by Ed West
RAPERS AND SELLSWORDS
The reality for the ordinary people of France was as far from any chivalric romance as could be possible.
One major difference between modern and medieval societies is that in the former the vast bulk of crime is committed by men from lower socio-economic classes, while in earlier periods those higher up the social ladder were as likely, and sometimes more likely, to do it. When, in 1317, the papal legates Cardinals Gaucelin of Euaze and Luca Fieschi were sent by Pope John XXII to install the new bishop of Durham, they were attacked by a Sir Gilbert Middleton, a knight who used his castle at Milford as a base for robbery, and his “gang of desperadoes.” In the following decade, England was plagued by outlaw gangs, often led by gentry families, and known variously as compaignies, conspiratours, or confederatours. This crime wave took place in an already violent society in which roads were very dangerous, and it was extremely unwise to travel except in large groups; the forests, home to countless outlaws, were even worse.
The most notorious gang were the Folvilles, six brothers from the English midlands and their accomplices, among them a village parson, a clerk, and a constable of Rockingham castle. The Folvilles robbed countless people as well as kidnapping a judge of the king’s bench and murdering a baron of the exchequer.
Some of these gangsters had connections at court. Roger Bellers, a confederate of the criminal Zouche brothers, had been protected by Despenser, at least from the authorities—but on the road between Melton Mowbray and Leicester he was murdered by the Folville brothers. Over the course of 1327, while violence spiked in the face of crumbling royal authority, the Folville gang cruised the highways looking for victims. One of the brothers, Eustace Folville, was personally accused of four murders and a rape, yet in the chaos of Mortimer’s takeover, the Folvilles were above the law.
They once again received a pardon in 1328 after helping Mortimer, after which they went on a crime spree, robbing people across Leicestershire of another two hundred pounds. The eldest brother was a keeper of the peace and probably provided information to the others. A sword for hire called Roger de Wensley was employed to track down the Folvilles and an associated gang, the Coterels, but so impressed were the latter family with him that they offered him a cut and he ended up joining them.
In 1331, the canon of Sempringham Priory hired the gang to destroy a water mill belonging to a rival; they then teamed up with other criminal families with the aim of kidnapping a judge, Sir Richard Willoughby, and ransomed him for 1,300 marks, a huge sum. Finally, Richard Folville was beheaded after a local bigwig, Sir Robert Colville, caught up with him, the two men engaging in a medieval shoot-out with arrows at a church. However, despite a big taskforce being sent out and charged with arresting two hundred known outlaws, most criminals escaped, and indeed many served in Edward’s war; Eustace Folville was eventually knighted, after having fought at Crecy; Robert Folville also served in Flanders.
Until modern times, soldiers were always hated figures, for they “ate and drank at the common people’s expense, uncontrolled by their officers, they . . . took what they chose, including sexual favors, paid for nothing and, if opposed, tortured and killed.”17 Yet the English in France were especially loathed and feared, largely because a large proportion were criminals. Troops were raised by local commissioners of array, who, when given the task of deciding which local men should be sent to the war, naturally chose the most anti-social and violent. At Halidon Hill there were robbers, poachers, and murderers in the army, and during the Scottish campaign of 1334-5 there were over two hundred men who had received royal pardons for serious crimes.
Arya’s journey with criminals destined for the Wall would have been not unlike life with soldiers of the Hundred Years’ War. As Tyrion said of the Men of the Night’s Watch, they are “sullen peasants, debtors, poachers, rapers, thieves and bastards.”18 In the words of one historian, France was “ravaged by the scum of England and the worst mercenaries of Europe.”19
Of the archers in Edward’s army, about one in ten were released felons, three quarters of them in jail for murder or manslaughter. The force raised by Percy in the Northumbrian army “contained a far greater than average proportion of killers, rapists, thieves and outlaws.”20 Among them were Robert atte Kirke of Brantingham, who had murdered the cooper Robert Plumton; Richard de Aclyngton who killed John Taullour in “hot conflict and not of malice,” according to Percy, who defended him.21 There was John Plummer, who killed Robert Epworth and stole his horse and saddle, but did “good service in the wars of France” for Percy.22 Over 1339-40, some 850 charters of pardon were issued nationally for men serving in the war,23 and, in 1390, there was even protest in the Commons about convicted rapists and murderers being allowed off.
Worse than the criminals were the sellswords, the mercenaries, also known as écorcheurs, which translates as “Flayers” or “Skinners.” Chroniclers describe these men as “adventurers”—but Froissart said they were “really brigands and thieves.”24 In Westeros, the Brave Companions were nicknamed the Bloody Mummers because of their brutality and are also called the Footmen because they cut off feet. The “Second Sons” name reflects the position of many medieval younger brothers who, “with no hope of inheriting under primogeniture, leave home to make their fortunes by their sword.”25 Likewise with bastards, the Golden Company being founded by a bastard Targaryen called Bittersteel.
In real life, free companies such as the White Company or Tard-Venus were equally brutal, if not worse. “Defiled by bloodshed, corrupted by money and by the gratification of their voracious appetites,” in the words of French historian Georges Duby, “these sacrilegious ruffians caroused from the chalices they had stolen from churches. Recruited from the very dregs of society and frequently illegitimate, they had known only penury and destitution.”26
Mercenary groups had existed since the twelfth century, composed of exiles from all across Europe; Walter Map described these men who “armored from head to foot in iron and leather, armed with clubs and with steel…reduce monasteries, villages and towns to ashes, commit violence and joyless adultery, saying in the fullness of their heart, ‘There is no God.’”27 However, there was a difference between professional mercenaries on the one hand and routiers on the other, who were just desperadoes without any sense of honor: “They lived for fighting and plunder; they spared neither sex nor age, neither the clergy nor the peace-loving trader; their ruthless cruelty and wanton destruction made them objects of universal detestation and fear.”28
Most mercenaries came either from heavily populated urban areas such as Flanders and Brabant, or from tough, poor, remote regions like Brittany and Wales. So many mercenaries came from Brabant that “Brabanters” became a generic name for all sellswords from the twelfth century.
Welshmen, in particular, were greatly feared, and in 1305 the future Edward II sent a letter to his cousin Louis, Count of Evreux, stating that “If you care for anything from our land of Wales, we will send you some wild men, if you like, who will know well how to give young sprigs of noblemen their education.”29 The mercenary market had grown with the rise of Italian city states in the thirteenth century, which had more money than men to defend them.
Among the major free companies in France were the Tard-Venus or “Latecomers” led by the notorious “Archpriest,” a former clergyman by the name of Arnaud de Cervole whose own men eventually hanged him. Two of the most famous and notorious of English mercenaries were Sir High Calveley and his half-brother Sir Robert Knolles.30 The Cheshire born Sir Robert’s mercenary army was three thousand-strong and he had grown so rich that back home was able to built a dyke around his house to keep out “clerks and apprentices” begging for his large fortune; when that failed he laid down potentially fatal caltraps to get the message across.31 Froissart’s phrase, to “better himself in the profession of arms” was a euphemism for getting rich from plunder, a new English word imported from Italy during this time, and lots of Englishmen bettered themselv
es in the war.
Of Knolles it was said: “Such was the terror of his name that at one place, it was said, people threw themselves into the river at word of his approach.”32
The combined free companies force was eventually sixteen thousand strong, larger than Edward III’s army, and the biggest and perhaps most frightening was led by John Hawkwood. Raised in Essex, Hawkwood had been a tailor’s apprentice, fought at Crecy and after the 1360 treaty of Brétigny went to Burgundy to join a mercenary company who were then in control of much of the region. He ended up in charge of his own group, the White Company, many of his troops also coming from Essex. After France became less profitable, they moved into northern Italy, where they fought for the Visconti family of Milan against Florence; Hawkwood won the hand of one of the leader’s numerous illegitimate daughters. He then fought for the pope against the kingdom of Naples, and afterwards Hawkwood was hired by Florence and, despite previously terrorizing the city, he ended up commander-in-chief of its armies for seventeen years until his death in 1394, showered with gifts of land and money. There is still a monument to “Sharp John,” as the Italians called him, in Florence’s Doumo.
And yet, while sellswords had no sense of honor, and were despised by the traditional aristocracy, they were usually better at fighting. In contrast, the French military was constrained by the desire to win glory, which hindered discipline and organization in the thick of battle. The free companies offered men a chance to rise up and the mercenary captains did represent a form of brutal and immoral social mobility; although many mercenary leaders were from the lower ranks of the aristocracy, usually younger sons, others came from modest backgrounds, while regular armies were totally constrained by class, and only noblemen could command.
As the war dragged on, with large amounts of territory outside of any central control, these routiers became addicted to destruction, spreading misery across the country. Roving gangs of desperados would seize a castle en masse and use it to gain control of the countryside, before moving onto a nearby town and robbing everything in sight, raping the women and murdering the men. As always, it was the innocent who suffered while princes played their games of thrones.
*In the novels she is called Asha.
14
THE SEVEN KINGDOMS
Game of Thrones was first described to me, by someone familiar with the project from before its initial broadcast, as “The Sopranos meets Lord of the Rings.”
—JOHN LANCHESTER
The Denham Tracts, an anthology of British folklore written between 1892 and 1895, names all the supernatural beings once thought to have lived in the isles, among them satyrs, pans, fauns, hellwains, fire-drakes, spoorns, pixies, giants, Tom-pokers, Elf-fires, fiends, gallytrots, imps, Peg-powlers, pucks, ginges, trolls, silkies, cauld-lads, nacks, waiths, buckies, hell-hounds, boggleboes, hobgoblins, and something called “mum-pokers.” Among the other strange creatures mentioned were hobbits. It was this collection that a professor of Old English named J.R.R. Tolkien stumbled upon while dreaming up his epic The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s work would draw on the history and mythology of Anglo-Saxon England, which in turn came to hugely influence his intitial-sake, George R.R. Martin.
The origins of this folklore and the people who created it lie in the vast forests of Germany, from where the Angles and Saxons emerged in deepest history. As the Roman Empire fell into steep decline, beyond its frontiers great population changes were occurring, and what would become known as the Völkerwanderung—the movement of peoples—had begun. While the Franks conquered Gaul and the Visigoths Hispania, tribes to their north in Angeln, the “thin peninsula,” which jutted out into the icy Baltic Sea, were put under pressure by land shortage. The Angles, along with neighboring tribes, the Saxons and Jutes, looked west.
The Angles had been mentioned by Tacitus as far back as the first century AD, but little was heard of them until their arrival in Britain; the Saxons were recorded as shaving their hairline to make their heads look bigger and drowning one in every ten prisoners they took as a sacrifice to a sea god.
Likewise, the Andals originated across the sea in the lands of the Axe, near to the Rhoyne and Rhoynar rivers, before conquering Westeros, their warriors carving a seven-pointed star on their bodies to show the religion they had imported. There was a war between the First Men and Andals, and some native kingdoms held out longer than others; the semi-mythical last king of the Rivers and Hills, Tristifer the Fourth, was killed in his hundredth battle fighting the Andals. The invaders went on to destroy the weirwood and defeat a combined army of Children and First Men, wiping out the former; however, the Children are still thought to haunt the hill at night. (Because of its conquest, the Dothraki called Westeros “Rhaesh Andahli,” just as the French still call Germany “Allemagne,” because of just one group who lived there, among many.)
The truth behind the Anglo-Saxon invasion is as clouded as the Andal equivalent. The bookish Hoster Blackwood explains: “No one knows when the Andals crossed the narrow sea. The True History says four thousand years have passed since then, but some maestars claim that it was only two.”1 Such confusion surrounds the arrival of the Angles, too, and although the medieval chronicler Henry of Huntingdon begins his history of the country with “in the year 449 after the incarnation of the Lord,” when “the Angles and Saxons came to England,”2 we cannot be remotely confident about that date, since the newcomers did not read or write. Indeed, they mostly avoided cities and Roman Britannia was left to ruin, its former settlements lived in only by ghosts; the people stayed away from old buildings, believing them to be haunted and to have been the work of superhuman goliaths. The Old English poem The Ruin, written in the eighth or ninth century, tells of a city, perhaps Bath, and calls the Roman buildings “the work of giants.”
The conquerors of Britain lived under a warrior code in which men would pledge allegiance to another in return for food and protection; “lord” comes from loafward, literally “loaf-giver,” someone who would provide shelter and sustenance for the men in his service. Living before the spread of castles, the focus of their society was the mead-hall, where a lord would entertain his sworn men and here tales were told and oaths sworn and much beer drunk.
These Germanic tribes had been working as soldiers in Roman Britain since at least the third century, but after 400 AD their numbers rapidly increased as they were hired to work as mercenaries protecting the region from Picts and Irish raiders.3 Soon they overrun the east of the island and those remaining in the west the invaders called Welsh, “foreigner” or “dark stranger,” although they still referred to them as “British” for many years aftewards. Michael Drayton’s epic poem The Miseries of Queen Margaret, about the War of the Roses and published in 1627, still talked of the Welsh as “those of the British blood.”
After the Saxons had captured the Severn estuary, the old tongue split off into Welsh in the west and Cornish in the south-west, but by the sixteenth century it was increasingly rare to hear in Cornwall “mees navidua cowzs sawzneck” (I speak no English).4 The language died two centuries later.
The earlier Beaker People had largely replaced Britain’s indigenous population, but now many Britons stayed behind as their countrymen fled west and to Britanny, and generation-by-generation more of these Britons would come to speak the more dominant language until eventually a tipping point came and theirs was forgotten—and so they had become Saxons too.
As one chronicler in Martin’s world records, “the First Men were far more numerous than the Andals and could not simply be forced aside,”5 and so the Andals took the wives of the conquered. This is what most likely happened in Britain after the fall of Rome, genetic studies showing that Englishmen carry a higher frequency of Anglo-Saxon ancestry on the male than on the female line. Some houses in the Vale at the time of Game of Thrones claim descent from the First Men, among them the Redforts and Royces, just as Anglo-Norman aristocrats like Roger Mortimer claimed a blood link to King Arthur, the legendary king of
the Britons.
The Jutes ruled the kingdom of Kent, while the South, East, and West Saxon kingdoms became Sussex, Essex, and Wessex respectively, the latter centred around the southern counties of Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset, the latter originally called “Dorn”. In the midlands the Angles had established a realm on the frontier with the Britons, called the “border” or Mercia; by the North Sea was East Anglia, a marshy, flat land resembling the Netherlands, between which people had always crossed; beyond that were the two most northerly kingdoms, Bernicia and Deira, which united to become Northumbria. And so later this era became known as the Heptarchy, literally “seven realms,” although there were originally more than twelve and by the time any records were made there were just four left.6
As in Westeros, native resistance continued for some time and one warrior in particular is said to have fought many battles against the Saxons. The legend of King Arthur came to absorb much of the world it was told in, rather than the world it originally portrayed, and everything about it belongs in the high and later middle ages rather than the far grimmer and more primitive sixth century. The story really took off in the twelfth century in the French-speaking world and came to define how aristocratic men should behave.
The first mention of a heroic British warrior fighting off the Saxon onslaught comes from around the year 700, and it goes without saying that, at a time of universal illiteracy, the nearly two-century interval would make any historical accuracy impossible to verify. The tale of Arthur was most popularized by Geoffrey of Monmouth, but before that an oral tradition had been maintained in the Celtic lands of Wales, Cornwall, and Britanny, between which there would have been continual contact. The real-life “Camelot”—the word was not invented until much later—could have been anywhere from Cornwall to southern Scotland, Arthur’s realm of “Lyonesse” being etymologically related to Lothian.
