1 ==> Is breaking the King’s Peace an act of treason agianst the Crown?

It depends on how the authorities want to treat the case, and what kind of act we’re talking about. Within the Westerosi tradition, we know that Eddard Stark as Hand of the King declared Gregor Clegane’s attack on the Riverlands worthy of attainder, which is associated with serious felonies and treason, and that historically kings like Aegon V have dealt with breaches of the peace by leading royal armies in the field to arrest and quite likely execute the violators.

On the other hand, in the English legal tradition, making a “breach of the peace,” wasn’t technically a criminal or civil offense, because it’s considered a violation of the royal prerogative to maintain the peace. So what happens when you commit a breach of the peace is that you get arrested, put in front of a magistrate, and “bound over” (essentially put on probation/bail) where you are required to refrain from certain activities (usually but not always the activity that involved the breach) for a given period of time. However, if you violate the terms of your binding, you’re in contempt of court, and then criminal penalties involve.

However, a lot depends on what kind of act we’re talking about. A drunken fistfight is technically a breach of the peace, but so is banditry. And given the context of Ser Gregor Clegane’s case, he was being accused of banditry, murder, wanton destruction of property, and in short being an “outlaw.” And in early common law, if you defied the laws of the realm you could be declared an outlaw or a legal non-person – which meant that murdering you was legal, and helping you was a crime. It’s arguably worse than being a traitor, as legal penalties go.

Likewise, if the powers that be decided that your breach of the peace was made as a deliberate insult towards the king – that you were implying through your action that the king was too weak or feeble to defend the peace, for example – you might be guilty of Lèse-majesté, and that is a form of treason.

Is it likely that there is a significant portion of the peoples of the North that migrate to the southern kingdoms (especially after Westeros’ unification) with the onset of winter or does the shorter agricultural windows during the climactic cold periods Planetos calls winter especially necessitate all hands on deck for the communities to survive, adding to the benefits of the Winter Town System? Thank you.

Well, we do have an example of such a migration, in the case of Cregan Stark’s invasion of the south in 131 AC:

Nowhere in the Seven Kingdoms did the winter matter more than in the North—and the fear of such a winter had driven the Winter Wolves to gather beneath the banner of Lord Roderick Dustin and die fighting for queen Rhaenyra. But behind them came a greater army of childless and homeless men, unwed men, old men, and younger sons, under the banner of Lord Cregan Stark. They had come for a war, for adventure and plunder, and for a glorious death to spare their kin beyond the Neck one more mouth to feed.

The day after the executions, Lord Stark resigned as Hand. No man ever held the office so briefly, and few left it as gladly. He returned to the North, leaving many of his fierce Northmen behind in the south. Some wed widows in the riverlands, others sold their swords or swore them in service, and a few turned to banditry.

So it does happen, but it’s a rare phenomenon that takes both an extreme winter and a prolonged war.

If you were Aegon the Conqueror, would you have included House Lefford of the Golden Tooth into the Riverlands under House Tully’s Lord Paramouncy or kept them as part of the Westerlands? (P.S. I’m asking Attewell, SLAL and the Good Queen, having huge respect for all y’all’s differing POVs, TY)

Well, it sort of depends on how, as King, you view the loyalty of the Westerlands and the Riverlands. After all, the whole point of Aegon’s Conquest was to assert the unity of Westeros and establish a scenario where wars between kingdoms don’t happen, and given that the only purpose of the Golden Tooth is to ensure that the Westerlands can’t be invaded by the Riverlands but can invade with impunity, the King’s rule should make the Golden Tooth irrelevant.

So the only scenario where I would see Aegon giving the Golden Tooth to the Riverlands is a scenario in which the new king sees the Riverlands as more loyal than the Westerlands, and needs to forestall any future rebellion which might involve an invasion of the Riverlands.

Indeed, if it wasn’t for Aegon’s dracocracy leading him to make minimal changes to pre-existing conditions, it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to annex the fortress to the crown to prevent either kingdom from invading the other without openly rebelling.

Would you say the NW’s vows of celibacy are beneficial or detrimental? I understand foreswearing lands and titles, and how that could extend to marriage, so that your only loyalties are to the Wall. So you don’t hesitate when it comes time to die for the Watch. But that means it’s harder to replenish their manpower, it makes joining seem like a punishment (even if you are joining willingly), and I feel like it gives the lifestyle a sense of hopelessness which affects morale. Maybe I’m off-base?

I’ve written about this somewhat in my discussion of Jon chapters.

While barring marriage goes along with the forswearing of lands and titles – since people have this stubborn inclination to try to pass wealth down through family lines – I think celibacy has been a long-term mistake, because it means that the Watch doesn’t naturally reproduce its own manpower.

If it was up to me, I’d embrace a somewhat Spartan model – communal reproduction, child-rearing, and education, all to build identification to the group as opposed to the fortunes of the individual family.

About the “Common Tongue”: With his otherwise incredible attention to detail and realism in all aspects, doesn’t seem like a pretty typically anglo-saxon AND presentist trope to have the Westerosi language be A) called the “common” tongue and B) somehow happen to be spoken fluently by so many all the way to Qarth? Why no mention of Qartheen or Asshaii languages (or accents)?

Yes and no.

GRRM has said in interviews that he had the vast majority of characters be fluent in the “Common Tongue” because A. it’s easier if all of the characters can communicate with one another, and B. he’s not an Oxford don linguist who can come up with new languages at the drop of a hat. So I think it’s more just for convenience’s sake than anything else.

On the other hand…I think you’re also painting with too broad a brush. Planetos is a place with many languages – Valyrian and not the Common Tongue is the lingua france of Essos, and even then it’s already breaking down into separate dialects on the way to separate languages in the various Free Cities and Slaver’s Bay, there’s the Slaver’s Bay dialect with its loan words that are all that remain of Ghiscari, and so on.

So to take Qarth as an example, when Dany is greeted by the three:

The pale man with the blue lips replied in guttural Dothraki, “I am Pyat Pree, the great warlock.”

The bald man with the jewels in his nose answered in the Valyrian of the Free Cities, “I am Xaro Xhoan Daxos of the Thirteen, a merchant prince of Qarth.”

The woman in the lacquered wooden mask said in the Common Tongue of the Seven Kingdoms, “I am Quaithe of the Shadow. We come seeking dragons.” (Dany I, ACOK)

Two out of three don’t speak to her in the Common Tongue. Pyat Pree takes a look at a small khalasar and speak to them in Dothraki, the merchant speaks to them in Valyrian because that’s what traders speak in, and the only one who uses the Common Tongue is a prophetess and shadowbinder who can see the future and who already knows who Dany is.

As far as accents go, they definitely exist. We know that Melisandre’s speech is “rich with the accents of the east” (Davos IV, ASOS), we know that the people of the Free Cities speak Westerosi with a “lilt of the Free Cities” (Arya II, ACOK), also described as a “liquid accent.” But we also know that the different accents of Braavos, Tyrosh, Myr, Norvos, Pentos, etc. are distinct.

what was Tywin’s plan if Eddard has gone after Clegane instead of Berric? he can’t actually know that Robert’s going to be assassinated, so isn’t luring the Hand of the King into an ambush just setting up a really elaborate way for the Lannister family to commit suicide?

That was his plan. He wanted to defeat and capture Eddard, force a prisoner transfer on unequal terms (symbolically humiliating the head of House Stark by equating him with Tyrion), and then hand Robert a fait accompli.

Now what Tywin planned to do if Eddard caught an arrow and word got out that Tywin had murdered the Hand of the King and was now in open rebellion against the Iron Throne, I don’t know. But then again, Tywin was a monumentally arrogant man who didn’t really understand that the people around him would do things he didn’t foresee them doing.

The intended amounts of food cached for winter seem far too small relative to the populations they must support and uncertainty of winter’s duration. Does this suggest that the primary strategy is to buy food, with the winter stores as more of a backstop?

You raise a good question, and all I can say is

GRRM seems to think it’s enough.

Well, that’s not exactly true, there’s a bunch more I can say:

There’s an underlying world-building problem here, which is that the multi-year seasons don’t really make sense when you consider the ecology of the life cycle of flora and fauna. If winter was just unrelenting night and cold and nothing else, you’d expect 100% die-off as seeds wither in the frost and animals run out of plants to dig up from the snow. (Either that or there are some truly baroque evolutionary adaptions that you’d think we’d have heard about by now) Likewise, it doesn’t matter how much you store and how cool your cellars are, there are hard limits to how long you can store food in a pre-modern context.

So the way that I’ve rationalized it is that the seasons are really closer to climate cycles than what we think of as seasons – summers are extended warm periods, winters are mini-ice ages. While agricultural productivity is going to be much much higher in the “summer” than in the “winter,” it’s not the case that there’s no growth at all during the winter.

Because even within the “winter,” you’re going to get variation in temperatures – your “false springs” and “spirit summers” – that allow for short bursts of agriculture productivity. Those little bursts are vitally necessary to stretch out your supplies, replenish fodder for whatever livestock and game is still around, repair some of the damage done by malnutrition, etc.

But I would imagine that those are very chancey – if the lull in the snows and the cold ends before you can harvest whatever crop you’ve been able to get into the ground, you’re going to lose it all.

The North’s Economic Development Plan

aspareme:

racefortheironthrone:

(for previous parts in the series, see here)

Of all of the regions of Westeros we’ve planned for, the North is perhaps the most difficult case we’ve deal with, next to Dorne (which had a much better export profile).

As the Lord of Winterfell, my main difficulties are that the North is severely underpopulated, and has extreme weather conditions that exacerbate the northerly climate’s limits on agricultural productivity.

So how do we overcome these problems…ideally, before winter comes?

Keep reading

This is brilliant–the idea of a canal system to connect the North is one I hadn’t considered, but it works.

Though–how would that be affected by the North’s sub-Arctic climate? Would a canal system be completed in the course of a summer?

The horse-breeding and emphasis on cavalry does make sense, though. You could also establish a policy of relative political isolationism–not totally, because trade will still be a necessity, but at the very least a policy of “don’t start none won’t be none” with the southern kingdoms, and then hold the line at the Neck.

Train your citizenry in what essentially amounts to guerrilla warfare, sort of like House Reed’s strike-and-disappear strategy, and you’d avoid the the Riverland’s’ problem of a helpless peasantry.

With the exception of the sections immediately adjacent to the existing rivers, digging a canal is basically digging a giant trench – it’s easier to do that during the summer, but you’re not limited to the summer.

Now, one major drawback to a Northern canal is that it’s going to ice over in the winter – which is when you’d need to bring in the sleds – so a lot depends on the level of competition. If a Manderly-Blackwater or Blue Fork canal are active, the economic impact of a canal in the North is going to be severely hampered.

In canals, tho, there’s a huge first-mover advantage. The Erie Canal wasn’t the shortest canal to the west, but because it was up and running before anyone else, it easily beat the pants off the competition, even after the arrival of the railroad potentially made it obsolete.

How long would it take to build a city like KL in RL given roughly the resources Aegon I had and would this change depending on the layout (hub-and-spoke vs. grid)?

In real life, it kind of depends. To take London as an example, there have been periods of extremely slow growth and periods of outright decline – Roman London was 35,000 strong whereas it was down to 18,000 by the time of the Domesday Book – but there have also been periods of extremely rapid growth. For example, by the end of the 15th century, London was only 60-70.000 strong and by 1600 it was up to 250,000 residents, and by the end of the 17th century was up to 600,000.

Hi, I love your economic development series! One thing that stuck out to me was the need for immigration in the north. The northerners just plain need more people to produce enough to be self sufficient AND trade competitive. Framing my question in a Post Dream/Post Second-Long-Night scenario, where the north as hit hardest but the south is also devastated, how would you (or Sansa Queen Of The North) repopulate the North? I assume some outreach to Essos would be necessary

I’ve talked about this a bit in my Northern economic development plan, but the foundation of any Northern immigration plan is going to have to be something akin to the German princes offering vacant land for free (as well as tax exemptions and other privileges) to anyone willing to settle in their lands after the Thirty Years War had depopulated entire regions.

We’re already starting to see that a little bit with the 100,000 willdings who just arrived, growing the North’s population by 2.5%, getting settled on the Gift. But, given its extremely low population density, the North is full of Gifts yet ungifted.

In terms of where these people would come from, you’re going to want people who are already familiar with agriculture and livestock herding, so I would concentrate on the younger sons of landholding yeomen who aren’t going to inherit the family farm, as well as any and all peasants who don’t hold land (your crofters, your cotters, your sharecroppers, etc.). In so far as the North is also looking to industrialize, I would target journeymen and apprentices from the textiles industries of Myr, Tyrosh, Norvos, etc.