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.

Say a peasant had a crippled child or infants to care for or nature was not cooperating or all of the above. Was it possible to appeal to his local Lord for a reprieve on his obligations? Obviously it would depend on the Lord’s character but I’m curious if there was flexibility in the system given 100% exploitation all the time seems like an impractical model yet on the face of it feudal contracts seem hilariously one sided and unfeeling.

Yep, happened all the time. Feudal obligations were very much tied to all kinds of traditions, which included things like tax or rent exemptions for a given period or privileges (collecting firewood from the lord’s forest, being allowed to trap rabbits in the lord’s deer park, gleaning grain after the harvest on the lord’s fields, etc.) or even donations (old clothes, leftovers, maybe some money).

So there was always a back-and-forth, where peasants pushed as far as they think they could get, and lords always had to shift on a spectrum from granting those favors when it suited their interests to be seen as generous to denying them if they felt their revenues were being cut into too much.

It’s actually not that different from the ways that scholars of slavery have talked about slave systems involving both resistance and accomodation as well as terror, brutality, and exploitation.

Anon Asks:

How much land would huge cities like Rome or Constantinople or Athens or the free cities in ASOIAF need to feed the population of just that urban city?

Great question! The answer is: large cities in any period of history, be it during classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, well into the Industrial Revolution, require a very large hinterland to provide the necessary food to feed their populations.

On a general rule of thumb, you’d generally expect cities of those size to command the resources of the countryside around them for at least several day’s travel distance from the city (basically, as far back as you can reasonably get goods to market before they go bad).

However, all of the cities you mention are port cities, which changes the story somewhat: Rome drew its food supply not just from Italy but also from western North Africa etc., Constantinople drew its food supply both from nearby Anatolia and Thrace but also from Egypt, and the Free Cities can draw their food both from their hinterlands but also from Westeros or other parts of Essos.

What do charters for guilds consist of? If all the alchemist guild has is wildfire, how to they sustain themselves? What does the Royal charter for the faith or citadel consist of?

Well, much like city charters, guild charters gave guilds legal recognition, rights, privileges, responsibilities, and limits.

So what kinds of “rights, privileges, responsibilities, and limits” did these charters include?

First, guild charters gave guilds a legal monopoly over a given trade or industry. If you wanted to work in a given industry in a given location, you had to be a member in good standing who had been given permission to work in that town or city. On the other side, employers and merchants who wanted to hire a smith or buy their goods also had to do so with a guild member, lest they be legally liable.
Next, guild charters gave guilds control of training, licensing, and locating of workers in their field. In order to become a member of the guild, you had to go through a guild apprenticeship where you would live with a master craftsman and labor for them for anywhere between seven and fourteen years. Apprentices were not paid save for food and lodging, but their masters were required to train them in the skills and trade secrets of their industry. When you had completed your education, you would be licensed as a journeyman, be given a set of tools that were now your property, and could now work for wages in your field. Journeymen were usually sent away from their home city for a period of at least three years (although that’s not where the name came from), for reasons that I’ll explain later. When you had completed that process and could afford to pay the application fee, you could apply to become a master craftsman, by submitting a masterpiece (that’s where the name comes from) to the guild masters for their approval – if your work was up to snuff and the guild masters let you in, you’d now be a full member of your field with the right to open your own business, hire journeymen, and train apprentices (indeed, you were required to train apprentices).
Third, guild charters gave guilds wide powers of regulation and self-regulation. In addition to the right to charge membership dues, guilds also had the right to fine members or even expel them for violating the regulations of the guild, and guilds established extensive regulations on prices, wages, working conditions, product quality, even standards of personal behavior. (Guild members could be fined or even expelled for drunkenness, for example, because it threatened the guild’s reputation for quality labor). At the same time, guilds also used their control over their members to essentially bargain collectively with governments, suppliers, merchants and employers, wielding the authority to blackball them from doing any business with guild members to get their way.

So how did the guilds use these powers?

First, they used them to control labor supply, labor demand, prices and wages – guilds carefully manipulated the intake of apprentices, the licensing of journeymen, and the qualification of masters, and used their powers to permit working or operating a shop in a given town/city/region, to ensure that there would be enough work/consumer demand for their members at the wages/prices necessary to support the living standards of guild members. If there wasn’t enough work to go around in a given location, journeymen would be refused entry to a given town and sent on their way, and masters would be refused the right to open a shop.

Second, they used them to control the quality of goods and services – if you sold shoddy goods or did shoddy work, the guild would fine or expel you, and if you tried to work in their industry without going through their training process, you’d be prosecuted.

And third, they used them to create mini-welfare states – financed by the various dues and fees they charged their members, guilds operated pensions for the elderly, the disabled, widows and orphans, a system of unemployment benefits for journeymen who couldn’t find work, and funeral benefits.

As for Westeros, the guilds we know about are the Alchemist Guild in King’s Landing, the Guild of Smiths in King’s Landing, and a series of unnamed guilds in Oldtown. The Faith isn’t a chartered institution – it’s a religious institution – but the Citadel might have a charter from King Urrigon Hightower, but we don’t have direct confirmation.

You couldn’t build a warehouse without a charter? How does that even work?

Well, keep in mind we’re talking about two separate things. There’s the physical structure where you keep goods. And then there’s the legal right to require goods to be stored in a public warehouse where they would be guarded by public officials and inspected by public officials, paid for by excise taxes on those goods.

Municipal warehouses were important pieces of civic infrastructure, because they provided an amenity that encouraged merchants to trade in that city and to bring larger quantities of goods, because those merchants knew there would be somewhere to store their goods, that they could bring goods in bulk (as opposed to just arriving with samples and then taking orders that would be shipped later), and that they could be assured of a certain standard of product quality.

And yes, you needed a charter to make all of this legal; that’s what it means to live in a pre-capitalist society – there is no assumption of a “free market” in which the government doesn’t intrude; rather, governments create markets by extending legal privileges that lower transaction costs. For more on this, I highly recommend Karl Polayni’s Great Transformation.

Anon Asks

How much trade does the iron throne do? Like what percentage of gdp would a typical medieval state have as imports and exports? What does this trade consist of? And how effected would westeros be if it were completely cut off from the rest of the world?

Well, if @warsofasoiaf asks…

The Iron Throne doesn’t do much trade itself, since it’s a government that derives most of its revenues from taxes as opposed to trading directly on its own account. Yes, Littlefinger has gotten into the wool trade, for example, but it’s unclear how much if any of that revenue actually goes to the crown instead of to Littlefinger.

If you’re asking how much international trade Westeros does, I think it’s rather low given that A. the overwhelming majority of the population works in subsistence agriculture, B. as Westeros is rather underdeveloped, there are severe limits to the spread of markets due to the inability to get goods to market, and C. Westeros’ exports are almost entirely natural resources (food, wine, wool, timber, etc.) and its imports are higher valued-added manufacturing.

If you’re asking for a percent GDP figure, there are estimates that 16th century England had a foreign trade of less than 8% and that was after a huge surge in the wool trade and we haven’t seen in Westeros anything like the social and economic transformation that the rise of the commercial wool trade had on England from the 14th through 16th centuries. Likewise, I’ve seen estimates that the agrarian economy (i.e, just that part of the economy that came from producing crops) made up 85% or more of English GDP in 1300, which also suggests a low figure for Westeros.

How do royal mints work? Like how often do new ones need to be made and why? Sorry if you have been asked this before.

Just to show how much I care…I did research on numismatics for you, and that’s something I once swore I would never do.

Medieval coins were “cold-struck” which means that the planchet or blank were allowed to cool before they were imprinted. They were made by hand, by sticking a planchet in between two dies (the one on top called the trussel die, and the bottom die called the pile die) upon which the design of the coin had been engraved and then hitting the trussel die with a hammer to imprint the planchet with both the obverse and design side at the same time.

The coining was actually the simplest part of the process. Producing the dies took up a lot of time, because the action of smacking them with a hammer inevitably damaged them – to take the Venetian mint as an example, they had to make one trussel die every day and one pile die every other day, because when you’re punching out 20,000 coins a day, the dies are going to get damaged in a hurry. Making the blanks was also a rather complicated process and took up a huge amount of time:

melting and casting the ingots,
annealing, or heat treating, the ingots to soften them,
hammering the ingots,
another annealing,
cutting the ingots into blanks,
annealing the blanks,
hammering the blanks thinner,
another annealing,
another hammering of the blanks,
another annealing,
another hammering of the blanks,
rolling and
hammering the edges to make the blanks rounder,
another annealing,
blanching to clean the blanks
and then finally coining.

In terms of how often the coins were made and why…part of it had to do with custom: new coins would be minted to celebrate the coronation of a new monarch in order to spread the word about who the new monarch was, new coins would also be minted to celebrate major military victories or weddings or the birth of royal children, or certain religious holidays. But a good bit of it had to do with supply and demand: i.e, when the monarch needs cash to buy stuff or when various vendors bring in royal ious and request payment in cash or when the royal paymasters need to make payroll for the army or the navy, etc.

Speaking of supply and demand, one of the long-term problems with metallic currency is that, over time, they have a deflationary bias – as people hoard coins, money falls out of the system, and prices start to drop in ways that become very dangerous to profit margins and thus economic viability. Thus, you have to mint coins just to make sure that there’s enough coins going around for economic transactions to take place and for the economy to grow. And the problems don’t end there: because metallic coins are easily counterfeited by clipping or sweating or plating, mints were constantly battling Gresham’s Law, which is one of the reasons why medieval punishments for forgery and counterfeiting were so legendarily brutal.

Ultimately it came down to how well things were going for the state. Remember, the coins are made of precious metals, which means you need the raw stuff on hand to mint. When things are going well economically and politically – trade is flowing, the harvest is good, people are paying their taxes – the king mints lots of coins both because he can and to show off his royal splendor and majesty. But when things are going bad – when the harvest fails, trade dries up, people are refusing to pay their taxes, foreign armies are rampaging up and down the countryside stealing everything shiny – first you start to adulterate your coinage with baser metals, then you cheat on the weight of the coinage, then you just stop issuing coins for a while. One of the ways that historians of the ancient world or the medieval period try to assess the strength and stability of various dynasties is just by looking at how frequently coins are being minted, how the weight and purity of the coinage is changing,

In the medieval period which would have been the more profitable activity- rearing cattle for meat, or rearing cattle for milk ? And which would have required more investment?

This is just an educated guess, but probably milk.

The problem with farming for meat is that prior to the agricultural revolution of the 18th century, something I talk about in my economic development series in reference to growing cereal crops, it was difficult to keep meat animals alive over the winter due to lack of food for them. Hence, you’d slaughter animals when they were roughly a year old, which limited their growth and thus how much meat you could get from them. (Lack of refrigeration and other means of storage was also a problem.)

During the agricultural revolution of the 18th century, you have a number of interlocking developments that changed that:

Changing rotation of crops to replace fallow fields with turnips, clover, hay, and other legumes. Not only do these help restore nutrients to the soil, which improves the yield of cereal crops, but they also meant that you now had a new source of fodder to feed your animals and could afford to keep them alive over the winter.
Introduction of water-meadows. Water-meadows are areas of grassland that are irrigated to keep them continuously damp, which promotes the early growth of grass, which allowed for animals to be pastured on these meadows in those tricky periods of late winter/early spring where you’ve run out of winter fodder but the legumes and grass haven’t kicked in generally.
Selective breeding of livestock. By carefully breeding animals for specific traits, farmers profoundly reshaped the economic potential of entire species. To give an example, the “average weight of a bull sold for slaughter at Smithfield was reported around 1700 as 370 pounds (170 kg), though this is considered a low estimate: by 1786, weights of 840 pounds (380 kg) were reported.”

The combination of these factors meant that animals were now routinely being kept alive over the winter, which means they produced much, much more meat, especially once farmers created breeds of cattle especially for that purpose.

And when I say more meat, I mean cows that looked like this:

That’s a square cow. That thing couldn’t be more genetically modified unless it came shaped in detachable burger shapes.