Without dragons, the Targaryens were, on paper, one of the weaker of the Great Houses, relying more on their established seat at the head of the table, which gave them the ability to assemble coalitions against rivals & enemies, than beating them solely on their own muscle. Do you think this is the same dynamic on a lesser scale within the various realms, with Lords Paramount having less incomes & fewer levies than some vassals, using the advantages of Paramount status to maintain supremacy?

To a certain extent, that is ultimately the story of how feudalism dismantled the medieval state post-Charlesmagne, and why kings in many different kingdoms from the High Middle Ages onwards spent so much of their time trying to slowly expand their power vis-a-vis their overmighty vassals. However, it’s not necessarily true that the pattern repeats all the way down – the reason why certain vassals got overmighty is that a lot of lords were good at accumulating as much land as possible while distributing as little as they could get away with while keeping their followers in-hand.

Indeed, whether king or duke or count or baron, there are two basic rules to medieval politics that follow from the above: first, gain land/power for yourself to remain primus inter pares (while avoiding the level of monopolizing greed that might provoke rebellion), second, divide and rule among your subordinates so that you don’t ever have to fight them all at once and can thus overawe any one rebel vassal.

And we have some local examples of that: as the Reynes and Tarbecks found out, they did not have more income and more levies than the Lannisters…

1/3 How on earth do the titles and styles of the Westeros nobility work? I am so confused, and part of that is probably because I know a lot about how titles and styles work in the British peerage (where Lady Catelyn and Lady Stark signify VERY different things). But I can’t make sense of it in AOIAF/GOT Sometimes people are called Lord first name, sometimes Lord last name, sometimes Lord first name last name. Children seem to be addressed by the same title as their parents (Lord and Lady).

2/3 And people of vastly different ranks seem to have the same title (Ned might be Hand of the King, Warden of the North, and so on, but he and Littlefinger and someone like Roose Bolton or Walder Frey, who are of different ranks and come from different places are all Lord of _blank_). The bastard of minor lord (albeit one with a high office) is addressed as Lady Alayne, but the bastard of the Warden of North is mockingly called Lord Snow.

3/3 And then you have Ser, and presumably some people who are called Lord also are knights, so how does that work? Titles seem to follow people to the Wall, but no to the Citadel or the Seven. I know sometimes people look to the historical time periods Westeros is based on for this kind of thing, but even that gets me at a loss, like Westeros clearly has the title of Princess which is a much later term. I just can’t figure it out. What am I missing?

Oh man, titles are such a tricky subject.

The thing to start with is that GRRM deliberately went with a simpler form of noble titles because he didn’t want to have to keep track of which outranked or had precedence over the other, although this creates some difficulties.

The way GRRM seems to use it, Lady Catelyn vs. Lady Stark is about familiarity and formality. Lady Catelyn suggests you know the person and are being familiar with them, Lady Stark suggests you don’t know them well and are being formal, Lady Catelyn Stark suggests that plus you’re being very formal and/or precise.
Ranks tend to be indicated by additional titles: Lord Paramount of X, Warden of X, Lord of X Castle, etc.

As for children, this to me is similar to how smallfolk members of the Small Council are called Lords out of courtesy as opposed to by right.
Lord Snow is an insult by way of exaggerated courtesy.

In pretty much all cases, you address someone by their highest rank, so a lord who is also a knight (and most sothron lords would have been knighted at some point) is called Lord. (There’s a bit of confusion over the Darrys, but this may be a case of Early Installment Weirdness)

As for the Night’s Watch, the title of “Ser” definitely carries over, because the oath requires you to abjure holding land. Don’t think there are cases of any Lord who isn’t a Lord Commander, tho.
As for the Citadel, maesters swear “sacred vows, to hold no lands or lordships.” I don’t know of any case of a knight becoming a maester, but presumably the same principle that applies to the Night’s Watch applies to them. OTOH, Aemon stopped becoming a Prince after he became a Maester although it’s possible that A. at the point he did that he was a “Prince of” something, which would indicate lordship or B. that as Aemon saw it, he stopped being a Prince when he ceased to be a Targaryen, since maesters give up their family names, which the Night’s Watch doesn’t.
We don’t know the rules for the Seven, although presumably it’s the same as the Citadel.

Pre-Targaryen monarchies outside of Dorne do not seem to have used the style of prince or princess, as we see with Argilac’s daughter being referred to as “Lady Argella” and not “Princess Argella.” The Targaryens started using the style somewhat belatedly, because for some reason people started using the Dornish style.

@goodqueenaly, any thoughts?

Anguy won 10 000 golden dragons on the Hand’s tourney with his archery skills. If he had more modern-day senses and long-term thinking about his life (no offense, Anguy), then what could a man of the smallfolk have done with this amount of money to improve his life in the long term? What are the options?

Great question!

I would say that his best bet for upward social mobility is to find an heiress of a poor noble family and marry his way into a title (either that of a landed knight or a petty lord) – the fact that he has a lot of cash on hand means that he can skip a lot of the steps along the way that people in medieval societies attempted to climb the social ladder. It would probably also help if he were to serve with distinction in war and get himself knighted* to belt-and-braces his drive for noble status, and given his superlative skills as an archer that wouldn’t be hard.

* hell, he managed this in OTL (in a fashion) despite having wasted his money. If Ser Anguy survives the BWB, there’s no reason he couldn’t have a decent career as a sworn sword or household knight (and even a tourney knight, if he can find enough tourneys offering archery prizes).

Next best, he could marry into a merchant family. This would advance him up to the status of burgher, and I would imagine there would be a lot more merchant families who’d be quite happy with such a large injection of capital and who’d be much less snobbish about his background than the minor nobility would be. My hesitation here is that, while Anguy is a perfectly nice young man, he doesn’t seem to have much of a head for or experience in business. Might be happy as head of security, maybe.

Another possibility is creating a sellsword company; he certainly has the up-front liquid capital to hire several hundred skilled archers and sell their services. Again, I don’t know necessarily that Anguy has the necessary head for military command or small business management, and mercenary work has all of the risk of social mobility through military service with less of the possibility of advancing into the nobility. Also, it would probably mean spending a lot of time in Essos, and Anguy might not like living abroad.

Would Garth “the Gross” Tyrell’s position as Lord Seneschal of Highgarden be as Mace’s treasurer given his consideration as Master of Coin, or more general administrator as a Hand equivalent, or something else?

Garth Tyrell is listed as the Lord Seneschal in the appendix. I was curious as to what exactly that means. And why is house Tyrell the only ones mentioned as having a Lord Seneschal?

Since I got a couple different asks on this subject, I thought I might as well tackle it in one place, as apparently I haven’t before.

The answer is that the text isn’t very clear about what the office entails. Nor does history eludicate matters, because the term can mean a number of different things:

Seneschal can mean “steward” (in the sense of official in charge of administration of the household) although that term doesn’t necessarily mean a high-ranking member of the servant class.
Second, “seneschal” was also an officer of a French (or more specifically Norman and Languedoc) administrative unit known as a seneschalty: seneschals governed the unit on behalf of the king but also acted as a chief justice or bailiff.

My guess, without much to base it off of, is that when the Tyrells replaced the Gardeners as Lords of Highgarden, they abolished the office of High Steward of Highgarden so as to prevent any comparisons being made between the incumbents and their predecessors. However, the work still needed to be done, so they created a new title for the old office so that they could use it as a cushy job for junior male relations.

As to why the Tyrells are the only ones, I think it’s because everyone else sticks with just stewards and doesn’t see a need to give servants ideas by giving them lofty titles.

Barbey Dustin says that she contributed as few of her men to the Stark host as possible. Would the Starks not be aware of how many men she can raise, and questioned this disloyalty?

Well, this gets us to the twisty nature of the feudal contract. As bilaterally-negotiated documents, feudal contracts could vary dramatically in terms of what kind of service was negotiated – how many knight’s fees your land was valued at, how many days’ service you were required to provide, how many men you had to bring, etc.

What this could often result is that there was a difference between the minimum a lord was required to kick in and the maximum they could actually bring to the table, and how many men actually showed up would depend on politics. If the king is popular and/or powerful, if the war is going well and there’s a good chance of winning loot/land, you bring extra men above your minimum requirement so as to gain royal favor. If the king is unpopular and/or weak, if the war is going badly and the risk/reward on participation is bad, you send as few as you can get away with.

We see this very early on in the War of Five Kings with Bran VI of AGOT: the lords who show up in full force to Winterfell are looking to gain something in return, whether it’s a military command, or Robb’s hand in marriage, or for him to give them some land or some use-rights, or to side with them in a dispute or what. Barbrey Dustin is making much the same political calculation, but in reverse: what’s the least amount of men she can get away with sending without incurring a felony?

i have a feudalism question. Youve said before that some lands belong to kings directly whereas others are owned by other nobles who pay tribute in taxes/military service to the king. But doesnt technically the whole realm belong to the king? Isn’t that the whole “sovereign ruler” schtick ?

It’s kind of complicated. The thing is that, in feudalism, almost no one actually owns anything outright in the sense that we think about it; rather property is distributed in various leases and use-rights and tenancies, all the way up and all the way down

And while in our 21st century capitalist mindset leases, use-rights, and tenancies sound like precarious second-class statuses that fall fall short of true ownership, that wasn’t the case in medieval societies. These statuses were backed up by tradition, law, and the willingness of very touchy mounted soldiers to go to war to uphold them against infringement from on high. Thus, even if something was de jure “owned” by the king, once noblemen felt that they had a right to inherit the fiefdom, de facto it became owned by those noblemen (save in the case of felony).

Is there a difference between freeriders and sellswords, or it more a case of all freeriders are sellswords, but not all sellswords are freeriders?

I thought I had answered this earlier, but searching through my archives and through google (because Tumblr’s search function is terrible) failed me, so I might as well do it now.

They are actually two distinct occupations, as explained by GRRM in one of his “So Spake Martin” Q+As:

“Sellswords are mercenaries. They may or may not be mounted, but whether ahorse or afoot they fight for wages. Most tend to be experienced professional soldiers. You don’t have a lot of green young sellswords – some, sure, but not many. It’s a profession a man tends to cho[o]se after he’s tasted a few battles and learned that he’s good at fighting….

Freeriders… well, that term is both broader and narrower. Narrower in that it excludes foot soldiers. You need a horse to be a freerider. Otherwise broader.

Freeriders are mounted fighters who are not part of a lord’s retinue or feudal levy. Some are veterans, sure, but also green and untrained recruits, farm boys on ploughhorses, men dispossessed by the fighting, a very mixed bag. They don’t as a rule collect wages. Some fight for plunder, of course. Other to perhaps to impress a lord or a knight, in hopes of being taken permanently into his service. For many it is simply a means to survive. If the war sweeps over your village, your house is burned, and your crops stolen or destroyed, you can hide in the ruins and starve, flee to the nearest city for refuge, take to the woods as an outlaw (the ones who do that are oft called “broken men”)… or you can saddle your horse, if you’re lucky enough to have one, and join one army or the other. If you do, you’re a freerider. Being part of an army at least gives you a better chance of being fed.

There are all sorts of freeriders, ranging from wandering adventurers who are virtually hedge knights (lacking only the knighthood) to the aforementioned farm boys on drays. Most are used as scouts, outriders, foragers, and light cavalry.

Obviously, there is some overlap between the two terms. A mounted man who fights for pay could be called either a freerider or a sellsword.

Both terms carry a certain stigma in Westeros. Sellswords are said to have no loyalty, and freeriders no discipline.”

So the distinction is that a mercenary is a professional soldier who fights for wages, whereas a freerider is an amateur volunteer who fights primarily for room and board with maybe a chance of plunder or getting a permanent job.

The social status of the freerider is interesting, because horses are quite expensive, and even a plowhorse is an indicator that a peasant family is doing well for itself and is probably among the upper ranks of the peasantry. Moreover, learning to ride and fight from horseback is not a simple endeavor and requires substantial training and spare time to do the training in.

Given this, it’s kind of interesting that someone would choose the economically precarious lot of the freerider. My guess is that you get freeriders through a couple different social processes:

Additional recruitment beyond the feudal levy. While most medieval wars were fought by professional soldiers, with traditional feudal levies being gradually phased-out, the longer and more intense a conflict became, the more you turn to additional sources of manpower and better-off peasants who have their own horses are an easy way to find additional cavalry.
“War is a young man’s game.” Another part of what might be going on is the trickle-down effect of a society and culture dominated by a warrior caste who conflate the virtues of masculinity and soldiering. Thus, we see situations like that of Rolly Duckfield or Dunk, young peasant men who dream of becoming knights even if their birth should rule it out might well be swept up in the romance of war and ride off to chase their dreams in the service of their lord, who’s unlikely to turn down “free” military labor.
Social mobility through any means necessary. Both historically, and in Westeros, working for the nobility was a good path to social mobility. Not only was pay, benefits, and job security pretty good, but because physical proximity is the coin of medieval politics, even low-level flunkies have a chance to raise in status. They’re probably nto going to become knights or lords, but they might well become sheriffs, which in turn might allow them to become an esquire and get their family officially into the lowest ranks of the nobility. So it may well be that, despite the lack of pay and the risk of death, peasant boys might think that the chance of getting into a lord’s service is worth it.

At what age would people in ASOIAF not try and marry widows like Donella Hornwood? She wasn’t able to have more children because of her age, but it seemed like everyone and their cousin was trying to marry her.

It’s not about child-bearing, since her children by someone else wouldn’t have a right of inheritance to her former husband’s lands. Rather, it’s about access to a widow’s “use-rights.” In many cultures, prior to the invention of life insurance or survivor’s insurance, widows had a customary right to use at least part of their former spouse’s estate for the rest of their lifetime, to ensure that they wouldn’t be left destitute.

Thus, marrying Lady Hornwood would give her suitor a claim to the Hornwood lands, at least for the duration of her lifespan. (Another sign of the Boltons’ abuse of the social contract is that Ramsay claims a permanent right to the Hornwood lands due to his forced marriage to/abduction of the widow Hornwood).

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.

I don’t know if you’ve been asked this before, but can you buy or sell land in Westeros? Lady Ellyn Reyne and her husband Lord Tarbeck buy up land surrounding them. The Westerlings lost land over the years. Just how would that transaction work and would it be acknowledged by others as legal?

I’ve discussed this before, so I’ll just quote myself:

The Westerlings selling their land is a highly unusual event in Westeros – the only other times we hear about selling land is in the context of the Tarbecks forcing people to sell their land through threat of armed force, so voluntary (to the extent that the necessities of poverty qualify as voluntary) land sales are a sign that the feudal order is in crisis.

It suggests that the Westerlings were falling into genteel poverty, such that their rental income had fallen massively behind their ability to service their debt, and that they were having to surrender the collateral they had put up to secure the loan.

Legally, this could be quite tricky. In Medieval England, for example, the feudal principle of “Nulle terre sans seigneur” (no land without a lord) meant that selling land outright, known as “alienation of lands by will,” was actually legally impossible in the late 12th century. (The Magna Carta, for example, says that “No free man shall henceforth give or sell so much of his land as that out of the residue he may not sufficiently do to the lord of the fee the service which pertains to that fee.”) Selling land was legalized by the Statute of Quia Emptores in 1290, although the buyer was “required to assume all tax and feudal obligations of the original tenant,” so the land remained under the same lord as before. It wasn’t until the Tenures Abolition Act of 1660 that those feudal obligations were eliminated.

The TL,DR is this: normally you cannot buy and sell land freely in Westeros. The Westerlings selling land and the Tarbecks buying land suggests the feudal order breaking down somewhat in the Westerlands.