Say a peasant had a crippled child or infants to care for or nature was not cooperating or all of the above. Was it possible to appeal to his local Lord for a reprieve on his obligations? Obviously it would depend on the Lord’s character but I’m curious if there was flexibility in the system given 100% exploitation all the time seems like an impractical model yet on the face of it feudal contracts seem hilariously one sided and unfeeling.

Yep, happened all the time. Feudal obligations were very much tied to all kinds of traditions, which included things like tax or rent exemptions for a given period or privileges (collecting firewood from the lord’s forest, being allowed to trap rabbits in the lord’s deer park, gleaning grain after the harvest on the lord’s fields, etc.) or even donations (old clothes, leftovers, maybe some money).

So there was always a back-and-forth, where peasants pushed as far as they think they could get, and lords always had to shift on a spectrum from granting those favors when it suited their interests to be seen as generous to denying them if they felt their revenues were being cut into too much.

It’s actually not that different from the ways that scholars of slavery have talked about slave systems involving both resistance and accomodation as well as terror, brutality, and exploitation.

Is it true that medieval peasants only worked 9 hours a day and 150 days per year?

Working hours depended mostly on how much light there was in the day, so it would vary from ~16 hours a day in the summer to ~8 hours a day in the winter.

The 150 days per year thing is somewhat debated, depending on the scholar’s views of capitalism vs. their views of medieval serfdom and how one analyzes incomplete information for example, Juliet B. Schor argues:

During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work “by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day.” And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income – which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year – 175 days – for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.

This, along with the many church holidays imposed by the Church, suggests very few working days per year. However, others argue that the records only capture the number of days of labor for one’s feudal landlord, not the full amount of labor needed to maintain one’s own lands or perform the necessary labor of the reproduction of the household. It’s not like animals stop needing to be fed on Day 121 of a calendar year, for example.

What does seem to be indisputable, though is that the emergence of capitalism – and one of the problems I have with this debate is that there were a lot of stages in between (the commercial revolution, the enclosure movements, the early stages of the Industrial Revolution), so you’re comparing capitalism to a moving target – involved a shift from less regular although occasionally quite intense labor to much more constant labor. E.P Thompson’s work effectively demonstrates how this was bitterly resisted out of a resentment against the discipline involved, that an outside force was telling you when you had to start and stop work – the factory clock, often resisted or challenged by the worker’s watch if they could afford one – or telling you that you couldn’t drink alcohol on shift, whereas before labor had been somewhat more self-directed and self-regulated.

How would noble families go about arranging marriages? Did they just out and out say it, or was there more subtly and manipulation? How did they breach the subject and negotiate it?

Both, depending on the circumstances.

If the families were well-known to each other and their interests likely to align – the most common scenario we’re talking about is neighbors looking to consolidate their estates – you’d probably be pretty frank about it.

If on the other hand, the two families are not well-known to one another, they’d probably get more subtle about it: have the two sides meet at social occasions, see how the young people in question get along (this is why formal balls and dances were created, and why it’s very strange that cotillion culture still exists), then bring it up in such a way that neither side could lose face, probably as a hypothetical or something.

On the other hand, we have plenty of examples in Westeros of people being very blunt about offers out of the blue and rejected offers leading to hurt feelings, so…

In a pre-modern society how many people need to be farmers to support a non-farmer? Like whats the percentage? More than the 99 to 1 for soldiers, would 9 farmers for 1 non-farmer make sense?

9 to 1 is way off.

A knight’s fee was a common metric used for fiefdoms – larger estates were usually calculated in multiples of knight’s fees, smaller estates in fractions that led to the imposition of scutage – which is meant to represent the size of land needed to support one knight.

A knight’s fee works out to five or more (I’ve seen 12 cited most often) hides, and a hide of land was supposed to support ten families. So a knight’s fee would have around 50-120 families living on it, and given an average household size of around five people during the Middle Ages, that works out to 250-600 people to support a knight.

What did the scutage based late medieval armies do in peace time? How did they differ in peace time then wartime, like did the monarch keep less troops on hand to real extra wealth and then just hire more men during a war or keep full time large armies all the time?

Quite right. Scutage was supposed to be a sometimes food, and abusing scutage by both raising the rates and imposing it in peace-time was a direct cause of the First Baron’s War and the creation of the Magna Carta.

And while we’re on the topic, let me answer this ask from @kuvirametalbender:

warsofasoiaf:

Tagging @racefortheironthrone on this in case I missed something, to add something, or just to dunk all over this question because this is something he understands very well.

Scutage itself evolved in the High Middle Ages where kings would levy the tax in lieu of feudal service, so during peace time, the military wasn’t much different from the levy model, in peace time the scutage wouldn’t be collected any more than the levies would be called. King Richard I would exercise a royal prerogative, deciding whether a tenant would be liable for levies or for the scutage. However, increasingly, the scutage became levied in peacetime, King John the Softsword often levied a two-mark scutage every year, this was one of the big bones of contention with him that led to the First Baron’s War when he levied an unprecedented three-mark scutage in 1214. The Magna Carta forbade scutage save by “the common counsel,” which was the Great Council, a council of barons, bishops, earls, essentially the tenants-in-chief which gradually evolved into the Parliament of England. In 1217, Henry III would often levy the scutage but usually after formal buy-in from the barons. This method of taxation lasted until the early 13th century, when royal taxation became more standardized and better enforced under King Edward II.

Typically in the time period, kings and nobles would have a small retainer who would be in their direct employ, men that they paid to help keep the peace, enforce edicts. This was an obligation, hence why the knight’s fee was the actual level of income needed to provide equipment for the retinue to fulfill the feudal obligation of military service. Depending on the king in question, they would often mandate a certain level of military readiness among the population, such as equipment and drill days, which were enforced to varying degrees of success and set by property holdings and wealth. Key to this was the yeoman class, who ranked below knights, squires, and other landed gentry but above pages. Yeoman, a distinct medieval middle class, were professional or semi-professional warriors often serving as bailiffs and constables, as well as the franklins, who were freemen and often served as aldermen or mayors, and usually required by different royal edicts to maintain a certain degree of equipment. As such, there was a very distinct hierarchy of class that factored into military readiness. The first full-time professional army in the medieval era in western Europe is typically identified as being in France, the army of King Charles VII of France, in 1445.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

Once scutage was more commonly practiced, what did Nobles did with their time, not having to go to wars? Also in the case of an invasion, of a noble’s land was the King expected to use the tax money collected from other nobles to defend the area under attack? Are nobels not expected to raise their own banners anymore since they’re paying a military tax?

Well, some nobles still went to war – after all, war was still for the elite a way to gain royal favor, land, money, and fame, whereas scutage was primarily useful for small landholders who couldn’t afford the costs of campaigns (and who would be unlikely to gain royal attention and favor in battle, given their lowly standing) – but it was now more at their discretion.

But in the most part, the nobility occupied their time by managing their estates, entertaining themselves, socializing and gossiping, or engaging in local, regional, and national politics, just as they had always done.

Finally, yes, the king was supposed to defend any part of their kingdoms from invasion – it’s not really the case that they would refrain from doing so because someone hadn’t paid their taxes because it was still a huge loss of prestige and invasions are rarely that discrete.

Hi Maester Steven, lover your blog. From time to time both in ASOIAF and in actual history, I see references to ‘the [adjective] Marches’ or ‘[noun] of the [adjective] Marches’. What exactly are ‘marches’, in this context? A general term for border regions, or something more specific? And how did this concept get this name? Thanks.

Marches do indeed refer to border regions and the lords who live in them are called marcher lords (or marquesses or margraves, etc. depending on the language).

Because Marcher Lords were expected to defend the frontiers of the realm against raids and full-scale invasions, they were given certian legal privileges. For example, Marcher Lords tended to be direct vassals of the king with no intermediary liege lords; they had the right to build castles, which otherwise required a license from the king; they had powers to wage war in their regions without seeking permission from the king; they had administrative and judicial autonomy (for example, they could grant charters that otherwise were the prerogative of kings), and had the exclusive right to “any and every feudal due, aid, grant, and relief" from their vassals instead of kicking those bennies up to the king, giving them the revenue needed to maintain their castles and armies.

In essence, you can think of marches as semi-militarized border zones where the central authority has ceded certain powers to the local authorities in a bid to get them to settle in and raise castles in very dangerous regions so that they can provide the central authority with a dedicated first line of defense.

Did medieval nobles value land itself, apart from the money they could make out of it or the defensive value? Did controlling a number of acres give you prestige by itself, or would people always ask how fertile it was and what you were producing from it?

Medieval nobles probably wouldn’t measure prestige in acreage or income; that’s much more of an Early Modern/19th century thing (think Jane Austen, where members of the gentry are sized up as having or “being on” “four or five thousand a-year.”). Rather land would be described in looser, more traditional terms: a “goodly” or “well-stocked” manor or fiefdom, as a barony or a county or duchy, etc.

As to how they felt about the land itself, it’s a bit complicated in the Medieval era, because technically, nobles didn’t own the land itself but rather owned an “estate in land,” i.e various rights over that land. Then again, virtually no one owned land outright, with it being far more common for people to have various tenancies and sub-tenancies. So the land (apart from the land held by the lord directly as opposed to rented out) is less important than one’s rental income.

This changed rather dramatically beginning in the late Middle Ages, as statues like Quia Emptores gradually allowed for the easier sale and purchase of land, and as cash rents replaced feudal obligations – leading to the period known as “bastard feudalism.” Basically, as lords increasingly began to own land outright and pay for soldiers directly as opposed to giving away land for feudal service, all of the sudden the nobility has a much higher stake in land management, because the more cash you can get out of your estate, the more men you can pay to be part of your affinity.

So if you’re a nobleman with an eye for the coming thing, you’re going to hire some people to turn any wasteland you might own into productive land by draining fenland and the like, you’re going to support the enclosure movement to get your hands on the commons, you’re going to invest in modern farming techniques, and try to raise rents whenever and however you can.

I think in a couples of recent asks you mentioned some points of Kings falling out of love with feudalism because it always de-centralized their power. Is it possible that you could provide some examples of nations and their methods (summaries that sort of thing) for such kingdoms as France and England? Furthermore if its not too much to ask, how does the re-fuedalization of Poland play into this?

In the context of England, I’ve written a lot about Henry II in the context of judicial reforms, Henry VII in terms of financial reforms, and Edward IV and Henry VII in terms of trying to eliminate affinities. (I’ve also talked more generally about scutage, which was created by Henry I, used more extensively by Richard I, abused by John, and eventually superseded by Edward I, II, and III’s use of direct taxation through Parliament.)

In the context of France, I’ve not written as much, but you can definitely look at centralizing monarchs like Phillip IV or Phillip V of the “rois maudits,” or Charles V, or Louis XI the “universal spider.”

The refeudalization of Poland is something of a confusing term, because what it’s actually referring to is the reintroduction of serfdom: cash rents which had gradually replaced forced labor were refused in favor of forced labor, freedom of movement was abolished, and family farms were supplanted by folwarks, vast serf-run latifundia aimed at exporting huge quantities of grain to Western Europe. The relation of this phenomena to feudalism is more complicated – the rise of the commercial and middle classes was slowed down, the nobility was enriched, and the money raised by exporting Poland’s material standard of living to the west was used to fund wars with Sweden, the Ottomans, the Russians, and many Cossack rebellions, wars that were generalled by the nobility – but at the same time, the government of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth couldn’t really be described as feudal in nature.

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.

What is the difference between nobles and merchants the idea is that merchants only sit around doing nothing making money of others work but isint that basically the same thing nobles do except they make it law that the people under them a half to pay taxes that the nobles use to buy pointless things like dresses

As with most questions of class, it comes down to questions of ideology and and power.

Ideologically, the ideals of the nobility and of the merchant class were entirely opposite: noblemen were supposed to be open-handed (especially since their power originated from them acting as “ring-givers” to armed men), ostentatiously luxurious (so as to display their glory and magnificence that set them apart from the common herd) and pleasure-seeking, bold and reckless in pursuit of fame and glory; merchants were supposed to be thrifty, sober, and prudent.

The nobleman saw in the merchant a coward who would debase himself (and debase others) for mere profit, and who valued his skin more than his honor; the merchant saw the nobleman as a hypocritical parasite who despised anyone who worked for a living and exalted his own idleness, while excusing mindless debauchery and bloodshed by appeal to obsolete virtues.

But as a Marxist historian would argue, there is always the means of production. The power of the nobility was in landed wealth and their rights to extract labor and taxes from those who dwelt on their land. The power of the merchant was in capital, and thus to a feudal mindset represented that terrifying impossibility: wealth not based on land and feudal tenure, notional, imaginary wealth that could fly through the air invisible like spirits and reshape entire economies, and somehow turn a peasant into a magnate richer than any nobleman, threatening the social hierarchy.

And to a merchant, the medieval order itself was the dead hand of the past, the obstacle to all progress. As Polayni notes, capitalism requires free markets in land, labor, and money – feudalism had frozen land into an unbreakable chain of agreements between lords and vassals; serfdom had chained men to their land and their ancestral occupations; faith had deemed lending money at interest to be a mortal sin.