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How did the Nights Watch get so weak?


Alyn Oakenfist

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6 minutes ago, Buried Treasure said:

And where would these women to marry come from?

Presumably "Planetos" is like Earth where women seem to have always been the majority of homo sapiens as near as we can tell. So the idea that there would be this dearth of women isn't necessarily plausible unless it was (essentially) socially engineered to be so after centuries of "reform".

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11 minutes ago, TheNecromancerofMirkwood said:

Presumably "Planetos" is like Earth where women seem to have always been the majority of homo sapiens as near as we can tell. So the idea that there would be this dearth of women isn't necessarily plausible unless it was (essentially) socially engineered to be so after centuries of "reform".

I don't claim there is a dearth of women. I argue that there aren't spare women to send to the Wall because their home regions need to them to marry the men that stay home. It's in that whole full paragraph that I bothered to write and you snipped when you quoted.

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10 hours ago, Buried Treasure said:

I don't claim there is a dearth of women. I argue that there aren't spare women to send to the Wall because their home regions need to them to marry the men that stay home. It's in that whole full paragraph that I bothered to write and you snipped when you quoted.

Okay, first of all why does it require spare women to be sent to the Wall? I mean, the women who would populate The Gift (and later the New Gift) would presumably be either Northmen already nearby where wives might come from (where did Wull, Norrey, Flint, et al women come from?) but there could be women who intend to go to the Gift/New Gift (or are sent). And this is assuming there aren't already women living in the area from the first days of The Night's Watch when it wasn't a penal colony and wasn't a life sentence.

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The NW should be so when you have served for however long you can ‘retire’ if you want and get some land in the Gift with which you help support the NW. As an incentive to perform well when you are actually in the watch it should be the best watchmen get the choicest land. This would attract a lot more people, especially hedge knights and second sons who otherwise wouldn’t get any land or anything at all. This would also make it difficult for wildlings to raid, since the Gift would be populated by hardened former watchmen.

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11 minutes ago, McGuv19 said:

The NW should be so when you have served for however long you can ‘retire’ if you want and get some land in the Gift with which you help support the NW. As an incentive to perform well when you are actually in the watch it should be the best watchmen get the choicest land. This would attract a lot more people, especially hedge knights and second sons who otherwise wouldn’t get any land or anything at all. This would also make it difficult for wildlings to raid, since the Gift would be populated by hardened former watchmen.

Bingo! As I've said, repeatedly, a ready-reserve of militia. Literally, defense-in-depth in the form of a soldier-farmers that occupy fortified farmsteads across the Gift/New Gift, with occasional townships and the like where rivers would allow watermills and such. They could maintain The Kingsroad as well as other roads throughout the Gift/New Gift to speed up movement of troops, supplies and such.

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14 minutes ago, TheNecromancerofMirkwood said:

Bingo! As I've said, repeatedly, a ready-reserve of militia. Literally, defense-in-depth in the form of a soldier-farmers that occupy fortified farmsteads across the Gift/New Gift, with occasional townships and the like where rivers would allow watermills and such. They could maintain The Kingsroad as well as other roads throughout the Gift/New Gift to speed up movement of troops, supplies and such.

That kind of thing would actually be worse than what the Watch do get at the present setting. They are the ruling elite. Collectively, the Watch owns the Gifts and they collect their due in coin and kind from the peasants sitting on their land. Like landed knights or petty lords they don't have to ruin their health working the land.

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