the river (probably somewhere near the mouth, given their conflict with the marcher lord Peakes) which allowed them to put a toll on river traffic – not only would this make the Manderlys reach indeed, but it would create a natural point of conflict with the Gardeners upstream at Highgarden.
Another possibility is that it was a John of Gaunt situation. The Manderlys were a very wealthy and thus envied house, Perceon III needed money for a war or something, and decided to confiscate the estate of the richest house in the kingdom, similar to how Richard II confiscated the estates of his uncle John of Gaunt to help pay for his failed war in Ireland.
A third possibility is that, similar to how Wyman Manderly wanted to become Robb Stark’s master of coin, the Manderlys were the masters of coin in the Reach. From that position, the same techniques that made Thomas Cromwell one of the richest men in England might explain how they had so much moveable wealth during their exile, in a society where most wealth is tied up in the land. And it might also explain how they were brought down, through allegations of corruption or embezzlement, true or false.
The two-handed longaxe was the province of the housecarls, professional warriors who served in the household guard of thanes and kings alike. Thus, they weren’t the most common weapon on the battlefield, but rather the sign and tool of office of an elite even within the warrior caste::
In combat, the axe was continuously (and unpredictably) swung to create a deadly zone around the axeman, and when that axe hit, it could easily hit with enough force to split a shield open or knock a man onto his back or cut through a spear or knock a sword out of someone’s hand – which made the thrusting/jabbing combat you’re talking about an extremely dicey proposition if the axeman was fast enough to avoid getting stuck.
Thus, the housecarls seemed to function in two ways: first, on the offensive, they would open up holes in the enemy shield-wall for other soldiers to exploit. Remember, the longaxe’s haft could be as long as six feet, making it a forerunner of the polearm, which gave the user a good deal of reach into the enemy line, and the axe’s blade was bearded, allowing the wielder to hook over the lip of shields and drag them down, opening up the shield wall:
On the defensive, the housecarl was there to disrupt the enemy shield-wall, either by opening up holes in their defense or by creating zones that soldiers naturally shied away from.
In either case, the housecarls seemed to function as skirmishers, stepping in front of the shield-wall to contest the area in between. When we look at the Bayeux Tapestry, for example, we see images of housecarls wielding only the longaxe standing between a Saxon shield-wall and the oncoming Normans (which shows you how insanely brave these guys were):
If it were me, I would advise Bittersteel to either rotate the capital between the Three Daughters or to build a new city in the middle of the Disputed Lands at the exact equidistant spot.
In terms of why he didn’t try to conquer the Disputed Lands, Bittersteel was a man with his eyes on the prize and the last thing he wanted was for his fellow Blackfyre loyalists to get distracted with Essos instead of getting ready to invade Westeros.
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