When did kings start allowing land to be bought and sold?

It’s a bit complicated. To quote myself:

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.

I think there are arguments you could make for either 1290 or 1660 as “when…kings start allowing land to be bought and sold,” although more accurately it was a gradual process, owing as much to decisions about enforcement and legal fights over whether feudal obligations once allowed to lapse could be invoked later on, that spans the two dates. 

When foot archers had to fight close up, what do they do with their bows? Would they throw them away or did they have some where to hold it so it wouldnt get in the way? Likewise how did heavy horse archers carry both a lance and a bow?

They’d usually drop them at their feet, because longbows are incredibly awkward to carry –  and stringing it across one’s back as in the movies is a great way to get yourself snagged on something.

Horse archers tended to have much smaller bows, and holsters that hang off the saddle.  

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As for how they transported the lances, see here

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Jon III, ASOS

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Jon III, ASOS

jon ygritte

“His guilt came back afterward, but weaker than before. If this was so wrong, why did the gods make it feel so good?”

Synopsis: “Oh sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found you…”

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.

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Why do you think monarchy has lasted( and is still here) for so long considering how flawed It is!?

Good question!

I think part of it has to do with hegemonic ideological power. To quote myself:

“Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist theorist, coined the term “cultural hegemony” (although ideological hegemony also works) as the idea that the ruling class imposes the prevailing norms on the rest of society, which are then believed to be natural, inevitable, benevolent, etc. 

This makes revolution more difficult, because those oppressed by the system don’t yet see their suffering as injustice (as opposed to bad luck, or the will of God, etc.) and can’t imagine a world organized differently than it is. Hence why Gramsci argued that intellectual liberation was necessary for political liberation, or why E.P Thompson argued that class is a process of people creating a new world-view (rather than just a result of material forces). 

In a post a while back, I linked this idea to Steven Lukes’ idea of the three faces of power. Lukes talked about the three faces of power as decision-making power (formal state power), agenda-setting (the ability to decide what’s within the realm of legitimate debate, what is considered a “problem” and what isn’t), and ideological power (the ability to influence other people’s thinking, even when that thinking is against their interests). For example, we can see the third face of power in the fact that, even though Wat Tyler had seized London, he still felt that he needed King Richard to give the commons a charter of liberty and trusted that the King would keep his word that he would issue one and his word that Wat Tyler would not be harmed during a parlay.”

So if the dominant ideological framework of your culture is that kings are chosen by God and that rebellion against them is a sin, you need a lot of ideological lifting power to get people who are being actively oppressed by the monarchy to rise up against it. Hence why so many peasant rebellions from 1381 to the Bauernkrieg drew on religious justifications for rebellion, because the only thing above the king is God. 

But an even bigger ideological lift than that is trying to envision an alternative method for organizing political authority if one was actually to succeed in overthrowing the system, especially if there aren’t multiple ideological frameworks available to your culture/time. While monarchy might not be a very good system, like primogeniture it had the advantage of being relatively simple and having fairly universal acceptance. This made it superior than the alternative of chaotic civil war among rival nobles who no longer have any central authority to check them.

And even when there are other models, transitioning isn’t exactly easy, as we can see from the history of revolutions. Not only are other models usually denigrated by the existing culture. political systems require no small amount of learning. 

Re: peasant land holding. What do you mean that the lord could give peasants land they hold personally within their manor. I thought the whole manor was the lord’s land personally already and peasants served their lord by working the land in exchange of protection

It’s kind of complicated, and it ultimately comes down to the relationship between land and labor forces. 

Unless you were literally a slave, and slaves did exist under feudalism although it had mostly died out by the 10-11th century, you didn’t spend 100% of your time working for the lord. Even the lowest serfs, villeins, cottagers, etc. only worked part of the week on lands held by the lord in demesne, and the rest of the time they would work on their own fields which they had been given a lease to as part of the feudal agreement. 

You can think of this arrangement as a balance of the needs of the landowner and the needs of the workforce: the lord couldn’t and wouldn’t farm their entire manor themselves, and didn’t need the whole of the manor to provide food for their household and personal servants. At the same time, the number of workers who would be needed to farm the whole manor have to be fed and clothed and housed somehow.

Trying to hold the whole of the manor yourself would mean that you’d need to maintain and manage a large workforce of either slaves or wage workers, which would require large up-front ouflays (slaves have to be bought and then fed and clothed and housed sufficiently to prevent them all dying, wage workers have to be paid enough to buy those things themselves) and a lot of management to ensure that people who had no personal stake in the output of their labor would work more than the bare minimum to avoid beatings or firings (respectively). 

And one of the things that the Middle Ages lacked was large amounts of capital and managerial capacity. It was much, much easier for a lord to lease out land to peasants who would then feed, clothe, and house themselves (thus freeing you from the cost of doing it yourself), then collect rent and taxes from them (without having to manage them yourself), while making sure you got enough free labor to do the work on the lands you kept for yourself. 

Medieval peasants and serfs could have differing size land holdings on the same manor. How did they acquire more land such that differences in holdings arose? Cultivate new land? Bribe the lord of the manor for a land grant?

Good question!

There’s a couple ways that that could happen:

  • Marrying the neighbors. Dynastic alliances and marriages based on landed dowries wasn’t just for the nobility; very frequently, peasants would seek strategic marriages for their children with their neighbors, which would allow the children to merge the two holdings into one larger farm with better economies of scale.
  • Cultivating new land…sort of. It’s not that you could just clear forested land or drain fenland by yourself and get a title on the land via homesteading, because that land probably existed within someone’s demense. More commonly, what you’d have happen is lords or churchmen looking to increase the profitability of their fiefdoms by paying people (often younger sons recruited from either nearby areas or foreign lands) to clear or drain the land in part by offering them tenures on the new land, with usually some sort of tax or rent holiday as additional incentives. 
  • Redistribution on failure of succession. While people of all social classes were incredibly defensive of their succession rights and would react badly to anyone trying to redistribute land that they felt was their inheritance, there were circumstances in which land tenures would become vacant. For example, if someone died without an heir or were convicted of a felony, under the law of escheat, the tenure reverted back to the lord and could be redistributed. If the heir could not pay their feudal relief (a one-time tax paid by the heir upon inheriting the tenure), the land would also revert back and could be redistributed. Etc.
  • Bribing the lord for a land grant. Depending on the size of the lord’s land vis-a-vis the local agricultural labor market, it might be in the interest of a lord to lease out some of the land they held personally, if for example they didn’t have enough serfs to perform the labor for free or there weren’t enough workers in the area to work for wages, relative to the size of the lord’s personal land. 

Why does it sometimes seem in the dialogue in aSoI&F as if breaking lances is a good thing? I thought the aim was to knock the other guy off his horse. Does the lance need to break for it to happen?

Well, a tourney lance is made to shatter rather than impale your opponent, because tourneys are supposed to be nonlethal. So breaking a lance meant that you scored a good direct hit against your opponent’s shield or armor. 

See, the thing is that while knocking the other guy off your horse was a clear victory, jousting didn’t always require it. There were quite a few victory conditions, depending on the style of joust – knocking off the crest of your opponent, causing a spring-loaded shield to detach, or simply winning on points. 

To use a modern analogy, winning a boxing match by K.O is very straightforward, but a lot of matches are decided on points. So breaking a lance would be like landiing a hard and clean shot which will contribute to the judges scoring a round in your favor. 

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Davos III, ASOS

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Davos III, ASOS

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“I am the king’s man, and I will make no peace without his leave.”

Synopsis: Davos has his first dialogue with Polemarchus and his second dialogue with Adeimantus.

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.

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someone asked you earlier what time of day did the battle of the blackwater take place, which got me thinking there’s probably pros and cons of time of day right? renly and stannis’ battle that didn’t happen was supposed to take place at dawn for the sun advantage, but there’s gotta be a stealth advantage to a night battle, yeah? what’s the real world medieval analogue to this question

There is a stealth advantage, definitely, although there’s a tradeoff in that it’s extremely difficult to coordinate the movement of military units at night and it’s very easy to get lost. 

The best historical example of this is the NIght Attack at Târgovişte, masterminded by none other than Vlad Tepes, aka Vlad the Impaler, aka Vlad Dracula. 

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While formally a subject of the Ottoman Empire – Vlad had been a hostage of the Sultan growing up, had sought refuge in the Empire when his father had been murdered by a usurper, and had twice been backed by the Sultan in invasions of Wallachia to take back the throne – Vlad didn’t want to pay taxes to the Sultan, especially the tax on non-Muslim citizens of the Empire, and rather fancied the idea of ruling Bulgaria, and decided to ram the point home by having tens of thousands of Turks impaled on spikes when he invaded said kingdom.

This naturally angered Mehmed II, who decided to invade Wallachia and annex it to the Ottoman Empire outright – no more half-measures of coddling the local aristos. The war between Vlad and the Ottomans was a brutal counter-insurgency campaign, with the Ottoman’s superior heavy infantry and artillery slowly grinding its way through Wallachian territory while Vlad’s cavalry ambushed them and then retreated, poisoned the wells and food and evacuated the population and livestock, and sent people suffering from tuberculosis, syphilis, and the bubonic plague into the Turkish camp to infect them. 

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The Night Attack came at the the regional capital of Târgovişte, where the Ottomans were enamped waiting to besiege the city. According to one source, Vlad actually disguised himself as a Turk and walked into the camp looking for the Sultan’s tent – while there, he learned that Mehmet had ordered his soldiers to remain in their tents. Vlad then launched a series of night attacks aimed at killing or capturing the Sultan himself, but got the wrong tent. A chaotic, bloody brawl ensued, and although the Ottoman army was not dislodged and the Wallachians had to withdraw, the combination of casualties and low morale took its toll, and the Turks soon withdrew from Wallachia, although notably both sides would declare victory. 

Moral of the story: do not pick a fight with Vlad Tepes unless you’re ready to fight dirty.