“His guilt came back afterward, but weaker than before. If this was so wrong, why did the gods make it feel so good?”
Synopsis: “Oh sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found you…”
SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.
Given that trying to force a river crossing against an entrenched enemy is one of the most difficult maneuvers I can think of (@warsofasoiaf, am I forgetting any?), he did a pretty good job of it.
If the Martells were using roads which are open to all (see below), then probably not. However, if the Martells were trying to use a proprietary bridge or toll road or cross someone’s fields without their permission, there the Tyrells would have more of a leg to stand on.
magicbeardpowers asks:
If an individual lord or group of lords wanted to put a proper road through their land, would they have to get the king’s or lord paramount’s permission, like they would a city charter or to build a dam?
You did see attempts by lords to exert authority over roads on their lands – usually by trying to levy tolls – but as time went on, kings successfully asserted the legal principle that main roads were considered “public thoroughfares” and under the protection of the king, and then in the later Middle Ages merged that concept with nuisance law, whereby obstructions, enclosures, or interference with public thoroughfares were considered to be injurious to the commonweal and damage to royal property, which gave the king two separate avenues for exerting authority over roads.
However, note the use of the word “public” there. Whether a road was considered a public thoroughfare could depend on certain factors: did the road lead to a town, port, or market, was the road listed as particularly belonging to the king (Fosse Way, Ermine Street, Watling Street, and the Icknield Way were called the “king’s four highways” in English law), and had it traditionally been open to the public.
But to answer your question, I would guess on principle that if the road was contained within the fiefdom of a lord and hadn’t traditionally been open to the public and it wasn’t a road that the overlord had asserted ownership over, they probably could do it without permission.
“Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist theorist, coined the term “cultural hegemony” (although ideological hegemony also works) as the idea that the ruling class imposes the prevailing norms on the rest of society, which are then believed to be natural, inevitable, benevolent, etc.
This makes revolution more difficult, because those oppressed by the system don’t yet see their suffering as injustice (as opposed to bad luck, or the will of God, etc.) and can’t imagine a worldorganized differently than it is. Hence why Gramsci argued that intellectual liberation was necessary for political liberation, or why E.P Thompson argued that class is a process of people creating a new world-view (rather than just a result of material forces).
In a post a while back, I linked this idea to Steven Lukes’ idea of the three faces of power. Lukes talked about the three faces of power as decision-making power (formal state power), agenda-setting (the ability to decide what’s within the realm of legitimate debate, what is considered a “problem” and what isn’t), and ideological power (the ability to influence other people’s thinking, even when that thinking is against their interests). For example, we can see the third face of power in the fact that, even though Wat Tyler had seized London, he still felt that he needed King Richard to give the commons a charter of liberty and trusted that the King would keep his word that he would issue one and his word that Wat Tyler would not be harmed during a parlay.”
So if the dominant ideological framework of your culture is that kings are chosen by God and that rebellion against them is a sin, you need a lot of ideological lifting power to get people who are being actively oppressed by the monarchy to rise up against it. Hence why so many peasant rebellions from 1381 to the Bauernkrieg drew on religious justifications for rebellion, because the only thing above the king is God.
But an even bigger ideological lift than that is trying to envision an alternative method for organizing political authority if one was actually to succeed in overthrowing the system, especially if there aren’t multiple ideological frameworks available to your culture/time. While monarchy might not be a very good system, like primogeniture it had the advantage of being relatively simple and having fairly universal acceptance. This made it superior than the alternative of chaotic civil war among rival nobles who no longer have any central authority to check them.
There is a specific term for it, and it’s amazing: pulling down a castle’s walls so that it can’t be used as a fortification is called slighting a castle.
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