Geographic: access to a good natural harbor or a river that offers good access to the interior, being at a ford or mountain pass, being at a crossroads.
Political: a royal court or the court of a powerful lord, or an actual sitting judicial body.
Religious: a prominent cathedral, church, or monestary, the location of an important shrine or reliquary or some other association with an important saint, being on the route of a pilgrimage.
Economic: having a charter to hold a market, nearby miines, a concentration of a particular industry like metalworking or textiles, etc.
This absolutely happened in historical slave societies. To take a recent example, the case of Solomon Northrup – a free man who was drugged and kidnapped in Washington D.C, taken to New Orleans and sold as a slave, and spent twelve years enslaved on plantations in the Red River area before he was able to win his freedom.
What the movie didn’t focus on was the political context of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, enacted three years before the publication of Northrup’s memoir, which allowed people to be arrested on nothing more than an affadavit that they were a runaway slave, denied them the right to a jury trial or to testify in open court, and paid the “judge” (actually a commissioner) who oversaw their case twice as much to declare them a runaway than to declare them a free person. Hardly much concern there about the rights of someone like Solomon Northrup.
The definition of a slave society is a society where social, political, and cultural institutions are all structured to uphold and defend slavery above all other interests. In such a society, mechanisms for preventing people from being “wrongly enslaved” are deeply destabilizing, because they introduce the idea that slavery could be illegal or illegitimate or immoral, and that mechanisms exist by which slaves could contest their status before an authority greater than their masters. Whereas allowing people to be “wrongly enslaved” creates more slaves to feed the system.
Well, the Kingsguard are a somewhat different case from the Night’s Watch. A small bodyguard doesn’t need to reproduce itself in the same way that a standing army does, so that’s not a drawback in the same way.
I think your suggestion kind of points out some of the benefits of the current system – if Kingsguard had families with them in King’s Landing, would they be looking out for the king or for their families? What happens if someone kidnaps their families and threatens to kill them unless they murder the king or leave the king vulnerable to murder?
Serving for life is a bit strange. If the point is to have the perfect bodyguard, why would you want someone who’s passed their peak fitness still on duty? Keeping them around to train the next generation and preserve institutional memory is a good idea, but when you’re limited to seven people, it seems a bit odd.
Well, your average lord couldn’t do a lot of what I was proposing – canals that unite entire kingdoms, significant changes in the law, etc. And keep in mind, I framed my ideas as being on the very edge of the possible.
But on a smaller scale, yes, some of these things could be done and some of them would see results in a few years. Others would take decades if not generations.
This is just an educated guess, but probably milk.
The problem with farming for meat is that prior to the agricultural revolution of the 18th century, something I talk about in my economic development series in reference to growing cereal crops, it was difficult to keep meat animals alive over the winter due to lack of food for them. Hence, you’d slaughter animals when they were roughly a year old, which limited their growth and thus how much meat you could get from them. (Lack of refrigeration and other means of storage was also a problem.)
During the agricultural revolution of the 18th century, you have a number of interlocking developments that changed that:
Changing rotation of crops to replace fallow fields with turnips, clover, hay, and other legumes. Not only do these help restore nutrients to the soil, which improves the yield of cereal crops, but they also meant that you now had a new source of fodder to feed your animals and could afford to keep them alive over the winter.
Introduction of water-meadows. Water-meadows are areas of grassland that are irrigated to keep them continuously damp, which promotes the early growth of grass, which allowed for animals to be pastured on these meadows in those tricky periods of late winter/early spring where you’ve run out of winter fodder but the legumes and grass haven’t kicked in generally.
Selective breeding of livestock. By carefully breeding animals for specific traits, farmers profoundly reshaped the economic potential of entire species. To give an example, the “average weight of a bull sold for slaughter at Smithfield was reported around 1700 as 370 pounds (170 kg), though this is considered a low estimate: by 1786, weights of 840 pounds (380 kg) were reported.”
The combination of these factors meant that animals were now routinely being kept alive over the winter, which means they produced much, much more meat, especially once farmers created breeds of cattle especially for that purpose.
And when I say more meat, I mean cows that looked like this:
That’s a square cow. That thing couldn’t be more genetically modified unless it came shaped in detachable burger shapes.
Close-up on his fist, as he unravels it to place an onyx dragon in her palm.
Cut to Volantis. We zoom out on Quentyn’s face.
His eyes are bloodshot.
His hands are trembling.
His friends are dead.
He’s going to die.
He knows it.
DORAN: (in voiceover) Fire and Blood.
As his opening move in Quentyn’s storyline, GRRM elects to rip a gigantic hole in it, disorienting the reader along with the protagonist right from the start. Quent’s first chapter in ASOIAF is not set in Yronwood, where his story “should” begin; nor is it set in Sunspear, receiving his mission from his father; nor is it set in Planky Town, as he sets out on his quest. It is set in Volantis, after Team Quent has already passed through all those others. Why structure it this way? Why open the story on what really ought to be the fifth or sixth chapter? So GRRM could start said story like this:
Adventure stank.
It’s the most meta moment in the series’ most meta storyline. Indeed, it’s a huge sick hilarious fourth-wall-breaking (and heartbreaking) joke, once you know how this story ends. But it’s also Quentyn’s story in miniature. Even more than, say, “he drank his way across the narrow sea,” the opening line of “The Merchant’s Man” throws down a gauntlet for the reader, setting the tone for the rest of the storyline. This adventure is not empowering or exciting or, indeed, successful. This adventure stinks. And what does it stink of?
She boasted sixty oars, a single sail, and a long lean hull that promised speed. Small, but she might serve, Quentyn thought when he saw her, but that was before he went aboard and got a good whiff of her. Pigs, was his first thought, but after a second sniff he changed his mind. Pigs had a cleaner smell. This stink was piss and rotting meat and nightsoil, this was the reek of corpse flesh and weeping sores and wounds gone bad, so strong that it overwhelmed the salt air and fish smell of the harbor.
It stinks of death, that winged chariot which has already visited Quent’s quest before we even meet him, the maw waiting for him at quest’s end. Quent’s death is so horrific you can smell it a book away. It haunts his entire story from the very first words. It’s the end result of every twist of the plot, every decision Quent makes, rendering the experience of reading Quent’s arc the equivalent of watching a dog-eared storybook set suddenly on fire.
And even before we enter Quentyn’s story, his best friend (Cletus Yronwood) and two of his other companions (Willam Wells and Maester Kedry) are dead, killed in a corsair attack. So the quest is broken before it starts. It’s already all gone wrong, and we have no experience of Quent’s story before that happens. Quentyn’s fantasy tale has torn off its mask and revealed itself as a horror story, and the trapdoors just keep opening up beneath him, falling closer to the fire with each drop. This is a Hero’s Journey in which the Refusal of the Call was absolutely correct, which in and of itself constitutes a radical reshaping of how this sort of story is supposed to go.
Brilliant stuff – cuts right to the heart of why Quentyn is so important for ASOIAF as a whole.
And the comparisons to Tolkein and the Hero’s Journey couldn’t be more apt. For Maester Kedry, read Gandalf. For Cletus Yronwood, read Aragorn. Imagine if they had died, permanently, right at the beginning of their quest, in a literal random encounter. No grand set-piece on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm or anything like that, just the DM rolling some percentile die on a table.
Azor Ahai/Last Hero’s legendary red sword being intepreted as Valyrian steel by later chroniclers, because that’s what magic sword means to them.
Perhaps Azor Ahai/Last Hero discovered the secret of dragonsteel before the Valyrians and it was lost with them and rediscovered later by the Valyrians?
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