by Ed West
Like most of the country’s leading clans, they had not always been from the island. The Percy histories claimed as their oldest ancestor Mainfred, or Manni, who in the year AD 896 arrived in France after pillaging in England. He was a Dane, or as we would call him now, a Viking, and like many of his kind, settled in a region of Francia that came to be called Normandy. From the Percy lordship in Pays de Caux, north-west of Rouen, one of their number had arrived in England alongside William the Conqueror in 1066 when England’s ruling class was ruthlessly eliminated and replaced by a French-speaking elite.
From minor lords in the wilder, rougher north of the country, which the Normans had treated with special brutality, the Percys had risen to become the most powerful family in the region. Just eleven generations after arriving on the island, a Percy was made Earl of Northumberland.
Although they had marched with the hated conqueror, the Percys had over time made themselves true men of the North. First settling in Yorkshire, they were a minor family who, in 1166, were still only the seventh largest tenant-in-chiefs in that county. However, Henry de Percy had that year married Isabel, daughter of Adam de Brus II, Baron of Skelton; it was an advantageous marriage, in return for which de Percy and his heirs swore to every year ride to Skelton Castle “to lead the lady of the castle from her chamber to the chapel for Mass, and then escort her back to her chamber and take meat with her before withdrawing.”3 This they did, honoring their debts, until the Reformation in the sixteenth century swept away such ancient traditions.
They were not just powerful and rich, but well loved too. Northern men followed them with their arms and their hearts, and at their command thousands would appear in the field, men to whom the king in London was a distant figure who spoke a strange dialect: “To them, the last man standing between Northerners and destruction was not the faraway king, but a Percy. He was their commander, their protector, their judge and their sheriff.”4
And the Percys had always looked after their men. The records down in London show Henry de Percy writing to the chancellor on behalf of a valet: “Aleyn, son of Sir Thomas de Heton, who might have lost his land”5 had his lord not defended his corner. Percy’s son would speak on behalf of attainders who had fought loyally for the crown so that they might be spared punishment for the violent crimes they had committed at home. The Percy soldiers were paid out of his own pocket, knowing that silver promised from the crown might take an age to reach men with hungry families, a level of diligence to vassals few southern barons would have bothered with.
The Percys came to dominate the local honors, among them Warden of the East March, whose role it was to secure the eastern portion of the border with Scotland. They were in charge of justice, too. In Westeros, “the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword,”6 and executions are carried out in the king’s name without any sort of trial. It was not quite the case in real life, although local lords were tasked with the grim task with punishing lawbreakers after their guilt was determined, for “he who prosecutes shall carry out the judgement,” as the twelfth century code of Preston in Lancashire goes.
The most recent Henry de Percy had, in 1294, adopted the lion as the symbol of his house, having married Eleanor, daughter of the Earl of Arundel. The Arundels, an Anglo-Norman family with their base on the Welsh border, had for generations displayed a golden lion on a red field, and could trace their ancestry back to Adeliza, widow of King Henry I. Percy now adopted the animal to show his Arundel blood, and in tribute to a founder of the Percy dynasty, Joscelin de Louvain—leeuwen being Flemish for lion.
Their new heraldic symbol—called sigils in Westeros—was appropriate for the Percys’ rising status. The art of heraldry was in its infancy, reflecting the importance of lineage and the most important thing to a man in the medieval world: who your father was. And just as the ruling houses of Westeros traced their lineage back to obscure and semi-mythical kings, in medieval England those of royal blood descended from the rulers of Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria, the ancient kingdoms of the island, which were eventually united before being conquered in 1066 by Normandy’s Duke William. Families placed great importance on their pedigree, in particular a link to the Conqueror and his companions, and through him to the ultimate forefather of medieval Europe, Charles the Great, King of the Franks, who in AD 800 had been crowned Emperor of the West in Rome.
And so heraldry was more than just about team colors; it was a reminder of who your father was, and his father before him, and what would be passed onto the next generation. It gave courage in battle, so that “a knight of good lineage would be emboldened in the field by recollection of his ancestors’ brave deeds and spurred on in bravery himself by a desire to add to the family roll of honour.”7
Henry de Percy, First Baron Percy, had been born in 1273, from a family that almost went extinct after his six paternal uncles all failed to produce children and his two brothers died without issue. His maternal grandfather was John de Warenne, the powerful Earl of Surrey who, back in 1278, had been served with a royal writ of quo warranto (“by what right”). King Edward I, determined to learn which subjects had usurped royal privileges in order to claim them back, demanded of each man proof of how he came by his property. De Warenne, approached by the king’s men, drew his rusty sword and declared that this was his warrant, for “My ancestors came with William the Bastard, and conquered their lands with the sword, and I will defend them with the sword against anyone wishing to seize them.”8
Alnwick had been erected during an intense period of castle-building following the Norman Conquest, during which five hundred such fortresses were erected in a generation. Raised as a show of strength against the Scots across the river Tweed, it was a motte-and-bailey castle, the standard type of the period used by the Normans, characterized by a raised and defensible central keep, the motte, surrounded by a courtyard (bailey) with a ditch around it. De Percy had now added a heavily fortified barbican, as well as new circular towers, more efficient than the older square towers as they could not be battered at the corners or easily undermined (that is, dug under and set fire to). A moat was added, along with a well, a portcullis, a drawbridge, and eight semicircular bastions to the keep, castle-building technology reaching its apex during this period. Erected on a peninsula, with the River Aln to the north and a ravine to the east and south, Alnwick was almost invulnerable, for a garrison of sixty men within could easily defend such a castle against six hundred outside.
Which was just as well, as in de Percy’s lifetime relations between the kingdoms of England and Scotland had deteriorated sharply, and he had spent almost twenty years fighting on the border, leading raids into enemy territory and defending the north from attack. De Percy had been knighted by King Edward in March 1296 while besieging Berwick, Scotland’s largest city; three years later he became the first Lord Percy as his reward.
The border wars came at great cost; in March 1307 Percy and three hundred of his men were at Turnberry Castle in Carrick when they were attacked by the Scottish leader Robert the Bruce. The fighting was so horrific it was rumored afterwards that Percy was afraid to go into Scotland again. In the autumn of 1314, as the harsh Northumbrian winter approached, Percy was forced to defend nearby Newcastle and lead a raiding party north. He died in early October, most likely fatally wounded while fighting Scottish raiders.
He died, but his house survived. As Tywin Lannister put it, “Before long I’ll be dead, and you and your brother and your sister and all of her children, all of us dead, all of us rotting underground. It’s the family name that lives on. It’s all that lives on. Not your personal glory, not your honor . . . but family.”9 Of 136 barons summoned to Westminster between 1295 and 1300, only sixteen of their houses were left in 1500, and the Percys were among the survivors. In fact, they still survive today, and still live in Alnwick six months of the year, the other half of which it is used as a film set to fund its maintenance. Fans of the Harry Potter films will recognize it as Hogwarts School of Witch
craft and Wizardry.
THE NORTH
The Great North Road is still there too, this real-life King’s Road now going by the less romantic name of the A1 and M1 motorway, and still following mostly the same route, one of four ancient paths in Britain dating to Roman times and beyond. The Gough map, commissioned during this period, shows three thousand miles of main roads by 1360, 40 percent of which were built by the Romans.
The map was ordered by a king intent on extending his power beyond the south of the island, outside of which most monarchs had little experience. Southern kings had often had only fragile control over the North, a naturally distinct region of England defined as the area between the great Humber river and the Scottish border. It has “older, harder rocks and hillier terrain,”10 compared to the flatter and more fertile South. The narrow width between the vast stretch of the Humber and the hills of the Pennines made the region hard for southern armies to control. Even thirty-five miles inland the great river is a mile across, and so dominance of just one small gap between river and mountain allowed an army control of York, the largest city in the region, as well as the rivers Ouse, Ure, Aire, Don, Derwent, and Trent—and so the whole North.* Any army arriving from the South would find themselves in a corridor between the Humber swamps and the Pennines, the mountain range that forms a spine down northern England, removing any numerical advantage southerners had.
People of the North were different: “When the earl and his Northern retinue travelled to London, locals would stare at the foreigners,” as one historian put it. “The Northerners were poorer and rougher, and it showed. Northern soldiers, overdressed for the summer climate,” had “outmoded armor; even the earl’s warhorse was a feeble creature compared to the splendid steeds favoured by Southern magnates. The Northerners were permanently wary and clannish.”11
Yorkshire, the largest of the northern counties, formed the southern extent of this region. Beyond that, the four most northerly shires, Northumberland, Westmorland, Cumberland, and Durham, were a patchwork of miniature fiefdoms run by warring families in which the laws passed in Westminster were of lesser importance than ancient traditions and local custom, including long-held vendettas.
The North of Westeros “is like its Warden: stark, unforgiving, masculine and wild.”12 Likewise William Camden, who in the Tudor period wrote the first geographical study of the British Isles, described a “rough and barren” land: “You would think you see the ancient nomads, a martial sort of people,” he concluded.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his History of the Kings of Britain, wrote that “it was a frightful land to live in, more or less uninhabited, and it offered a safe lurking place to foreigners. Indeed, by its very geographical position it lay open to the Picts, the Scots, the Danes, the Norwegians and anyone else who came ashore to ravage the island.”13 According to the twelfth century chronicle, the Gesta Stephani, “the root and origin of all evil arose in that part of England called Northumbria to produce plunder and arson, strife and war.”14 Or as a fifteenth century writer put it: “The north, whence all evil spreads.”15 But then, of course, these men were all from the South.
Long ago it had been a kingdom in its own right, Northumbria, one of seven in early medieval England, a chaotic and violent time commonly called the Dark Ages. Its two warring kings brutally killed by Viking invaders in 865, Northumbria had been heavily settled by Norsemen, a Scandinavian legacy still reflected in Yorkshire dialect today. A century later it had been the last region to come under the sway of the southern kings of Wessex who had united the country, and retained a distinctive, semi-Scandinavian identity for far longer. Reluctant to help the southern lords fight off the Norman invaders in 1066, the northern men had afterwards most ferociously opposed the conqueror and been crushed as a result. Hundreds of thousands died, whole villages were destroyed, and the region never recovered.
Border life was still tough, centuries later, as it always had been. The Flemish chronicler Froissart wrote of men there forced to consume “small poor wine” and “bread evil baken in panniers” which “was sore wet with the sweat of horses.”16 Up in the North, saddles were “all rotten and broken, and most part of their horses hurt on their backs . . . nor they had nothing to make fire but green boughs, the which would not burn because of the rain.”17
In the North, some traditions held on longer: stories of shapeshifters that dated back at least to Saxon times before the conquest. Beyond lay the terror of Scotland, a barren, cold land with its folk tales of sith, or aes sídhe, supernatural undead beings who lived in the Land of the Dead, having been driven into remote areas by invaders.18 In Scottish folklore, these creatures formed the slaughe sidhe, the “fairy horde,” an army of the undead. Few on the English side of the wall believed that anymore; the living Scots were terrifying enough, and that year the army of the realm headed deep beyond the wall to fight them—only to meet with disaster, a catastrophe that would plunge the kingdom into civil war.
But worse still, people across the Realm and beyond had noticed that the weather was turning. On the colder fringes of the known world those on the margins felt it first as the temperatures plunged; they did not know it yet, but the following year the cold rains would begin, and the crops would fail. Winter was coming.
KING’S LONDON
As the fifteenth century chronicler Polydore Vergil observed, “The whole Countrie of Britaine . . . is divided into four partes; wherof the one is inhabited of Englishmen, the other of Scottes, the third of Wallshemen, and the fowerth of Cornishe people. Which all differ emonge them selves, either in tongue, either in manners, or ells in lawes and ordinaunces.”19
The Realm of England had grown out of several small kingdoms carved out by three Germanic tribes, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, arriving on the island as Rome’s control of western Europe collapsed. The kingdom, united four centuries before Henry de Percy’s time, shared the island of Britain with various peoples beyond a wall on its northern frontier, speaking a mixture of tongues, as well as surviving British speakers on two peninsulas in the west and south-west.
The island’s thriving economic hub had for many years been London, settled on the north bank of the River Thames by the Romans, and with access to the continent, especially the rich markets of Flanders, northern France, and the German “free imperial cities” across the North Sea. Here the king of England sat in Westminster Hall, once part of a tiny island a mile upstream from Lundenberg (as the Saxons called it) but now a western suburb of the city. Like the Great Hall of the Red Keep, this is where the monarch kept court.
The throne sat at the south end of the hall by a twelve-foot-long marble slab, the King’s Table, which long symbolized the monarch’s power. The current King’s Table dated to the reign of Edward I’s father Henry III, replacing a far older wooden slab that once would have travelled around the country with the monarch. The throne itself, the King’s Seat, was modelled on the Biblical throne of Solomon and carved with lions, emblems of the kingdom. Marble thrones had become symbols of great imperial prestige, used by the still surviving eastern Roman emperors in far-off Constantinople and by Charlemagne, Emperor of the West. The palace of Westminster had also recently become home to semi-official meetings of lords and commons now called the Parliament (“to talk” in French, from where English also gets “parley”, to talk with an enemy).
London, from where the king ruled his realm, was perhaps home to sixty thousand people, far smaller than Granada, Seville, Venice, or Milan, or countless other cities to the south. London’s merchant elite were English-speakers, as they always had been, although the kings and higher aristocracy had spoken French for two and a half centuries. A teeming, bustling, and squalid city, London was surrounded on three sides by a Roman wall with seven gates and on the other by the river (these gates were not pulled down until 1760). The city had by now long sprawled out of its ancient wall and extended from the Tower in the east to the River Fleet to the west.
The Tower of London, built by the Norma
ns in order to control the city and intimidate it, was a royal fortress, apartment block, and even zoo, home to an elephant and leopard during the reign of Henry III. It was also a prison, from which only one man had ever escaped, Ranulf Flambard in 1101, a bishop notorious for scamming both rich and poor out of their wealth. The Tower also had a library of 160 volumes, one of the biggest in England20—although in real life people’s reading tastes were rather lowbrow, fifty-nine of these books being trashy romances, with the Queen of England among the keenest borrowers.21 In Westeros, The Citadel, headquarters of the Order of Maesters in Oldtown, has the “largest library in the Known World”22 but in England at the time even the greatest book collection scaled into insignificance compared to their ancient equivalents, and would do so until the seventeenth century.
London was grotesquely unhygienic, a city drowning in its own filth. One Londoner complained of the slaughterhouse nearby that had made his garden “stinking and putrid,” another that blood from animals filled nearby streets “making a foul corruption and abominable sight to all dwelling near.”23 A complaint against William E. Cosner, resident of the ward of Farringdon Without, stated that “men could not pass” by his house “for the stink [of] horse dung and horse piss.”24 It was not unknown for men to drown in shit, or for the smell and squalor to drive people to murder, hardly surprising when they lived and worked in “lanes barely wide enough for a fat man to turn around in.”25 It was not until later that century that slaughterhouses and other unhygienic places were forced to locate outside of the crowded city.