WarsofASOIAF Asks: A Successful Aegon V Reformation

Couple days back I was asked a question about how an Aegon V reformation would go down. Let’s say you’re the Hand of Aegon V. The Fortunate King has been able to successfully get all four of his marriages to go off without a hitch. I’m sure some form of your EDP’s will make their way into it, but what sort of acts would you do to reform and restructure the government for the sake of the smallfolk?

Cheers,

-SLAL

As I talked about a while back, it’s very hard to know what Aegon’s reforms consist of, because GRRM is very unspecific about them and because a lot depends on what precisely is the legal status of westerosi smallfolk.

But if I had to guess, I would say that there probably would be a lot of legal reforms – royal judges and sheriffs, eliminating the right of pit and gallows, the right to a jury, etc. – given the lawlessness of the period (especially in the Westerlands), Egg’s experience with local conflicts between nobles in the Reach, and so on.

Given that he gave food to the North during winter (which may also have been prompted to his trip to Winterfell), I think he was definitely focused on charity during natural disasters and the like.

But beyond that, I don’t know.

Given that royal imposters could successfully impersonate kings, (a la Perkin Warbeck) did any commoners ever try to impersonate a member of the nobility?

Yep, definitely happened. Pretending to be a down-on-their-luck nobleman was actually a pretty common confidence trick back in the day, whether one was looking to get handouts from other aristocrats touched by your hypothetical suffering, or trying to pass off fake “heirlooms” as genuine articles that have to be sold off in a moment of need, or trying to finagle your way to marrying the daughter of a wealthy and socially ambitious bourgeois.

When you get right down to it, nobility ultimately is just a set of mannerisms and cultural capital attached to a certain costume and appearance.

Simon Rumble Asks: Daemon’s Riverlands strategy

So Daemon invaded the Riverlands with the force of two kingdoms behind him and most likely dangled the Lord Paramountcy of the Riverlands in front of rebellious and powerful lords like the Freys, Lothstons, Brakens, etc. How badly did the Riverlands get crushed?

How did his invasion differ from the Lannisters in OTL?

Well, we know almost nothing about Daemon’s strategy in this theater, so it’s hard to say how it differed. Although I’m guessing that, with those rebellious lords in his coalition, he didn’t go with Tywin’s reaving.

But to me, the main difference is that the Riverlands were divided during the Blackfyre Rebellions. And, as we see with the various invasions of the Riverlands – the invasion by the Stormlanders where the Blackwoods invited in the Stormlanders to help them overthrow the Teagues, the invasion by the Ironborn where the Brackens sided with the Hoares to revenge themselves on the Brackens – when the Riverlands are divided, they lose badly.

Is asoiaf’s depiction of minor lord’s living in poverty realistic? For instance, Godric Borrel can’t afford to repair or heat his castle, has his meals cooked and served by his own family, and even his liege lord can’t afford to equip his own sons as knights.

Absolutely, that’s one of the more realistic things about ASOIAF. Here’s the crucial factor to consider about the economics of the nobility – in feudalism, rents are generally fixed at traditional rates. Which means that the nobility are more exposed than most to economic shifts, especially shifts in prices.

One of the reasons why we see peasant revolts in the 14th century following the Black Death (which greatly decreased the labor supply and thus raised wages, at a time when noble incomes were declining because their rent-paying tenants were dying or running away) and then again after the Great Price Revolution (which raised the price of everything, and thus was a major real income cut for people on fixed incomes) is that these events hammered the economic position of the nobility, the nobility responded by trying to violently restore the balance of power (both by trying to freeze wages and worker mobility, which often meant attempts at enforcing or re-establishing serfdom), and the peasantry responded with violence in return.

Now, the greater nobles were better able to adapt to changing economic circumstances – they had more land and more liquid capital, so they could convert more easily to pasturage and thus get into the lucrative cloth trade, they could invest in new commercial and industrial ventures, etc.

But the lower nobles didn’t. Hence the figure of the impoverished nobleman, who becomes ubiquitous from Don Quixote to Jane Austen to the freaking Bluths.

how many ships / of what type would you expect the riverlands brown water navy to have? would it be organized with each lord having a small fleet, or would it be more like the vikings where every river town has a few ships for community use that the lord would then draft into a fleet as needed?

Well, we don’t see anyone but House Tully itself with a riverrine navy, so I’m guessing they’re the only one with one.

And in terms of type, according to Jaime I they are “river galley[s]…nine oars on each side, which means eighteen men.” More, if they crowded on fighters as well as rowers. And larger sails than ours…” These are pretty small vessels, even by Ironborn standards, but against ground forces trying to ford a river, they’d be incredibly potent.

But where does it (reliably) say that the Others are “omnicidal”. To the COTF, the First Men must have seemed omnicidal, the two tried to exterminate each other. The Human-COTF war started out as a side effect of migration and cultural differences, they didn’t start killing each other just because, but it snowballed into attempts at genocide and human sacrifice. TWOTFK saw numerous atrocities on all sides, and even now “good factions” aren’t big on morality (Frey Pies), but is that omnicide?

From the pitch letter:

“The greatest danger of all, however, comes from the north, from the icy wastes beyond the Wall, where half-forgotten demons out of legend, the inhuman Others, raise cold legions of the undead and neverborn and prepare to ride down on the winds of winter to extinguish everything that we would call “life.” The only thing that stands between the Seven Kingdoms and an endless night is the Wall…”

That’s Word of Author right there. The Others want to kill everything. Full-stop. And as @poorquentyn says, remember the bear.

You can say a lot of things about the various participants in the War of Five Kings, but wanting to kill everything with warm blood isn’t one of them.

How should Edmure have handled the Lannister invasion of the Riverlands?

I addressed this in Cat VII of AGOT, but basically he should have done the opposite of what he did – rather than trying to defend every square inch of Riverlands territory, he should have relied on the rivers as defensive multipliers and in general, traded space for time while he was still mobilizing.

Vance and Piper’s 4,000 men were never going to be able to stop Jaime’s army in the open field – but they could have shadowed Jaime’s advance and slowed it down, giving Edmure time to rally and drill his troops, and then gotten across the river ahead of Jaime. With these 4,000 men still in hand, Edmure would have been at least numerically equal and most likely numerically superior to Jaime’s army – but he likely still would have been outnumbered by both Jaime and Tywin’s armies, so I would not have advised going on the offensive at this point.

However, as we saw in the OTL Battle of the Fords, the rivers give significant defensive advantages – they funnel the enemy into a limited number of crossing points, negating the advantage of the Lannisters’ bigger armies and allowing Edmure to establish local superiority of numbers, and the crossing itself leaves their forces exposed to missile fire and in danger of being wiped out when counter-attacked. The Tully river-navy could have been used here to great effect, both as siege platforms and essentially mini-castles that you can use to block crossing points.

Essentially, Edmure should have done the Battle of the Fords in reverse. This may well have meant a siege of Riverrun – so be it, that’s what Riverrun was for. Potentially, he could have stopped the Lannisters there, allowing Robb to link up with the Riverlander army and fight a weakened Lannister opponent. But at the very least, it would have prevented the Riverlanders from being routed and allowing the Lannisters to run rampant with no one there to stop them.

Even if Jaime and/or Tywin had managed to force a crossing, you leave a garrison at Riverrun to hold the castle, and pull back to the next defensive line – the Blue Fork (and then the Green Fork) in the north and/or various castles in the hills country in the south (ultimately, you’re going to be using Harrenhal as the place to stop any southern thrust). Keep making the Lannisters charge headlong at strong defenses, use your cavalry to attack the Lannisters guerrilla-style along the way just like the Riverlanders did in the Dance of the Dragons when the Lannisters tried marching through the Riverlands, and again, buy yourself time.

How effective do you think the wildlings are as a fighting force? Much is made of their lack of disclipline, which I assume in the context to mean their lack of battlefield formations and advanced tactics. Are they truly ineffective, and if so, how far do their great numbers go towards compensating for that?

Keep in mind, only about a third of their entire force are fighters. And while Mance is clearly trying to teach them how to form shield walls and fight on horseback, they’re clearly not fully trained or well-equipped.

To me, the analogy here is Boudicca. Her Iceni and Trinovanti forces were capable of wiping out significant detachments of Romans (as at the Battle of Camulodunum) when those forces were isolated, outnumbered, poorly led, and caught off-guard. But give the Romans time to get into formation and let them choose the terrain, as at the Battle of Watling Street, and the Iceni/Trinovanti’s lack of ability to use their numbers in an effective fashion turned them into so much wheat for the reaper man.

Your thoughts on why Lord Frey got off so easy at the end of the Whitewalls tournament? Peake gets decapitated, but all Brynden Rivers aka Maynard Plumm says to Frey is “We will speak again later.” Further, why was Bloodraven so lenient with the other second-time rebels? Houses Costayne and Sunderland don’t seem to have been strongly demoted (like say, Osgrey was in the first Blackfyre) and while wouldn’t expect them to be Reyne-ized or Darklyn-ized, but how did House Peake even still exist in strong enough form to resist and kill King Maekar not too many years later?

Frey didn’t actually fight him or commit any open acts of treason, and had a plausible reason to be at the wedding. Indeed, it’s possible he was one of the informants who tipped off Bloodraven. Regardless, he now has a homeless son in law who brings nothing to the table.

Houses Sunderland and Peake are both in the category of probably not worth the effort to destroy, given that the former requires sending out the royal navy and an amphibious landing party at a time when Bloodraven needs the seas covered against Bittersteel, and the latter is a particularly hard nut to crack, given that the eventual Storming of Starpike takes out Maekar, Robert Reyne, and Tywald Lannister.

Regarding your advice to Bittersteel to seize Lys, Myr, Tyrosh & the Disputed Lands, don’t you think that is simply opening up a can of worms? After all, from what we know the Essossi city states don’t look kindly upon any power seizing control of multiple major cities at once( refer anti Volantis alliance in CoB). What’s stopping Bravos, Pentos, the anti Blackfyre factions of the Three Daughters & maybe even Volantis allying with the Targs & ganging up on the Company’s holdings in Essoss?

To quote HBO’s Rome, “if my last coin buys me a throne, it will have been worth it.”

Yes, potentially I might have to deal with an Essosi alliance down the line. But the Triarchy lasted 34 years on its own, so it’s not like I don’t have time.

And since what I’m actually after is Westeros, losing the Three Daughters after I take Westeros is an acceptable loss, but I could potentially buy off my opponents by giving them Myr and/or Lys and still be in the positive.

Then again, if and when I’ve taken Westeros, I’ll have a lot more resources to hold onto the Three Daughters if I want to.