Feudal Manor asker, yes it was a broad question. I’ve found it hard to zero in on specific things with the word limit. What id like your take on is about as much about management and politics as about economic specifics. You mentioned the oppressive taxes/ evasion vicious spiral causing unrest and economic disruption. How would lord, or really any authority escape or mitigate this and create psychological landscape that would allow for long term development and prosperity. The variations of 1/2

2/2 this can pretty easily be seen in history where regions with many of the same qualities and resources either advance and grow in wealth and development or remain stagnant. You had touched on some of this in your regional development pieces, “In Dorne we all band together…”, something like that. I know its very vague and has to do with symbols and emotional stats and so on. Still seems important in relation to how states and so on grow or don’t. Thanks

Ultimately the management of feudal manors was a political process by which relations between lord and peasant were worked out, and it could be a very antagonistic or a more symbiotic one depending on the political skills of both sides (or even mediators like royal judges or local clergymen).

While law and political culture gave lords the upper hand (although not entirely), pushing too hard and too fast would cause unrest and disruption, so a lot of aspects of noble culture were designed to give noblemen the skills necessary to manage their tenants and workforce without provoking resistance: adhering to noblesse oblige was a good way of gaining popular goodwill through symbolic displays of generosity (donating hand-me-downs to the poor, or conspiciously giving alms/tithing at church, etc.), being able to gracefully condescend to your lessers was important to ensure that social interactions between noble and peasant didn’t give rise to contempt or resentment.

On the flip side, peasants had one important trump card that made up for some of their massive disadvantages when it came to legal, political, and sociocultural status: they were the only workforce around. Peasants could use various means of direct action to resist actions of their landlords: they could strike as workers by refusing to labor on the lord’s land, they could strike as tenants by withholding their rent payments, they could get violent (often by setting gathered crops or fixed improvements on fire, or breaking fences and other symbolic violations of noble prerogatives, or beating the crap out of the bailiffs and reeves or burning down the manorial court), or they could turn to the courts. There were quite a few cases where individual peasants and whole village would hire lawyers and sue their landlords, especially in cases where there was a dispute over whether tenants were free peasants or serfs.

But on both sides, there were always important tensions between peace and profit, and between tradition and innovation. To quote myself for a second:

Almost by definition, the major source of income of a noble family is rent income from their lands, and rents were overwhelmingly set by custom and tradition. This meant that most nobles were living on something like a fixed income, which meant they were very vulnerable to changes in prices. Crop failures, rebellious peasants demanding wage increases, competition from foreign countries, all of these things could seriously negatively affect the bottom line.

This meant that attempts to raise rents could be resisted by peasants through the law, pointing to manorial rolls or copies of tenancy agreements (or even the memory of the oldest person around) as proof that their lord was violating their ancient rights. At the same time, there were also examples of lords who went looking for feudal taxes, privileges, or labor that had been previously waived (a strategy that lords could and often did use to decrease tensions), and insisting on enforcing their ancient rights.

So, how do lords pursue economic development in that situation? Well, if one had the capital, one could invest in infrastructure: draining fenland or clearing forest would give the lord additional land that they could now settle with new tenants (and since these were legal blank slates, the lord wasn’t bound by the old terms of service), building mills or other processing industries would create new ways to extract income from one’s tenants and increasing the value-added of the good produced by the manor, investing in new farming techniques on the lord’s land (as opposed to the land that was leased to tenants) would increase the productivity of that land.

In addition to techniques, the most historically significant change a lord could make would be to change what they grew. In the early modern period, with the advent of the commercial revolution, many English landlords shifted from growing traditional cereal crops to pasturing sheep to export their wool to the Netherlands, despite the massive disruption to agricultural labor markets. To quote from Utopia:

But yet this is not only the necessary cause of stealing. There is another, which, as I suppose, is proper and peculiar to you Englishmen alone. What is that, quoth the Cardinal? forsooth my lord (quoth I) your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities. For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore dearest wool, there noblemen and gentlemen, yea and certain abbots, holy men no doubt, not contenting themselves with the yearly revenues and profits, that were wont to grow to their forefathers and predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in rest and pleasure nothing profiting, yea much annoying the weal public, leave no ground for tillage, they inclose all into pastures; they throw down houses; they pluck down towns, and leave nothing standing, but only the church to be made a sheep-house.

See, along with the shift to wool exports came a legal movement in the 16th century to enclose the formerly common lands of manors (one of those pesky traditional rights that peasants kept insisting upon) and turning them into the lord’s property. This was so hugely disruptive that it led to riots starting in the mid-16th century, but lords with a sturdy enough backbone and quiet enough conscience were able to bull ahead despite resistance from King, Parliament (from 1489 to 1639) and their own people, so lucrative were the profits.

Should the rivertowns you mentioned (Seagard, Saltpans, Fairmarket, LHT) be granted city charters, what kind of industries and guilds do you imagine developing there?

Good question!

For the most part, I would imagine that these towns would be primarily commercial: Seagard is a port serving the trade along the Sunset Sea, Saltpans (to a lesser extent than Maidenpool) serves trade along the Trident and the Bay of Crabs, Fairmarket is a market town with a bridge that allows one to travel from Riverrun to Seagard or the Twins and vice versa, and Lord Harroway’s Town is located at the Ruby Ford over the Green Fork and close by to the crossroads of the Kingsroad, the River road, and the High Road.

Beyond that, we know that Ironman’s Bay is teeming with fish, so I would imagine that Seagard would have a fishing industry as well. We know that Saltpans also has a fishing industry, and as we know from the name flat salt pans (likely due to extensive shallows at the estuary where the freshwater Trident meets the saltwater Bay of Crabs) where salt is mass-produced and sold to Essos. Associated with that, Saltpans likely also has a significant salting industry, where fresh fish are preserved so that they can be stored longer and thus sold further afield.

In terms of other industries, I would start with industries that process agricultural resources: we know that the Riverlands produces some wine, so there’s probably coopers making barrels to hold the wine; we know that the Riverlands produces a lot of cattle, so you probably have (in addition to cattle markets) butchers, cheesemakers, and tanners and leatherworkers; we know that lots of grain is grown and traded in the Riverlands, so you need millers and bakers. After that, I would guess that between all the rivers and roads, the Riverlands also has a lot of industries that are associated with transportation: in addition to merchants, teamsters, longshoremen, porters and warehouse workers, ferrymen, and sailors, you probably also have a lot of boatwrights, cartwrights, wheelwrights, and blacksmiths who manufacture and repair the boats and wagons that carry the goods on land and water.

X-Men read A Song of Ice and Fire. Who’s rooting for whom?

This is a great question for @postcardsfromspace, but I’ll throw my two cents in:

Magneto would probably be a fan of Melisandre or Beric Dondarrion.
Xavier…I can see the parallel to Doran Martell, but I actually think he’d be a big fan of Sam Tarly.
Emma Frost is all about the Lannisters, but prefers Tywin while cosplaying as Cersei.
Cyclops I would see as a huge fan of Ned Stark and/or Stannis.
Jean Grey would be all about Daenerys Targaryen and Sansa, which is hilarious given the state of the fandom atm.
Wolverine is absolutely a fan of Sandor Clegane.
Storm might be an Asha Greyjoy fan. I could see her either liking or having a huge problem with Daenerys, not sure.
Beast and Iceman would be fans of Tyrion for different reasons.
Nightcrawler would probably be either into Oberyn Martell or Jon Snow.
Kitty Pryde would be an Arya fan, I think.
Angel would be into Jaime Lannister, I think.
Colossus would be into Davos, although I could see an argument for Gendry.

Why does it sometimes seem in the dialogue in aSoI&F as if breaking lances is a good thing? I thought the aim was to knock the other guy off his horse. Does the lance need to break for it to happen?

Well, a tourney lance is made to shatter rather than impale your opponent, because tourneys are supposed to be nonlethal. So breaking a lance meant that you scored a good direct hit against your opponent’s shield or armor.

See, the thing is that while knocking the other guy off your horse was a clear victory, jousting didn’t always require it. There were quite a few victory conditions, depending on the style of joust – knocking off the crest of your opponent, causing a spring-loaded shield to detach, or simply winning on points.

To use a modern analogy, winning a boxing match by K.O is very straightforward, but a lot of matches are decided on points. So breaking a lance would be like landiing a hard and clean shot which will contribute to the judges scoring a round in your favor.

Writing a fanfiction on this scenario if you’re interested but I wanted to ask again what your objection was to Ned installing Jon as King in the aftermath of Robert’s death? Your argument aboht Viserys made sense but as a half Stark with Ned as regent wouldn’t that solve the potential for recrimination?

It solves some of the problems – a King Jon would probably not want to revenge himself on the Starks in the name of his father – but not all of them. For one thing, this doesn’t exactly do much for the Tullys, Baratheons, Arryns, and Lannisters, who don’t have the same protection of blood.

But there’s a larger political problem: the rebellion was launched as an argument that the actions of King Aerys and Prince Rhaegar were so contradictory to the feudal social contract that they had forfeited their right to rule. Naming Jon as King goes back on that in a really egregious fashion: by acknowledging Jon as Rhaegar’s heir, you’re accepting his abduction of Lyanna as legitimate, which the Baratheons are going to have a problem with. Moreover, as Rhaegar was Aerys’ heir, you’re accepting that Aerys was a rightful monarch.

Moreover, the Rebel Alliance had already acclaimed Robert as their King. So now Ned has forsworn his oath to Robert to put his nephew on the throne, which is going to be seen as both an unspeakable personal betrayal and dishonor for Ned and as rank self-interested treason in the eyes of the political class. Ned’s now going to have to deal with the Baratheons and the Arryns and Tullys who’ve sworn their oaths to Robert and his heirs, and he’s going to have to deal with the Lannisters who have every reason to fear a Targaryen restoration.

So the only scenario I see coming out of this is a bloody and entrenched civil war, likely leading to the fracturing of the realm as the Vale, Riverlands, and Stormlands declare for King Stannis, Dorne and possibly the Reach splits the Targaryen loyalist faction (because the Dornish are not going to recognize anyone of Lyanna’s line ahead of Elia’s), and the Westerlands and Iron Islands are all out for themselves.

And since Ned’s not an idiot, he’s going to see this coming the moment he finds out about Jon’s birth and that’s why he would never name Jon King.

did feudal lords ever have to worry about farmers cheating their taxes by cutting grain with sawdust or padding sacks of oats with gravel to make it look like they paying more than they really were?

Yes! In fact, it was a major problem in estate management, and a lot of what the stewards, reeves, bailiffs, and other officials had to deal with was peasants cheating their taxes by misrepresenting the number and health of their livestock, or agricultural products like cheese. The problem was that, as they added more officials to oversee their peasants and prevent this kind of tax fraud, they opened themselves up to being embezzled by their household and estate staff, especially because there was something of a custom of staff taking various bribes, kickbacks, and small-scale theft as perks to make up for the relatively small fixed salaries that came with those positions.

In addition to direct management, lords had two other means for capturing value from their peasants. The first was local monoplies: lords would invest in some improvements on their land, like a mill to turn grain into flour or a weir to encourage river travel or a bridge to encourage road traffic, and then they would require people to use them and/or pay for their usage. To take the example of a mill, if you had peasants who were trying to cheat their taxes by stuffing all of the chaff from their weight into the sacks they owed the lord, you could require them to take their grain to your mill, where not only you could charge them a fee for the use of your mill, but you could also fine them for adulterating their product. And if you were crooked, you could also cheat them by cutting their grain yourself (thus keeping more wheat for yourself) or fixing the scales so that they’d have to give you more to make weight.

The other was the manorial courts: you use the law to extract every rent and privilege you can from your peasants, whether that’s extracting additional feudal labor that might have been allowed to lapse in the past but could now be enforced, or equally common, by turning up the enforcement on taxation, labor, and feudal privileges to eleven and extract additional income in fines where you can’t in rent.

So you can see something of a back-and-forth process, where the nobles try to squeeze every last drop of wealth from their peasants, while the peasants try to cheat their overlord at every turn, and the balance of power depended a lot on organization, force of personality, and broader legal and political circumstances (this is a big part of why royal courts were so important in the centralization of monarchy). If managed incorrectly, you got tyranny and oppression, peasant rebellions and bloody repression. If managed correctly, you got economic development and growth.

“Timett son of Timett…he may have Arryn blood in him…” Whoa wait what? How did I miss this?

So let’s talk about Timett son of Timett.

The Burned Men are a particularly fearsome mountain clan from the Vale, who broke off from the Painted Dogs to worship a fire-witch (almost certainly the fugitive Nettles with her dragon Steepstealer). The Burned Men are known for their fearlessness demonstrated in their coming-of-age ceremony where they burn off a body-part, a ceremony deriving from the practice of sending young men as tribute to the fire-witch who would have to prove themselves by daring the flames of Sheepstealer. And the Burned Men once carried off the daughter of Alys Arryn (Jon Arryn’s sister)…

Timett became a red hand (war chief) of the Burned Men from a very early age by burning out one of his eyes at the coming-of-age ceremony, which scared the hell out of the normally unflappable Burned Men. Timett fought for Tyrion at the Green Fork and Blackwater with some distinction, and then returned to the Vale with the spoils of war:

“The Burned Men are fearless since Timett One-Eye came back from the war. And half a year ago, Gunthor son of Gurn led the Stone Crows down on a village not eight miles from here. They took every woman and every scrap of grain, and killed half the men. They have steel now, good swords and mail hauberks, and they watch the high road—the Stone Crows, the Milk Snakes, the Sons of the Mist, all of them. Might be you’d take a few with you, but in the end they’d kill you and make off with your daughter.“

So now you have the mountain clans armed and armored equivalent to knights, with experience in fighting knights in open battle, and Timett leads the toughest of their clan.

My speculation is that, once the Knights of the Vale go north to pursue Sansa’s claim to Winterfell, Timett will seize the Eyrie. And in a bit of dramatic irony, it’ll turn out that he’s actually the rightful heir, as his claim outranks that of Harry the Heir (who descends from the youngest of Alys Arryn’s daughters).

Is there a copper to stag, stag to dragon ratio that’s known? Traditional fantasy rules is an easy 10 copper to 1 silver, 10 silver to 1 gold but that doesn’t hold up with the way the value of a gold dragon has been worked out. (sorry if you’ve answered this, link plox)

Decimalized currency is something of a modern convenience, and it’s not an accident that it spread rapidly about the same time that the metric system, a decimal system of measurement, was being spread by the French Revolution and its belief in human perfectability through reason.

Westeros’ currency is not decimal at all. One dragon is worth:

30 silver moons.
210 silver stags.
1470 copper stars.
2940 copper groats.
5880 copper halfgroats.
11760 copper pennies.
23520 copper halfpennies.

This is a rather bizarre system:

you have two separate silver coins, which is a complication to the minting process (you now need two sets of dies for the silver coins, and you also have to cast the blank planchets in different sizes and/or purities), and probably means you’re losing money that you could have made through seignorage of the more valuable silver coin.
you have no less than five separate copper coins in circulation, which as with the silver means additional sets of dies and different planchets, all for the least valuable of coins and therefore the least possible amount of profit.
the conversion rates are not particularly intuitive. At first I thought the fact that it’s seven stags to a moon and seven stars to a stag was a bit of religious symbolism, but that breaks down quickly because it’s two groats to a star and four pennies to the groat, and so on.
Also, because of the large amounts of smaller coins that go into a larger coin, I imagine it’s easy for vendors to cheat people while making change because it’s pretty difficult to eyeball whether you’ve been given 49 stars for a moon and so forth.

GRRM is absolutely borrowing from the pre-decimalized British currency of pounds, shillngs, and pence, where you had 12 pence (i.e pennies) in a shilling and 20 shillings (or 240 pence) in a pound. If that wasn’t confusing enough, you also had coins that were smaller than a penny (farthings were worth ¼ of a penny, halfpennies were eponymous) and coins that were more than a penny but less than a shilling (groats were worth two pennies and there were also half-groats, threepenny bits existed, as did silver sixpence coins), and coins worth more than a shilling but less than a pound (florins were worth two shillings, crowns were worth five and there were also half-crowns, there were half-sovereigns worth ten shillings, and a half-guinea coin as well). And to cap off this insanity, in addition to the pound, you also had guineas worth one pound one shilling so that gentlemen could pay people with their own special currency.

As far as we know, was First Men society feudal? If so, what does the structure of a feudal society look like when polygamy is widely practiced?

I talk a bit about it here, but part of the problem we have in assessing whether First Men society was feudal is that a lot of the sources (although not all) are non-contemporaneous and written down by Andals who were bringing something more recognizably feudal with them (iron armor, better castles, knights, and lots ot feuding warlords, kings, lords, and knights all struggling to claim their own bits of land).

Based on what we learn from the WOIAF and the ways in which the culture of the mountain clans of the Vale or the wildlings beyond the Wall have maintained certain aspects of First Men culture with as little admixture from the Andals, I think “the ancient Kings of the First Men [had] far more in common with Agamemnon or Hammurabi than they would with Edward III.” Consider, for example the Thenns:

“The Thenns were not like other free folk, though. The Magnar claimed to be the last of the First Men, and ruled with an iron hand. His little land of Thenn was a high mountain valley hidden amongst the northernmost peaks of the Frostfangs, surrounded by cave dwellers, Hornfoot men, giants, and the cannibal clans of the ice rivers. Ygritte said the Thenns were savage fighters, and that their Magnar was a god to them. Jon could believe that. Unlike Jarl and Harma and Rattleshirt, Styr commanded absolute obedience from his men, and that discipline was no doubt part of why Mance had chosen him to go over the Wall.”

“Aye, my lady. The Thenns have lords and laws.” They know how to kneel. “They mine tin and copper for bronze, forge their own arms and armor instead of stealing it. A proud folk, and brave…”

Think about the way that a lot of the Heroes who founded Great Houses have a connection to the divine – whether we’re talking about Brandon Stark learning the wisdom of the Old Gods, or Durran the First’s war with the gods of sea and storm, or Garth Greenhand being a fertility god – and I think you can see a model of early First Men kings who were a lot like the Magnar of Thenn. Add onto that the way in which the clans of the Mountains of the Moon or the Northern hill country operate more on the basis of “fictive kinship” than strict hierarchy between the social orders of feudalism, and I think you have a good picture of what the early First Men societies looked like.

However, it’s not like there was nothing between the king and the rank-and-filer, as we see in WOIAF, there was a process in pretty much every kingdom where the petty kings were beaten down by stronger kings and made to submit, initially as vassal kings to high kings and then eventually as lords to kings.

As to polygamy, well it’s got advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that you can marry into multiple families at once, which allows for more dynastic alliances. The disadvantage is that you then have heightened competition within the royal dynasty as to which half-sibling will succeed, which can potentially lead to infighting. This is why having some combination of primogeniture and acclamation is quite useful.

How do you think the Lannister deal with the workforce for the mines at Casterly Rock? – Do they go in an out every day and live at Lannisport? – Are they quartered at the Rock? – Or are they quartered in barracks outside just outside the Rock?

That’s a great question!

There isn’t an answer in the text, but we do have some idea of how premodern miners lived.

As mining developed from seasonal labor done between planting and harvest to a specialized craft (especially as increased demand due to population growth and frequent warfare made mining increasingly lucrative), miners tended to live in their own settlements originally built immediately around mine shafts. As H.J Habakkuk puts it: “Whether the mining community formed part of a town or not, it was generally a sort of a state within a state, with laws and regulations of its own…”

This leads me to believe that the miners would probably live in or around the Rock. There’s another reason why this is the case. While miners did have certain legal privileges regarding taxation and their own courts, there were extremely harsh penalties for stealing ore (or more accurately, since lords and kings alike taxed a certain percentage of ore, evading taxes by concealing ore about their persons):

“…If he be attainted of carrying away ore a third time, his right hand shall be pierced by a knife through his palm and pinned to a windlass (1) up to the handle of said knife. There he shall remain until he be dead or shall have freed his hand from the aforesaid knife. And he shall forswear his franchise of the mine and if he have a meer (2) in the mine it shall be forfeit to the lord.“ (source)

If miners regularly commuted to and from Lannisport, with all of its many goldsmiths and merchants, you’d have a wide-open vector for stealing and then processng stolen gold for easy money for any miner looking to make some cash under the table. Given their reputation as tightfisted bastards, I would guess the Lannisters would prefer to have miners live on site or in a mining village where they could more easily “inspect” their workers (strip searches and cavity searches are not uncommon down to the present day in gold and diamond mining) and notice any signs of pilfering.

Knowing GRRM’s penchant for high romantic fantasy, I would guess the miners live a morlock-like existance deep within the bowels of Casterly Rock, far from sunlight and air, kept under strict discipline by the Masters set above them (literally) under the threat of the cisterns above them been loosed to flood their tunnels and make a second Rains of Castamere. But it’s not all bad. Living close enough to the forges and smelteries would no doubt allow one to laugh at the very idea of winter (or even doubt its very existance), and there’s always the possibility for the strong and clever to work their way up (literally) to better work at the port of the Rock where you’d get to see the sky and smell the salt air, or as a guard or soldier and get to see the world outside.