After he captures Griffin’s Roost, Jon Connington says he will obfuscate the matter by writing to the Iron Throne and claiming he is merely reclaiming his lands. Is that not also an offence likely to result in brutal retaliation?

This is historically grounded. Henry Bolingbrooke of Lancaster, Richard Duke of York, Edward of York, there was a long tradition of exiles making a landing and then claiming that they were only intent on reclaiming their family lands and bygones be bygones.

While almost always a cover for a coup, it was a good bit of political cover, because feudalism being what it was, the nobility were generally in favor of lands staying in the family and looked with deep suspicion on the monarch taking people’s lands (indeed, in the case of Henry Bolingbrooke, one of the main reasons why his coup succeeded was that the nobility really did not like Richard II seizing the Duchy of Lancaster from Henry as a matter of precedent and principle).

Thus, it made it difficult for the monarch to go all-out against the invader, in part because their vassals might be quite slow to respond to the call.

Inspired by the inquiry about peasant labor hours through the year, is there any research on the labor hours, etc. of artisans and artists? Woodworkers, painters, sculptors, architects, blacksmiths, etc. whose labor sort of varied by the seasons’ change, but wasn’t tied quite as tightly to it?

I would highly recommend checking out Baul Blyton’s Changes in Working Time, pgs 15-17 for a good overview of the literature on this. Hours varied, not so much by the seasons, but by guild regulations and customs (see Saint Monday) and economic conditions (when wages rose, hours often fell). It’s complicated, because you have to balance regulations about daily working hours against the number of holidays.

This is more of a historical question than strictly about ASOIAF–since the people of Westeros aren’t interested in higher learning outside of the Citadel’s–but I recently found out that feudal rulers would grant charters to form Universities in medieval times. What would such a charter typically entail? Since I know you’ve talked about city and town charters before, I figured you’d be the guy to ask.

Good question!

So here’s how university charters worked (and incidentally, they could be Royal, Imperial, or Papal): an organization that met certain criteria* would be granted a charter that offered three key privileges known as the “studium generale” following their introduction at Salerno, the first degree-granting institution in Europe (hotly debated):

The “jus ubique docendi” meant that a master who had been educated at and then registered by the Guild of Masters of the University could teach anywhere without going through an examination to prove their bona fides, whereas all universities with this right would examine all teachers who didn’t have this privilege. (Reminds me vaguely of Harvard’s attitude to Harvard PhDs vs. non-Harvard PhDs…) Originally, this privilege belonged only to the Universities of Salerno, Bologna, and Paris, but it spread elsewhere thanks to Pope Gregory IX’s sponsorship of the University of Toulouse, and then the Holy Roman Emperor doing the same for the University of Naples just to show the Pope that he wasn’t in charge.
An exemption (granted by Pope Honorius III) from the residency requirements of benefices, as set down in canon law. See, at this time pretty much all university positions were also religious positions, so becoming a teacher meant becoming a priest. However, because professors weren’t usually paid well, you needed a benefice (i.e, a piece of church property, usually tied to a church or monestary or cathedral) to give you a (usually tax-free) income stream. However, professors have always been more interested in research and teaching than pastoral commitments, so the exemption meant that you could stay in your cosy university post and not have to do pastoral work among the riff-raff.
The major source of “town and gown” conflict since at least the 13th century, a “studium generale” university would be granted the “privileges of Paris,” which gave them autonomy from local civil or diocesal authorities. This means the universities didn’t pay taxes, it meant that students were immune from local law enforcement (beginning the long tradition of students getting drunk and rowdy and trashing some place in town and then running like hell for the campus dorms which are off-limits to town police) and the university had its own judicial system, and it meant that the university wasn’t under the direct control of the local bishop. This last part became incredibly important when it came to the Protestant Reformation, because it meant that there wasn’t a censor of printed materials, people could debate theology openly without being arrested for heresy, and so on. There’s a reason why almost all of the major Protestant figures all came out of the university systems of Europe…because the ones who didn’t often got burned at the stake.

* In order to qualify for the charter, a university had to meet certain criteria:

First, it had to have a “universal” student body, open to students from all nations. (This is especially ironic given how universities are being pressured on foreign and out-of-state students) Student organizations were organized by nationality and sub-nationality, and originally were the main financial organization that hired and paid for teachers – anyone complaining about entitled students trying to run the university should count themselves lucky!
Second, the university had to teach more than just the Seven Liberal Arts (grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy formed the Trivium and Quadrivium respectively). There had to be a faculty of either Law, Theology, or Medicine, showing that even in the Middle Ages the liberal arts are still not treated equally with the law schools and the medical schools (the schools of theology have lost a lot of their influence these days). Eventually, there would be pressure from the students, starting in the Renasisance, to add the Humanities (history, greek, moral philosophy, and poetry) to the curriculum.
Third, a major part of the teaching had to be done by Masters, i.e a teacher graduated from one of the “studium generale” who held not only a bachelor’s degree but also a masters in a given field. Goes to show that even in the Middle Ages, we see boundary-setting fights about credentialism, specialization, and the quality of instruction.
Fourth, the whole “jus ubique docendi” thing.

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.

Can you explain the concept of a dry exchange to me? I’ve read a bit about it in The Rise and Fall of the Medici Bank, and the author said it was a way of ensuring that usury didn’t take place, but he never really explained how the exchange actually worked.

Great question!

A dry exchange is actually a matter of historical debate. As Raymond de Roover puts it, “the nature of “dry exchange…has given rise to a good deal of confusion; and to most people the meaning of the terms remains obscure.” Different scholars have different opinions as to what “dry exchange” was, based on conflicting sources.

As best I understand his article, dry exchange involves a legal or conceptual fiction, whereby interest rates (forbidden as usury) were concealed by adding them on to exchange rates. To quote the article:

“In view of the existing organization of the money market, only merchants who had connections abroad could take up money by exchange, because the taker had to be represented in other places by an agent, a partner, or a correspondent who would accept and honor his bills. If this representative did not have sufficient funds to meet maturities, he could always raise money by drawing on his principal. In any case a merchant who had no such connections was seriously handicapped. He was shut off from the money market, unless he could make special arrangements with a deliverer. The purpose of dry exchange was to make such arrangements possible. “Dry exchange” was merely a device by which a local loan was disguised under the form of an exchange transaction.”

In other words, if I’m an Italian banker who wants to buy wool cloth in England, I need pound sterling to make the transaction. But if my bank isn’t particularly well known on Lombardy Street because we don’t normally do a lot of business in England, I could be out of luck because no one will take my bill of exchange.

However, a “dry exchange” would allow me to get a loan in pound sterling from an English banker. The English banker would, obviously, want to make a profit from this loan, but isn’t legally allowed to charge interest. So instead what happens is that I go to the banker and fill out a bill of exchange from Florins to Pounds Sterling where the banker is both payer and payee (this is what makes it fictional, he’s basically paying himself), and then the banker fills out a second bill of exchange from Florins to Pounds except for that it’s payable to me, which I can then take to a cloth merchant. He has essentially loaned English pounds to me which I then turn around and use in another exchange.

The main difference between the two bills, besides the payers and payees, is that they would have different exchange rates between Florins and Pound Sterling, which would net the banker a profit on the exchange. However, legally speaking, the banker could say that he hadn’t actually loaned money at interest, but rather conducted two currency exchanges at variable rates.

Getting some cool ASOIAF Maps recently got me thinking about roads. It seems there are some places (Kings Landing, Winterfell) that seem geographically important enough to draw roads towards them. I imagine other castles or towns are built because of where the road goes. Are there historical parallels for that? When roads are built what kind of factors go into where they go?

Excellent question!

In terms of where fortified settlements are found, prominent hills that provide for better defense, natural harbors on the coasts, good crossing points of navigable rivers, and points on overland trade routes (as well as crossroads) are all good candidates.

For example, the city of Florence prospered in no small part because it was positioned right on the overland trade route between Venice and Rome, and on the overland trade routes from Italy to northern Europe. So in a sense, roads helped to build the city…although Florence’s growing industries in wool cloth, silks, and finance then gave reasons to build roads to connect other places to Florence.

In terms of what factors decide where roads go, it really comes down to geography (in the sense that a lot of main roads get built to connect major regions – think about the Via Appia, which the Romans built to connect Rome to connect the capitol to the grain-growing regions of southern Italy – or to deal with major natural obstacles (think roads built through mountain passes or bridges or the like)),and demography (in the sense that when you have clusters of people (because they’ve found a spot with certain advantages) it generally makes sense to build roads to connect them so that trade can be conducted, and this in turn makes those clusters bigger because it’s easier to move to those clusters, and creates new clusters at key points of the new networks).

A Parcel of Rogues in a Nation: the Great Councils of Westeros (Part I)

credit to Marc Simonetti The “game of thrones” has become such a powerful symbol in the broader ASOIAF fandom that our perceptions of how Westerosi politics function have been distorted by it, resulting in an imaginary that is far too authoritarian and top-down. The King of Westeros is not an absolute monarch, nor is it normal for liege lords to wipe out entire houses for disloyalty. Rather,…

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Is there any basis for putting leather on top of a metal breastplate to protect from “the cold?” Or are they just setting up a means to disguise the fact that all of the extras are going to be wearing leather clothes in battle scenes instead of armor

None whatsoever. I think Benioff and Weiss wanted something to show that Sansa was being a good ruler when it came to military logistics, and just don’t understand that you don’t wear a breastplate against bare skin (which would be a problem in a frigid winter, I concede) but rather you wear a breastplate over quite thick padded jackets, which themselves are worn over one’s normal clothing, providing quite a bit of insulation from the cold.

Indeed, the one example I can think of of cloth being added on top of armor is the precise opposite of the climate of a Northern winter: namely the long cloaks and robes worn by crusader knights over their metal armor to shield it from the sun, so as to cut down on the serious problem of heat stroke and heat exhaustion that they faced wearing metal armor in the Levant.

why did the scotts lose at falkirk?

Chiefly, a failure to coordinate combined arms. When the Scottish and English armies encountered eachother at Falkirk, the English knights charged rather hastily before the rest of the army had gotten into position – but the Scots for some reason had left their archers outside the protection of the schiltrons, so while the knights bounced off the schiltrons to no effect, they overran and wiped out the archers as the Scottish pike and cavalry looked on. Compounding error with error, the Scottish gave King Edward time enough to get his knights back under his command and into formation, and then stupidly charged with their cavalry against Edward’s much larger cavalry and were driven off the field.

*credit to MIke Young

The Scottish schiltrons were left completely undefended, with no cavalry to chase off the English archers and no archers to punish the English cavalry and infantry. Edward was now able to use the same tactics that had been used agaisnt the Welsh at the Battle of Maes Moydog: surrounding his enemy on three sides, he simply had his archers advance and fire into the tightly-packed schiltrons, who couldn’t advance against the archers for fear of leaving themselves open to the knights. Once the schiltrons were weakened enough, Edward sent in the infantry, and the schiltrons broke, and then Edward sent in the cavalry to chase down the fleeing infantry, causing huge casualties.

To use a counter-factual for a moment, imagine that the Scottish archers and cavalry had remained on the inside of the schiltrons – Edward couldn’t have advanced his archers for fear of counter-fire and cavalry charges, reducing their efficacy, and sending in the infantry would have had the same problem. Now, these aren’t unsurmountable obstacles, and at the end of the day Edward had more archers, more cavalry, and more infantry than the Scots, but it would have given the Scots a fighting chance, which they didn’t have in OTL.

Re: medieval war length (different anon): Weren’t wars like the Wars of the Roses and the Hundred Years’ War sort of off-again on-again affairs with a decade or two of peace between each conflict flaring up? So with Aegon and Dany getting involved in the Wot5K couldn’t some future historians label the whole 283-300 period one long ‘War of the Stag’ or whatever?

That’s true, but the lengths of the conficts within were still longer than most GRRMatical wars and the peaces were often quite briefer than a decade.

With the Wars of the Roses, you have 1455-1458 (depending on whether you count Nevillle/Percy fighting as part of the whole, which you should), then 1459-1462, then 1464-5, then 1469-1471, then a gap until 1483, then 1485. So that’s 4 years, 4 years, 2 years, 3 years, 1 year, and 1 year respectively, so the average is much higher than in Westeros.

With the Hundred Years War (taking just the Edwardian period because I don’t want this to go crazy) you have fighting in 1338-1340, 1341-1345 (despite a truce technically being in effect from ‘43-45), then 1346-1347, then 1355-1358, then 1359-1360. So that’s 3 years, 5 years, then 2 years, 4 years, and 2 years, again a much higher average.