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Why not an explosive population growth of lords


zaphodbrx

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I was just thinking, since the women of westeros don't have any birth control, what stops an explosive population growth from taking place?

For example, Catelyn and Ned Stark have 5 children. 2 become 5. In the next generation 5 become 15, and so on. Where do all these kids go? There can be only one Lord of winterfell. No doubt, you'd have some dying of childhood diseases, some dying in battle, some becoming maesters or septons or going off to the wall.

But that still leaves an awful lot of kids unaccounted for. Especially since these families have been going on for 1000s of years. You'd think there'd be hundreds of starks running about, at the very least.

But- inexplicably- by the time AGOT rolls around, all the major houses are practically extinct. Starks are just Ned and his kids, Boltons are just Roose and his bastard, Arryns are just Jon and his son, and so on.

This doesn't even take into account exceptions such as Leyton Hightower who has like.. fourteen children? On the same wife too. And of course Walder Frey is in a class of his own. Where do all these people go? Why isn't there a malthusian population growth of lords and running out of lordships to give them?

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Catelyn surviving after having five kids without miscarriages or stillborns and having them all survive infancy might be a bit on the lucky side.

But as others said, wars can certainly affect the population.

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There is. But it doesn't matter for the number of lords, because second sons and daughters tend to trickle down the social ladder. Ten generations later, they could easily be peasants.

For example, every european currently alive is descended from Charlemagne. And the percentage on other continents is "high" as well. How many of us try to claim nobility on that reason? Or did so when there still was nobility a century ago?

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But- inexplicably- by the time AGOT rolls around, all the major houses are practically extinct. Starks are just Ned and his kids, Boltons are just Roose and his bastard, Arryns are just Jon and his son, and so on.

I don't know about the others, but LF says in AFFC that there are several branches of Arryns scattered across the Vale. Many of them are proud but poor (except the ones who married merchants). Maybe there are smaller branches of the other Houses as well, but they aren't in the direct line of succession?

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Because it is the trappings of nobility - dowries, fine armor, horses, apartments in the main family keep, etc... that stuff only gets handed down to only a few members of each generation. The further out from the main core of the family you become (second and/or third cousins - children of the old lord's siblings, for example), you are just as likely to be made a member of the houseguard if you are a male, or a woman who comes into the main family apartments to come trim the nails and brush the hair of the lord's wife and daughters. They may all be family, but at some point, you stop being noble for all intents and purposes.

Consider hypothetical Lord Brendick Tarly and his wife Rowyna, oldest daughter of Lord Rolland of House Rowan. Brendick and Rowyna have four kids, two sons and two daughters. This family lives well, they have fine clothes and a stable of horses for their personal use. The all live in a warm, well-appointed rooms in Horn Hill. The boys have personal tutelage from a maester and are trained in arms by the master-at-arms. Lady Rowyna brought her childhood septa, Septa Hortensia, with her from her home castle to train her daughters. Once or twice a season, the whole family is summoned for lavish banquets and thrilling tourneys at Highgarden. These people never change their own sheets, do their own laundry, cook their own meals or dump out their own privies.

In time, their oldest son, Rollyn, is annointed as a knight and betrothed to a nice Hightower girl, Leyla; they in time will become Lord and Lady of Horn Hill and continue to live in privilege. After they marry and have three children in rapid succession (the line of House Tarly is secure!). The eldest Tarly daughter, Brenna, is selected to become a maid-in-waiting to the Lady of Highgarden (herself the eldest daughter of the Lord of House Oakheart), where fair Brenna is part of a clique of upper tier noble girls who are the subject of social affairs up there and all of whom are prized as suitable wives for the Reach lords and their heirs. Brenna Tarly is ultimately married to the son of the Lord of Bitterbridge and moves in with House Caswell, going off with a trousseau of gowns, fine linens and some expensive jewelry, three maids (including a cousin - the spinster daughter of her mother's brother), and now aged Septa Horensia as her duenna/mistress of staff/mistress of the garderobe.

Now, the elder two children have done rather well for themselves. Rollyn will eventually become Lord and his line will comprise the main core of the family. He makes sure that his sons are trained in arms, they buy them fine armor and have them assigned as pages then squires to other lords of their tier, say, House Bulwer or Mullendore, and eventually his daughters will be raised and betrothed out as high placed matches as well. The children of his sister Brenna will also be similarly situated, she is the consort of a ruling lord.

Consider now the two younger Tarly children. The second daughter, Amelia Tarly. Let's say that the harvest was bad in the years running up to her flowering and when it came time to set her dowry and put out feelers, the Tarly coffers were a little skint. Plus, they have ben spending profligately to make sure that the family of the heir, Ser Rollyn, is kept up in luxury (horses and armor are not cheap and you need servitors to maintain them), they did set a huge dowry for the older sister Brenna in order to entice Lord Caswell to marry his son and heir to her, and plus they spent lavishly to make sure that Lady Brenna didn't look impoverished when she was flitting about the halls of Highgarden - her dresses, her maids, her jewels, all had to be sufficient to make her look like she belonged in that glittering world of House Tyrell.

The best that they can do for Lady Amelia is scrape together a dowry that is enough to attract a nice, stolid household knight of House Florent, Ser Maxwell Morefield. She will probably not start her family in a nice warm apartment in the central core of Brightwater Keep, with scads of servants to change out the rushes, make her bed and cook her meals. She will probably have a smallish manor/farmhouse on Brightwater property (as her husband manages a tract for his liege lord) where she may be required to sew her own linens, gather her own eggs and heaven forfend beat her flax and weave her own cloth. Her children are the grandchildren of a Lord of Horn Hill but I guarantee that when they come of age, no one will be looking for her daughters to be in the decorative train of nubile young maidens to sweep prettily behind the Florent or Tyrell daughters. Her eldest son might be trained well as take service as his father did as a household knight of Brightwater, but the younger sons are looking more and more like they may have to go seek service in Horn Hill castle as castle guards or perhaps take service as a blacksmith's apprentice, or even learn how to be a reeve or steward. Her daughters, well Lady Amelia manages to press upon her sister Brenna, now Lady of Bitterbridge, take her daughter Linna (Brenna'a niece) in service as her tirewoman or bedmaid, to care for her hair and shoes and jewelry (the spinster cousin has died) . There will be no jousts in which dashing young knights compete for her favor, alas. The youngest daughter, Sallia just ends up marrying the innkeeper from Bitterbridge town, where she finds she excels at household management and likes to bake and brew.

The last child of Lord Brendick Tarly, second son Tomas. he doesn't have a lot of options. His father's line is secure as his older brother is due in time to ascend his father's high seat and he has his own family. As a second son, not a lot of other lords are willing to marry their daughters to him since he far from the line of inheritance and moving further away every time Rollyn has another kid. Although his father may have spent a lot of money to give him a proper military education, the monies needed to keep him up in lordly fighting style are being spent on the sons of Ser Rollyn now. He may, if he is able, go forth and try to enlist as an armsman to the overlord, Lord LuthardTyrell, or maybe seek service as the master-of-arms at some other lord's castle - they would pay for his horse and upkeep of his weapons and armor. He may go rogue and be a hedge knight. Any of these options pretty much ensures that even if he were to start a family himself, they would be raised away from and out of the sphere of what we would call a 'lordly/noble lifestyle.'

Ultimately, he may just decide to take holy orders as a Septon, or perhaps go to the Citadel and become a maester.

So what you end up with is basically a nuclear family, who after a generation are a group of first cousins are all leading disparate lives. You have knights in training, glamorous demoiselles, bedmaids hairdressers, blacksmith's apprentices, household guards and stewards, all of whom are first cousins to one another (all descended from Lord Brendick and Lady Rowyna) - they have all have noble bloodlines but at some point, they aren't all living as nobles should and sort of just withdraw from the shimmering demimonde of aristocracy, even if some of them still carry the name Tarly. -- edited for syntax

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Because it is the trappings of nobility - dowries, fine armor, horses, apartmemts in the main family keep, etc... that stuff only gets handed down to only a few members of each generation. The further out from the main core of the family you become (second and/or third cousins - children of the old lord's siblings, for example), you are just as likely to be made a member of the houseguard if you are a male, or a woman who comes into the main family apartments to come trim the nails and brush the hair of the lord's wife and daughters. They may all be family, but at some point, you stop being noble for all intents and purposes.

Yep and this can lead to conflicts within the family. So it's sometimes in the families best interest to have a limited number of kids or sometimes marry back into the family like Tywin and Joanna did.

In the Middle Ages, the chances of the children surviving childhood were much lower than they are in Westeros and the contraception methods less effective. Only foolish Lords like the Freys have so many children.

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Yea I have to agree, having children is no guarentee that your children survive to adulthood. Also your forgetting the way the season's work. Old Nan tells story where mothers smother their babies during the winter so they don't live to starve suffer. So really only children born at the end of winter or during summer are likely to survive anyway. Also I'm sure just like it works in the real word the "pesant" class breeds much more quickly than the "noble" classes. Also to be a lord the child has to been born from two highborn parents but even then if they aren't married the child still is no more than a bastard and can not make claims to either of his parents nobility.

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Well there actually is birth control in Westeros but I understand your post. However, I can't answer it better than these guys.

50/50 on a female child, the possibility of them becoming Night's Watch, a knight, a septon, or some dying young, etc. It's not as implausible as you make it out to be.

There is. But it doesn't matter for the number of lords, because second sons and daughters tend to trickle down the social ladder. Ten generations later, they could easily be peasants.

For example, every european currently alive is descended from Charlemagne. And the percentage on other continents is "high" as well. How many of us try to claim nobility on that reason? Or did so when there still was nobility a century ago?

Plus Daena the Defiant's very long post.

Pretty much ends the thread.

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1. Most children don't make it to adulthood

2. Second sons don't inherit much if anything and 3rd even less

3.Theres a war almost every generation which is gonna thin the herd quite a bit

4. Women in our world didn't use birth control through out the Middle Ages and there wasn't giant population increases because more people were dieing than were being born you have to remember if you lived to be 40 you were considered to have lived a full life

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