Do we have a comprehensive list of the houses descended from the Gardener Kings? I’m trying to determine if House Manderly is anywhere in that tree.

That’s a tricky question. We know that virtually all the Houses of the Reach claim descent from Garth Greenhand, hence why the authority of House Gardener was so strong. (Interestingly, though, the Manderlys are not counted among the descendants of the leading children of the Greenhand, whereas the Peakes are.)

Descent from the Gardeners we have less comprehensive information about: we know the Gardeners and the Hightowers wed in both directions from the time of Garland the Bridegroom; we know Garth Goldenhand wed his daughters to the heirs of House Lannister and House Durrandon, so the Lannisters and Baratheons have some Gardener blood through the female line. And from the conflicts between the Tyrells and their bannermen, we know that the Oakhearts, the Florents, the Rowans, the Peakes, and the Redwynes have “closer blood ties to House Gardener” than the Tyrells do.

As far as the Manderlys go, we know that Garth X married one of his daughters to the Lord Manderly of his day (and another to the Lord Peake). But as to whether there were more connections between the Manderlys and the Gardeners, it’s not clear.

How exactly did the Manderlys receive their fief in the North? Did some Stark King hear of their fate and take pity? Or were the Manderlys actively looking for new land? A House migrating from one Kingdom to another never happened before or since then, right?

As I’ve discussed here, here, and here, the Manderlys went into exile with a good bit of portable income and were looking for not just land to settle on but royal protection (they were for all intents and purposes exiled fugitives), and the Starks were looking for a House with ready income to take over the Wolf’s Den and solve the tricky problem of the security of their eastern border:

“A thousand years before the Conquest, a promise was made, and oaths were sworn in the Wolf’s Den before the old gods and the new. When we were sore beset and friendless, hounded from our homes and in peril of our lives, the wolves took us in and nourished us and protected us against our enemies. The city is built upon the land they gave us. In return we swore that we should always be their men. Stark men!“

As for a House migrating, we’ve definitely seen some examples of this: the Blackwoods moved from the North to the Riverlands, and lots of Andal Houses would have moved from the Vale to the Riverlands to the Westerlands and the Reach.

Concerning House Manderly: (1)Among the “dozen petty lords and a hundred landed knights” they count as vassals, what percentage of them do you imagine fled alongside the Manderlys and how were the rest acquired (Carrot vs Stick)? (2)How did the northern lords react to the meteoric rise of these foreigners, especially after the discovery of silver in their demesne? (3)Given how they got their lands, would the Starks have a disproportionate finger in the Manderly’s silver pie? Thank You, RSAfan.

Most of the knights I think probably started as Manderly household knights and got a promotion as thanks for their continued loyalty during the long trek to the North, as well as folks like Ser Bartimus. The lords I think are mostly Northern houses who washed out as lords of the Wolf’s Den (the Lockes, the Flints, the Slates, the Longs, the Holts, the Ashwoods, etc.) and non-Wolf’s Den locals like the Woolfields (between Ramsgate and the Sheepshead Hills, they seem rather substantial), with a salting of Reach vassals who kept the faith.
There was definitely some grumbling, but with the direct patronage of the Starks – the Boltons are definitely going to complain but no one wants a Bolton for a neighbor, the Lockes and Woolfields and Flints might bristle (depending on when they were vassalized) but the Lockes and the Flints don’t have much pull at Winterfell after their failures in the Worthless War, the Karstarks and Umbers might complain on general principle but they’re too far from the action, the Dustins would worry about the economic threat, but at the end of the day no one is willing or able to pony up enough cash to replace the Manderlys, which is what the Starks would probably say to anyone who complained directly.
Well, there’s definitely a quid-pro-quo of “build me a castle and a fortified city that no Valeman will ever capture again” and there’s definitely a good chunk of silver flowing upriver, b/c the Manderlys know the Starks’ benevolence was the only thing that kept them alive. As I talked about in my essay, I think Stark-Manderly relations were a mixture of the Manderlys being the mostest loyalest vassals ever while at the same time grabbing for power with both hands as if it might vanish if they looked away, and the Starks keeping the Manderly ambitions in check while still rewarding good service.

Why do you think House Manderly was able to build a thriving port on the mouth of the White Knife when all the other houses that held the Wolf’s Den ultimately failed to last?

White Harbor was “built with the wealth that the Manderlys had brought with them from the Reach.” The previous occupants of the Wolf’s Den simply didn’t have the money to make the heavy up-front investments necessary to make the city secure (not only does White Harbor have the original Wolf’s Den and the much larger New Castle, but it also has city walls around both of those, and seawalls protecting the harbor, making it really, really hard to assault) and attractive to commerce (White Harbor might be small, but it’s got a double harbor with protective walls, jettys, a respectable shipbuilding industry, etc.)

Once those investments were made, they eventually more than paid for themselves, but it would have been hard for a lot of the smaller houses who held the Wolf’s Den after the Greystarks were brought down to make them in the first place. Moreover, the Manderlys had the advantage of making those investments at a time when the North wasn’t fighting wars against pirates and slavers on the one hand, and the Vale of Arryn on the other, so they had the opportunity to make their investments stick without seeing them burned to the ground.

Do you think that Wyman Manderly is sincere in claiming that the old customs officers were still loyal to King’s Landing or is he taking the chaos and inexperience of a new administration to consolidate his power in White Harbour with more loyal/less scrupulous appointees?

Both.

Here’s the thing about our good friend Wyman Manderly: he believes in doing well by doing good and vice-versa. He’s always going to be there for the Starks, and he’d never be so crude to demand to be compensated first…he’s not a Frey after all. Instead, he steps forward as the good vassal in times of need, and then he comes forward with all kinds of helpful suggestions about how he can be even more helpful if he was given all kinds of new offices. And it’s understood that, just as it would be crude to demand payment in advance, it would be rude to deny such a loyal vassal such a minor favor…

But here’s the thing – he’s not lying about any of it, because he doesn’t have to. Of course the royal customs officers who were in place before the War of Five Kings aren’t going to support a rebellion against the Iron Throne, so they need to be replaced. And I’m sure the people who replaced them were loyal to Robb Stark, because Wyman Manderly would have made sure of it. Likewise, establishing a mint or a royal navy are absolutely in Robb Stark’s best interests – but they’re also going to rebound to Wyman Manderly’s benefit by boosting White Harbor’s economy and military power.

Where things get trickier is the Hornwood Question and what happens when Wyman starts conflating what’s good for House Manderly and what’s good for the North. On the one hand, Wyman was perfectly happy to play the normal Northern political game when it came to the Hornwood lands. But when Ramsay broke the rules and it didn’t look like Rodrik was going to do anything, Wyman didn’t hesitate to occupy the Hornwood lands “for their own protection.” And that’s the kind of thing that can be politically destabilizing, and you get the sense that, as with Garth Greybeard, the Manderlys were not entirely innocent when it came to their feud with the Peakes.

But…and this is important, they’re still mostly constructive, and as long as their liege lord maintains a firm hand, giving them enough of a return on their good work without giving away the shop, and making sure that the rewards get spread around liberally and the Manderlys are made to play nicely with the others so that jealousy doesn’t give way to feud, they’re a credit to their kingdom.

How do you think the Manderlys managed to flee to the site of White Harbor, which is on the eastern seaboard of the North? As far as I know, the Mander doesn’t link with any river draining into the Narrow Sea, & the Reach borders the Sunset Sea not the Narrow Sea, so wouldn’t it have made more sense for them to flee to somewhere on the Stony Shore or Sea Dragon Point? Plus, why did they flee all the way to the cold North instead of say, the more verdant Riverlands or Vale?

Well, they probably sailed east around Dorne and then up the Narrow Sea.

As to why not the Riverlands or the Vale…the Riverlands is famously fractious and prone to private wars over land, why would any houses stand by and let some king take their land and give it away to a Reacherman when the Reach had been invading the Riverlands since the fall of House Justman? And what Riverlander king would have the authority to make that stick?

Likewise, the Vale is pretty small and the lands had been divided up early on, which is one of the major reasons why the Andals had invaded the Riverlands with the encouragement of the Arryns – not enough space, need to get people to emigrate.

Whereas the Starks had vacant land, because the Wolf’s Den was not being properly held and had been repeatedly attacked by the Arryns and the Sistermen and slavers from the Stepstones. The Manderlys offered an opportunity to solve a major security problem without the Starks themselves having to pay for it.

Do you feel that GRRM is a bit unfair in his depiction of the Brackens and the Peakes vis-a-vis the Blackwoods and the Manderlys?

goodqueenaly:

Read my Peake essay

Building off of a discussion that I had with @goodqueenaly, I thought I’d share some thoughts I had about the expulsion of the Manderlys from the Reach. We don’t know much about what precipitated this event other than that Perceon III “feared their swelling power in the Reach.” Now, this could be pure feudal politics, with Perceon III wanting to take down an "over-mighty vassal.”

However, I think it’s notable that when the Manderlys fled, “the wealth that the Manderlys had brought with them from the Reach” was enough to build both the New Keep and the city of White Harbor. It takes an enormous amount of money to do that. This makes me think that the conflict was over money.

Now there are a couple ways this could happen. One possibility is that, as the Mander is named after the Manderlys, they probably had a dominant position on the river (probably somewhere near the mouth, given their conflict with the marcher lord Peakes) which allowed them to put a toll on river traffic – not only would this make the Manderlys reach indeed, but it would create a natural point of conflict with the Gardeners upstream at Highgarden.

Another possibility is that it was a John of Gaunt situation. The Manderlys were a very wealthy and thus envied house, Perceon III needed money for a war or something, and decided to confiscate the estate of the richest house in the kingdom, similar to how Richard II confiscated the estates of his uncle John of Gaunt to help pay for his failed war in Ireland.

A third possibility is that, similar to how Wyman Manderly wanted to become Robb Stark’s master of coin, the Manderlys were the masters of coin in the Reach. From that position, the same techniques that made Thomas Cromwell one of the richest men in England might explain how they had so much moveable wealth during their exile, in a society where most wealth is tied up in the land. And it might also explain how they were brought down, through allegations of corruption or embezzlement, true or false.

RE: Founding of White Harbor. I guess it was headcannon, but do you think Manderlys brought other people from the Reach with them such as skilled shipbuilders? Also explains the high concentration of Seven worshipers in White Harbor since Northerners, granting a liege lord’s push, seem VERY reluctant to convert. If don’t think Reach folks came with the Manderlys, curious on backstory of converting Wolf’s Den to the Seven? Would it have been forced or local smallfolk did so on their own accord?

Oh, I’m absolutely certain they did – as a powerful noble House, the Manderlys would have brought their bannermen, soldiers, servants, etc. on their flight from the Reach, along with their wodgers of cash. You can even see that in the traditional title of the House as “Defender of the Dispossessed” – at the beginning at least, this likely referred to the people who the Manderlys brought with them who had lost their lands and property during the Manderlys’ expulsion.

Why do you think it took the Manderlys to establish White Harbor at the mouth of the White Knife given its prime trading location? Do you see the North’s material existence or culture as particularly averse to founding permanent cities. Was it more of the fact that the area was (as detailed in WOIAF) highly contested between so many petty kings for so long? Historical contingency? Thanks for your reply.

Money, primarily. It’s not like the North didn’t use the mouth of the White Knife – the Wolf’s Den was fortified because that territory was useful to them. But the Manderlys had a depth of liquid capital that the less-fertile North simple didn’t have to hand, and because it was the only option, they invested all of it into a single location. This created the necessary labor demand for a proper city.

But yes, the development of the Wolf’s Den was likely inhibited by the castle being the Vale’s focus of attack during the Worthless War and then suffering the effects of civil war and repeated change in management.