Tag: royal bureaucracy

There’s a lot of talk about people being given “offices and honors” but outside of the Small Council and Wardens, we don’t seem to see a whole lot. What do you imagine these “offices and honors” would be?

I don’t think we need to need to examine, exactly, as much as we need to extrapolate from what we know. 

Thanks to Littlefinger’s importance to the plot, we know quite a bit about the offices that fall under the office of the Master of Coin:

“The keepers of the keys were his, all four. The king’s counter and the king’s scales were men he named. The officers in charge of all three mints. Harbormasters, tax farmers, custom sergeants, wool factors, toll collectors, pursers, wine factors; nine of every ten belonged to Littlefinger.”

Now, as I’ve written, not all of these people are royal officers, but a lot of them are. So those are offices that can be handed out to people as royal favors, and I would imagine you’d see a similar level of staffing in the other offices of the Small Council:

  • the Master of Ships oversees dozens and dozens of captains, and probably hundreds of lesser ship’s officers, then you have the officers of royal navy yards, quartermasters who handle naval logistics, etc. 
  • the Master of Laws…sigh, so much is unknown here. But we know that at the least there are chief gaolers, chief undergaolers, undergaolers, the King’s Justice, and the officers and rank-and-file of the City Watch.
  • the Master of Whisperers must have handlers and clerks and the like as well as spies. 

While not exactly canon, we also have Westeros.org’s MUSH, which has a more well-developed list of the court offices of King’s Landing. 

We know that unified Westeros has a pretty sophisticated royal bureaucracy, given the medieval setting, but I was wondering if you had any guestimates about how many clerks we could be talking about in the capital proper. The Master of Coin needs staff big enough to keep track of the reports and accounts of the gods know how many harbormasters, tax farmers, customs sergeants, wool factors, toll collectors, pursers and wine factors spread over a country the size of a continent.

I would urge some caution as to how sophisticated the Iron Throne’s bureaucracy is. As I’ve written about before, Westeros’ royal government is wildly uneven, with a relatively active fiscal bureaucracy but an almost non-existent judicial bureaucracy.

It’s also not clear how developed the financial bureaucracy is, because there’s a weird cross-fertilization between Littlefinger’s own criminal empire and the royal government. For example, wool and wine “factors” are not civil servants, but private traders who buy and sell on commission. Likewise, tax farmers are generally a sign of weak financial bureaucracies, as they’re essentially privatized tax collectors. 

Notably, most of the legit civil servants we see are related to ports: harbormasters, customs sergants, etc. This suggests a bureaucracy largely focused on enforcing and collecting tariffs and excise taxes, which allows you to collect taxes with a much smaller workforce, since you only need to cover ports rather than trying to collect taxes from vast swathes of rural territory. If we go by medieval England, the New Customs Act of 1275 required that each port had to have two collectors and one controller – as Westeros has five cities and about twelve or so towns which are clearly ports, I would guess that you’re talking about 50-100 men across the kingdom.