by Ed West
Among those taken was a commander called Marco Polo; as he talked in jail about his experiences, another prisoner, Rustichello da Pisa, saw a good story and began to write down Polo’s tales.
The two powers fought another war in 1352, in Constantinople, in which a sea battle was fought in the dark. After Venice had finally crushed Genoa, the city instead submitted to its northern neighbor Milan, whose ruler sent the poet Petrarch to persuade the Venetians to make peace, warning them “the dice of fortune are ambiguous . . . For to hope for a bloodless victory over such an enemy, beware less it betoken a fatuous and fallacious confidence.”24 They ignored it, unwisely, as Genoa then rebuilt a new fleet and soon captured six thousand Venetian sailors.
In 1378, Genoa and Venice squared up for one final battle. The winter was exceptionally cold—snow fell hard, the frosts were biting, and the wind from the Hungarian steppes made life in Venice harsh. Command of the Venetian forces was given to Carlo Zeno, a man who had led a quite extraordinary life. Orphaned as a child after his father was killed in battle, he grew up to become “a scholar, a musician, a priest, a gambler” as well as a soldier of fortune. On another he was left for dead after a Turkish siege, then wrapped in a shroud and put in a coffin; the nails were going in when signs of life were detected. He once climbed up the prison in Constantinople by rope in order to release Pope John V. People called him the Unconquered.
At the climatic Battle of Chiogga in 1380, Venice, under Carlo Zeno, finally crushed its enemy once and fall. Afterward Paduans, Hungarians, and mercenaries were separated from Genoese POWs by asking the prisoners to pronounce capra, goat, which the Genoese could only enunciate as crapa. Some four thousand were marched off to prison camps where many died, while the others, mere sellswords with whom they had no real fight, were freed.25
And yet both powers were in a sense doomed. The final defeat of the Crusades had ruined the market in the east and led the Genoese to explore other avenues of trade. In 1291, two brothers sailed out past the Straits of Gibraltar and into the Atlantic Ocean, hoping to find a passage to India. They were never seen again—but they were on the right track.
*Braavos is also famous for its arsenal.
19
THE SMALL FOLK
That was the way of war. The smallfolk were slaughtered, while the highborn were held for ransom.
—TYRION LANNISTER
No Parliament met between April 1348 and February 1351, and so no tax-raising powers could be voted to restart the war, a small mercy the plague had brought. However, this would not put King Edward off all together, and even during the summer of 1350 he managed to hunt some Castilian ships where, when the cry “Ship ahoy” was heard, he ordered for helmets to be put on and wine to be drunk as they steered the enemy vessels in the manner of a “demented ten-year-old in the dodgems.”1 After this victory, Edward and Henry Percy celebrated by spending the night “in revelry with the ladies, conversing of arms and matters of love.”2
The English won a second great victory, at Poitiers in 1356, when six thousand Englishmen under Edward III’s young heir Edward of Woodstock, known in later centuries as the “Black Prince,” beat a French force twice its size. Edward was the eldest of the king’s five sons and had first seen battle at 16, alongside a father who was just 34. Now, ten years later, he led his men to victory. The French king Jean II, who had inherited the throne from his father Philippe, was taken captive, despite apparently having nineteen identically dressed doppelgangers on the field.3 However, being an aristocratic hostage was not a fate worse than death, and as the great medieval historian A.L. Poole said: “For the higher ranks, war was, in part at least, a game governed by the strict code of chivalry; it was only the unfortunate peasantry and other non-combatants who suffered from the savage plundering of the routiers.”4
For monarchs, imprisonment was always luxurious, and the king of France was transported to London and showered with golden leaves along his hours-long procession. Jean was dressed in black and rode a white horse alongside Prince Edward, and “past houses hung with captured shields and tapestries, over cobblestones strewn with rose petals, the procession moved through fantasies of pageantry that were the favorite art of the [fourteenth] century. In twelve gilded cages along the route, the goldsmiths of London had stationed twelve beautiful maidens, who scattered flowers of gold and silver filigree over the riders.”5 At a feast the English toasted and honored him as a great and brave king, with the Black Prince waiting on him at the table, an elaborate and ostentatious example of chivalry.
During his captivity in England, Jean lived in the Duke of Lancaster’s palace of the Savoy west of London, the most sumptuous luxury home in the city, where his household accounts show money spent not just on horses and musical instrument but the cutting-edge technology of the time, a clock. He was much desired by London society and, in fact, so well-treated in England that in 1364 he died from overindulgence at parties; Jean was especially feted because he had voluntarily returned after his son had escaped English captivity, as a matter of honor.
A peace treaty in 1360 had failed to end the conflict, and the English instead courted the Castilians. In 1367, the Black Prince sent three diplomats to the Alcázar to talk with King Pedro the Cruel, on the same spot where Jaime Lannister meets the Dornish leader Prince Doran Martell. Nothing came of it. (Pedro is alleged to have murdered his wife Blanche de Bourbon, whom he deserted just three days after their wedding; for that event she had come with an outfit made of 11,784 squirrel skins, mostly imported from Scandinavia.)
After Lancaster’s death, the Savoy Palace, along with his title, passed to his son-in-law, King Edward’s third surviving son, John of Gaunt. Gaunt became very rich indeed, with a gross income of £12,000 as well as a pension from Castile worth £6,600 a year, which he acquired through his second marriage (to put those numbers in perspective, the average baron had an income of between £300 and £700). He also grew increasingly unpopular as his father’s health deteriorated and he took a more active role in government.
While aristocrats lived gilded lives even in war, for the small folk there was no such comfort, and Norman poet Robert Wace remembered of another conflict:
What sorrow and what injury they did to the fine folk and the good land . . . burning houses and destroying towns, knights and villeins, clerics, monks and nuns they hunted, beat and murdered . . . you might see many lands devastated, women violated, men speared, babies disembowelled in their cradles, riches seized, flocks led off, towers brought low and towns burnt.6
Indeed, for the peasantry life was pretty awful even in peace time. Society was unforgiving and unsympathetic to the poor, illustrated by the words that stem from the medieval class system. “Generous” comes from generosus, and “gentle” from gentilis, two names for the upper class that have the same etymology as “genetic” and mean “born,” but implying “high born”; the opposite was Nativi, the word for the poor, also meaning literally “born,” but suggesting born unfree. In contrast, various words that originally applied to the medieval poor retain a derogatory air, among them ignoble, churlish, villain, and boor (from gebor, an Anglo-Saxon peasant).
It was generally believed that high-born people were of better and more moral stock. The Owl and the Nightingale, a poem of the time, recalled the belief that the low born were of inferior breeding:
A wicked man
from a foul brood
who mingles with free men
always knows his origins
and that he comes from an addled egg
even though he lies in a free nest.7
Peasants were generally despised, and most poems and tales depict them as credulous, greedy, and insolent. As Littlefinger puts it, “Most of them believe that if a woman eats rabbit while pregnant, her child will be born with long floppy ears.”8
However, the class system was not quite as terrible as imagined by later eras. In one chilling moment, the dead-eyed psychopath Roose Bolton tells his even more awful son how h
e was conceived: “The moment that I set eyes on her I wanted her. Such was my due. The maesters will tell you that King Jaehaerys abolished the lord’s right to the first night to appease his shrewish queen, but where the old gods rule, old customs linger.”9
Droit de seigneur, alternatively “First Night,” where lords took the virginity of peasant girls on the day of their wedding, is a powerfully horrific idea, appealing to our fears of sexual abuse and cuckoldry, and has appeared in historical drama. It’s also a modern myth, only first mentioned in the sixteenth century and becoming popular among French Revolutionaries and Marxists to illustrate how wicked the aristocracy were—but it never happened. No doubt many low born women were raped by their lords, but it was never institutionalized or justified.10
Some nobles were indeed deeply unpleasant, but as the medieval era went on it became far harder—at least in England—for them to abuse those beneath them. Increasingly laws protected the poor, who also enjoyed more land rights and mobility; indeed, in England there is a great deal of evidence that even by this stage there was a free market in land.11
Varys is one of the few characters in Westeros who has risen far in the social order, from child-beggar and prostitute in Myr to a member of the small council. Lord Baelish inherited some land and a title, but he’s from a new family, and is despised for it. One fourteenth century comparison is with Geoffrey Chaucer, whose father and grandfather were London wine merchants, his parents owning twenty-four shops; Chaucer as a very young man fought for Edward III in France, having an utterly miserable time, and then went into service for Edward’s daughter-in-law Philippa, Countess of Ulster, later ending up head of customs and brother-in-law to John of Gaunt.12 He rose so far that his son Thomas became Speaker of the House of Commons and his granddaughter Alice was a member of the higher aristocracy during the War of the Roses. Most people, of course, know Chaucer better as a poet who wrote bawdy stories, but that was something of a sideline.
Another example is the de la Pole family. William de la Pole was a Hull wool merchant who grew so rich that he was able to fund Edward III’s war, in return for which he became Baron of the Exchequer; this laid the groundwork for his son Michael to rise even further, much to the annoyance of contemporaries of better breeding. Alice Chaucer later married another William de la Pole, so linking the two nouveau riche families, and by the end of the Cousin’s War, the de la Poles had come close to winning the crown—instead failure meant destruction. They were looked down upon because bloodline was everything in the medieval period; indeed, people would sue over allegations they came from serf blood, and with good reason, as it could be used by predators to seize property.
In Westeros, small folk can rise up by becoming members of the City Watch or septons; they could also become knights, although rarely. In real life, it was unusual for villeins to go far, although not impossible, and the Church was the best avenue. William of Wykeham was the son of a Hampshire freeman and rose to become Bishop of Winchester and also Chancellor of England, equivalent to the Hand in Westeros. He also founded Winchester College, the oldest public school in England, with its famous motto “Manners makyth man.” Wykeham was fortunate to have received patronage from two wealthy men, and after becoming a chaplain acquired a reputation as a good administrator in the service of the king. Two centuries earlier, Robert Grosseteste was born into a humble Suffolk family in 1175 and rose to become Bishop of Lincoln; among other things, Grosseteste is generally thought of as having pioneered the scientific method.
However, the best means of social mobility was through warfare, a brutal sort of meritocracy, especially if a humble soldier could capture someone of value. William Callowe, an archer at Agincourt in 1415, ransomed a prisoner worth £100, equivalent to more than ten year’s wages for someone of his station. John Hawkwood, the Free Companies leader who became the most feared man in Italy, may have been a humble tanner’s son in Essex, although his origins remain mysterious.
In very rare cases someone might really go far. Bulgarian Tsar Ivaylo was supposedly a swine-herder to start with, but after leading a group of peasants in defeating an invasion from the Mongol Golden Horde he then took on the reigning tsar and killed him in battle, and so the Byzantines helped install him as a puppet. Against the odds, Ivaylo then defeated the Byzantines before ending up being thrown out by his own people and going to the Mongols for help. They beheaded him.
Only one pope rose from very humble origins, Silvester II, originally Gerbert of Aurilliac. He was the son of a mountain peasant from the Auvergne region of southern France and ended up tutor to the Holy Roman Emperor’s children before ascending to the papacy, largely on account of his intellectual reputation. But his rise was so unusual that, rather than being celebrated, many suspected the devil must have played a role.
In Westeros, “most smallfolk are poor, illiterate, and live very provincial, humble, simple lives. They do not have surnames. They dress in raw wool and dull brown roughspun. They use roads which are crooked muddy tracks that do not appear on parchment maps.”13 Surnames become ubiquitous in England in the thirteenth century, so while in 1160 very few English tenants had them recorded, by 1260 all did. The main reason was the growth of the state and the increase in record-keeping and taxes, which required proper identification, especially at a time when people were very unimaginative about names.
In England many surnames relate to trade and location (West, for example) but in the Highlands of Scotland and in Ireland almost all surnames are patronymic, reflecting the importance of parental ancestry. The Welsh individually used extensive patronymics, so that the Lancastrian soldier Owen Tudor’s full name was Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur—Owain son of Maredudd son of Tudur (Theodore)—a common practice even in relatively recent times (people used to say “as long as a Welshman’s pedigree”).* Irish and Scottish Highland surname patterns are due to the survival of clans, which were long broken up in England—except in the far north. Before the growth of the state people relied on the protection of close-knit extended families, which usually practiced in-group marriage and placed great significance on a common ancestor, but as people came to depend on the law, such family ties weakened.
In England, the most common name was Smith, which accounts for just over 1 percent of English people today. This is unsurprising as blacksmiths were often admired or feared, “likely to be a dominant figure since at least the twelfth century, sometimes the leader of a gang, often rather a sinister fellow, recognizable by the lead rings in his ears,”14 and often associated with supernatural practices. However, even in England seven of the ten most common surnames are originally patronymic, including Johnson, Davies, and Williams.
Village life was extremely tough, even in peacetime: skeletons from the period show widespread bone deformation, osteoarthritis, and other signs of continual grinding labor. The harvest was cut using an eighteen-inch sickle—the scythe didn’t come about until the sixteenth century—and this involved gruelling, repetitive work, with people bent down from dawn to dusk with a threshing flail weighing twenty pounds, brought down on grain every five seconds for hours upon hours, day after day.”15
Most people lived in fairly awful conditions. Shepherds and cowherds would sleep in the barn with their animals, usually the most valuable possession they owned. Thatched roofs were common, being the cheapest and most effective form of insulation, unless they became rotten with damp, or burned down, which they did very easily; they were also home to numerous rodents or insects. In the High Medieval period most peasant houses were incredibly flimsy, with walls so thin that one poor man was killed while having breakfast, shot through the head by a stray arrow.16 In fact, “house breaking” meant just that, and coroners’ records describe wrongdoers smashing through the walls of buildings with agricultural instruments. A court in Elton in East Anglia punished a minor who hadn’t received his inheritance and so “tore up and carried away” a house once belonging to his father.
Roughly half the population of England
occupied the lowest position in society, serfs or villeins. Serfs were unfree peasants unable to move from their manor and subject to severe restrictions, although they were not slaves, being tied to the land almost as a fixture rather than by being owned by another human. Their lord could not arbitrarily kill them, for instance, as with a slave, and they could not be removed from their families, one of the cruelest aspects of slavery. (A serf in Scandinavia was called a thrall, as with the Iron Islands, from which we get the word enthralled.)
They were also subject to some punishing taxes and restrictions; if a villein’s daughter had sex out of wedlock she or her father had to pay their lord a fine called a leirwite or legerwite. When they died various possessions were grabbed by their lord, including animals, any gold or silver and brass pots. The Church also installed a “mortuary fine” on top of this.
Crime was widespread, and rarely punished, although many of those in trouble with the law had committed rather pathetic offenses, as manorial court records illustrate. Edith Comber, maidservant to William son of Letitia, “carried away some of the lord’s peas,” while Alice, servant of Nicholas Miler, was fined for stealing hay and stubble.
The favorite rural past time was drinking, most of it done in taverns which were usually just the house of a villager who had recently brewed cheap beer. Horrific accidents were the norm. One Margery Golde died in Oxford in June 1279, burned to death after being “drunk beyond measure,” having spent all day in a tavern, after which she stuck a candle into the wall above her bed, which was made of hay. William Bonefaunt, a skinner, was recorded as standing “drunk, naked, and alone at the top of a stair . . . for the purpose of relieving nature when by accident he fell headforemost to the ground and forthwith died.” A goldsmith called John de Markeby was in 1339 “drunk and leaping about” at a friend’s house when he accidentally stabbed himself with the knife he carried in his belt, bleeding to death that night.