When discussing the Martells travelling to KL for the royal wedding, Mace Tyrell gets miffed at the notion of them “crossing his lands without asking his leave”. I get that he’s just being extra, but does he have a legal leg to stand on? Can a lord deny another lord from simply travelling across his lands?

If the Martells were using roads which are open to all (see below), then probably not. However, if the Martells were trying to use a proprietary bridge or toll road or cross someone’s fields without their permission, there the Tyrells would have more of a leg to stand on.

magicbeardpowers asks:

If an individual lord or group of lords wanted to put a proper road through their land, would they have to get the king’s or lord paramount’s permission, like they would a city charter or to build a dam?

You did see attempts by lords to exert authority over roads on their lands – usually by trying to levy tolls – but as time went on, kings successfully asserted the legal principle that main roads were considered “public thoroughfares” and under the protection of the king, and then in the later Middle Ages merged that concept with nuisance law, whereby obstructions, enclosures, or interference with public thoroughfares were considered to be injurious to the commonweal and damage to royal property, which gave the king two separate avenues for exerting authority over roads.

However, note the use of the word “public” there. Whether a road was considered a public thoroughfare could depend on certain factors: did the road lead to a town, port, or market, was the road listed as particularly belonging to the king (Fosse Way, Ermine Street, Watling Street, and the Icknield Way were called the “king’s four highways” in English law), and had it traditionally been open to the public.

But to answer your question, I would guess on principle that if the road was contained within the fiefdom of a lord and hadn’t traditionally been open to the public and it wasn’t a road that the overlord had asserted ownership over, they probably could do it without permission.

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.

When a lord or king decides to build a new seat or give lands to a knight as a reward, where does that land come from? I know that in war it can just be taken from a defeated enemy and given to a loyal supporter, but what about in peace time? Where did Daemon Blackfyre’s land come from? Or the land Daeron II built Summerhall on? I assume most, if not all, land within the borders of the realm is spoken for to one degree or another. How can you do this in peacetime without creating bad blood?

Great question, which builds nicely off of this one.

The answer is, it depends and is complicated. Surprise, surprise.

For one thing, liege lords don’t give away all of their land to their vassals – indeed, historically, they kept a plurality of it and usually the choicest lands for themselves while handing out the rest. So in the case of Daemon Blackfyre, who was given “a tract of land near the Blackwater” (no indication of how huge it was), chances are that was royal land in the Crownlands, as opposed to the fiefdom of any lord.

In the case of Summerhall, however, we have a more complicated story. Summerhall is located “where the boundaries of the Reach, the stormlands, and Dorne met.” This leaves a couple possibilities: first, Summerhall could be on formerly Dornish land that was given to the King as part of the peace treaty. (In which case, the political bramble is the Martells to grasp.) Second, it could be formerly part of the Reach or the Stormlands, in which case the King has to get the local lord and/or the Lord Paramount to hand it over.

This is where the politics get delicate. Yes, the king could potentially just take the land, like Aegon IV did with the Teats, but that causes bad blood. It becomes somewhat easier if the ownership of the land is in question – the last owner died intestate or the new owner can’t pay the customary tax that a new vassal owes their liege lord when they inherit, the owner is a minor who happens to be a ward of the crown, two or more claimants are in dispute about who owns it and are appealing to the king, etc. – because the king gets to rule on that.

But potentially, the king can offer the owner to take the land off their hands. This isn’t exactly the same thing as buying and selling the land outright – what’s actually going on is the crown getting the owner to agree to surrender their customary rights to various incomes and usages of that land – and it’s got more in common with barter. Most likely, the king would be offering title on some other land, or some royal charter or privilege (think water rights, hunting rights, etc.), or possibly a royal pension or a royal office, as an exchange for their current rights, instead of a sum of money.

It can be done, and it was done all the time, but it requires extreme delicacy because if the owner decides to dig in their heels the king either faces a lot of bad press and probably a protracted legal battle.

In our world, was a Queen’s adultery considered to be a capital offense by itself? My knowledge about these issues is rather sketchy, but it seems most of the times charges of “imagining the King’s death” or “planning the King’s death” were tacked on in such cases to facilitate capital punishment.

Thanks to @goodqueenaly jogging my memory and giving me the statute on this one!

As with everything medieval, it depends on the time and place, but to take England as our example (because Wars of the Roses), the Treason Act of 1351 codified and clarified the laws on treason (indeed, the long version of the Act’s title is “Declaration what Offences shall be adjudged Treason”), separating out high treason and low treason – the difference being that high treason was death by hanging, drawing, and quartering whereas petty treason was drawing and hanging without the quartering (for men, women got either drawing and burning or just burning).

Among the various crimes considered high treason was “if a man do violate the King’s companion, or the King’s eldest daughter unmarried, or the wife of the King’s eldest son and heir.” And if the King’s “companion” consented to the violation, she was on the hook (essentially as an accomplice, which is really weird when you think about it for a minute).

The specific case of Anne Boleyn, which you seem to be referring to, was somewhat complicated by the question of evidence – the Act of 1351 required an “overt act” and Thomas Cromwell didn’t quite have the goods to prove that. So he threw in a bunch of additional charges where the burden of proof was lower, and that’s basically how he got a guilty verdict. And that, plus some of Henry VII”s very personal hangups, is why Anne Boleyn’s bill of indictment was so very long.

What is the formal charge that an overlord would level at a vassal for not fulfilling his feudal obligations (Example – Late Walder Frey during Robert’s Rebellion)? Thank You – RSAFan

The name of the formal charge is actually….”felony.”

Indeed, if we consult legal dictionaries, we find that “felonia” was originally understood to mean “the act (or offense) by which a vassal forfeited his fee.”

Maester Steven, thank you for the quick answer. Though there are several historical accounts of various gruesome executions that took place in the North (13 deserters entombed in the wall, entrails hanged in heart tree, Pink pavilion, flaying, Theon Stark’s Easter Island Corpse Statues, etc), the Starks, in recent times, seemed to have adopted a more moderate stance. Is this correct and if so, why go in that direction and did the North suffer certain drawbacks from this stance on justice?

Well, as I’ve talked about with the Starks and personal justice, I think it’s more a statement of judicial philosophy than moderation per se.

The Starks essentially invert the normal order of medieval justice as Foucault saw it: rather than making the royal body symbolic and larger than life, it’s made literal as the king becomes the executioner; rather than dwelling on the obliteration and humiliation of the body, the emphasis is on one precise strike with a Valyrian steel sword, almost an artisan guillotine.

In some ways, it’s actually most reminiscent of the classical Greek model that Hesiod wrote about, where lords and kings are local warlords who people come to lay their cases in front of, because they’re the only people around who can enforce judgement. In that situation, carrying out the execution yourself is a dramatic political display, showing off the personal strength and martial prowess of the king which is the proof of their right to rule.

But I think there’s another purpose to Ned’s thing about “the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a man’s life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.” One of Hesiod’s major, major complaints is that the lordly system of justice is corrupt – given that the judges are literal strongmen, they don’t really give a damn about fairness, so the parties come to them with bribes disguised as tribute, and the king sides with the rich man over the poor man. By having the king be personally implicated in the execution, he’s making a public statement that the king is sure that the condemned deserves to die (because if the king kills someone who’s innocent, that’s when supernatural retribution kicks in…) and that therefore the justice system is honest.

So I think that it’s something that historically worked in favor of the Starks. As with the Justmans, personally identifying the Starks with justice created a strong bond of loyalty between subject and sovereign. And the Starks lived up to their own mythologizing: hence Ned going in person to Bear Island to chop off the head of Jorah Mormont, showing to everyone who sees or hears about his progress from Winterfell that the Stark will uphold the law against anyone, even the lords.

Maester Steven, this might be a bit morbid, but do you have any information on the annual amount of executions performed, as well as the number of practicing executioners, in your average medieval state? If you extrapolate this to Westeros, what fraction of those condemned to death chose the Black instead of the noose? Thank you.

Historical sources on that kind of thing are extremely sketchy and yield wildly varying estimates – 41 executions a year in Toulouse in the 14th century according to one source; 11-13 a year in Florence in the 14th century but 7-8 per year in the 15th versus 1-5 in Nuremberg, Lyon, or Frankfurt according to another; yet another source says that Avingon’s 15-30 executions per year was low by comparison to other medieval cities. That kind of variation isn’t unusual in premodern studies, btw; accurate statistics being very much a key element of modernity, both the child of and the result of the rise of the nation-state.

Continued after the cut, because this is going to get gruesome.

One thing that pretty much every scholar both before and after Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) agrees on is that frequency isn’t the real story here: for unlike executions after the Enlightenment, medieval executions were meant to be exemplary. As Foucault puts it:

“The public execution is understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the cermonies by which power is manifested…in punishment, there must always be a portion that belongs to the prince…it requires that the king take revenge for an affront to his very person…”

“The public execution…is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. it restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular…it deploys before all eyes an invincible force….the punishment is carried out in such a way as to give a spectacle not of measur,e but of imbalance and excess; in this liturgy of punihsment, there must be an emphatic affirmation of power and of its instrinsic superiority. And this superiority is not simply that of right, but of the physical strength of the sovereign beating down upon the body of his adversary and mastering it…it is the prince…who seizes upon the body of the condemned man and displays it marked, beaten, broken.”

For those reasons, medieval executions were public by design – the masses had to bear witness to the power of the monarch, hence why places of execution were public, prisoners were transported in the open air, and crowds were encouraged (although attempts were made to control them).

Moreover, deaths were also designed to be as humiliating and violent as possible: the condemned being stripped of clothes or hair or other badges of rank or being made to wear symbolic garments was often a part of the process; blurring the lines between torture and execution, the process was made as drawn-out and lingering as possible, and efforts were made to combine many different forms of “almost-deaths” as possible (medieval hangings or drownings for example, were often cut short of death); the human body would be opened up, divided, and mutilated, and as with the “almost-deaths,” great care was taken to try to keep the condemned alive and conscious for as much of the process as possible, so that they would see and be aware of their own obliteration. Some particularly skilled executioner/torturers took pride, for example, in being able to keep a man alive long enough to see his own heart burned in front of him.

In other words, terror was meant to do the work of frequency – if the medieval state with its extremely limited law enforcement capacity couldn’t demonstrate that there was a good chance that you would be caught and punished, it was going to do its level best to ensure that the fear of what would happen to you if you lost the lottery of crime was as intense as possible.

With regards to your Royal Justice System, would you first approach the paramount families of each region, expecting of them to sell the reforms to their vasssals, or instead go directly to the second tier families (Swann, Royce, etc), seeing as the Paramount houses already enjoyed significant liberties within their respective regions? Secondly, would these noble sons appointed by the crown need to undergo training at the citadel, sans oaths, to become justices for the crown? Thank you – RSAFan

Ultimately, what these royal judicial reforms are all about is trying to create direct connections between the individual subject and the monarch, cutting through the various layers of subinfeudation.

So going to the Great Houses to ask for their help is kind of counter-productive, because it at least implicitly establishes the precedent that the Great Houses have a say in what royal policies will be in their realm. Instead, you want to assert that the Great Houses have an obligation as Lords Paramount holding their titles from the King, to uphold the King’s Justice.

As for the younger sons, you’d probably want to encourage some formal training, whether that’s by being sent to the Citadel or having them be tutored by a maester. Depends on what’s more practical.

If you’re a King on the Iron Throne, you wanted to implement a royal justice system (and abolish the right of pit and gallows), what would be your course of action?

Well, the confusing thing is that, according to the WOIAF, there is both a royal justice system and the right of pit and gallows. So there’s a question about where the dividing line is between royal authority and the privileges of the nobility.

To quote an earlier post of mine:

“Well, let’s take Henry II’s judicial reforms as a jumping-off point: he’s perhaps best known for the Assizes of Clarendon (which in addition to asserting exclusive royal jurisdiction over criminal cases and royal jurisdiction over land disputes, also created some of the first grand juries) where he established the justices in eyre – six judges from Westminster who divided England between them and would travel in a circuit from county to county, covering their entire circuit every two years. He also established permanent judiciaries in the capitol which would eventually be known as the Court of Common Pleas and the Court of King’s Bench. And this was pretty much how things went from about 1166 to 1285-1360, where the system of local justices of the peace began to replace the justices in eyre in terms of who does the majority of judicial work.

So if we were talking about providing a judiciary for Westeros, I think you’d probably start with a system of itinerant justices who could cover a good deal of territory between them, and you’d probably stagger the numbers by the size of the territory involved: Iron Islands are pretty small geographically so you could get away with one, Stormlands and Crownlands could probably be covered by two justices each, Westerlands and Vale maybe three or four each given the difficulty of mountain travel, the North and Dorne would probably need 5-6 given the long distances but also the lower population density, and the Reach would probably need 10 or more given the size and high population.”

So the first step is to set up itinerant royal justices so that you have a mechanism by which royal judicial authority is transmitted to the provinces outside of the direct overlordship of the King, and to establish in law that these courts have jurisdiction over certain crimes.

Note that Henry II targeted criminal cases – murder always gets people het up, and given the tendency of private wars between nobles to end in murder, it’s a good excuse to get the lords under warrant – and land disputes, because in a society where land disputes are going to be the majority of legal matters, that makes the royal courts very attractive.

The second step is to establish firmly in law what is already precedent: that the king and his ministers have appelate jurisdiction over judicial disputes between lords, with an eye to extending this into appelate jurisdiction over the judicial decisions of lords. This can also be important for royal authority down the line, because it allows you to overrule local lords and gets the ordinary subject to see the king as an interposing power they can appeal to.

The third step, as suggested by the second, is to maneuver yourself into a situation where A. the king gets a veto over local judicial decisions through appelate jurisdiction over all judicial decisions, and B. local lords are held legally accountable for violating the royal justice code in either action or decision. Perverting the course of justice, embracery, obstruction of justice, misprision of felony, mis- and malfeasance in public office, compounding a felony – there is a long list of old crimes from the Common Law that could be used as a cudgel against lords trying to maintain their tradional privileges.