After a large battle, who’s job was it to clear the field of bodies and what were done with the corpses?

A good, if morbid, question!

It depended, both on who won the battle, what terms were agreed to, and what your status was, and of course by what period of history we’re talking about.

(Key image here is actually in the center margin, ignore Harold for a second.)

If we take the Battle of Hastings, as an example, the field was not cleared by anyone in particular: the victorious Normans and their camp followers stripped the dead of their arms and armor and left the bodies for the crows, which was pretty common until the 12th century. If you came from the area you were fighting in, maybe your family would look for you and try to bury you. Maybe you’d get lucky and some monks might consider it the Christian thing to do. But chances are you were crowfood.

By contrast, by the time you get to the later period of the Hundred Years War or the Wars of the Roses, mass graves (often with people being buried in their armor) become the normal post-battle practice – according to some scholars due to the Black Death convincing everyone that manhandling corpses or leaving them in the open air was a Bad Idea. And of course, status played a big role here: one of the reason why anyone with status brought camp followers with them was for them to retrieve your body and bring it back home, or at the very least arrange for it to be buried at a nearby church with some ceremony, as opposed to being dumped in the pit.

As to who did this, well, this is one of the reasons why armies marched with camp followers: large labor force who could be pressed into doing the messy business, and you could get around paying them by letting them loot the dead.

When Wyman Manderly offered to build a fleet of warships for Robb, would those ships have been a Royal fleet where Manderly would have had influence on appointments, or would they have been a Manderly fleet, fighting for the Starks due to Wyman’s oaths of fealty? Did vassals need permission to build up their own military capabilities?

From the way that Wyman Manderly puts it…

Wyman Manderly had a great booming laugh. It was small wonder he could not sit a saddle; he looked as if he outweighed most horses. As windy as he was vast, he began by asking Winterfell to confirm the new customs officers he had appointed for White Harbor. The old ones had been holding back silver for King’s Landing rather than paying it over to the new King in the North. “King Robb needs his own coinage as well,” he declared, “and White Harbor is the very place to mint it.” He offered to take charge of the matter, as it please the king, and went from that to speak of how he had strengthened the port’s defenses, detailing the cost of every improvement.

In addition to a mint, Lord Manderly also proposed to build Robb a warfleet. “We have had no strength at sea for hundreds of years, since Brandon the Burner put the torch to his father’s ships. Grant me the gold and within the year I will float you sufficient galleys to take Dragonstone and King’s Landing both.”

…I would lean heavily towards the former. The customs officers serve the King in the North, and the king has the power to confirm them or not, but Wyman gets to appoint them (although he might have to pay for them as quid-pro-quo). Likewise, I’d assume that Wyman pays for the mint, gets to appoint the officials, Robb confirms them and keeps the right of seignorage, etc.

So with the fleet, I would imagine that, especially if Robb is paying for them with royal funds as Wyman suggests, it’s a royal navy based out of White Harbor. Which means that there will be lots of offices and sinecures in this new royal navy for Manderlys and Manderly vassals, as per usual subject to the king’s approval.

To answer your last question…it’s tricky. Under the normal rules of feudalism, military capabilities were limited by the terms of the feudal agreement – you get so much land, you agree to raise so many men, the number of men per unit of land is fairly standardized – and it was hard to alter that, because the vassals’ vassals know their rights in law and get pretty litigious about it.

It’s really more when you get to what’s known as “bastard feudalism” that things start to go off the rails. Under bastard feudalism, instead of relying on those feudal agreements to raise soldiers, you convert military service obligations into taxes paid in cash and then use the cash to put fighting men on the payroll, who wear your livery and are counted as members of your “affinity.”

So now you have a system where noblemen can raise and maintain private military forces above and beyond their feudal rights – and the only limit to how many of these guys you have on the payroll is your ability to make payroll on the first of the month.

That’s what leads to “over-mighty vassals” starting private wars and making themselves extremely difficult to govern by their liege lords, because they might have more military manpower than their overlords. And that’s what eventually brings down heavy regulation where vassals did indeed need legal permission to have any military power whatsoever.

Quick question. If a peasant managed to capture a knight or a lord in a battle, does he get the ransom or at least a share of it?

warsofasoiaf:

I’m having difficulty finding sources to answer your question, but I’d imagine it’d be difficult to tell which lucky peasant was the one who captured the noble in battle, since they’d probably be in formation. My guess is that it would depend upon the general of the capturing side. A peasant rebellion against the nobility probably is killing any nobles they capture, and a feudal levy might be so tightly overseen that the captain in charge takes control of the POW fairly quickly.

My instinct tells me that the captain would reward the peasants that captured the knight, perhaps with coin, and the general would collect the ransom, but again, my typical sources aren’t helping me here. @racefortheironthrone might know, though.

Thanks for the question, Overlord.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

Good question.

Part of the tricky thing here is the term “peasant,” which I guess means peasant levy? Because there were a lot of soldiers who were non-nobles but professionals and therefore of higher status – your men-at-arms, your mercenaries, your household guard, etc. – who might technically be “peasants” in the sense of not being nobles or clergy, but who had all or most of the equipment and training of a knight.

But for more specifics, let’s jump on the research train!

Turns out…yes, sort of. Culturally/ideologically it was a bit of a problem: Michael S. Drake in Problematics of Military Power points out how the common soldiers was a bit of a problem conceptually for the medieval mindset in general because they were commoners who did knightly stuff yet were too necessary to ban; likewise, common soldiers were not necessarily ransomable (there were some pretty ugly mass killings of captured peasant levies in the Hundred Years War, for example) and one couldn’t necessarily trust them to ransom a noble as opposed to rob his corpse.

But, while I’ve seen a few legal scholars say the law of war forbade peasants/common soldiers from ransoming prisoners, they seem pretty well out-argued by the folks who can point to historical accounts of just that thing happening, so I’m going to say that whatever the laws of war might have said, once you have thousands of professional killers roaming the battlefield with misericords with profit in mind, those laws are promptly ignored so that nobles could be safely ransomed rather than being brutally murdered for their rings…

So yes, common soldiers could ransom, and odds are non-levies would be ransomed (because soldiers learned to keep enough liquid capital to pay a ransom pretty quick) albeit on the cheap. What seems to have become the practice vis-a-vis the common soldier capturing a knight is that the ransom would be bought by a higher up for a percentage of its value. For example, at one point Henry I of England bought the King of France’s banner (which had been taken on the field by a common soldier) for 20 marks, so that he could have the gloating privileges.

Follow up to the Royal Fleet question: Would you characterize the 200+ ship royal fleet under Stannis as being exceptionally well-maintained and centralized then, or do you think that most of that is holdovers from the build-up following the War of the Usurper and Greyjoy’s Rebellion?

More the latter.

Consider that the Royal Fleet was destroyed in that big storm when Dany was born and Stannis had to build a new one. That highly unusual circumstance meant that, for once, the royal fleet would not be a patchwork but rather a unified cohort of ships with the same longevity, which would be running out around the start of the ASOIAF timeline. This provides unusual opportunities to maintain a steady number of ships through rationalized maintenance and repair schedules and other procedures.

Now, an open question is to what extent the Greyjoy Rebellion offered an opportunity to overhaul the Royal Fleet – after all, the ships would be about halfway through their normal lifespan and here you have a war where naval power is absolutely necessary; likewise, the voyage around Westeros to link up with the Redwynes, the subsequent Battle of Fair Isle, and the various amphibious landings that followed it would put a good deal of wear-and-tear on the fleet. So it’s possible that the Royal Fleet got a refresh before or after the Greyjoy Rebellion.

All of that Watsonian explanation aside, I think GRRM doesn’t want the headache of tracking ship counts over time – he’s trying to tell a story, and it’s not a Patrick O’Brien story where that kind of nautical pedantry sells.

I think you may have written a post about this, but I couldn’t find it. I always thought that the royal fleet’s administration was out-of-sync with the rest of the continent’s medieval political development in the sense that it is much more centralized and permanent than any land force. Is this correct?

Discussed here.

Navies were historically always more centralized and permanent than armies, because of the fiscal and administrative complexities of ship-building.

That being said, “more” is not the same thing as “entirely.” Medieval kings would “borrow” merchant ships to bulk up their navies, they sometimes required port-cities to maintain auxiliary navies, they hired mercenaries, etc. Likewise, while royal navies had more longevity administratively, the realities of irregular warfare and the lifetime of wodden ships meant that their size fluctuated drastically – so technically it would be a series of fleets rather than a permanent fleet.

What made the halberd so useful?

Well, let’s look at the head of a halberd:

It’s got a long stabby bit so that you can use it like a pike, it’s got a hook on the back so that you can use it like a bill to pull a cavalryman off his horse and onto the ground where you can stab him more easily, and it’s got an axe-blade to chop at the other person’s pole.

I think the best explanation for why the halberd was so useful is that it was the Swiss army knife of polearms, a category of weapon that has a pronounced tendency to hybridization already.

How common we’re war hammers and axes in the Middle Ages? I feel they’re over represented in fantasy

Answered here.

Warhammers and axes weren’t uncommon, especially during the Late Middle Ages once armor got good enough that you couldn’t easily cut through it with a sword. In that situation, a warhammer or axe were really good at concentrating force to a point, hopefully smashing through their armor, but if not definitely knocking them down so that you could put one of these through a weak point:

That’s not to say that people stopped using swords – there’s a whole bunch of rather clever folks who’ve gone back to arming manuals to rediscover how people used half-swording and other techniques to deal with opponents in plate – but those techniques were rather advanced and involved. It’s a lot simpler and easier to grab an axe or a hammer and smack someone in the head until they fall down.

Do you think half-swording is used in Westeros?

Half-swording is the practice of gripping the blade half-way down in order to deliver a more accurate and powerful thrusting attack or to use the sword as a club, as seen below:

Given the prominence of plate armor in Westerosi warfare (46 results for plate armor across ASOIAF), I would expect half-swording techniques would develop in order to deal with opponents in full plate.

Incidentally, GRRM, if you wanted a better way to depict the Bronn/Vardis Egan fight, you should have gone with half-swording rather than the old canard about the weight of plate armor…

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.

How did the Danes & Saxons manage to integrate a two handed long weapon like Dane/English Longaxe with the shield wall formation ? Logically when two densely packed shieldwalls meet in battle, stabbing/thrusting/jabbing attacks & weapons like short swords or spears should predominate. A two handed long hafted weapon that requires a bit of swing space seems to be rather unfeasible in the jostling melee, not to mention it leaves the wielder unshielded & thus, open to aforementioned stabs/jabs.

Great question!

The two-handed longaxe was the province of the housecarls, professional warriors who served in the household guard of thanes and kings alike. Thus, they weren’t the most common weapon on the battlefield, but rather the sign and tool of office of an elite even within the warrior caste::

In combat, the axe was continuously (and unpredictably) swung to create a deadly zone around the axeman, and when that axe hit, it could easily hit with enough force to split a shield open or knock a man onto his back or cut through a spear or knock a sword out of someone’s hand – which made the thrusting/jabbing combat you’re talking about an extremely dicey proposition if the axeman was fast enough to avoid getting stuck.

Thus, the housecarls seemed to function in two ways: first, on the offensive, they would open up holes in the enemy shield-wall for other soldiers to exploit. Remember, the longaxe’s haft could be as long as six feet, making it a forerunner of the polearm, which gave the user a good deal of reach into the enemy line, and the axe’s blade was bearded, allowing the wielder to hook over the lip of shields and drag them down, opening up the shield wall:

On the defensive, the housecarl was there to disrupt the enemy shield-wall, either by opening up holes in their defense or by creating zones that soldiers naturally shied away from.

In either case, the housecarls seemed to function as skirmishers, stepping in front of the shield-wall to contest the area in between. When we look at the Bayeux Tapestry, for example, we see images of housecarls wielding only the longaxe standing between a Saxon shield-wall and the oncoming Normans (which shows you how insanely brave these guys were):