Anon Asks:

What exactly is ‘royal land’? how is it run? is it all directly ruled by the king or does it have petty lords/landed knights on it? if it does have petty lords/landed knights, how does it differ from other land in the realm that isnt ‘royal’? Like what is the difference between a great knightly house like templeton sworn to arryn or a powerful masterly house in the north and landed knights, besides size/lineage? Or would such territory be considered royal land rather than vassalized land because they aren’t lordly houses or sworn to one between them and the royal house?

>_> Feudalism is way more confusing than people like to think, though it does make things more interesting and its nice that GRRM can catch that sort of political incoherency for his setting.

Welp, shoulda known I’d opened up a can of worms.

Royal land is land that the monarch holds themselves, rather than giving out as a fiefdom to any of their vassals. So it probably wouldn’t have petty lords or landed knights on it unless the monarch had decided to give away that land to said lord/knight as a reward for some service. (There’s an exception to this that I’ll discuss in a bit.)

In terms of how it is run, it would be run quite like other land. Typically, territory would be divided into various manors – manors being an economic and judicial unit run by the manorial court. Manorial courts both were the main source of records on and made the legal decisions on just about everything: who had rights (primarily tenant’s rights) to what bit of land (but also usage rights to the commons or to the water or hunting rights or wood-gathering, etc. etc.); who owed what in rents, taxes, and feudal obligations of labor and to whom; what would be grown, where and when, and who would labor; and crucially, the court also dealt with contract law and torts in the manor, so when you loaned your best milk cow to your neighbor and it died, everyone knew where to go for adjudication.

That manor would be run by various officials:

at the top was the steward, who oversaw the manorial court and who was responsible for the overall condition of the manor.
immediately below them was the reeve (adding to the complication, this is the Saxon term; Normans called them bailiffs and then started using the word for all kinds of judicial offices and then started using reeve again) who was the chief overseer of the peasants and was usually a peasant himself (sometimes appointed, and sometimes elected, subject to veto by the lord). The reeve’s job was to make sure that the crops got planted and harvested in line with the manorial court’s decisions and to carry out the marketing of the manor’s produce; to collect rents and debts (if a given tenant was late on their rent, for example) but also to make disbursements; and to make sure that the peasants performed their feudal obligations.
And then there were assistant reeves and assistant stewards and under-bailiffs and all kinds of minor functionaries.

So the main difference, as far as the peasants were concerned, between royal land and fiefed land really was just who appointed the steward and signed off on the reeves. Now here’s where it could get tricky, because sometimes the King would lease out their lands to their friends and people who gave them money (sometimes not the same people!) without giving them away.

When a lord or king decides to build a new seat or give lands to a knight as a reward, where does that land come from? I know that in war it can just be taken from a defeated enemy and given to a loyal supporter, but what about in peace time? Where did Daemon Blackfyre’s land come from? Or the land Daeron II built Summerhall on? I assume most, if not all, land within the borders of the realm is spoken for to one degree or another. How can you do this in peacetime without creating bad blood?

Great question, which builds nicely off of this one.

The answer is, it depends and is complicated. Surprise, surprise.

For one thing, liege lords don’t give away all of their land to their vassals – indeed, historically, they kept a plurality of it and usually the choicest lands for themselves while handing out the rest. So in the case of Daemon Blackfyre, who was given “a tract of land near the Blackwater” (no indication of how huge it was), chances are that was royal land in the Crownlands, as opposed to the fiefdom of any lord.

In the case of Summerhall, however, we have a more complicated story. Summerhall is located “where the boundaries of the Reach, the stormlands, and Dorne met.” This leaves a couple possibilities: first, Summerhall could be on formerly Dornish land that was given to the King as part of the peace treaty. (In which case, the political bramble is the Martells to grasp.) Second, it could be formerly part of the Reach or the Stormlands, in which case the King has to get the local lord and/or the Lord Paramount to hand it over.

This is where the politics get delicate. Yes, the king could potentially just take the land, like Aegon IV did with the Teats, but that causes bad blood. It becomes somewhat easier if the ownership of the land is in question – the last owner died intestate or the new owner can’t pay the customary tax that a new vassal owes their liege lord when they inherit, the owner is a minor who happens to be a ward of the crown, two or more claimants are in dispute about who owns it and are appealing to the king, etc. – because the king gets to rule on that.

But potentially, the king can offer the owner to take the land off their hands. This isn’t exactly the same thing as buying and selling the land outright – what’s actually going on is the crown getting the owner to agree to surrender their customary rights to various incomes and usages of that land – and it’s got more in common with barter. Most likely, the king would be offering title on some other land, or some royal charter or privilege (think water rights, hunting rights, etc.), or possibly a royal pension or a royal office, as an exchange for their current rights, instead of a sum of money.

It can be done, and it was done all the time, but it requires extreme delicacy because if the owner decides to dig in their heels the king either faces a lot of bad press and probably a protracted legal battle.

Steven Xue Asks: Why didn’t Tywin purge Robb’s allies post Red Wedding?

I’m sure you will eventually cover this somewhere down the road, but I have to ask. After the Red Wedding wouldn’t it have been more beneficial in the long term if Tywin had agreed to Joffrey’s wishes on purging Robb Starks former allies?

I know Tywin believes “if your enemies bend the knee you must help them to their feet otherwise nobody will bend the knee to you”. I for one believe in this doctrine as well but I feel that many of the former rebels may still feel very bitter towards the Lannisters for all the grievances they have suffered because of them. So even though they have since the Red Wedding reaffirmed their allegiance to the Crown, there’s no guarantee that most if not all of them will rebel again if given the chance.

Even though the Riverlords and Northern lords have been crushed at the Twins and now possess very limited military strength, they are still in a position to cause the Crown much trouble if opportunity arises. With Lannister power now weakening, many Riverlords especially in the current political climate would want to avenge themselves of the first wedding as well as any other transgressions by the Lannisters, which means they will not only rebel openly but also do it by rallying behind any of the Lannister’s enemies whether they be a Stark, Tully or any of the pretenders to the throne.

I know it would have been more costly and even looked upon unfavorably but in the long run don’t you think that it would have been more sound to have done what Joffrey wanted and eliminated the houses that had followed the Starks in rebellion and most likely still secretly oppose the Crown, while also giving their seats to nobles who are loyal to the Lannisters?

Well, let’s start with a very important factor in this decision: Robb Stark left the Riverlands part of his army behind when he went to the Twins, because he was planning on returning to the North: “aside from her brother Edmure’s modest retinue of friends, the lords of the Trident had remained to hold the riverlands while the king retook the north.” These Riverlords have 11,000 soldiers between them.

And while the Lannisters and Tyrells together have the manpower to destroy these remaining forces, their forces are split between many fronts: initially they have to retake Dragonstone and retake Storm’s End from Stannis, then the Tyrells send men to besiege Brightwater Keep, then the Tyrells send men to threaten King’s Landing if anything happens to Margaery, then the Golden Company lands, etc. And keep in mind, a lot of the Lannister forces demobilize when Tywin’s body is sent back to the Rock.

So the best example of why the Lannisters didn’t do this is the second Siege of Riverrun, where poor Daven is trying to coordinate a military operation with only 1,500 Westermen under his command:

You’ve seen our numbers, Edmure. You’ve seen the ladders, the towers, the trebuchets, the rams. If I speak the command, my coz will bridge your moat and break your gate. Hundreds will die, most of them your own. Your former bannermen will make up the first wave of attackers, so you’ll start your day by killing the fathers and brothers of men who died for you at the Twins. The second wave will be Freys, I have no lack of those. My westermen will follow when your archers are short of arrows and your knights so weary they can hardly lift their blades.

Without the Riverlords, that first wave (which is what really demoralizes Edmure) doesn’t exist and instead the assault will have to go with Freys and Westermen leading the way and maybe the assault fails.

Which brings me to the ultimate point: yes, on paper, the Lannisters and the Tyrells could completely destroy the armed strength of the Riverlands. But when you back someone into the corner, they fight like a trapped rat, and that pushes up the casualty rate. Just look at what happened at Dragonstone, where a token force of men killed a thousand Westermen. Now imagine that happening again and again in dozens of sieges across the Riverlands.

Anon Asks:

When Aegon confirmed the titles of those pledging fealty to him, what does that mean? How does a king confirm the properties of his vassals? Does every king do that when inheriting or just when conquering?

This can get a bit complicated and contradictory, but at least in theory under feudalism titles represent a feudal contract between a vassal and their overlord: so if you’re the Knight of Standfast, for example, you hold that land from House Rowan, who holds it from House Tyrell, who holds it from the King.

That fiefdom is (in theory) a grant from the liege lord that they can give or revoke technically at will. And even in a situation in which practically speaking a feudal system had moved from the Carolingian model in which fiefdoms were considered a grant for life only and then reverted back to the king to an inheritance model in which fiefdoms were considered to be the rightful property of the heir of the previous lord, there still were a lot of medieval ceremonies that took place when either a vassal or a liege lord died, in order to re-enact the agreement between vassal and overlord.

So what Aegon was doing was writing a bunch of feudal contracts, “giving” the lands in question back to his new vassals in return for their homage and an agreement about what kind of service they would give in return (which would include military service, taxation, etc.). And then when Aegon died and Aenys I was crowned, he would have received the homage of his subjects, and at that ceremony the feudal contract would have been renewed between the new king and his subjects.

Could the king rewrite those contracts and shift the land around? Sure, we’ve seen plenty of examples of it, from the Brackens and the Blackwoods lobbying the King to choose which of them gets various disputed lands, to Harrenhal handed out as a token of royal favor, to the creation of the New Gift and the founding of Summerhall. But it’s risky, because taking land from some to give to others creates a lot of angry people…just ask Raoul of Cambrai.

Politics of the Seven Kingdoms: The Reach (Part II)

credit to ser-other-in-law
Last time, we discussed the geography of the Reach, and the pre-history of Garth Greenhand and how it structured the polity that House Gardener would build. In this essay, we’ll look at how House Gardener went from ruling a fortnight’s ride from the walls of Highgarden to the masters of the Reach.
(more…)

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Why don’t you condemn Aegon The Conqueror like you do Renly Baratheon? After all, they both ultimately based their claim on the strength of their arms, rather than the will of the people or rights of succession. I’m not defending either of them, just wondering what you see as the difference.

I think that’s a misinterpreation of Aegon the Conqueror. As I discuss in my essay on him, far from being based solely through strength of arms, Aegon and his sisters were careful to establish consent from and establish legitimacy with his subjects:

“Having taken a dozen castles and secured the mouth of the Blackwater Rush on both sides of the river, he commanded the lords he had defeated to attend him. There they laid their swords at his feet, and Aegon raised them up and confirmed them in their lands and titles. To his oldest supporters he gave new honors…Heraldic banners had long been a tradition amongst the lords of Westeros, but such had never been used by the dragonlords of old Valyria. When Aegon’s knights unfurled his great silken battle standard, with a red three-headed dragon breathing fire upon a black field, the lords took it for a sign that he was now truly one of them, a worthy high king for Westeros. When Queen Visenya placed a Valyrian steel circlet, studded with rubies, on her brother’s head and Queen Rhaenys hailed him as, “Aegon, First of His Name, King of All Westeros, and Shield of His People,” the dragons roared and the lords and knights sent up a cheer … but the smallfolk, the fisherman and field hands and goodwives, shouted loudest of all.”

“the men of the Trident had no love for their ironborn overlords…so now the riverlands rose against him, led by Lord Edmyn Tully of Riverrun. Summoned to the defense of Harrenhal, Tully declared for House Targaryen instead, raised the dragon banner over his castle, and rode forth with his knights and archers to join his strength to Aegon’s. His defiance gave heart to the other riverlords. One by one, the lords of the Trident renounced Harren and declared for Aegon the Dragon. Blackwoods, Mallisters, Vances,
Brackens, Pipers, Freys, Strongs… summoning their levies, they descended on Harrenhal…The next day, outside the smoking ruins of Harrenhal, King Aegon accepted an oath of fealty from Edmyn Tully, Lord of Riverrun, and named him Lord Paramount of the Trident. The other riverlords did homage as well —to Aegon as king and to Edmyn Tully as their liege lord.”

And this went on and on – the homage of the Westermen and the Reachermen ater the Field of Fire, the submission of Highgarden, Torrhen kneeling at the Trident, and Aegon’s anointment and coronation at Oldtown. At every step of the way, Aegon spends as much time establishing the reciprocal bonds of feudal obligation and enacting the symbolism of monarchy as he does fighting. And he continued this policy as King:

“he worked to knit the realm together with his presence—to awe his subjects and (when needed) frighten them…the other half of the year he dedicated to the royal progress. He traveled throughout the realm for the rest of his life,
until his final progress in 33 AC—making a point of paying his respects to the High Septon in the Starry Sept each time he visited Oldtown, guesting beneath the roofs of the lords of the great houses (even Winterfell, on that last progress), and beneath the roofs of many lesser lords, knights, and common innkeepers… In these progresses, the king was accompanied not only by his courtiers but by maesters and septons as well. Six maesters were often in his company to advise him upon the local laws and traditions of the former realms, so that he might rule in judgment at the courts he held. Rather than attempting to unify the realm under one set of laws, he respected the differing customs of each region and sought to judge as their past kings might have.”

When Arrec and Arlan V Durrandon both tried to take back the Riverlands why didn’t any of the lords of the Trident side with them against the Ironborn, who were way worse?

Here’s the thing tho: in the case of Arrec, there weren’t a lot of Riverlanders who were eager to have him back – maybe the Blackwoods, given their blood ties, although they would have been licking their wounds from their massacre at Blackwood Hall, and maybe the Tullys (although they were far too practical to throw good money after bad) – and a lot of Riverlanders who had participated in overthrowing him (the Brackens, the Charltons, and twenty other houses) who would have been facing treason trials if he ever retook the Riverlands.

As for Arlan V, it’s probably a case of better the devil you know – Harwyn was a hard man when it came to tribute and homage, but if you kept out of his line of march, he generally let you alone (”their ironborn overlords had largely ignored such conflicts amongst their vassals”) – than the devil you don’t. After all, the memories of Durrandon tyranny were still fresh, and the worst of Ironborn tyranny had yet to come…

Simply put, in the Riverlands, Durrandon was not a name a name to conjur with.

Hey Steve! How does a merchant like Spicer get to take the name Spicer? If he gets rich enough, does he just get to take a last name for himself? Or does he have to go to Lord Tytos and pay some money and get approval? How did Maggy the Frog’s son get to found a House? How does it work?

Good question!

Well, if we’re going by medieval England as we usually are, you can pick a last name whenever there’s enough people in a given area that it’s tricky to keep track of who’s related to who, because last names weren’t a signifier of status as much as titles or coats of arms or mottos (which required approval from above and usually some payment). So Ralph the spicer becomes Ralph Spicer and becomes considered a particularly well-established member of the merchant classes who’s following the forms.

The big change is what happens when Ralph Spicer wants to make the transition from merchant to the nobility and found House Spicer. This was a difficult and slippery process, because one would have to start by becoming a gentleman (which generally required that one owned a manor that could support you without your own labor), then ascend to the status of esquire (which definitely required approval from above in the form of achieving some form of office that brought the title of esquire with it, usually Justice of the Peace or Sherriff or something else having to do with the law), then become a knight (which requires being knighted), and generally only after could one aspire to the nobility. Along the way, there were not merely legal forms one had to pass through but cultural forms as well – gentlemen were supposed to learn to be “genteel,” to get into chivalry and noble sports and out of trade, they had to get a coat of arms which meant their pedigrees had to pass muster with the College of Heralds (although this could often be finessed with the right payments to the King and then to the herald).

So if Ralph Spicer was in England, he would probably have started by getting his hands on enough land that he could pretend that he wasn’t a spice merchant any more or to give it up altogether, then gotten himself a Justiceship by knowing the right people or bribing people, then making sure that his kids were squiring for a local knight and then marrying them off to any impoverished nobility in the area, and then making a bid for a knighthood and hope to ascend from there.

But Westeros is less legalistic and bureaucratic than that, at least as how GRRM describes it. It could be as easy as Ralph getting his hand on a bunch of land then paying off a hedge knight to make all of his sons knights.

Maester Steven, do you think there’s a reason that Essos lacks a comparable institution of higher education to the citadel given how they are comparatively far more developed than the seven kingdoms? And if so how do you think it would develop? I’d imagine that it would be much more a centralized place of learning for the children of magisters and other free city notables than the lifelong monastic commitment of the citadel. Probably with atlesst one existing in every major free city.

I’ve discussed this before here, but given their level of technology and literacy, Essos must have more of an education system than is shown in the text.

There’s a couple possibilities:

Greco/Roman slave-tutoring: this fits the Free City’s social structure, even if that social structure isn’t super well-suited to their level of technology but w/e. Well-educated slaves tutoring the elite philosophy, rhetoric, and the rest of the trivium and quadrivium is certainly a long-lasting “successful” model of education, so there you have it.
Local Academies: This is more likely in Braavos and Braavos-centric cities that don’t have slavery. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Essosi academies are A. more focused on Valyrian “humanism” as opposed to the Citadel’s relentless focus on empiricism, and B. more focused on applied sciences needed for finance, commerce, and high-end manufacturing than the Citadel’s trade-school-approach to feudal administration.

re: King Arthur/Garth Greenhand

I find the Arthur comparison to Garth Greenhand surprisingly apt. As you point out, GG exists as a number of different characters. With ASOIAF, I’m never sure what to do with Martin’s coy in-world-historical-skepticism, but I can imagine a Maester trying to tease apart the threads of the legend, and if you asked him: “was there a historical Garth Greenhand,” he might answer: “depends what you mean.”

GG is supposedly: the founder of House Gardener, the leader (or a leader) of the First Men, the father of a lot of other heroes, and a fertility god. The first three (and maybe the fourth!) are all things that definitely happened in Westerosi history – someone was the first Gardener, the First Men into Westeros surely had leaders, the great heroes had fathers (whether or not they were all the same man). From this much material you could spin out a thousand different guesses at a “historical” GG … you could even question whether any of them actually had to be named Garth.

Thus with Arthur. If there was anything like Geoffrey’s version – “King Arthur”, ruling much of Britain and fighting Saxons – then his absence from the historical record is astonishing. (But if you were going to lose a guy like that, 5th-6th c. Britain is where you’d do it.) The earlier references to Arthur present one of two themes: a warleader (not necessarily a king) fighting foreign enemies, or a culture hero akin to Finn McCool or Paul Bunyan. One is part of the historical narrative about Romano-British resistance to foreign incursions, and the other rides around the countryside lopping the heads off giants, sometimes being a giant himself, and having bits of landscape named after where his horse stopped for a drink.

Given that even the nature of the historical context in which Arthur-warleader is found is up for debate, “was there a real Arthur” is up for infinite re-definitions, most of which have to land on “maybe” for an answer. I only see two ways to get a “no” – one is to insist that anything short of Geoffrey doesn’t count, the other is to argue that Arthur was a purely fictional culture hero, who was eventually historicized and attached to a bare minimum of historical events but not to any one man’s deeds (because then you could say that he was the “real” Arthur). At the extreme you wind up with cranks doing bad history and worse linguistics telling you that the REAL Arthur was prince of some valley in Wales or Scotland, not named Arthur, and never fought anybody except other princes of valleys in Wales or Scotland, and ohmygod who cares.

But I still want to know: who was the historical Garth Greenhand?

Good question!

I guess I’d say that I see a couple key differences between Arthur and Garth Greenhand.

as far as we can see, there isn’t the same problem of non-contemporaneous sources – the legends of Garth Greenhand are really, really old and the Citadel has preserved runic records that go all the way back to the arrival of the First Men in Westeros, so we’re not relying on, say, post-Andal sources as we might have thought prior to WOIAF.
there’s a relative consistency about Garth. Man or God, pretty much all of the sources say Garth was one of the luminaries of the Age of Heroes, that he had the green clothing, the association to agriculture and fertility, that he was the father of kings and lords and heroes. Indeed, one of the things that I find most interesting that @goodqueenaly brought up is that there’s not even any debate about the birth order of Garth’s kids – no rival ever thought to argue that their ancestor was actually the oldest kid, and everyone seems to agree on who the main kids of the Greenhand were.
there’s an immediacy of the claims of descent. Again, as @goodqueenaly reminds us, it’s not like there weren’t royals who claimed descent from King Arthur, but we don’t really see that happening until almost a millenia after and those claims are pretty clearly modelled after Geoffrey of Monmouth and much later sources. But in House Gardener we have a case where we have heirs of Garth Greenhand from very early on – judging by regnal numbers, there must have been at least 23 generations of Gardeners before the arrival of the Andals.

So who was the historical Garth Greenhand? I’m not sure. Could be him:

Or him:

Or him: