Tag: asoiaf meta

Tyrion mentions that the Westerlings had sold off a large portion of their lands. How exactly would such a transaction take place in a feudal economy? Would there be restrictions on who they could sell to and for how much?

Discussed somewhat here. 

The Westerlings selling their land is a highly unusual event in Westeros – the only other times we hear about selling land is in the context of the Tarbecks forcing people to sell their land through threat of armed force, so voluntary (to the extent that the necessities of poverty qualify as voluntary) land sales are a sign that the feudal order is in crisis. 

It suggests that the Westerlings were falling into genteel poverty, such that their rental income had fallen massively behind their ability to service their debt, and that they were having to surrender the collateral they had put up to secure the loan. 

Legally, this could be quite tricky. In Medieval England, for example, the feudal principle of “Nulle terre sans seigneur” (no land without a lord) meant that selling land outright, known as “alienation of lands by will,” was actually legally impossible until the late 12th century. (The Magna Carta, for example, says that “No free man shall henceforth give or sell so much of his land as that out of the residue he may not sufficiently do to the lord of the fee the service which pertains to that fee.”) Selling land was legalized by the Statute of Quia Emptores in 1290, although the buyer was “required to assume all tax and feudal obligations of the original tenant,” so the land remained under the same lord as before. It wasn’t until the Tenures Abolition Act of 1660 that those feudal obligations were eliminated. 

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Catelyn II, ASOS

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Catelyn II, ASOS

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“It was the moment she had dreamt of and dreaded. Have I lost two sons, or three?”
Synopsis: “No I would not give no false hope/On this strange and mournful day/But the mother and child reunion/Is only a motion away…”
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.
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I’m always confused on whether we know when Littlefinger learns he slept with Lysa instead of Cat. Do we have any indication he knows this before the moon door scene?

That’s an excellent question, because I realized that I was also unsure about this question. My asearchoficeandfire-fu was failing me, but @goodqueenaly​ found this rather interesting passage from Tyrion III of ASOS:

“My lords, with your leave, I propose to travel to the Vale and there woo and win Lady Lysa Arryn. Once I am her consort, I shall deliver you the Vale of Arryn without a drop of blood being spilled.”

Lord Rowan looked doubtful. “Would Lady Lysa have you?”

“She’s had me a few times before, Lord Mathis, and voiced no complaints.”

It’s a rather surprising moment, because I had been looking in AGOT for where Tyrion discusses Littlefinger’s boasting at court, and had had a false memory of him boasting about both Tully girls when in fact the text only mentions Catelyn. 

So this raises some interesting possibilities: either Littlefinger had realized what happened at Riverrun, but was unwilling to admit the full truth either to himself or anyone else, or he and Lysa had actually had an affair either in the Vale or King’s Landing (which is something that’s been debated but never proven), or Littlefinger was inadvertently telling the truth while lying.  

How was Balerion during conquest and at the time of its death?

I’m guessing the missing word there is “old”?

Balerion was born ~106 BC, so would have been around 100 or so during the Conquest, and died aged around 200 in 94 AC. 

Idk if my last ask got eaten but if not, sorry for sending two in a row. I’m wondering, do lords in westeros have a right to services and feudal incidents from their feudal tenants like wardship and relief and primer seisin? How do wills work in westeros or is it just automatic primogeniture? And if there’s no feudal incidents is military service the only reason lords will have tenants? Sorry for so many questions, ur blog Is one of the things keeping me sane lol, take care

Ok, there’s a lot here, so let me break it down:

GRRM isn’t hugely specific about feudal incidents – we don’t hear about feudal aid (money to pay for the lord’s ransom, to knight his oldest son, or to provide a dowry for his oldest daughter), relief (payment from the heir of a tenant to take up the tenantcy), primer seisen (payment of a year’s profits before relief can be paid by the heir), fines on alienation (a payment when a tenancy changes hands), escheats (reversion of a tenant’s land if they die without heir or are convicted of a felony), wardship (the right to receive the profits of a tenancy while the heir is underage), or the like. 

As far as services go, we know from how Robb’s armies form and how Ser Eustace raises his meager forces that there is some obligation to provide military service for a given time. 

On the other hand, we have to keep in mind that these aren’t the only sources of income for a lord from their tenants. You also have feudal taxation and whatever share of that a lord got to keep from what they sent on to the king (for example, the Anglo-Saxon Earls usually got to keep “the third penny” from the taxes they assessed on behalf of the king), feudal rents (which were usually set by custom and tradition), and income from their own lands (which also brings up the tricky issue of feudal labor obligations vs. work done by paid laborers). 

So there’s a lot of reasons to have tenants beyond military service. 

What do you think happened to Simon Strong and his grandsons? Executed by Aemond and Cole? Died as prisoners of Daemon or the Lads?

Something of a mystery, isn’t it? Something must have happened to them, because none of them inherited Harrenhal, and instead it reverted back to the crown and then was given to the Lothstons only twenty years later. 

One thing that’s noticeable is that while Simon Strong is described as among the “dozen valuable hostages, amongst them Ser Simon and his grandsons” when Daemon captures Harrenhal, he doesn’t show up again when Aemond retakes the castle later. To me, that suggests that Simon et al. died in that period, so that probably puts Aemon and Cole out of the picture. 

As to how, I’m going to guess disease as opposed to execution, since I think the latter would be more likely to come up in the text. 

Why do you think House Manderly was able to build a thriving port on the mouth of the White Knife when all the other houses that held the Wolf’s Den ultimately failed to last?

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White Harbor was “built with the wealth that the Manderlys had brought with them from the Reach.” The previous occupants of the Wolf’s Den simply didn’t have the money to make the heavy up-front investments necessary to make the city secure (not only does White Harbor have the original Wolf’s Den and the much larger New Castle, but it also has city walls around both of those, and seawalls protecting the harbor, making it really, really hard to assault) and attractive to commerce (White Harbor might be small, but it’s got a double harbor with protective walls, jettys, a respectable shipbuilding industry, etc.)

Once those investments were made, they eventually more than paid for themselves, but it would have been hard for a lot of the smaller houses who held the Wolf’s Den after the Greystarks were brought down to make them in the first place. Moreover, the Manderlys had the advantage of making those investments at a time when the North wasn’t fighting wars against pirates and slavers on the one hand, and the Vale of Arryn on the other, so they had the opportunity to make their investments stick without seeing them burned to the ground. 

How much land would the faith own?

It’s hard to say, because the historical context by which the Faith of the Seven came to Westeros is entirely different than the context by which the Catholic Church became hegemonic across Western Europe. A very quick example: there’s no Westerosi equivalent of the Donation of Pepin and thus no equivalent of the Papal States.

Notably the Faith seems to have relatively little political authority even where it has physical structures – the Hightowers rule the land on which the Starry Sept is located, and the Kings of Westeros rule the land on which the Great Sept of Baelor stands, but we can see this even on a more modest level. Despite the fact that Stoney Sept’s economy is probably based around it being a religious center, the septons don’t rule the town – rather, there’s a knight of Stoney Sept. This suggests that the Faith’s landholding hasn’t extended to lordship, which is an important point.

On the other hand, if we look at the septries we encounter in the series, they do have property, both real estate and otherwise: the Quiet Isle has “terraced fields, with fishponds down below and a windmill above…sheep grazing on the hillside,” and has orchards and vineyards besides; the sept where the Brotherhood Without Banners corners Septon Utt was quite large: “Before the war we were four-and-forty, and this was a prosperous place. We had a dozen milk cows and a bull, a hundred beehives, a vineyard and an apple arbor.” And given this is a feudal society, there has to be some sort of formalized relationship that underpins it – but whether that tenure is freehold or something else, we don’t know.

Finally, there is a cryptic comment in WOIAF that “many lords complained of unscrupulous septries and septons making free with the wealth and property of their neighbors and those they preached to,” prior to the Reconciliation of Jaehaerys. So it may well be that the Revolt of the Faithful and the Reconciliation severely curbed the position of the Faith compared to the medieval Catholic Church. 

I’m trying to wrap my head around how many slaves are in Volantis, the Three Daughters, and Slaver’s Bay. Given the volatility of that kind of societal makeup and how long Volantis has been around, I just can’t believe those societies have been that dysfunctional for thousands of years. My theory is that the conquest of Sarnor/Century of Blood created a massive glut in the global slave trade that really warped the political economy of southern Essos. Do you have any thoughts on the matter?

Well, we know that the societies of Slaver’s Bay were reconstructed after the Doom:

“What now remains of the once-proud empire of Old Ghis is a paltry thing—a few cities clinging like sores to Slaver’s Bay and another that pretends to be Old Ghis come again. For after the Doom came to Valyria, the cities of Slaver’s Bay were able to throw off the last of the Valyrian shackles, ruling themselves in truth rather than playing at it. And what remained of the Ghiscari swiftly reestablished their trade in slaves—though where once they won them by conquest, now they purchased and bred them.”

And certainly the rise of the Dothraki, and the way their khalasars’ raiding and migratory patterns “industrialized” the acquisition of captives which the cities of Slaver’s Bay would then “process” into skilled slaves for the Free Cities’ markets, would have probably contributed to an increase in supply of slaves. 

However, we also know that the Valyrian Empire was a slave society stretching back thousands of years, so it’s not like Volantis et al. just started buying slaves for the first time. So the political-economy mystery here is what would have caused such a sharp increase in demand to meet the increase in supply.