Students in my medieval history courses often wonder whether historical reality can be gleaned from medieval cinematic fantasy.
I tell them that fantasy does not aspire to historical verisimilitude. But it can reflect medieval conflicts, values and norms.
The first season of HBO’s “House of the Dragon” exemplified this. Its narrative, as noted by co-creator George R. R. Martin, drew inspiration from England’s Anarchy, a 12th-century civil war sparked by King Henry I’s effort to make his daughter, the Empress Matilda, a ruling queen. King Viserys of Martin’s fictional Westeros does the same with his daughter Rhaenyra. This fantasy evoked the vagaries of hereditary succession and the misogyny characteristic of the Middle Ages.
The new season offers a more colorful medieval palette. Its themes of internecine strife, justice and the power of everyday people have broad – indeed, universal – resonance.
Students in my medieval history courses often wonder whether historical reality can be gleaned from medieval cinematic fantasy.
I tell them that fantasy does not aspire to historical verisimilitude. But it can reflect medieval conflicts, values and norms.
The first season of HBO’s “House of the Dragon” exemplified this. Its narrative, as noted by co-creator George R. R. Martin, drew inspiration from England’s Anarchy, a 12th-century civil war sparked by King Henry I’s effort to make his daughter, the Empress Matilda, a ruling queen. King Viserys of Martin’s fictional Westeros does the same with his daughter Rhaenyra. This fantasy evoked the vagaries of hereditary succession and the misogyny characteristic of the Middle Ages.
The new season offers a more colorful medieval palette. Its themes of internecine strife, justice and the power of everyday people have broad – indeed, universal – resonance.
‘A sin begets a sin begets a sin’
One conflict encapsulates the factional violence in fictional Westeros.
The feud between the Brackens and Blackwoods, two noble families, is a storyline in both seasons.
During Princess Rhaenyra’s tour to find a husband in Season One, one of her suitors, a member of the Blackwood family, slays a heckler in her presence who happens to be a Bracken.
It represents the newest broadside in an escalating cycle of retribution, with the dispute’s origins long purged from memory. As one character observes, the spark igniting the Bracken-Blackwood feud “is lost in time. A sin begets a sin begets a sin.”
No slight is deemed too trivial in the age-old hostility between these two families: At one point, the Blackwoods accuse the Brackens of moving a boundary stone to purloin grazing land, and this accusation somehow reaches King Viserys’ ears, who dismisses it as a local problem.
In Season Two, bands of Bracken and Blackwood youths meet in the disputed pasture. Hotheaded invective follows: A Brackencalls a Blackwood a “babe-killer” and “kin-slayer.” A battle ensues, resulting in a pasture littered with Bracken and Blackwood corpses, the Blackwood patriarch dead, too.
The Brackens’ victory proves ephemeral.
The surviving Blackwoods offer arms to Princess Rhaenyra’s husband, Daemon, in return for aid in assailing the Brackens. The Brackens are unmoved by the threat of carnage that Daemon can unleash on them with his fire-breathing dragon, so Daemon urges the Blackwoods to perpetrate atrocities. They do: looting and destroying sacred shrines, burning crops, seizing livestock, slaughtering peasants and abducting women and children.
Cobbling together a legal framework
Westeros’ intractable factional hatreds echo elements of the medieval experience.
When Germanic kingdoms emerged in the early years of the Middle Ages, they lacked institutions for maintaining order, such as a standing police force and sophisticated judicial institutions and procedures.
In these kingdoms, the victim of a crime could personally and legitimately impose rough justice on a suspected culprit. This could invite retaliation and spark cyclic, long-term hostilities, though the threat of a feud could also lead to a settlement of a dispute without resort to violence. The intercession of a local lord was often key here.
Early Germanic law endeavored to contain this sanctioned vigilantism. It assigned monetary values to virtually every antisocial act to encourage material compensation over vengeance. In Æthelberht of Kent’s code, every lopped-off finger, dislodged tooth or wound had a precisely delineated worth. In the case of murder, everyone had a “wergild” – literally, “man money” – assessed according to their social status. One fascinating law penalized the destruction of the male “genital limb” at three “man-prices.” Perhaps there were things deemed worse than death.
Medieval kingdoms incrementally forged more sophisticated institutions to mete out justice. The 12th century – the chronological muse of “House of the Dragon” – saw the emergence of English common law. Inquests gathered information, grand juries leveled accusations, sheriffs apprehended wrongdoers, and trial juries rendered verdicts.
Rumblings of revolt
Despite efforts to develop legal systems, in medieval Europe – as in Westeros – the king was the final arbiter.
In the show, a humble shepherd petitions King Aegon for relief from hardship for sheep taken through a royal tithe to feed dragons; Aegon refuses. The blacksmith Hugh Hammer requests payment for dragon-slaying weapons he is crafting and receives only Aegon’s empty promise of recompense.
These impositions are reminiscent of medieval taxation and the English king’s “right of purveyance,” which gave the king the ability to appropriate, at his pleasure, food and goods. Abuse of purveyance led to its regulation in the Magna Carta, the first document to put in writing that a king is not above the law.
But what did the elite’s machinations, whether in Westeros or medieval England, mean for society’s lower echelons?
To me, one of the most interesting aspects of Season Two is the focus on the everyday people of Westeros. Mysaria – an immigrant, one-time thief, prostitute and paid informant – becomes confidant to Rhaenyra. Keenly aware she is “common-born,” Mysaria is able to observe how elite animosities rain downward on a vulnerable populace that possesses little recourse.
In the show, Rhaenyra’s naval blockade of King’s Landing most poignantly exposes the plight of regular people. Until Rhaenyra can muster a land army, the blockade is the only tactic she could direct at her opponents.
Food becomes exorbitantly expensive. Purchasing and hoarding by the better off worsens the dearth. Hungry commoners scrap with one another over bare morsels. As starvation looms, Hugh Hammer and his family attempt to flee to the countryside, only to find themselves locked inside the city by royal command.
In her clear-eyed understanding of the dynamic between the elite and commoners, Mysaria foresees blowback for burdens inflicted on the poor.
For her, law and order is only sustained by the extent to which everyday people buy into the system. She counsels Rhaenyra not to undervalue her subjects. Their power resides in their sheer numbers.
The women devise a plan to permit unmanned boatloads of food to pass through the blockade into the harbor of King’s Landing under Rhaenyra’s banner to weaponize the people’s misery. The people conclude that Rhaenyra, even though the blockade is hers, cares for the common born, while her opponents, seemingly oblivious to their hardship, continue to feast in the Red Keep, the royal castle.
News of this food sparks a riot against the supporters of Rhaenyra’s opponent.
Clinging to power
This explosion of popular violence has its medieval analogue in the urban and rural uprisings of the 14th century, a century beset by a “plague of insurrection,” most famously the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
Rhaenyra understands how decades of peace efface the collective memory of warfare’s inherent awfulness.
She poses a quintessentially medieval query after her father’s death: “As queen, what is my true duty to the realm … ? Ensuring peace and stability? Or that I sit on the Iron Throne no matter the cost?”
Rhaenyra’s musings about leadership during a fractious era evoke not only the Middle Ages, but also US politics today – a moment beset by aging rulers, political tribalism, rising inequality and murmurings of armed civil strife.
