How do Lords Paramount of their Region and the King collect taxes? In Dragons, Stags, and Copper Stars? In items like food or cloth or etc.? Do the Stormlands receive less taxes because they have the Marcher Lords and those guys historically didn’t have to give taxes to their liege I think?

Probably a mix of in cash and in kind, although you can always sell the in-kind stuff if you need the readies and if you don’t need the goods.

That’s a very astute observation! My answer is, yes and no. Keep in mind, the feudal contracts of the marcher lords would have been written when the Storm Kings were their monarchs, so they wouldn’t have intermediate liege lords, but would owe their fealty to Storm’s End. That wouldn’t change when Aegon came around, so the Baratheons aren’t getting cut out completely. What is the case is that the Marcher Lords (and keep in mind, there are Marcher Lords in the Reach as well) wouldn’t pay as much as other lords, since they get to keep “feudal due, aid, grant, and relief" from their own vassals to pay for their castles out of their own pockets.

How much were various medieval taxes like the scutage on a knights fee? Like in terms of percentages (or were taxes fixed amounts not percentages?)?

Some taxes were “fixed” by tradition – so for example, at various times scutage was one mark (2/3 of a pound), one pound, or two marks. King John got himself into trouble by demanding first two and then three marks. On the other hand, starting in 1166, there was a tax on moveable property and income which was known as the “tenth” that was a percentage tax (10%, natch).

Generally speaking, over time, there was a movement by monarchs away from fixed taxes – which didn’t keep up with inflation or economic growth – and towards percentage taxes, which did.

Thank you for the answer to my question on strengthening the crownlands but it’s not really what I was asking. To clarify I’m wondering why the King didn’t strengthen his military might by taking lords sworn to the different Lords Paramount and have them swear fealty directly to him. For example, Harrenhal has been granted to numerous people by numerous kings. Why did he not keep their vassalage instead of transferring it to the Riverlands?

Ah, I see.

I think what you’re running up against here is that feudal politics don’t work like nation-state politics.

Sure, the King could expand the Crownlands vis-a-vis the other kingdoms (he already did with Massey’s Hook and the southern Crownlands across the Blackwater), but…unless he’s going to rule them himself (and that’s not easy to do – you need bureaucrats to manage your manors, you need bureaucrats to keep records, you need bureaucrats to pay the taxes, you need soldiers to make sure people don’t rob your tax collectors, etc.), he still has to give that land to someone in exchange for their fealty. Sure, you could get rid of one layer of subinfeudation, but that’s a huge political effort for not really that big of a change.

Moreover, and this is the real kicker, a king is supposed to be open-handed, a ring-giver. Indeed, giving stuff away is the primary way you get armed men to fight for you in a context where you don’t have the state capacity for a standing army. So a king who gets a reputation as miserly or greedy is going to find themselves lacking in armed men to fight for them no matter how much land they control.

That’s the catch-22 of feudal politics: you have to give away the thing that people want from you to get them to do stuff for you, but the more you give away, the harder it is to get them to keep doing stuff. And historically, while kings did eventually grab more and more land for themselves (hence the coalescing of nation-states from nuclei like the

Île-de-France), the main route that kings used to increase their power was to convert feudal military service into taxes paid in cash (the so-called scutage) that would allow them to hire mercenaries and other professional soldiers, gradually building up the state capacity so that they no longer had to rely on the old way.

Thanks for the prompt answer to the Hasty question! Following up on land grants, why didn’t medieval monarchs set aside some land which could be allotted to commoner settler-soldiers like the Kleuroch/Katoikoi of the Hellenistic era ? Wouldn’t this create a semi-professional army directly at the beck & call of the throne & not beholden to vassals & sub-vassals of the throne? Or were there any medieval rulers who did do something like this?

Well, they did. The Roman Empire was doing this from the time of Diocletian and Constantine and kept it up for the better part of the Byzantine Empire. Inititally, a bit part of it had to do with the empire having trouble paying the army in coin, so instead it started paying it in kind, and then in land. Whether we call it the limitanei or the themes, it’s a pretty similar system.

Likewise, the Anglo-Saxons established the fyrd. Under this system, all freemen had to serve in the fyrd or risk a fine or confiscation fo their land. The problems with this kind of system are twofold: first of all, semi-professionals don’t do very well against professionals, due to the greater experience, better equipment, and superior readiness of the latter. Second, by putting people on the land, they naturally tend to spend their time working the land and don’t want to go off and fight for extended periods, because that would be bad for the harvest. In other words, it had the classic problem that these armies took too long to summon and didn’t want to serve for very long.

And the solution was to use professional soldiers instead and fund them through taxation. Hence, Alfred transformed the fyrd from a slow militia that couldn’t respond effectively to lightning-quick Viking raids into something very different: instead, lords and towns were taxed on the basis of how many hides of land they controlled. Every five hides were to pay for one fully armed soldier in the king’s service (the select-fyrd, who were fully armed and armored mounted infantry who could respond to raids quickly) and provide one man to do garrison duty (the general-fyrd) in the new fortified towns known as burhs (from which the word borough and burgh derive). Now rather than having to assemble and try to chase down Viking raiders, all the settler had to do was man the walls of a fort and hold out until the professional soldier could come and chase off the Vikingers.

We can see the same phenomena if we look backward and forward. The Byzantines first started to hire mercenaries to supplement their armies, because the settler-soldiers weren’t that good, and the professional Kataphraktoi required a lot of time and money to train and equip, so it was easier to hire an army for as long as you needed it rather than keeping one on the payroll. Likewise, when the Plantagenet kings of England got tired of their slow-to-assemble, don’t-want-to-fight feudal armies, they shifted over to charging their subjects a scutage tax to get out of their military service and used the cash to hire professional soldiers instead.