Piggybacking of the recent ask on coins, do we have examples of periods of inflation or, bettered yet, hyperinflation in westeros’s history? If we don’t why do you think that is? Thanks

Follow up to inflation question on further thinking: it seems especially strange if there are no periods of crisis level inflation on a third century Rome level given the rudimentary knowledge, lack of financial governing (esp. between kingdoms pre-conquest) and the need to outbid rivals for swords given the very regular inter- and intra-kingdom violence. I admit to being no financial expert but that seems like a nice mixture for devaluation and inflation. Thanks.

As people have pointed out, GRRM is not super-consistent on this stuff. For example, in a time of plenty, Dunk sells his horse for 2.3 dragons; in the midst of bloody civil war, with people increasingly unwilling to take coin (which you can’t eat) for horses (which you can), Brienne buys two horses for 1.5 dragons each.

On the other hand, at times, GRRM is better at depicting the impact of the War of Five Kings on prices. For example, when Tyrion arrives in King’s Landing just as the Tyrells have cut off the city from the south (a major supply shock) and the city has become swollen with refugees (a major increase in demand), we see hyper-inflation in action:

“The markets were crowded with ragged men selling their household goods for any price they could get … and conspicuously empty of farmers selling food. What little produce he did see was three times as costly as it had been a year ago. One peddler was hawking rats roasted on a skewer. “Fresh rats,” he cried loudly, “fresh rats.” Doubtless fresh rats were to be preferred to old stale rotten rats. The frightening thing was, the rats looked more appetizing than most of what the butchers were selling. On the Street of Flour, Tyrion saw guards at every other shop door. When times grew lean, even bakers found sellswords cheaper than bread, he reflected.”(Tyrion I, ACOK)

“Muddy Way was crowded, but soldiers and townfolk alike made way for the Imp and his escort. Hollow-eyed children swarmed underfoot, some looking up in silent appeal whilst others begged noisily. Tyrion pulled a big fistful of coppers from his purse and tossed them in the air, and the children went running for them, shoving and shouting. The lucky ones might be able to buy a heel of stale bread tonight. He had never seen markets so crowded, and for all the food the Tyrells were bringing in, prices remained shockingly high. Six coppers for a melon, a silver stag for a bushel of corn, a dragon for a side of beef or six skinny piglets. Yet there seemed no lack of buyers. Gaunt men and haggard women crowded around every wagon and stall, while others even more ragged looked on sullenly from the mouths of alleys.“ (Tyrion IV, ASOS)

So there you go.

In terms of devaluation, you have the example of the Gardener coins that Olenna uses to cheat merchants with, which are small and thin compared to post-Conquest dragons.

Did Masters or Journeymen who couldn’t get a licensed spot for a shop in a town or city ever set up outside of the city for production? I remember you said once that Masters often took more apprentices than there ever would be positions for, because of the cheap labor. That sounds like it would lead to a glut of journeymen.

Good question!

Yes, they did. To quote Friedrichs’ Early Modern City:

“…This was especially the case in the rapidly expanding metropolitan centers with their sprawling outer districts – the suburbs and faubourgs outside the walls where work and residence patterns were particularly hard to control. Unlicensed artisans and unskilled workers abounded in these outer neighbourhoods, where overlarge parishes and underdeveloped institutions made it difficult to keep track of exactly who lived there.”

This was, however, a somewhat risky strategy, because (for the most part) you still had to get your goods into the city, which meant coming under the legal jurisdiction of the city once again. Not only would imported goods usually be taxed, but trading in unlicensed goods could lead to legal penalties.

It seems like a lot of people, myself included, mix up medieval taxes with medieval rents as the source of the nobility’s wealth due to our modern conception of the private vs. public sphere whereas medieval forms of governance mix the two. Can you talk about how the intersection of the public vs. private spheres in medieval times differed from modern times? Was tax money nobles collected treated differently than the money they got from contractual rent?

Great question!

One of the reasons why libertarians have had a suspicious admiration for the Middle Ages is that feudalism turned what we think of today as the state/public sector (which is different from the public sphere b/c Habermas) into personal property rights.

In a feudal contract, the king gives taxation power, judicial authority, etc. over a geographically-defined area to an individual leasee, in return for that leasee providing a certain amount of military service. (Which in turn means that these leasees are also exercising significant amounts of military power, so there goes the monopoly on force.) And as I’ve discussed before, this grant changes over time from what we might call an outsourcing contract that can be reassigned to an inheritable estate, which makes it ever more propertyish than before. And when, over time, people are allowed to sub-lease parts of their grant to other people, it becomes more propertyish still.

This blurring of the public (taxation, military power, judicial authority) and the public goes all the way up the chain. For a long time, there wasn’t a clear distinction made between the king’s personal household and the state: we can see this from the fact that a lot of the offices of the privy council use the same names as offices on private estates, or from the fact that there wasn’t for a long time a clear separation between the personal income of the monarch and the revenue of the state (see for example the long bureaucratic struggle over whether the Office of the Wardrobe (which was supposed to pay for the king’s household but ended up paying for wars) or the Exchequer would be dominant in finance).

This begins to change in the Early Modern period, where you see the emergence of professional bureaucracies who can more efficiently collect taxes, keep accounts of moneys received and spent, so that ever-growing armies can be outfitted, supplied, and paid promptly enough to keep them from deserting. (This is all very much a work in progress.)

Not coincidentally, the growth of these large royal armies coincides with a period of struggle between monarchs and the nobility over the boundaries of the public and the private: whether the king’s courts could overrule local manorial courts, whether nobles could fight private wars, fortify manors without royal permission, keep more men under arms than their feudal service allowed, and whether royal tax collectors could directly extract revenue from their fiefdoms without the lords’ being able to intervene.

To answer your second question, there was a distinction between various income streams: in addition to feudal rents, the use of monoplies on mills and the like were called banalities (great name, imo), chevage or chiefage was a poll-tax paid by villeins, income generated for lords from fines in local courts was called the third penny, the sales tax on livestock was called the toll tax, and then there were a large number of what were called feudal incidences (fees paid when a peasant got married, inherited land, or died, etc.). And to go back to the paragraph above, one of the reasons why so much conflict arose over judicial reforms was because the king was often muscling into revenue streams that the lords considered their personal property right as opposed to public finance.

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.

Feudal Manor asker, yes it was a broad question. I’ve found it hard to zero in on specific things with the word limit. What id like your take on is about as much about management and politics as about economic specifics. You mentioned the oppressive taxes/ evasion vicious spiral causing unrest and economic disruption. How would lord, or really any authority escape or mitigate this and create psychological landscape that would allow for long term development and prosperity. The variations of 1/2

2/2 this can pretty easily be seen in history where regions with many of the same qualities and resources either advance and grow in wealth and development or remain stagnant. You had touched on some of this in your regional development pieces, “In Dorne we all band together…”, something like that. I know its very vague and has to do with symbols and emotional stats and so on. Still seems important in relation to how states and so on grow or don’t. Thanks

Ultimately the management of feudal manors was a political process by which relations between lord and peasant were worked out, and it could be a very antagonistic or a more symbiotic one depending on the political skills of both sides (or even mediators like royal judges or local clergymen).

While law and political culture gave lords the upper hand (although not entirely), pushing too hard and too fast would cause unrest and disruption, so a lot of aspects of noble culture were designed to give noblemen the skills necessary to manage their tenants and workforce without provoking resistance: adhering to noblesse oblige was a good way of gaining popular goodwill through symbolic displays of generosity (donating hand-me-downs to the poor, or conspiciously giving alms/tithing at church, etc.), being able to gracefully condescend to your lessers was important to ensure that social interactions between noble and peasant didn’t give rise to contempt or resentment.

On the flip side, peasants had one important trump card that made up for some of their massive disadvantages when it came to legal, political, and sociocultural status: they were the only workforce around. Peasants could use various means of direct action to resist actions of their landlords: they could strike as workers by refusing to labor on the lord’s land, they could strike as tenants by withholding their rent payments, they could get violent (often by setting gathered crops or fixed improvements on fire, or breaking fences and other symbolic violations of noble prerogatives, or beating the crap out of the bailiffs and reeves or burning down the manorial court), or they could turn to the courts. There were quite a few cases where individual peasants and whole village would hire lawyers and sue their landlords, especially in cases where there was a dispute over whether tenants were free peasants or serfs.

But on both sides, there were always important tensions between peace and profit, and between tradition and innovation. To quote myself for a second:

Almost by definition, the major source of income of a noble family is rent income from their lands, and rents were overwhelmingly set by custom and tradition. This meant that most nobles were living on something like a fixed income, which meant they were very vulnerable to changes in prices. Crop failures, rebellious peasants demanding wage increases, competition from foreign countries, all of these things could seriously negatively affect the bottom line.

This meant that attempts to raise rents could be resisted by peasants through the law, pointing to manorial rolls or copies of tenancy agreements (or even the memory of the oldest person around) as proof that their lord was violating their ancient rights. At the same time, there were also examples of lords who went looking for feudal taxes, privileges, or labor that had been previously waived (a strategy that lords could and often did use to decrease tensions), and insisting on enforcing their ancient rights.

So, how do lords pursue economic development in that situation? Well, if one had the capital, one could invest in infrastructure: draining fenland or clearing forest would give the lord additional land that they could now settle with new tenants (and since these were legal blank slates, the lord wasn’t bound by the old terms of service), building mills or other processing industries would create new ways to extract income from one’s tenants and increasing the value-added of the good produced by the manor, investing in new farming techniques on the lord’s land (as opposed to the land that was leased to tenants) would increase the productivity of that land.

In addition to techniques, the most historically significant change a lord could make would be to change what they grew. In the early modern period, with the advent of the commercial revolution, many English landlords shifted from growing traditional cereal crops to pasturing sheep to export their wool to the Netherlands, despite the massive disruption to agricultural labor markets. To quote from Utopia:

But yet this is not only the necessary cause of stealing. There is another, which, as I suppose, is proper and peculiar to you Englishmen alone. What is that, quoth the Cardinal? forsooth my lord (quoth I) your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities. For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore dearest wool, there noblemen and gentlemen, yea and certain abbots, holy men no doubt, not contenting themselves with the yearly revenues and profits, that were wont to grow to their forefathers and predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in rest and pleasure nothing profiting, yea much annoying the weal public, leave no ground for tillage, they inclose all into pastures; they throw down houses; they pluck down towns, and leave nothing standing, but only the church to be made a sheep-house.

See, along with the shift to wool exports came a legal movement in the 16th century to enclose the formerly common lands of manors (one of those pesky traditional rights that peasants kept insisting upon) and turning them into the lord’s property. This was so hugely disruptive that it led to riots starting in the mid-16th century, but lords with a sturdy enough backbone and quiet enough conscience were able to bull ahead despite resistance from King, Parliament (from 1489 to 1639) and their own people, so lucrative were the profits.

Should the rivertowns you mentioned (Seagard, Saltpans, Fairmarket, LHT) be granted city charters, what kind of industries and guilds do you imagine developing there?

Good question!

For the most part, I would imagine that these towns would be primarily commercial: Seagard is a port serving the trade along the Sunset Sea, Saltpans (to a lesser extent than Maidenpool) serves trade along the Trident and the Bay of Crabs, Fairmarket is a market town with a bridge that allows one to travel from Riverrun to Seagard or the Twins and vice versa, and Lord Harroway’s Town is located at the Ruby Ford over the Green Fork and close by to the crossroads of the Kingsroad, the River road, and the High Road.

Beyond that, we know that Ironman’s Bay is teeming with fish, so I would imagine that Seagard would have a fishing industry as well. We know that Saltpans also has a fishing industry, and as we know from the name flat salt pans (likely due to extensive shallows at the estuary where the freshwater Trident meets the saltwater Bay of Crabs) where salt is mass-produced and sold to Essos. Associated with that, Saltpans likely also has a significant salting industry, where fresh fish are preserved so that they can be stored longer and thus sold further afield.

In terms of other industries, I would start with industries that process agricultural resources: we know that the Riverlands produces some wine, so there’s probably coopers making barrels to hold the wine; we know that the Riverlands produces a lot of cattle, so you probably have (in addition to cattle markets) butchers, cheesemakers, and tanners and leatherworkers; we know that lots of grain is grown and traded in the Riverlands, so you need millers and bakers. After that, I would guess that between all the rivers and roads, the Riverlands also has a lot of industries that are associated with transportation: in addition to merchants, teamsters, longshoremen, porters and warehouse workers, ferrymen, and sailors, you probably also have a lot of boatwrights, cartwrights, wheelwrights, and blacksmiths who manufacture and repair the boats and wagons that carry the goods on land and water.

did feudal lords ever have to worry about farmers cheating their taxes by cutting grain with sawdust or padding sacks of oats with gravel to make it look like they paying more than they really were?

Yes! In fact, it was a major problem in estate management, and a lot of what the stewards, reeves, bailiffs, and other officials had to deal with was peasants cheating their taxes by misrepresenting the number and health of their livestock, or agricultural products like cheese. The problem was that, as they added more officials to oversee their peasants and prevent this kind of tax fraud, they opened themselves up to being embezzled by their household and estate staff, especially because there was something of a custom of staff taking various bribes, kickbacks, and small-scale theft as perks to make up for the relatively small fixed salaries that came with those positions.

In addition to direct management, lords had two other means for capturing value from their peasants. The first was local monoplies: lords would invest in some improvements on their land, like a mill to turn grain into flour or a weir to encourage river travel or a bridge to encourage road traffic, and then they would require people to use them and/or pay for their usage. To take the example of a mill, if you had peasants who were trying to cheat their taxes by stuffing all of the chaff from their weight into the sacks they owed the lord, you could require them to take their grain to your mill, where not only you could charge them a fee for the use of your mill, but you could also fine them for adulterating their product. And if you were crooked, you could also cheat them by cutting their grain yourself (thus keeping more wheat for yourself) or fixing the scales so that they’d have to give you more to make weight.

The other was the manorial courts: you use the law to extract every rent and privilege you can from your peasants, whether that’s extracting additional feudal labor that might have been allowed to lapse in the past but could now be enforced, or equally common, by turning up the enforcement on taxation, labor, and feudal privileges to eleven and extract additional income in fines where you can’t in rent.

So you can see something of a back-and-forth process, where the nobles try to squeeze every last drop of wealth from their peasants, while the peasants try to cheat their overlord at every turn, and the balance of power depended a lot on organization, force of personality, and broader legal and political circumstances (this is a big part of why royal courts were so important in the centralization of monarchy). If managed incorrectly, you got tyranny and oppression, peasant rebellions and bloody repression. If managed correctly, you got economic development and growth.

Why did soldier get paid in land rather than gold?

As I discuss here and here and here, paying soldiers in gold requires substantial state capacity – you need a large bureaucracy that can collect taxes in cash (which requires significant record-keeping, valuation, and enforcement capacities), you need the logistical ability to mint the necessary amount of coins and ship them to the army in time for pay day, you need both the authority/legitimacy and economic development to ensure that coin can exchanged with civilians for food and other supplies, and so forth.

Thus, even in the late Roman Empire, you see this system begin to break down – the commercial economy is weakening and urban centers are declining, which means the state is having a harder time extracting the necessary amounts of gold to pay the army (especitally when the army has gotten a sense of its political power and starts demanding more and more gold), the currency is becoming less valuable as a result, which means fewer people are willing to take coins (they’re not trading as much and now you see how all of these factors are mutually-reinforcing)

So the late Roman Empire begins to shift to a proto-feudal system. First they shift to a system of direct requisition of supplies from provinces by the army (which means the army is collecting the taxes itself so you don’t need a bureaucracy to do it for them) and taxes being paid in kind (which means that you don’t need to worry about currency as much). Second, from there it’s not much of a jump to just hand over land to armies in return for military service – whether you’re talking about the limitanei under Diocletian and Constantine or the stratiotika ktemata of the Byzantines, etc.

And in the West, once the Roman Empire falls completely, it was similarly an easy shift for ring-giving kings to start giving out land, now that the Roman bureaucracy and economy that let them get their hands on gold to turn into rings to hand out went away.

What was wage labor like in feudalism? I know it wasn’t hourly before clocks were around and stuff like that, but how was it thought of? Did they have the concept of employer and employee of a company (or the concept of a company outside of whatever the mercenaries count as). Did taking wages for work affect your class, maybe making you more than a serf but less than a skilled craftsman?

In terms of when you got paid, it depended. Most wage laborers were paid daily, but in some cases you could be paid weekly, monthly, or even yearly.

Companies were very rare, and required special licenses and legislation to set up (think things like the East India Trading Company or the Muscovy Company) because they were monopolies. So in most cases, wage labor took place between an owner-operator and their worker.

In terms of how it was thought of in class terms, it’s a bit complicated.

On the one hand, you had a significant body of journeymen who were paid wages, and they were significantly above serfs although below master craftsmen. Journeymen were legally free and no longer bound as apprentices were, they had property in their tools, they had certain rights (and responsibilities) as guild members, etc. And below the journeymen, you had a population of (unskilled) free laborers who worked for wages as well.

On the other hand, a significant percent of the population (about 4-5% in rural areas and 11-17% in urban areas) were servants. And servants had a different status than other wage workers. To quote Steinfeld:

“Servants were different from other wage workers – laborers and artificers – who occupied separate social and legal niches. Servants ordinarily were single and had not yet established households of their own. Hence, they lived with their masters and served them full time for a term. Laborers generally were married and maintained their own households. In most instances, they did not serve for a term, but worked on a casual basis by the day, week, or task…

Servants were “in the service of another.” But laborers and artificers [i.e, artisans], who did not live with their employers, might be employed by one person today and someone else tomorrow or next week, or they might…simultaneously undertake a number of different tasks for different persons.”

This distinction had important legal consequences: because they were part of someone’s household, servants were under the legal control of the master of the household; servants weren’t free to leave their employer until their term of service was up; etc.

Hello Steven! Are there any historical examples of nobility “investing” in their peasants? such as buying them flocks of sheep or ox and plows to jump start productivity, like a medieval stimulus package? Whats a way that a lord could “spend money to make money” w/o including banking?

Interesting question!

Most of the examples that I can remember of nobles investing in their estates are things like draining fenland to create more arable land, building mills to turn grain into flour (thus, climbing the value-added ladder), or building weirs and the like to shape trade. These improvements are more akin to investments to fixed plant or capital goods than investments in the productivity of the labor force.

That’s not to say that lords wouldn’t buy livestock or plows or the like, but they’d usually buy them for their own lands, as those kinds of moveable goods were considered individual property. Indeed, in many cases peasants were required to bring their own plows on those days when they had to perform labor on the lord’s land as part of their feudal service.