#and then who is a lordly/knightly/other house under them

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Anon Asks:

What exactly is ‘royal land’? how is it run? is it all directly ruled by the king or does it have petty lords/landed knights on it? if it does have petty lords/landed knights, how does it differ from other land in the realm that isnt ‘royal’? Like what is the difference between a great knightly house like templeton sworn to arryn or a powerful masterly house in the north and landed knights, besides size/lineage? Or would such territory be considered royal land rather than vassalized land because they aren���t lordly houses or sworn to one between them and the royal house? 

>_> Feudalism is way more confusing than people like to think, though it does make things more interesting and its nice that GRRM can catch that sort of political incoherency for his setting.

Welp, shoulda known I’d opened up a can of worms.

Royal land is land that the monarch holds themselves, rather than giving out as a fiefdom to any of their vassals. So it probably wouldn’t have petty lords or landed knights on it unless the monarch had decided to give away that land to said lord/knight as a reward for some service. (There’s an exception to this that I’ll discuss in a bit.)

In terms of how it is run, it would be run quite like other land. Typically, territory would be divided into various manors - manors being an economic and judicial unit run by the manorial court. Manorial courts both were the main source of records on and made the legal decisions on just about everything: who had rights (primarily tenant’s rights) to what bit of land (but also usage rights to the commons or to the water or hunting rights or wood-gathering, etc. etc.); who owed what in rents, taxes, and feudal obligations of labor and to whom; what would be grown, where and when, and who would labor; and crucially, the court also dealt with contract law and torts in the manor, so when you loaned your best milk cow to your neighbor and it died, everyone knew where to go for adjudication. 

That manor would be run by various officials:

at the top was the steward, who oversaw the manorial court and who was responsible for the overall condition of the manor. 

immediately below them was the reeve (adding to the complication, this is the Saxon term; Normans called them bailiffs and then started using the word for all kinds of judicial offices and then started using reeve again) who was the chief overseer of the peasants and was usually a peasant himself (sometimes appointed, and sometimes elected, subject to veto by the lord). The reeve’s job was to make sure that the crops got planted and harvested in line with the manorial court’s decisions and to carry out the marketing of the manor’s produce; to collect rents and debts (if a given tenant was late on their rent, for example) but also to make disbursements; and to make sure that the peasants performed their feudal obligations. 

And then there were assistant reeves and assistant stewards and under-bailiffs and all kinds of minor functionaries.

So the main difference, as far as the peasants were concerned, between royal land and fiefed land really was just who appointed the steward and signed off on the reeves. Now here’s where it could get tricky, because sometimes the King would lease out their lands to their friends and people who gave them money (sometimes not the same people!) without giving them away. 

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Where does the internal heirarchy of each region comes from? As in how do you know who are lesser lords and high lords? I thought in Westeros you had a three tier system of King>Lord Paramount>Vassal Lords.

It’s a bit more complicated than “King>Lord Paramount>Vassal Lords.” Under the Lords Paramount of the Great Houses, you have the Lesser Houses. But the Lesser Houses can be subdivided in different ways.

Principal vs. Non-Principal

For example, you have the distinction between the Principal Houses and the non-Principal Houses. Principal Houses are the leading Houses of each Kingdom, and not every Lesser House is a principal House; we don’t know precisely what it entails to be a principal House or what kind of status it offers. So for example, the Karstarks, Umbers, Flints, Mormonts, Hornwoods, Cerwyns, Reeds, Manderlys, Glovers, Tallharts, and Boltons are considered principal Houses, but the Dustins and the Ryswells are not, neither are the Norreys or the Liddles or the Harclays, etc. 

Lordly vs. Masterly/Knightly 

One of the major distinctions between the lesser Houses is the question of whether they are lordly or masterly/knightly. Lords have the right of pit and gallows but landed knights or masters do not. This can be a potentially confusing distinction, however. There are many petty lords who jealously cling to that right, but who are far weaker than landed knights - think of the difference between the Lords of House Baelish and their few sheep versus the Knight of Ninestars who can raise a thousand men. Likewise, the Glovers and the Tallharts may be Masterly rather than Lordly, but they remain principal houses of the North and their fiefdoms are quite large and important.

Direct Vassal vs. Subinfeudation

Another major distinction, which may or may not be tied up in principal vs. non-principal, is whether the House in question pledges its fealty directly to the Lord Paramount or whether they are vassals of vassals. For example, the Webbers and Osgreys are bannermen of the Rowans who in turn are bannermen of the Tyrells, which points to the higher status of the Rowans than either. 

But again, things can be complicated/confusing: House Hightower and House Mullendore are both principal Houses of the Reach, but the Mullendores are sworn to Oldtown rather than to Highgarden directly. Does this mean that the Mullendores are less than the Vrywels or the Florents? 

Status, Wealth, and Power

Another thing that confuses this is that status, wealth, and power don’t always track with one another. There’s lots of examples of Houses that have a lot of prestige but nothing else - think of the Westerlings, with their ancient First Men blood and their royal connections, but almost no money and land and a castle sinking into disrepair, or the touchy Waynwoods whose pride forces them to live above their means, allowing Littlefinger to buy up their debts. 

Likewise, there’s other examples of Houses that have a lot of money but little prestige - the Freys are considered jumped-up toll collectors, the Butterwells are called cow thieves, the Spicers only two generations away from being “in trade.” And there’s other examples of Houses with wealth but no power - the Lannisters of Lannisport are rolling in gold but they’re second fiddles; the Arryns of Gulltown married into merchant money, but don’t control Gulltown (rather the Graftons do, although the Shetts clearly have a good deal of power there too). 

And there’s some Houses that have a good deal of power beyond perhaps what their economic power would suggest - think about the Brackens and Blackwoods who somehow manage to be strong enough that their feuds can’t be suppressed by Lords Paramount or Kings; or the way in which the Boltons have roughly as many soldiers as the Freys without anything like the economic advantages of the Twins.