Three hides of land is a good bit – it’s a bit below a “knight’s fee” which was usually five or more hides, but a single hide enought to support one family, or 30 modern acres. So each of Gregor’s men gets 90 acres of land, which would put them solidly in the ranks of the yeoman – below the knight but above the knave, as it were.
Tag: income
Are the Manderlys richer than the Starks? What are Winterfell’s and Whiteharbours incomes?
I doubt that the Manderlys are richer than the Starks, since the Starks get income from the entire North in addition to from the Manderlys, so they’re taxing 3.5-4 million people rather than a hundred thousand or so. And even though the per-capita income of the Manderly’s subjects is way higher than the rest of the North, it’s not enough to outweigh the Stark’s manpower advantage.
I did a rough estimate of Great House incomes here, but let’s try to do some calculations based on the ones I did for the Seven Kingdoms as a whole. The North has 3.5 to 4 million people, and assuming that 90% of them earn around 3-5 dragons a year, we’re talking 10.5-20 million gold a year as the rough GDI of the North.
Now, medieval taxation thankfully was generally simple (because medieval states lacked the bureaucracy to get fancy) so we’ll be using the English “tenth” (i.e, a 10% tax on moveable property and income) as our model. That would suggest that the North generates 1-2 million in tax revenue. Now, a good part of that goes to the King, but the Starks probably keep the bulk of it.
Now, the North is considerably less fertile and prosperous than the rest of Westeros, so we might want to start with the low range for peasant income and then adjust further. So if the North is half as prosperous as the average, then the North has a GDI of 5.25 million and produces 525,000 gold in tax revenue. If we say it’s two-thirds, then we’re talking a GDI of 7 million and 700,000 in tax revenue.
The Manderly’s income is a bit harder to figure out, because we don’t have a firm number on their total population – we know that White Harbor has 50,000 people living in it, but we also know that the Manderlys control a broad swathe of territory beyond just the city and have a higher per capita GDI than the rest of the North between their silver and their artisans. I would say that at a minimum, the population of White Harbor brings in 15,000 golden dragons to the Manderlys just on the regular tenth, not counting taxes and fees coming in from the port.
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