Wealth and revenues of Westeros

[Lord Varys]

55 minutes ago, SeanF said:

Northern Lords rule absolutely vast territories with tiny populations.  I imagine they would receive a lot of their income in kind, from tenants, and that coin circulation is relatively limited, outside White Harbour and Barrowtown. Overall, the income of a great Northern lord might be similar to that of a Florent, or Tarly, but only because of the vast territories that the former rules over.

If we have less coin circulation in the North, then I'd guess that little of the rent and taxes paid in kind would actually arrive at Karhold or the Dreadfort or Barrowton but stay with the local masters and petty lords and smaller lords sworn to the great houses. Some of the rents and taxes paid in kind that doesn't go bad all that quickly might find its way to a castle a hundred leagues or more away. But I don't see fish caught on Sea Dragon Point being paid as rent to Winterfell, say.

And considering that lords would have to actually pay for a lot of things in coin one imagine that they would demand that their really important vassals/peasants, etc. actually do pay their rent in coin rather than kind.

In that sense I think the kind thing would be something limited to the more local sphere - which, of course, might be much more spread out and include higher spheres than it does in the Riverlands.

One would also have to keep in mind that provisions for winter would be a top priority, causing local lords to indeed take a considerable portion of each harvest on their lords into their own hands - for the greater good, of course ;-).

55 minutes ago, SeanF said:

Dorne is interesting.  It's very arid, but raises the kind of crops (citrus, olives, wine, spices) that would fetch a substantial premium in Kings Landing.

Dorne is described as 'poor', just as the Iron Islands and the North are. That doesn't mean the lords there are (all) poor, because they milk the land - but that the land, of average, would be poorer than others.

Dorne definitely must have regions that are pretty wealthy - in the north-east where the lands are more fertile and many of the fruits are likely grown - also in the mountains - the Yronwood, Fowler, and Dayne lands. The Sands should be pretty empty and without a lot of resources.

[Ran]

41 minutes ago, Nittanian said:

Tangential to this, in a recent map discussion over at /r/gameofthrones a few people insisted that George has stated the Iron Islands are inspired by Ireland. Would you happen to recall George ever mentioning that?

Not to my recollection. I mean, the obvious inspiration are the Vikings. Perhaps he meant a little bit of some of the seascapes and rocky promontories one can see in Ireland (but more generally throughout the UK and Ireland as well), if he made such a remark. Particularly the smaller isles like the Hebrides, the Orkneys, and so on.

 

Certainly, I think he's been to the UK and Ireland more often than he has been to Scandinavia or Iceland, so his visualizations could well be drawn from there. 

[Nittanian]

33 minutes ago, Ran said:

Not to my recollection. I mean, the obvious inspiration are the Vikings. Perhaps he meant a little bit of some of the seascapes and rocky promontories one can see in Ireland (but more generally throughout the UK and Ireland as well), if he made such a remark. Particularly the smaller isles like the Hebrides, the Orkneys, and so on.

Certainly, I think he's been to the UK and Ireland more often than he has been to Scandinavia or Iceland, so his visualizations could well be drawn from there. 

Indeed! I like the comparison to the Vikings of the British Isles.

[Legitimate_Bastard]

On 9/1/2018 at 7:37 PM, Alexander Targaryen said:

 

What would be the annual revenue from the holdings of a landed knight? A minor lord? A great lord? What would be their personal wealth? What would be the wealth of a prominent great house such as the Manderlys, or a less money-minded great house such as the Umbers?

I think it would be hard to assign a number to any house, but I think we can glean a lot about wealth based on geographic location (climate, proximity to towns and transportation infrastructure etc.), population (taxes), vassals and military size.

To use your example houses, the Manderlys have a large city to draw revenue from, access to trade via their port and river location, large numbers of troops and ships. I would think this would make them 'wealthy'.

The Umbers though, do not have a large city, are not close to trade hubs and do not have a particularly large military. I do not think it would be fair to necessarily call them 'poor' but rather class them as 'not wealthy'.

From the info we have I think it is difficult to do more than categorize houses as 'wealthy' (we have info about wealth ie. Lannister, Tyrell, Manderly), 'not wealthy' (we have no info ie. most houses), and 'poor' (we have info that the house is poor ie. House Reed).

Regarding wealth I think it is important to point out that there may be Landed Knights that are wealthier than minor lords and so on and so forth. I forget the house but remember reading that a westerlands house was created from a merchant who had done particularly well. I can envision a house such as this being wealthier than an otherwise 'greater' house.

[SeanF]

2 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

If we have less coin circulation in the North, then I'd guess that little of the rent and taxes paid in kind would actually arrive at Karhold or the Dreadfort or Barrowton but stay with the local masters and petty lords and smaller lords sworn to the great houses. Some of the rents and taxes paid in kind that doesn't go bad all that quickly might find its way to a castle a hundred leagues or more away. But I don't see fish caught on Sea Dragon Point being paid as rent to Winterfell, say.

And considering that lords would have to actually pay for a lot of things in coin one imagine that they would demand that their really important vassals/peasants, etc. actually do pay their rent in coin rather than kind.

In that sense I think the kind thing would be something limited to the more local sphere - which, of course, might be much more spread out and include higher spheres than it does in the Riverlands.

One would also have to keep in mind that provisions for winter would be a top priority, causing local lords to indeed take a considerable portion of each harvest on their lords into their own hands - for the greater good, of course ;-).

Dorne is described as 'poor', just as the Iron Islands and the North are. That doesn't mean the lords there are (all) poor, because they milk the land - but that the land, of average, would be poorer than others.

Dorne definitely must have regions that are pretty wealthy - in the north-east where the lands are more fertile and many of the fruits are likely grown - also in the mountains - the Yronwood, Fowler, and Dayne lands. The Sands should be pretty empty and without a lot of resources.

Not perishable foods, but things like furs, skins, timber, amber, smoked or salted meat and fish, walrus ivory, which the lords would value as exports.

[Lord Varys]

3 hours ago, SeanF said:

Not perishable foods, but things like furs, skins, timber, amber, smoked or salted meat and fish, walrus ivory, which the lords would value as exports.

Aside from the food stuffs many of those things might actually be recently relevant 'luxury goods' the average peasant/commoner had no access to. I don't see many peasants being allowed to take timber from the forests of their lords, skin their lord's animals, and the like.

The lords would have people in place securing such goods for them - and they might hand them over to their lieges as tribute or as gifts to the NW, but I'd be very surprised if the commoners had just the right to exploit their lord's lands aside from the tiny little fraction they were allowed to work on.

[The Grey Wolf]

7 hours ago, Ran said:

Not to my recollection. I mean, the obvious inspiration are the Vikings. Perhaps he meant a little bit of some of the seascapes and rocky promontories one can see in Ireland (but more generally throughout the UK and Ireland as well), if he made such a remark. Particularly the smaller isles like the Hebrides, the Orkneys, and so on.

 

Certainly, I think he's been to the UK and Ireland more often than he has been to Scandinavia or Iceland, so his visualizations could well be drawn from there. 

I thought that comparison had more to do with land size. As in the Iron Isles all together are the size of Ireland.

[SeanF]

8 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

Aside from the food stuffs many of those things might actually be recently relevant 'luxury goods' the average peasant/commoner had no access to. I don't see many peasants being allowed to take timber from the forests of their lords, skin their lord's animals, and the like.

The lords would have people in place securing such goods for them - and they might hand them over to their lieges as tribute or as gifts to the NW, but I'd be very surprised if the commoners had just the right to exploit their lord's lands aside from the tiny little fraction they were allowed to work on.

I imagine that much of the North is like Siberia and Northern Russia, trackless forest and tundra.  In an environment in which landlords own vast, but very sparsely-populated territories, it would make good sense to get the Smallfolk to fell trees, hunt and trap animals for fur and skins, collect amber and other valuable goods and then pay a proportion of what they get to the landlords. Much of the North would not be suitable for the kind of agriculture that would be practised in somewhere like the Riverlands,  where the lords would keep forests as private hunting parks.

it was not unusual in certain terrains for lords to get their serfs to hunt and fish for them, while allowing them to keep a certain proportion fo what they caught. 

[Jaak]

17 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

And considering that lords would have to actually pay for a lot of things in coin one imagine that they would demand that their really important vassals/peasants, etc. actually do pay their rent in coin rather than kind.

Can the business of stewards like Vayon Poole (and ladies/housewives also taught numbers...) include selling for coin the rents collected in kind?

[SeanF]

48 minutes ago, Jaak said:

Can the business of stewards like Vayon Poole (and ladies/housewives also taught numbers...) include selling for coin the rents collected in kind?

One would expect that to be a part of their duties.

[Free Northman Reborn]

5 hours ago, SeanF said:

I imagine that much of the North is like Siberia and Northern Russia, trackless forest and tundra.  In an environment in which landlords own vast, but very sparsely-populated territories, it would make good sense to get the Smallfolk to fell trees, hunt and trap animals for fur and skins, collect amber and other valuable goods and then pay a proportion of what they get to the landlords. Much of the North would not be suitable for the kind of agriculture that would be practised in somewhere like the Riverlands,  where the lords would keep forests as private hunting parks.

it was not unusual in certain terrains for lords to get their serfs to hunt and fish for them, while allowing them to keep a certain proportion fo what they caught. 

No. The Haunted Forest is Siberian forest. And tundra only starts north of the Haunted Forest.

[Lord Varys]

5 hours ago, SeanF said:

I imagine that much of the North is like Siberia and Northern Russia, trackless forest and tundra.  In an environment in which landlords own vast, but very sparsely-populated territories, it would make good sense to get the Smallfolk to fell trees, hunt and trap animals for fur and skins, collect amber and other valuable goods and then pay a proportion of what they get to the landlords. Much of the North would not be suitable for the kind of agriculture that would be practised in somewhere like the Riverlands,  where the lords would keep forests as private hunting parks.

That could very well be for certain portions. We just don't know. The Wolfswood around Winterfell seems to be 'the Stark forest', though. It doesn't look like a place where the peasants are allowed to live and hunt (at least not in those portions the Stark directly control).

And in some of the Northern villages and settlements people must be doing 'normal agriculture' - such people would likely only have the right to use the resources on their lands, not neighboring lordly lands.

But, sure, the wood's folk we meet in the Wolfswood in ADwD likely is given a portion of the lordly forest they can live off in exchange for them paying a rent - likely in kind there.

Overall I think the idea of lonely farms and people living spread out in very small communities fits better with the fact that people only huddle together in winter (at the Winter Town and other places). After all, if there were villages of considerable size everywhere in the North where people lived then they could just spend the winter there rather than near Winterfell.

5 hours ago, SeanF said:

it was not unusual in certain terrains for lords to get their serfs to hunt and fish for them, while allowing them to keep a certain proportion fo what they caught. 

One imagines this is how things are done along the coasts and rivers.

[argonak]

There's little evidence of it, but my impression was that the north was more of an anglo-saxon sort of place, with mostly yeoman rather than serfs, and different in that way than the south.  Tyrion talks passing a lot of small holds on the way to the Wall.

The North doesn't have knights, and its a place that sees regular conflict with wildlings and mountain clans.  Its also enourmous, so traditional serfdom wouldn't work very well there.

[Free Northman Reborn]

People in Westeros don't live on isolated single family farms. They aren't American frontier ranchers from the 19th century.

The standard social setting - as in the real middle ages - is the peasant village. It would have maybe a dozen to a score of families, and 90% of the people are working the surrounding farmland. The village may be just a few hovels clustered together, where people retire to at night for safety. And during the days they emerge from their hovels and go out to work the land again. And the next village is located 2 miles further, over the next hill, as the center point of the next cluster of farms, and the next one 2 miles after that etc.

In areas of lesser fertility, villages would be farther apart, but peasants would still be in a village, rather than lone families living on single farms far away from others.

Consider that the North has millions of people, and with an average village size of a maybe 50 people, you would have close to 100,000 villages in the North. That means they can't be that far apart, on average.

[Jaak]

17 hours ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

People in Westeros don't live on isolated single family farms. They aren't American frontier ranchers from the 19th century.

The standard social setting - as in the real middle ages - is the peasant village.

Norway WAS real middle ages, and throughout middle ages Norway, along with Iceland and parts of Sweden were dominated by isolated single family farms.

[Lord Varys]

19 hours ago, argonak said:

There's little evidence of it, but my impression was that the north was more of an anglo-saxon sort of place, with mostly yeoman rather than serfs, and different in that way than the south.  Tyrion talks passing a lot of small holds on the way to the Wall.

The North doesn't have knights, and its a place that sees regular conflict with wildlings and mountain clans.  Its also enourmous, so traditional serfdom wouldn't work very well there.

That certainly may be the case for quite a few regions, but likely not for the places close to a great castle. They should have their thumb on their smallfolk.

But, sure, the clansmen clearly are semi-nobles who actually work the land they live on. In the Wull lands there live on Wulls, etc. - they have one chieftain and said guy might reside in a pretty large keep, but the others would actually work the land and not have smallfolk unrelated to them doing that. A similar thing can be observed for the Umbers - it is stated about them that they graze their sheep, not that their smallfolk does, implying that they have clan structures as well (although the Umbers certainly do count as a significant noble house).

But my point in general was more about the impracticality of the smallfolk paying their rents in kind if we assume this is done on the large scale like a great lordship in the North. Such a thing would imply a strong and thorough bureaucracy and there are no hints that this kind of thing is in place.

1 hour ago, Jaak said:

Norway WAS real middle ages, and throughout middle ages Norway, along with Iceland and parts of Sweden were dominated by isolated single family farms.

That is what makes the most sense in a land as vast and empty as the North. If it is hard to work the land then you go to a place where the land is yours, not to a place where you have to compete or share with others. There certainly would be villages in certain regions - at the coast of Long Lake, perhaps, or along the White Knife, and some of the coastlines, etc. But those are clearly very scarce.

Westeros is a medieval place. Even in the Reach there should be vast tracts of wild places and land that could be cultivated but simply isn't because there are not enough men around to actually cultivate it. For all intents and purposes the medieval lifestyle was a frontier culture considering how few people lived back then and how vast and wild Europe was in those days.

I mean, we see how wild a place like Crackclaw Point is in AFfC, never mind that this place is very close to KL.

And the fact that people are only living in the Winter Town in winter very much implies that spring/summer/autumn are solitary seasons in the North, where people can and do live by themselves, only to come together when the cold comes. If there was no difference between the lifestyle of the smallfolk there, then one should expect KL and the other large cities and towns also to draw a lot of people in winter - or there to be cities and towns that are only occupied in winter, like the Winter Town. But this isn't the case as far as we know.

[argonak]

Hmm, nevermind.

[Free Northman Reborn]

5 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

That certainly may be the case for quite a few regions, but likely not for the places close to a great castle. They should have their thumb on their smallfolk.

But, sure, the clansmen clearly are semi-nobles who actually work the land they live on. In the Wull lands there live on Wulls, etc. - they have one chieftain and said guy might reside in a pretty large keep, but the others would actually work the land and not have smallfolk unrelated to them doing that. A similar thing can be observed for the Umbers - it is stated about them that they graze their sheep, not that their smallfolk does, implying that they have clan structures as well (although the Umbers certainly do count as a significant noble house).

But my point in general was more about the impracticality of the smallfolk paying their rents in kind if we assume this is done on the large scale like a great lordship in the North. Such a thing would imply a strong and thorough bureaucracy and there are no hints that this kind of thing is in place.

That is what makes the most sense in a land as vast and empty as the North. If it is hard to work the land then you go to a place where the land is yours, not to a place where you have to compete or share with others. There certainly would be villages in certain regions - at the coast of Long Lake, perhaps, or along the White Knife, and some of the coastlines, etc. But those are clearly very scarce.

Westeros is a medieval place. Even in the Reach there should be vast tracts of wild places and land that could be cultivated but simply isn't because there are not enough men around to actually cultivate it. For all intents and purposes the medieval lifestyle was a frontier culture considering how few people lived back then and how vast and wild Europe was in those days.

I mean, we see how wild a place like Crackclaw Point is in AFfC, never mind that this place is very close to KL.

And the fact that people are only living in the Winter Town in winter very much implies that spring/summer/autumn are solitary seasons in the North, where people can and do live by themselves, only to come together when the cold comes. If there was no difference between the lifestyle of the smallfolk there, then one should expect KL and the other large cities and towns also to draw a lot of people in winter - or there to be cities and towns that are only occupied in winter, like the Winter Town. But this isn't the case as far as we know.

People don’t work their own land. They work their lord’s land.

[Lord Varys]

43 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

People don’t work their own land. They work their lord’s land.

That depends what they are, no? There are yeomen in this world, and those clan structures in the North imply that there is no clear difference between large farmers and lords (of sorts).

In the end, lords are also just peasants with a lot of land who can pay or force other people to work on their land.