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about scutage, which was created by Henry I, used more extensively by Richard I, abused by John, and eventually superseded by Edward I, II, and III’s use of direct taxation through Parliament.)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.

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Catelyn II, ASOS

“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.
(more…)

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You mention that feudal rents were nominal so didnt account for inflation, what difference would it make if they did adjust according to inflation/how could that be done?

Given that the Price Revolution played a major role in the relative decline of the nobility’s economic and thus military and political power, allowing for the rise of both the bourgeoisie and the monarchical nation-state…it would change a lot.

Not that things wouldn’t happen – the commercial and industrial revolutions are still going to happen, and the early modern military revolution is still going to happen, regardless of the position of the nobility – but it’s more that the nobility would be better positioned to fight the political ramifications of these changes. Whether they would succeed and make all of Europe look like a rationalized Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, or fail and the only difference is that it takes a lot more violence for those political revolutions to succeed, I don’t know.

One of the major changes that would happen is that the peasantry of Europe would be much, much worse off, because one of the few routes to upward mobility they had was making more money off of the increase in food prices relative to their rent. So maybe you’d see a lot more peasant rebellions than in OTL?

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.

All the peerage ranks were originally due to some certain service or position they did that became hereditary titles, but were each of those ranks responsibilities and privledges? I know only that marquess was in charge of marches, aka border lords

Good question!

Since different courts and different languages developed their own system of titles – you don’t get earls outside of Britain or Scandivia, landgrave and freiherr have a very specific Germanic context – it sort of depends on which one you’re looking at.

But there are some etymological roots that can tell us what the original responsibilities of these different titles were (said roles shifted hugely over time):

Duke originates from the Latin dux, and was originally a Roman title indicating the highest-ranking military commander in a given province.
Count comes from the Latin comitem, meaning companion or delegate of the emperor, and was originally a Roman title indicating a high-ranking courtier, and the title continued to have this association with courtly service, see also count palatine, which referred to someone who served in the royal palace. Viscount comes from the Latin vice-comitem, meaning the deputy of a count.
Earl, which is pretty much only used in Britain and Scandinavia, comes from the Anglo-Saxon and means chieftain.
Marquess/Marquis does indeed refer to a lord who holds land on the borders, and thereby has additional responsibilities of defense and fortifications and additional privileges to go along with that.
The etymology of Baron is a bit contested, but is generally held to originally be a military title similar to dux, although indicating a lower rank.

What would the ceremony for a king confirming the land and title of a vassal consist of? I assume their would be some kind of formal script like the vassal kneeling and pledging loyalty in front of the throne followed by a feast.

Well, here’s how it worked in Medieval Europe. From Wikipedia by way of Anne Duggan’s Nobles and Nobility in Medieval Europe:

“The would-be vassal appeared bareheaded and weaponless as a sign of his submission to the will of the lord and knelt before him. The vassal would clasp his hands before him in the ultimate sign of submission, the typical Christian prayer pose, and would stretch his clasped hands outward to his lord. The lord in turn grasped the vassal’s hands between his own, showing he was the superior in the relationship, a symbolic act known variously as the immixtio manuum (Latin), Handgang (German), or håndgang (Norwegian).[1] The vassal would announce he wished to become “the man”, and the lord would announce his acceptance.

Now there were variations on this model: often there was an exchange of tokens, such as rings, to signify mutual aid and fidelity; when a king was confirming a religious office, he handed the new bishop or whoever a crook staff (although this was a major source of disputes between church and state); sometimes, the ceremony of homage would be combined with the knighting ceremony so that there would be a dubbing; etc.

But the basics of a symbolic show of submission and trust on the one hand and protection and honor on the other were usually the same.

After a large battle, who’s job was it to clear the field of bodies and what were done with the corpses?

A good, if morbid, question!

It depended, both on who won the battle, what terms were agreed to, and what your status was, and of course by what period of history we’re talking about.

(Key image here is actually in the center margin, ignore Harold for a second.)

If we take the Battle of Hastings, as an example, the field was not cleared by anyone in particular: the victorious Normans and their camp followers stripped the dead of their arms and armor and left the bodies for the crows, which was pretty common until the 12th century. If you came from the area you were fighting in, maybe your family would look for you and try to bury you. Maybe you’d get lucky and some monks might consider it the Christian thing to do. But chances are you were crowfood.

By contrast, by the time you get to the later period of the Hundred Years War or the Wars of the Roses, mass graves (often with people being buried in their armor) become the normal post-battle practice – according to some scholars due to the Black Death convincing everyone that manhandling corpses or leaving them in the open air was a Bad Idea. And of course, status played a big role here: one of the reason why anyone with status brought camp followers with them was for them to retrieve your body and bring it back home, or at the very least arrange for it to be buried at a nearby church with some ceremony, as opposed to being dumped in the pit.

As to who did this, well, this is one of the reasons why armies marched with camp followers: large labor force who could be pressed into doing the messy business, and you could get around paying them by letting them loot the dead.

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Arya II, ASOS

How does the idea that medieval warfare was seasonal match up with the idea that it was mostly focused on sieges? What happened if a siege started to drag into the harvesting season? Wouldn’t it make sense to just wait until the “off season” and then launch an attack on your unsuspecting foes who are all out tilling their fields?

Well, sieges and seasonal warfare had strong interactions: the foks inside would hope that supply problems would make the larger army go away before their stores inside ran out, the folks outside would try to feed themselves as best they could on the surrounding areas. But it’s also true that because of the size disparity between a castle garrison and an army, you could downsize your army to just enough men to keep them bottled in if the levies were needed in the field (this is another reason, btw why kings started to rely more on professional soldiers).