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.

Tyrion mentions that the Westerlings had sold off a large portion of their lands. How exactly would such a transaction take place in a feudal economy? Would there be restrictions on who they could sell to and for how much?

Discussed somewhat here.

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 until 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.

Idk if my last ask got eaten but if not, sorry for sending two in a row. I’m wondering, do lords in westeros have a right to services and feudal incidents from their feudal tenants like wardship and relief and primer seisin? How do wills work in westeros or is it just automatic primogeniture? And if there’s no feudal incidents is military service the only reason lords will have tenants? Sorry for so many questions, ur blog Is one of the things keeping me sane lol, take care

Ok, there’s a lot here, so let me break it down:

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.

What would the ceremony for a king confirming the land and title of a vassal consist of? I assume their would be some kind of formal script like the vassal kneeling and pledging loyalty in front of the throne followed by a feast.

Well, here’s how it worked in Medieval Europe. From Wikipedia by way of Anne Duggan’s Nobles and Nobility in Medieval Europe:

“The would-be vassal appeared bareheaded and weaponless as a sign of his submission to the will of the lord and knelt before him. The vassal would clasp his hands before him in the ultimate sign of submission, the typical Christian prayer pose, and would stretch his clasped hands outward to his lord. The lord in turn grasped the vassal’s hands between his own, showing he was the superior in the relationship, a symbolic act known variously as the immixtio manuum (Latin), Handgang (German), or håndgang (Norwegian).[1] The vassal would announce he wished to become “the man”, and the lord would announce his acceptance.

Now there were variations on this model: often there was an exchange of tokens, such as rings, to signify mutual aid and fidelity; when a king was confirming a religious office, he handed the new bishop or whoever a crook staff (although this was a major source of disputes between church and state); sometimes, the ceremony of homage would be combined with the knighting ceremony so that there would be a dubbing; etc.

But the basics of a symbolic show of submission and trust on the one hand and protection and honor on the other were usually the same.

How is it some lines of noble families end up as poor as the Tolletts, or end up becoming merchants like the Gulltown Arryns?

Good question!

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…

What were common benefits from marriage alliances, apart from alliance in case of war? Toll freedom?

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.

If the Kingswood Brotherhood was likely a reaction to the policies of Aerys II and Tywin, or at least they grew because of it, why didn’t any groups in the Riverlands or elsewhere form? Local politics? Unsuitable terrain?

Well, keep in mind that the condition of the peasantry, or indeed of any socio-economic group, is never uniform.

In the case of the Kingswood Brotherhood, you’re dealing with a population of foresters who have to make their living from the King’s own wood. The King’s privileges and exclusions directly impact their livelihood in a way that isn’t the case for many peasants.

From the little evidence we have, the Kingswood Brotherhood used these grievances to rally support from the smallfolk:

“Good luck getting answers then,” said Jaime. “If you want their help, you need to make them love you. That was how Arthur Dayne did it, when we rode against the Kingswood Brotherhood. He paid the smallfolk for the food we ate, brought their grievances to King Aerys, expanded the grazing lands around their villages, even won them the right to fell a certain number of trees each year and take a few of the king’s deer during the autumn. The forest folk had looked to Toyne to defend them, but Ser Arthur did more for them than the Brotherhood could ever hope to do, and won them to our side. After that, the rest was easy.”

Grazing rights, hunting rights, felling rights – these things might seem parochial, but they could mean the difference between starvation and and prosperity to marginal communities like the people of the Kingswood.

However, if you’re a smallfolk in the Riverlands, you have an entirely different set of interests and concerns, so you don’t necessarily have anything vested in the Kingswood Brotherhood.

Why was the first Baelish granted the title of Lord, when the actual amount of land granted to him would have made a well to do landed knight snort? Conversely, how come a House as powerful as the Templetons never managed to get themselves elevated to the status of Lords in past several millennia, despite being one of the original Andal houses to fight under Ser Artos Arryn ?

Baelish has the title of Lord because he inherited it: “Lord Petyr’s father had been the smallest of small lords, his grandfather a landless hedge knight; by birth, he held no more than a few stony acres on the windswept shore of the Fingers.” Here’s the thing about lordship – lordship is a social and legal status that affords you certain privileges, like the right of pit and gallows. It is not dependent on wealth, beyond an absolute minimum of land.

Hence the phenomenon of nobles living in genteel poverty, who were far poorer than many commoners – and these nobles tended to be the most insistent on maintaining the privileges of the nobility. For example, the noblesse d’epee in the ancien regime were the most conservative of the Second Estate, resistant to both the rising bourgeoise and the noblesse de robe (who they saw as upjumped commoners and not true nobles).

As for the Templetons, we don’t really know why, any more than we know why the Tallharts or the Glovers are Masterly Houses despite the fact that the Glovers were once a royal house.

RE: Kingdom vs Empire

Does that mean westeros is full of empires more than kingdoms?

Nymeria’s conquest of dorne led to a polity composed of multiple ethnic groups and cultures, there is the first men, andal, and rhoynar or the division between, stony, salty, and sandy dornish. That seems to be an empire.

Likewise, the Gardners realm was said to be made of four seperate kingdoms (arbor, hightower, marches, and reach proper).

The North has the mountain clans, the ‘regular’ northmen, skaggos, the craggomen, and the southerns from the manderlys.

The vale, has the andals and andalized first men, the mountain clans (though they are rebels) and the sistermen.

The riverlands has two different religious groups.

And thats not even mentioning the stormlander and both ironborn empires.

Plus of course the Targaryen realm.

Also, I find that many people, including myself, have this perception or disposition to think or view empires as somehow ‘better’ in someway than kingdoms (though definetely not necessarily morally better). Would you care to comment on this belief and how it holds up to scrutiny?

To answer your last question first, I don’t see why empires would be considered “better” than kingdoms. They’re not more efficient or effective as political structures – the sheer coordination issues that crop up in empires alone – they don’t lead to more political stability or internal peace, etc. etc.

I would push back a bit on your descriptions above:

Nymeria could have been said to have conquered an empire, if she and her dynasty hadn’t made it a central policy to eradicate all differences between her subjects in the name of creating a common Dornish identity.
The Gardeners might have been considered Emperors if they had left the Kings in place instead of absorbing them into one Reach.
The North’s divisions don’t come close enough to constituting different nations – with the exception of the Manderlys, they’re all First Men, they all worship the Old Gods, etc.
The Vale either forcibly assimilated or excluded the First Men from the polity, so they don’t reconize multiple peoples.
Two religious groups in the Riverlands isn’t enough to distinguish two “nations” in the sense of peoples, not without a lot more religious division on the level of the Thirty Years War.

What you could say is that, by claiming to be the “King of the Andals, the First Men, and the Rhoynar,” Aegon implicitly claimed an empire in Westeros, although hasn’t used the title (or indeed an imperial crown).

Anon Asks:

What exactly is ‘royal land’? how is it run? is it all directly ruled by the king or does it have petty lords/landed knights on it? if it does have petty lords/landed knights, how does it differ from other land in the realm that isnt ‘royal’? Like what is the difference between a great knightly house like templeton sworn to arryn or a powerful masterly house in the north and landed knights, besides size/lineage? Or would such territory be considered royal land rather than vassalized land because they aren’t lordly houses or sworn to one between them and the royal house?

>_> Feudalism is way more confusing than people like to think, though it does make things more interesting and its nice that GRRM can catch that sort of political incoherency for his setting.

Welp, shoulda known I’d opened up a can of worms.

Royal land is land that the monarch holds themselves, rather than giving out as a fiefdom to any of their vassals. So it probably wouldn’t have petty lords or landed knights on it unless the monarch had decided to give away that land to said lord/knight as a reward for some service. (There’s an exception to this that I’ll discuss in a bit.)

In terms of how it is run, it would be run quite like other land. Typically, territory would be divided into various manors – manors being an economic and judicial unit run by the manorial court. Manorial courts both were the main source of records on and made the legal decisions on just about everything: who had rights (primarily tenant’s rights) to what bit of land (but also usage rights to the commons or to the water or hunting rights or wood-gathering, etc. etc.); who owed what in rents, taxes, and feudal obligations of labor and to whom; what would be grown, where and when, and who would labor; and crucially, the court also dealt with contract law and torts in the manor, so when you loaned your best milk cow to your neighbor and it died, everyone knew where to go for adjudication.

That manor would be run by various officials:

at the top was the steward, who oversaw the manorial court and who was responsible for the overall condition of the manor.
immediately below them was the reeve (adding to the complication, this is the Saxon term; Normans called them bailiffs and then started using the word for all kinds of judicial offices and then started using reeve again) who was the chief overseer of the peasants and was usually a peasant himself (sometimes appointed, and sometimes elected, subject to veto by the lord). The reeve’s job was to make sure that the crops got planted and harvested in line with the manorial court’s decisions and to carry out the marketing of the manor’s produce; to collect rents and debts (if a given tenant was late on their rent, for example) but also to make disbursements; and to make sure that the peasants performed their feudal obligations.
And then there were assistant reeves and assistant stewards and under-bailiffs and all kinds of minor functionaries.

So the main difference, as far as the peasants were concerned, between royal land and fiefed land really was just who appointed the steward and signed off on the reeves. Now here’s where it could get tricky, because sometimes the King would lease out their lands to their friends and people who gave them money (sometimes not the same people!) without giving them away.