GRRM isn’t hugely specific about feudal incidents – we don’t hear about feudal aid (money to pay for the lord’s ransom, to knight his oldest son, or to provide a dowry for his oldest daughter), relief (payment from the heir of a tenant to take up the tenantcy), primer seisen (payment of a year’s profits before relief can be paid by the heir), fines on alienation (a payment when a tenancy changes hands), escheats (reversion of a tenant’s land if they die without heir or are convicted of a felony), wardship (the right to receive the profits of a tenancy while the heir is underage), or the like.
As far as services go, we know from how Robb’s armies form and how Ser Eustace raises his meager forces that there is some obligation to provide military service for a given time.
On the other hand, we have to keep in mind that these aren’t the only sources of income for a lord from their tenants. You also have feudal taxation and whatever share of that a lord got to keep from what they sent on to the king (for example, the Anglo-Saxon Earls usually got to keep “the third penny” from the taxes they assessed on behalf of the king), feudal rents (which were usually set by custom and tradition), and income from their own lands (which also brings up the tricky issue of feudal labor obligations vs. work done by paid laborers).
So there’s a lot of reasons to have tenants beyond military service.
Notably the Faith seems to have relatively little political authority even where it has physical structures – the Hightowers rule the land on which the Starry Sept is located, and the Kings of Westeros rule the land on which the Great Sept of Baelor stands, but we can see this even on a more modest level. Despite the fact that Stoney Sept’s economy is probably based around it being a religious center, the septons don’t rule the town – rather, there’s a knight of Stoney Sept. This suggests that the Faith’s landholding hasn’t extended to lordship, which is an important point.
On the other hand, if we look at the septries we encounter in the series, they do have property, both real estate and otherwise: the Quiet Isle has “terraced fields, with fishponds down below and a windmill above…sheep grazing on the hillside,” and has orchards and vineyards besides; the sept where the Brotherhood Without Banners corners Septon Utt was quite large: “Before the war we were four-and-forty, and this was a prosperous place. We had a dozen milk cows and a bull, a hundred beehives, a vineyard and an apple arbor.” And given this is a feudal society, there has to be some sort of formalized relationship that underpins it – but whether that tenure is freehold or something else, we don’t know.
Finally, there is a cryptic comment in WOIAF that “many lords complained of unscrupulous septries and septons making free with the wealth and property of their neighbors and those they preached to,” prior to the Reconciliation of Jaehaerys. So it may well be that the Revolt of the Faithful and the Reconciliation severely curbed the position of the Faith compared to the medieval Catholic Church.
I mean, in the Westerosi context, there’s still quite a bit of violence and other causes that deals with younger sons – I mean, technically there hasn’t been a fighting war in any of the Dunk & Egg stories, but for all their lighter tone, they have a pretty high body count – tourney deaths, plagues, “pissing contests” between local lords, bandits, stupid coup attempts, etc.
But in terms of how the social order would react, it’s a bit tricky because an extended period of peace probably also means an extended period of prosperity as well, if only because the opposite tends to intensify resource conflicts and thus lead to war. And prosperity is a great social lubricant.
When the harvests are good, trade is up, and people have cash on hand and good terms of credit, it’s easier for the social order to deal with surplus kids – get them dowers/dowries to smooth the way for a marriage that wouldn’t have made fiscal sense otherwise, give them jobs around the castle or pay a neighbor to take them off your hands or send them to court, or even set them up as a landed knight or cadet branch if you’re particularly rolling in it. And yes, I imagine you’d see quite an uptick on younger sons and daughters getting sent off to septries and motherhouses with generous donations, as well as an increase in acolytes and novices sent to the Citadel.
There are many ways a noble family can either fall into genteel poverty or experience downward social mobility into the merchant class or even below (just look at the Heddles), but most of them come down to the relationship between rent, income, and debt:
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.” (Dickens)
Almost by definition, the major source of income of a noble family is rent income from their lands, and rents were overwhelmingly set by custom and tradition. This meant that most nobles were living on something like a fixed income, which meant they were very vulnerable to changes in prices. Crop failures, rebellious peasants demanding wage increases, competition from foreign countries, all of these things could seriously negatively affect the bottom line.
This could be especially problematic, because nobles were supposed to A. live an ostentatious lifestyle (hunting, hawking, entertainment, and fancy clothes cost a lot), and B. not care about money like some grubby bourgeoisie. A combination of these two social expectations means that a lot of nobles went into debt to keep up with their social peers, and since land was the only collateral they had…you can see where this goes.
So you get a gradual process by which trying to keep up with one’s station and the Joneses lands you in debt, the debt eventually gets larger than your ability to pay, you end up losing bits of your land to satisfy your creditors, that reduces your income and exacerbates the problem, and so on…
As we might expect from a society which is more than 90% agricultural in its economy, the major benefit was:
Joking aside, marriages were a key method of acquiring, expanding, and rationalizing estates, from the lowliest peasant who had to get permission to marry to kings and queens. After all, you didn’t have a free market in land so marriage was one of the few times in which you could actually transfer property, and since nobles couldn’t work for a living, marrying well was one of the few things they could do to become economically self-sufficient.
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?
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.
The Daynes are fairly prominent – they’re a principal house, they have that marriage link to Nymeria, etc. But the Jordaynes, Santagars, Allyrions, Tolands, Yronwoods, Wyls, and Fowlers are also principal houses and many of them have more useful economic advantages: the Tor and Ghost Hill sit on the Sea of Dorne which gives them a closer shot to the Narrow Sea trade, Godsgrace and Vaith sit on rivers that give them some of the rare arable land in Dorne and access to the Narrow Sea, the Fowlers sit on top of the caravan route through the Prince’s Pass, etc.
And as for the Daynes, it’s unlikely that there is much overland trade between Starfall and Oldtown, because that trade wouldn’t get much further than Starfall due to having to go over the Red Mountains to get to the rest of Dorne, as opposed to the easier route through the Prince’s Pass. Likewise, the high value export commodities probably aren’t produced in the arid Red Mountains – it’s far more likely that production takes place more in eastern Dorne.
anonymous asked: How feasible would a grain dole be in westeros? Could you have a Roman style aystem at least for a major city like King’s Landing, sort of as a primitive social safety net? Where/how could you develop this? Thanks!! Excellent question! Judging from the WOIAF, we do have some crude systems of regional redistribution of grain in times of crisis, as seen by the fact that Aegon V…
Judging from the WOIAF, we do have some crude systems of regional redistribution of grain in times of crisis, as seen by the fact that Aegon V sent grain up to the North during a particularly bad winter. I would argue that the North’s intense attachment to guest right (and its less frequently mentioned tradition of self-euthanasia during long winters) has a lot to do with a sort of crude welfare state of seeking food and shelter at Winterfell. (We also see the Starks exercising very close control over food reserves, for example)
But in terms of a regular grain dole, we actually have an example from Westerosi history:
“Ultimately, some have wondered if the king’s near death in Dorne did not affect his mind in some way, for as the years of his reign progressed, his decisions grew ever more zealous and erratic. Though the smallfolk loved him—he emptied the treasury regularly to fund his charitable acts, including the year when he donated a loaf of bread daily to every man and woman in the city—the lords of the realm were beginning to grow uneasy.” e
Ultimately, some have wondered if the king’s near death in Dorne did not affect his mind in some way, for as the years of his reign progressed, his decisions grew ever more zealous and erratic. Though the smallfolk loved him—he emptied the treasury regularly to fund his charitable acts, including the year when he donated a loaf of bread daily to every man and woman in the city—the lords of the realm were beginning to grow uneasy.
So Baelor the Blessed supposedly bankrupted the monarchy by (among other things) providing a bread dole for the population of King’s Landing. Now, according to AGOT, a tart costs around three coppers, which I’ve been using as a pre-war price for a loaf of bread. That would suggest that it would cost around 127 dragons a day to buy everyone in King’s Landing a loaf of bread, or 46,355 gold a year.
At that rate, a grain dole for the whole of Westeros would cost 3.7 million gold a year, or 0.7% of GDI, or 7% of total tax revenue. This seems surprisingly affordable, although based on my old estimates of royal income, it would bankrupt the monarchy.
However, you have to keep two things in mind: first, it’s all based on the estimate of how much bread costs. If bread costs more than 3 coppers a loaf as I had originally estimated, the price skyrockets. Second, I could be quite wrong about GDI and thus tax revenue.
So let me see if I can approach it from another angle. I’ve estimated that the average yearly income is between 3-5 gold. During the Ancien Regime, the average worker spent about half their income on bread, although this could spike as high as 88% during crop failures. (That suggests that the average Westerosi spends 48 coppers (or ~1 silver) to 80 coppers (or 1.5 silver) a day on bread.)
In turn, this would suggest that a grain dole would cost 60 to 100 million dragons a year. That’s 11.4 to 19% of GDI, or 114% to 190% of total tax revenue.
So I’m going to go out on a limb and say that either three coppers is the wrong price for a loaf of bread, or the smallfolk of Westeros eat 16 tarts a day, which seems unhealthy.
Excellent question! My answer will come in two parts, relating to different ways to think about money.
The first has to do with the relationship of money to land in a feudal society. As I explained with regards to Littlefinger:
If you’re asking why he doesn’t have more land (other than the lands of Harrenhal, which are quite extensive if slightly cursed), it’s that Westeros doesn’t have a free market in land, wherein land becomes a fungible commodity that can be bought and sold at will and abstracted into derivatives and futures, etc.
Land in Westeros is distributed through feudal relationships that are traditional and customary in nature – fiefdoms are hereditary, taxation and rent levels are fixed, and tenancies are more likely to involve feudal obligations than pure cash rents.
Karl Polayni, in his masterwork Great Transformation, identified the transition from feudalism to capitalism as the creation of a free market in land, labor, and money where none had existed before: the feudal contracts that stretched from the king on high all the way down to the peasant on the manor had to be destroyed so that land could be bought and sold as a commodity; serfdom had to be abolished and the commons enclosed to first free the peasants from the land they were bound to and then drive them into the factories; and usury laws that had hampered lending money for profit needed to be abolished to allow the banking industry to flourish.
This hasn’t yet happened in Westeros, for the most part. The only mention that land can be bought comes from the extended Westerlands chapter, where at Ellyn Reyne’s “urging, Lord Tarbeck expanded his domain by buying the lands of the lesser lords and landed knights about him… and taking by force the holdings of those who refused to sell.” The canonicity of this event being in question, nevertheless the context suggests extra-legality, with cash payment being used to mask violent seizure.
So even if they wanted to, no I don’t think the Lannisters could buy Westeros. I’d also point out that it would never occur to them to do so; as I’ve said before, the Lannisters are aristocrats and have an aristocrat’s conception of money rather than a merchant’s conception of money. Gold becomes land by buying swords to take it, not by going to a market like some Pentoshi cheesemonger.
The second has to do with inflation, as @joannalannister suggested. As I wrote here, the size of the Westerosi economy itself acts as a limiter on House Lannister’s ability to spend its gold:
The danger of dumping 18 billion gold into the Westerosi economy is that you’d generate a wave of hyper-inflation so bad that you’d make the SpanishPrice Revolution look like a mere stock market hiccup. While in the long run providing the liquidity necessary for Westeros-and indeed even Planetos-wide economic development, the short-term implications would be the destruction of the Westerlands economy, as skyrocketing inflation would destroy the value of our reserves, cause our goods to be non-competitive, and cause the price of food to soar faster than wages, leading to massive socio-economic conflict.
When the Kingdom of Spain conquered Mexico and Peru in the late 15th-early 16th centuries, they got their hands on the great silver mines of Zacatecas and Potosí, which produced $2.7 trillion in 2015 dollars. This vast tidal wave of precious metals, torn out of the ground by slaves, had the paradoxical effect of destroying Spain’s economy with inflation. Inflation meant that it was far cheaper to import raw materials and manufactured goods into Spain, rather than produce them at home, so manufacturing and even farming went into decline. Rather than invest in agriculture or commerce, the wealthy put their money into government debt instead so as to be repaid in silver.
And of course, the irony of all of this is that the Crown’s vast treasure hoard by its very vastness destroyed its value. Drunk on their own precious metals, the Kings of Spain tried to conquer all of Europe for Catholicism and the House of Hapsburg, and went bankrupt in the process. As I discuss here:
@racefortheironthrone estimated that Westeros has an annual GDI of 525 million gold, while I think the Lannisters have an annual income of approximately 6 million gold. The Lannisters’ annual income is a little more than 1% of Westerosi GDI per year. (For comparison, Rockefeller’s entire net worth – not his annual income, but his entire fortune – was 1.5%-2% of GDP.)
Phillip II of Spain, despite all the gold and
silver of Mexico and Peru, went bankrupt four times (1557, 1560, 1575, and 1596),
and historians suggest that his *personal* debts were equal to 60% of Spain’s
GDP at the time..
It got so bad that during the Dutch Revolt, which lasted from 1568-1648 (if you want to know where all the money was going…), that Phillip II had to get his financing and supplies from the Dutch because no one else would lend him money to pay for his war against the Dutch. The Dutch bankers agreed to finance him at exorbitant rates of interest, and then turned around and used his own money to support the rebellion against the Spanish.
So the Lannisters have to tread lightly when it comes to their gold…
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