Appointment from above – the most powerful king or warlord chooses his favorite holyperson to be in charge, and they choose the people below them and so forth, similar to the Faith of the Seven post-Jaehaerys and Baelor, or in our world how the Byzantine Emperors appointed the Patriarchs of Constantinople.
Election from below – the congregation elects one of their own who’s their favorite holyperson to be their local priest, the priests from a given area elect their superior, and their superiors either belong to a general council and/or elect a single person to lead the whole community. Similar to in our world the conciliarist views of Marsilius of Padua, at least some interpretations of the early Christian church, and the emergence of Presbyterian and similar forms of Protestantism.
Not that often. Not only were full crowns rather heavy, they were often the most valuable thing the monarch owned, partly for the symbolic value the particular crown had but mostly because of all of the jewels and precious metals. Thus, wearing it from day to day would have been a huge risk. (Also, depending on the state of the royal finances, you might have had to pawn them…) So most of the time, the crown stayed in the vaults with the rest of the royal jewels and plate.
A further complication is that monarchs seldom had just the one crown. To use the English monarch as one example: St Edward’s Crown was the oldest of the Crown Jewels and goes back all the way to Edward the Confessor (hence the name), although parts of it supposedly go back to Alfred the Great. This crown represented stability and legitimacy of succession, as it had been used for every king pretty much between William the Conqueror and Charles I, so using it was very important: hence why Henry VIII used it to crown Anne Boleyn, a very public statement about the way things went. Incidentally, Parliament sold the crown in 1642 during the Civil War, and no one knows where the original went. (Charles II had a replacement made, and then Colonel Thomas Blood stole that one, and so on…)
Needless to say, you wouldn’t dream of using this crown except for coronations, so kings acquired other crowns to be used on different occasions. (Edward III, for example, had no less than nine crowns and a dozen circlets, because if you’re going to try to conquer France, you need to do that in style.) So when would a king wear a crown? Well, any major public event – a religious holiday, the installment of a bishop or the dedication of a church, a session of Parliament, meeting another monarch, making a pilgrimage, etc. etc.
For ordinary fancy occasions – your state dinners, your feasts, your dances, your earlier monarchs went with circlets or coronets. But fashions change, and once we get into the later Middle Ages, you start to see more of a preference for fancy hats as day-to-day wear. My personal favorite is Henry IV’s rather snazzy red number:
Now that is a hat that screams “I may be a usurper whose actions will lead to the Wars of the Roses, but you have to admit, I look damn good.”
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“They never listened to what he wanted, even though Bran was a Stark and a prince besides, and the Reeds of the Neck were Stark bannermen.”
Synopsis:
Warning
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Good question! If I had to guess, there’s probably two simultaneous phenomena going on.
For the folks who are definitively on one side of the border or the other, you’re going to get mirroring of the feud, because those smallfolk see their liege lords as “their” lords, their protectors, and the other side as the thieving, murdering bastards who keep raiding their lands. Indeed, a lot of these people are going to be the folks who the lords turn to first to make up their feudal levies, they’re going to have been involved in a lot of the fighting and raiding, so there’s a strong element of selective hypocrisy here, similar to how the border reivers from the 13th through the 17th centuries had their clan feuds on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish border, despite the fact that these clans were basically indistinguishable.
For the folks who are in the middle, things are going to be more complicated. Since the land shifts back and forth so much between Bracken and Blackwood, you’re not going to get clear-cut divisions of loyalty. Rather, there’s likely to be a lot of mixed loyalties, both inside families and between generations. Here, I’m reminded somewhat of a lot of the German peasants during the Thirty Years War who made sure to own a picture of both the Pope and Martin Luther and then swap them on the wall depending on which marauding army was passing through.
Well, they did. The Roman Empire was doing this from the time of Diocletian and Constantine and kept it up for the better part of the Byzantine Empire. Inititally, a bit part of it had to do with the empire having trouble paying the army in coin, so instead it started paying it in kind, and then in land. Whether we call it the limitanei or the themes, it’s a pretty similar system.
Likewise, the Anglo-Saxons established the fyrd. Under this system, all freemen had to serve in the fyrd or risk a fine or confiscation fo their land. The problems with this kind of system are twofold: first of all, semi-professionals don’t do very well against professionals, due to the greater experience, better equipment, and superior readiness of the latter. Second, by putting people on the land, they naturally tend to spend their time working the land and don’t want to go off and fight for extended periods, because that would be bad for the harvest. In other words, it had the classic problem that these armies took too long to summon and didn’t want to serve for very long.
And the solution was to use professional soldiers instead and fund them through taxation. Hence, Alfred transformed the fyrd from a slow militia that couldn’t respond effectively to lightning-quick Viking raids into something very different: instead, lords and towns were taxed on the basis of how many hides of land they controlled. Every five hides were to pay for one fully armed soldier in the king’s service (the select-fyrd, who were fully armed and armored mounted infantry who could respond to raids quickly) and provide one man to do garrison duty (the general-fyrd) in the new fortified towns known as burhs (from which the word borough and burgh derive). Now rather than having to assemble and try to chase down Viking raiders, all the settler had to do was man the walls of a fort and hold out until the professional soldier could come and chase off the Vikingers.
We can see the same phenomena if we look backward and forward. The Byzantines first started to hire mercenaries to supplement their armies, because the settler-soldiers weren’t that good, and the professional Kataphraktoi required a lot of time and money to train and equip, so it was easier to hire an army for as long as you needed it rather than keeping one on the payroll. Likewise, when the Plantagenet kings of England got tired of their slow-to-assemble, don’t-want-to-fight feudal armies, they shifted over to charging their subjects a scutage tax to get out of their military service and used the cash to hire professional soldiers instead.
Is the term goodman used to refer to a member of the lower class by a noble? I recall “Goodman Willit” being rewarded after the Battle of the Blackwater. Is this accurate?
“Goodman” is a historical term, a polite way to address a respectable person who was nonetheless below the rank of gentleman. And to get even more complicated, it’s actually a term you would give to someone who was fairly lower-class, but still respectable. A “goodman,” for example, was more lowly than a “Master,” a term originally used for master craftsmen but was then extended outward to all respectable men, and then turned into “Mister.” It’s also a gendered term – “goodman” and “goodwife” (and “master” and “mistress” or “mister” and “mrs”).
“Goodman” was used in England in the late medieval and early modern period, but it eventually fell out of fashion. It stuck around longer in Scotland and especially in Puritan New England, where Governor John Withrop defined it as meaning “worth as a citizen capable of serving his community in civic matters,” although some Puritan ministers insisted that the term could only be applied to church members.
It depends on the time and place, but often the position of executioner was a patronage position, and not a particularly desirable one, so you got people who weren’t very good at their job and weren’t hugely interested in being good at their job. For example, the infamous Jack Ketch:
Jack Ketch was Charles II’s executioner and was so astonishingly bad at his job that he became a figure of both hatred and mirth to the London public, such that to this day his name is a synonym for death, executioners, and Satan himself, and he became a bad guy in the Punch & Judy shows. (Yes, some of the research here started with Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch) For example, this is how Ketch carried out his job when it came to Lord William Russell:
“On that occasion, Ketch wielded the instrument of death either with such sadistically nuanced skill or with such lack of simple dexterity – nobody could tell which – that the victim suffered horrifically under blow after blow, each excruciating but not in itself lethal. Even among the bloodthirsty throngs that habitually attended English beheadings, the gory and agonizing display had created such outrage that Ketch felt moved to write and publish a pamphlet titled Apologie, in which he excused his performance with the claim that Lord Russell had failed to “dispose himself as was most suitable” and that he was therefore distracted while taking aim on his neck.”
To be more specific, he took three swings with the axe and couldn’t pull it off, and then finished the job with a saw. It takes a special kind of bastard to write, print, and distribute a pamphlet to avoid blame for botching an execution, and to hit on “the dead guy sucked at being executed” as the excuse. And this was not a one-time thing: Ketch botched the execution of the Duke of Monmouth, taking no less than five whacks of the axe to finish the job (apparently because Ketch hadn’t bothered to sharpen the axe ahead of time) and had to be hustled out of town for a while because the London mob wanted to lynch him.
Well, as I’ve talked about with the Starks and personal justice, I think it’s more a statement of judicial philosophy than moderation per se.
The Starks essentially invert the normal order of medieval justice as Foucault saw it: rather than making the royal body symbolic and larger than life, it’s made literal as the king becomes the executioner; rather than dwelling on the obliteration and humiliation of the body, the emphasis is on one precise strike with a Valyrian steel sword, almost an artisan guillotine.
In some ways, it’s actually most reminiscent of the classical Greek model that Hesiod wrote about, where lords and kings are local warlords who people come to lay their cases in front of, because they’re the only people around who can enforce judgement. In that situation, carrying out the execution yourself is a dramatic political display, showing off the personal strength and martial prowess of the king which is the proof of their right to rule.
But I think there’s another purpose to Ned’s thing about “the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a man’s life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.” One of Hesiod’s major, major complaints is that the lordly system of justice is corrupt – given that the judges are literal strongmen, they don’t really give a damn about fairness, so the parties come to them with bribes disguised as tribute, and the king sides with the rich man over the poor man. By having the king be personally implicated in the execution, he’s making a public statement that the king is sure that the condemned deserves to die (because if the king kills someone who’s innocent, that’s when supernatural retribution kicks in…) and that therefore the justice system is honest.
So I think that it’s something that historically worked in favor of the Starks. As with the Justmans, personally identifying the Starks with justice created a strong bond of loyalty between subject and sovereign. And the Starks lived up to their own mythologizing: hence Ned going in person to Bear Island to chop off the head of Jorah Mormont, showing to everyone who sees or hears about his progress from Winterfell that the Stark will uphold the law against anyone, even the lords.
Historical sources on that kind of thing are extremely sketchy and yield wildly varying estimates – 41 executions a year in Toulouse in the 14th century according to one source; 11-13 a year in Florence in the 14th century but 7-8 per year in the 15th versus 1-5 in Nuremberg, Lyon, or Frankfurt according to another; yet another source says that Avingon’s 15-30 executions per year was low by comparison to other medieval cities. That kind of variation isn’t unusual in premodern studies, btw; accurate statistics being very much a key element of modernity, both the child of and the result of the rise of the nation-state.
Continued after the cut, because this is going to get gruesome.
One thing that pretty much every scholar both before and after Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) agrees on is that frequency isn’t the real story here: for unlike executions after the Enlightenment, medieval executions were meant to be exemplary. As Foucault puts it:
“The public execution is understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the cermonies by which power is manifested…in punishment, there must always be a portion that belongs to the prince…it requires that the king take revenge for an affront to his very person…”
“The public execution…is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. it restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular…it deploys before all eyes an invincible force….the punishment is carried out in such a way as to give a spectacle not of measur,e but of imbalance and excess; in this liturgy of punihsment, there must be an emphatic affirmation of power and of its instrinsic superiority. And this superiority is not simply that of right, but of the physical strength of the sovereign beating down upon the body of his adversary and mastering it…it is the prince…who seizes upon the body of the condemned man and displays it marked, beaten, broken.”
For those reasons, medieval executions were public by design – the masses had to bear witness to the power of the monarch, hence why places of execution were public, prisoners were transported in the open air, and crowds were encouraged (although attempts were made to control them).
Moreover, deaths were also designed to be as humiliating and violent as possible: the condemned being stripped of clothes or hair or other badges of rank or being made to wear symbolic garments was often a part of the process; blurring the lines between torture and execution, the process was made as drawn-out and lingering as possible, and efforts were made to combine many different forms of “almost-deaths” as possible (medieval hangings or drownings for example, were often cut short of death); the human body would be opened up, divided, and mutilated, and as with the “almost-deaths,” great care was taken to try to keep the condemned alive and conscious for as much of the process as possible, so that they would see and be aware of their own obliteration. Some particularly skilled executioner/torturers took pride, for example, in being able to keep a man alive long enough to see his own heart burned in front of him.
In other words, terror was meant to do the work of frequency – if the medieval state with its extremely limitedlaw enforcement capacity couldn’t demonstrate that there was a good chance that you would be caught and punished, it was going to do its level best to ensure that the fear of what would happen to you if you lost the lottery of crime was as intense as possible.
The Faith Militant is a pretty close Expy for the monastic orders, with some differences. For one thing, the Poor Fellows are more reminiscent of the Peasant’s Crusade, with a strong dash of the peasant revolts of the 14th century.
The Warrior’s Sons are a lot closer to the literary imagination’s version of the monastic knightly orders – they’re knights, they protect pilgrims and holy sites, etc. The main difference, I would argue, is that (compared to the Warrior’s Sons who seem to answer directly to the High Sparrow) the historical orders were a bit more loosely affiliated with the church and more responsive to their own elected leadership, although there are some substantial exceptions where popes got more directly involved in their activity.
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