As Prince Daron said about his own brother, Arian Targaryen.
A pity he wasn't born a Fossaway then.
He'd think himself an apple and we'd all be a deal safer, but
there you are. We've also been told that
Dragons don't plant trees, but House Fossaway does.
It's an interesting contrast, isn't it?
The symbolic, the symbolism of something that's around forever
and represents life and and fertility versus something
that's just absolutely bent on destruction and kills itself
whenever it fights another of its kind.
And yeah, it's a very different vibe there, isn't it?
Now, they've also been playing with colors for much longer.
House floss away. Well before the Dragons came
along. Yeah.
Red Dragons, green Dragons, brown Dragons, apples have that
variety as well. And though I haven't eaten any
Dragons, it's a meal for kings, and I'm more of a common man, I
suspect I'd prefer apples if I did have the opportunity to do
some sort of taste test. And he has.
Apples are loaded with symbolism on their own, even without
Dragons in the picture. They're also loaded with fiber,
by the way. And George RR Martin doesn't
just love food, he loves word play.
So you get both of them here. You get a house just as old as
any with ties to the ancient, possibly supernatural,
mythological founders of the Reach and all the things that
come along with that. The the real First Men, the
first First Men. But of course the Fossa ways,
like so many other houses, made the transition to Andal, to the
Seven, to knighthood, and it seems they took to it well, like
much of the Reach. They're big fans of all these
things. Like always, it's the characters
that matter the most. However, all the rest is just
set up to make the characters more interesting, to have them
something to exist in, to be a part of.
And the apples do fall far from the tree, meaning there's a wide
variety here, Right? They're not all just carbon
copies of each other. A bunch of very similar
characters. Just comparing Stefan to Raymond
says a lot. And while we don't have an
example of a better Fossaway than Raymond, I almost said
bitter. Yeah, we all.
We do have a candidate or two for someone worse than Stefan,
so that's something. But sticking with the word play,
bad apples don't ruin the bunch, especially not in this case.
They actually make for a better story.
They enhance the bunch. Yeah, from the noblest deeds to
the worst puns, from apple lore to a son of Garth Greenhand,
plus theories to fill in all the gaps.
All that and more, plus a taste of glory on this episode of
History of Westeros Podcast. Hello and welcome back,
everybody. It's another episode of History
of Westeros Podcast coming at you on Easter Sunday.
As it turns out, here at 3:00, our usual time slot on Sundays.
Grab an apple and enjoy as we take you through the full
history of House Fossaway, talking about characters and
everything else. Now, I actually ate a lot of
apples while I'm writing this episode.
Yeah. I mean, every time I was writing
something, I'd be like, apples. Yeah, that sounds really good.
And I would just go grab an apple and eat it while I was
writing this. Green apples.
Mind you, I didn't eat a red apple while writing this
episode, but I had several. Granny Smith's Darn right.
Anyway, we are here like I said, every 3:00 on Sunday.
Well most 3:00's on Sunday and we are everywhere.
You can find us podcast that is with on podcast platforms and AD
free if you look on Patreon. And if you catch us on Spotify,
the video version is edited a week after we're live on
YouTube. So the best cleanest version of
this is up on Spotify. Thanks to Nina.
She had a lot of great notes, as she so often does when we're
doing house histories or deep dives on characters or something
in between. Over on her on
goodqueenalley.tumblr.com you can find a post about Makar and
how things would have gone in that family if Makar had been a
woman. Like would he have married or
she in this case have married Baylor?
Or was Darren just so against the incest marriages?
What we think would happen? It's a good what if type
question from a family that was that generation was all male.
This is the first episode of Topics Moot 2026.
Patreon voters picked this one. 11 more are coming.
As of right now, only three are left to be chosen.
We've got the last three currently being voted on, so
we'll have a full list for you all pretty soon.
As to what was chosen, House Fossaway, unless that changes
is, was the biggest single vote getter out of all the topics.
So this one was very wanted and we're very happy to deliver it.
You can hit us up with questions about this or about topics,
mood, or about anything at westeroshistory@gmail.com or on
any of our socials. We're pretty much everywhere.
Start off with a trivia question, and of course it's
very related to the topic. Not directly related to House
Fossaway in this case, but apples who mentioned an apple
while on their deathbed. Somewhat prominently mentioned
an apple on their deathbed. Narrows a doubt a bit.
Not every, not that many characters have deathbed scenes,
but there's a few answer at the end and answer during the
episode. If you're paying close
attention, you'll hear it get delivered under the radar here.
Let's talk real quickly about what's in store for today.
Apples, obviously, they're in lots of stores, in fact.
But here we have a persistent presence throughout history in
this house. They are an old house.
Like I said, they're first men then and all, and then they're
still around now. So just everything they've been
around for, all the major events we need to have always have
detail on how they participated. But it's a very large, long,
rich history. It's a ubiquitous food, right?
Which means it appears often enough outside of the context of
Mouse Fossaway. Just George likes describing
food. And apples are, well, they are
up their dessert food, their breakfast food, their snack
food, their alcohol. I mean their food for common
folk. They're used in savory dishes.
Too. Yeah, they're just really,
really are ubiquitous and just our existence, Their dessert,
they're like I say, Shea said. Savory dishes.
And they're food for horses. That's food for rich people and
food for animals like you don't. This is not a lot of examples
like that. It's arguably a top five human
food stuff of all time. I don't know how you would rate
that go about deciding that, but I'm going to make the case
anyway. We'll have a little bit of apple
facts and apple symbolism a little later in the episode and
more than 5 minutes on the Wester Rossi aspects there.
Starting off, I'll give you the list of topics that are coming
here. We have first mentioned, as we
so often do, First Men era. Foss, the Archer who is the
progenitor of House Fossaway, Cider Hall, the red apple.
Fossaways Castle, then the coming of the end.
All some tidbits there. The Targaryen era to follow.
Field of fire. The old King's apple counter.
The Reds stay green, The Reds stay red.
From apple Lords to apple Knights.
Ashford Meadow the Reds turn green.
The bad apple a fruity diversion.
Then the apples of A Song of Ice and Fire.
We see A Song of Ice Apple, Fire.
Yeah, ice apple and fire. The three things that matter
most. Lady Leonette, who is a Fossaway
green, Sir John Fossaway, some red apple, Fossaways Lothor,
Apple Eater. And we'll close off with the
brown apple. I think a lot of you know who
I'm talking about there. That's Franklin Flowers, who is
a Fossaway bastard in the Golden Company.
So. And a captain at that.
So an important guy. All right, let's get to it.
And now that we have those first mentions in the way here, let's
get to it. First mention, they don't
actually appear in A Game of Thrones in the main text, but
they do appear in the appendix. We learn in the appendix of Game
of Thrones that Mace Tyrell's sister Jana is married to Sir
John Fossaway, who is probably the head of the house, but
they're a knightly house these days.
They used to be lordly. We'll, we'll get into that
detail too. So Sir John could just be a
knight of the house, but he might be the head.
It's that's makes it a little confusing.
But not to mention there's lots of ways here and there.
We're not always sure who's green and who's red, but either
way, they're all sworn to House Tyrell and they're both reach
houses, of course. So that works together as well
as serving to make them sort of a whole.
They're mentioned again in a John chapter in The Clash of
Kings, when Lord Commander Commander, Lord Commander
Mormont sends a certain Sir Arnell to Renly as an envoy.
And this Sir Arnell, whose last name isn't mentioned.
So he's probably a bastard 'cause it says his mother was a
green apple flossaway. I was like, yeah, I mean, maybe
Sir Arnell with some noble last name with his father's house.
But I have a feeling this that's not what we're we're seeing
here. Either way, sadly, we never hear
again of Sir Arnell. He's sent to Renly as an envoy,
and that's the last we hear of Sir Arnell.
He may have gone rogue, may have been killed.
I mean, he probably never even got to Renly.
Renly's probably dead before he got there.
Either way, here's the actual first appearance of a Fossaway.
Sir Wendell Manderly, Lucas Blackwood, Sir Perwin Frey, and
the rest of her highborn companions accompanied her to
the castle. The Great Hall of Lord Caswell's
keep was great only by courtesy, yet room was found on the
crowded benches for Catlin's men amidst Renly's own Knights.
Catlin was assigned a place on the dais between red faced Lord
Mathis Rowan and genial Sir John Fosaway of the green apple
fosaways. Sir John made jests while Lord
Mathis inquired politely after the health of her father,
brother and children. Maybe a little word play with
George there, having red faced Mathis and Sir John of the
Green, Green and Red. Right away.
It would be funny if it turned out that Math is Rohan's mother
was a Fossaway also, or something like that.
Especially a red apple Fossaway. And right away when we first
meet Raymond Fossaway and Stephen Fossaway, there's a
bunch of puns. I'm sure you all remember that.
We'll be getting to it in good time.
And here we have Sir John, the first Fossaway meet.
He's a jokester. I think this is just a theme
with the house. George has included a lot of
humor with these guys, not just word play, but things like this,
just having them be of that sort.
I think if you grow up with your sigil being an apple, you have
to know how to take a joke or you're just going to be
miserable for your whole life. Right?
Like everyone's going to make fun of you if you don't make fun
of yourself first. That's a good point.
Yeah. It's a Tyrion thing.
You got to. You got to lean into the joke
before they do. Yeah.
You got to make it your own. That's a great point.
Yeah. And I think that's not just
random, though. It's not just about the apple
sigil. I say it makes a good point
here. But as we get into it, Cider
Hall, it's really well located. It looks like a place that has
probably, as far as the Reach goes, mostly avoided war.
It's not in the path of where a lot of armies would be.
It's not a big target. Kind of like how the Arbor gets
left alone a bit because no one wants to screw up the wine
supply. Like leave them cider guys
alone, let them make their cider unless they're a big problem.
So honestly, I think it's kind of an idyllic place to grow up.
We'll get into more detail later, but growing up in a
really nice place, we don't have a lot to worry about.
Yeah, That might make you be more likely to grow up a little
bit of a jokester. Just, you know, you're a little
more at ease. Who knows?
So score one for the green apples, too.
They appeared before the red apple.
Fossaway say. Hey, now, it's also notable that
the Fossaways, like I said, are nightly here, Sir John Fossaway.
But they still, it's, it seems like they're treated still like
they're at the top of the nobility in the Reach, minus the
Tyrells. And that has to do with events.
We'll get to it. It seems like perhaps they they
were demoted. And while we don't have all the
details of that, we will talk about it.
It seems like a lot of the rest of the Reach kind of ignore
that. It's like, yeah, they we all
descend from the descendants of Garth Greenhand here.
We're all about the same. Yeah.
Anyway, the marriage alliances seem to reflect that.
No one seems to treat them like they're lesser, even though like
kind of technically they might be.
Anyway, if Renly had become king, an ideal situation for the
Fossaways would be two of them in the Rainbow Guard, one the
red and one the green. Of course, knowing George would
probably flip it like this, The green apple fossaway would be
the red and the red one would be the green.
Yep, first man era. The reach is fame for fertility
and produce is ancient. It's been that way for a long
time. Everybody knows it, it's well
established, blah blah blah. Many of the old stories are
about the origin of it all, meaning how it became so fertile
in the 1st place. Some of it's just of course
natural. It was came out that way.
Garth Greenhand of course is given a lot of credit too.
He's the major founding myth, supposedly taught farming to the
rich and or he led his people to the reach from Essos, got them
all set up there, taught them how to work the land and met the
most out of it. And they sure did make the most
out of it. Many of his various children
were associated with different crops or foods or ways of
getting those foods. Like you might have one like a
house dairy where they're not in the reach, but a good example,
they have a plowman, right? That's that's farming.
You have Fost. The Archer is the character
that's founder here. It's a little unusual.
We have an Archer character, not a some sort of apple planter
guy, but Garth Greenhand kind of already took that role.
He's like the Johnny Appleseed of Westeros, but blown to much
bigger proportions because he was doing not just apple
spreading, but like all the foods, but apples included all
the like prominent ancient foodstuffs, right?
That's that's kind of where Garth Greenhand's descendants
took things. And this is one of the most
prominent ones because, well, apples are also a really big
deal in the real world. George was barred from a lot of
that and hence the influence of the Johnny Appleseed type
character. So some of Garth's children and
himself included, are mythology mythologized given supernatural
powers. Perhaps that's just exaggeration
given time pass. These people did such important
things that they're raised up. This is a common thing we've
seen not just here, but in the real world.
But here we we can't just of course, eliminate the
possibility that it was supernatural.
It might have been supernatural stuff.
Maybe it's just the stories that we're told, but could be that
could be both. Some of his descendants aren't
absolutely notably supernatural. Like they descend from a
supernatural person, but they don't actually do supernatural
things. They're just really good at
stuff, you know, they're just like really excellent in what
they do. Fost the Archer might be a
example of that. Let's talk about him
specifically. So he's the a first generation
descendant of Garth Greenhand, a rather large number of
descendants. You know, I guess when you have
that many brothers and sisters like Foss the Archer did, maybe
you're more likely to specialize in things or maybe you got to
really find your place as so many different people, so many
people doing different things, so many people good at different
things. Well, you got to stand out
somehow. This guy, he's known for
shooting heads off of women he liked.
I don't know why that's. Shooting the heads.
Shooting the apples off of Geez, that is really dark, isn't it?
Shooting the heads off I. Don't think he was.
What's funny is that again. Known to shoot apples off the
heads of women he liked. We have art here by Michael
Clarfeld. Of course it's Michael Clarfeld
art. Not, not always.
But you're not no one's surprised that we have Michael
Clarfeld art here. It's on the map.
Here is our friend MO, the cosplaying as Fossey Archer.
Now, if this is what he did to women, he liked shooting apples
off their heads, what did he do to women he disliked 'cause this
is a weird way of flirting. This is really weird.
But it's also meant to be like, symbolic, right?
This is his exploits or some sort of extension of his
famously fertile father. So this is also a dude who hung
out with lots of women, and the implication being that some of
them had his children. And you know, these early days,
so many people descend from these characters.
So if you have a father doing this kind of thing, like from a
very realistic perspective, a real world perspective, if you
grow up with a father who's sleeping around a lot, well, you
might do that too. Or you might push again, push
back against it. But and and do do never do it
like a Jon Snow. But Foss is more of the former
category, it seems. It's probably a euphemism or
could be a euphemism. Shooting apples off the heads is
could be some sort of euphemism for getting them pregnant.
I mean, Cupid's Arrow, Rott, William Tell, there's a lot of
other stories that are going on here that are being borrowed
from and the vibe is there for that.
Need to suggest maybe he was worshipped as a minor deity.
A lot of these ancient figures were.
That's a real world thing too. People that get so famous in
their own time, they established such important traditions or
kingdoms or what have you, they figure out the importance of
apples. They're the first guy to Bruce
Sider or something like that. You'd be remembered for that.
Even in, in prehistoric times. That's the kind of thing that
people would just link, latch onto and tell their children
about and so forth. But it is kind of weird, right?
And that's why you look for euphemisms and symbolism in this
story. Cause all these apples, this
bounty, this fertility, and he just wants to shoot at it with
his arrows like that. Something's wrong with that,
right? Aren't there better uses for
bows? And that like, why would I go
hunting when I have all these apples to shoot at?
That's crazy, right? Like the food that runs away
seems like the one you need to shoot at.
The apples are just there, man. You don't have to shoot them.
It's just, it literally falls on the ground eventually if you
just leave it be. Arrows seem like overkill, but
that might be part of the point. This things were so fertile.
Nina suggests the age of heroes was such a different time that
people have the ability, the time, the extra resources to
waste on things that make them look like demigods.
This is might be how he established his reputation, by
spending his time doing demigod things and that convinced people
he was one. You know, there's a children's
movie, a classic movie a lot of people listening might have
might think of called the Swan Princess.
In the first half, the the Prince is kind of a a real jerk.
You know who who kind of a Jamie type character, you know, really
show offish and he's shooting arrows off the head of like his
bumbling sidekick. And so like it's kind of a
boring thing, but also show off He's like he is like look at my
prowess type of thing. So I think it is maybe a little
trophy. I'm sure there's other other
examples of men showing off their prowess by doing like
these very dangerous things. And you could probably get away
with making mistakes and not having people find out like the
occasional one like that. If some of you may remember, the
movie The Quick and the Dead is a kind of a silly gunslinger
movie. But they did get serious with
the character. That was like a trick shot
artist. And he would like, shoot cards
like right through the the center of the ace of spades or
whatever. And this one, I think it was
Sharon Stone's character, or maybe it was.
I don't know. It doesn't matter who accused
him was like, hey, I know, I've heard of you.
What happened in that names of towns like you?
You don't always hit, do you? You know, it's like acting like
this dude shot a kid or something like that.
Yeah. Well, you know, if you're fosty
Archer, maybe that happened once or twice too.
But you have the power, the wealth to make that rumor go
away or to, you know, somehow make people not talk about it,
maybe very and very using very dark means Anyway.
I mean, the presumably one of these women he liked that he
shot arrows at the apples off their heads, became the first
lady of House Fossaway. I suppose he retired from his
days of shooting at fruit to raise a family that turned out
to be quite famous and successful.
I'm guessing, given his vibe, that this first lady Fossaway
had more to do with the raising of the children.
I mean, that's often how it goes.
This guy just seems like a weirdo shooting at apples all
the time. But anyway, obviously I'm being
a little silly here, but there's in the ancient times of the
Reach and First Men days, marriage, the seven, it wasn't
like that. You could have a guy that
married or impregnated lots of women and that would have been
OK in First Men times. I mean OK meaning somewhat if
not maybe entirely socially acceptable.
It's not against their religion, I guess is the point I'm making.
Because that religion didn't exist then.
There wasn't as big of a emphasis, if any, on monogamy in
those times. So we don't have to assume that,
you know, Foss chose one woman in particular to settle down
with, but there may have been a whole bunch of women and the
children of those women as a whole.
The strongest of those perhaps ran with it and became the first
Lords of House Fossaway of Cider Hall.
Foss's legendary half sister Floris is supposed to be the
simultaneous ancestor ancestress, school name, cool
word. Houses Ball Peak and Florent and
maybe even the Lannisters. So there's a lot of connection
here and this is part of why these houses even with fought
with Fossaways getting demoted to nightly, they still can
consider themselves largely equal.
Foss's half brothers, he had half brothers.
Harlan and Herndon had a polyandrus marriage with a
woods, which that's explicit. It's not even it's not like
between the lines. No, they had they both had this
woods witch as a lover. A centuries later, Lyman
Hightower had polygamous marriages.
He only gave it up at the coming of the end all.
So there was a lot of this going on.
It wasn't just the occasional thing.
It was pretty normal at the time and of course, very, very, very
long ago. So maybe he there was never an
official life for Fosty Archer. It may have just been something
that developed over time. There's a consolidation of
fostaway power. You know, these, these, as the
culture shifted and populations grew, these things became more
delineated. But the bottom line, however it
got that way, The wealth of Cider Hall is held by armed
force. They are a noble house, a
nightly house, same difference in this case, meaning that,
yeah, they're, they're a house with a product, with produce
that makes the money, which is not super typical.
In fact, a lot of noble houses look down on that.
They look down on merchant business, which probably just
means that the FOSSA ways have a, a gap, like they have a, a,
some space between themselves and the running of the business.
They have subordinates, Stewart's maybe they have a, an
equivalent of House Cassell, a house that's been tied to them
for a long time as basically as the stewards of that house or as
a recurring role subordinate to the main house, something like
that. There could be some, yeah, some
smaller house. There's a house called Appleton
in the Reach. We have really no idea where
they exist or where their castle is, but that could be, for
example, that's the kind of name you might expect for a Fossaway
steward house, right? Someone that runs the business
that does the day-to-day operations while the Fossaways
themselves do what? Practice fighting, running
armies, jousting, playing with swords.
You know, like doing the things that keeps everybody else in
line in case something goes wrong.
Well, they can fight for their lands to hold them and let the
stewards continue making them big money.
And that's important, though I think you consider the Arbor.
They're rich and it's not hard to see why.
They've got wine, they've got shipping, and they own the
shipping. Well, the shipping is different
from Cider Hall. It's inland, very inland.
They do. They are on the river, actually,
two rivers. So there's some shipping
downriver, but we're not talking sailing halfway around Westeros
to deliver their goods. They probably have to outsource
that. Still, this is a house that's
had a product that is widely used frequently.
So this that implies a steady if not substantial income for very,
very, very long time. So you can kind of understand
why even though mercantilism is found on by nobility, it's
pretty big for houses like the Fossa Ways and the Arbor and a
few others. Particularly houses of the Reach
are where that exception is found, where you have a bit more
of the mercantilism married to the house vibe, the other big
heart of Andal nobility and cultures, of course, the veil.
And you don't have as much of this there where they're like,
yeah, we like apples or we like golden roses or grapes, for
example. Yeah, the the veil symbolism is
more martial, more religious, or both.
Now let's talk about Cider Hall itself.
Like many castles, it probably had an early version that was
expanded on. In this case, it's easy to see
how they expanded on it 'cause we just got through talking
about their steady income. So they, like the phrase, for
example, started off with a wooden Fort on either side that
greatly became stone Fort, stone bridge.
This and that big tower I just added to over the centuries.
Now that's only 600 years old. Cider Halls had way longer for
that. They're also not in a place that
says contested the phrase people they know people would want to
pay to get across the river cider hall.
People are coming there to drink the cider or to get to apples or
to do business, right. It's not, it's not to go from
one place to the other. It's not a transition point
necessarily, although they do have a lot of traffic coming
back and forth because of they are in an extremely strategic
place. More strategic perhaps for money
making then for military things, but both it is.
My guess would be that they built their first Fort out of
apple trees, the wood from apple trees that had been developed in
the area. Maybe the seeds and root stocks
had been brought over from SOS or maybe they were already
there. Maybe this was a place where
Apple's been growing naturally and people said boom, look at
this spot, let's build a castle here.
It's got apples. It's got fertile ground around
it, which is implied by the apples.
And from a geographical standpoint, it's right on.
Ashea is going to put the map up, but she doesn't already have
it up at the confluence of the cockles went and the mandor.
So it's right there on the two rivers.
So it's got rivers on two sides of it, which is very defensible.
So they don't really have to worry as much about being
attacked from the West or the South.
And there's a lot of traffic because the Mandor is the main
river of the reach. Lot of traffic, boats and people
going upriver like alongside it to use, using it as a way to
find their way. You know, just follow the river
whether you're on it or not. You would be passing by Cider
Hall if you go about halfway up or halfway down.
It's very central in the Reach, which is also really important
to what I was saying earlier about it being kind of idyllic.
It's very defensible and in perhaps even commanding right.
This helps explain why it's so ancient.
It wouldn't take long to figure out the value of this, but even
Foss, the Archer who maybe was only interested in shooting at
apples can see, wow, I'll get all the apples for me to shoot
at. Just upriver.
The mandor is Bitter Bridge. And before that though, before
you get to Bitter Bridge, there's a smaller tributary that
features long table right at the end.
So you've got a lot of pretty well known reach castles along
this stretch here downriver from Cider Hall, not very far, once
again on the Mandor, is actual Highgarden.
I'm not sure the travel distance, but it might be just a
couple of days by boat to get from Highgarden to Cider Hall.
Might be faster. Which means that Highgarden has
fresh cider and apples all the time because they get it right
from the Cider Hall by boat very quickly downriver.
Don't even have to like ROW, just catch some wind or just
sit. Just catch the drift.
Literally. Heck, who needs boats?
Just throw the apples into the water and some dudes can sit
there with Nets down at the mander catching apples.
They float, right? Why waste good boats from that?
Just catch them in the Nets. So that's pretty cool for them.
They're really locked in. They don't have to worry about
defense as much, but they probably have plenty of money to
spend on it, you know, in in case they do.
So think about this. I said it's deep into the reach.
It does. It's it's not close to any
borders. It's not close to the West and
there's a river in the way. It's not close to the
Riverlands, and there's a river in the way there too.
It's not close to the Dornish Marches and there's a river in
the way, and it is closest to the Stormlands out of
everything, but not that close, and there's no river in the way.
So of all the ancient wars they would have fought, and we're for
now discounting wars, they would have fought against other houses
in the Reach. Once the Reach was a thing, a
contiguous polity, a region, there was kings of the Reach and
all that, and kings of the Stormlands.
That's where a lot of their warring would have been because
that's the closest contested border.
That's the one enemy that doesn't have to cross a river to
get to them. They can just March straight
West and they'll get to Cider Hall.
Just March along the cockles went, and you get there.
Now what they would pass on the way, if they're marching along
the cockles went, is Ashford Meadow.
This is something that I neglected to point out during
any of our Duncan Egg coverage. I don't think maybe we did.
It's been so long, maybe we talked about it years ago, but
it's really close. Cider Hall is probably the most
major castle near to Ashford. The first one you'd get to,
especially if you're going downriver on the Cockles went,
which again, be a very easy way to travel downriver.
No sailing, just let the river take you.
So again, this this paints a picture of a place that's very
nice to live. You probably are less likely to
have your lands despoiled. Your Lord might be a jerk from
time to time, but he's not going to be a jerk because he's broke
probably and is trying to extra tax you.
It can still happen. Rich people can be all kinds of
jerky no matter and greedy. But this is a guy.
This is a house that has a steady income and is less likely
to have to get desperate. So you probably and this is
where like the real world trickle down effect gets
exaggerated and is, you know, get this gets it's a political
football that people just abuse. But this is where the trickle
down effect actually has some merit.
Well, you're collecting all this extra produce for your Lord.
They're not going to care if a few extra apples go missing.
They won't even know there's so much.
So yeah, you are going to see what's very likely a more well
fed peasantry in a round all over the reach.
That's probably true, but the cider hall peasants would be a
particularly healthy lot. Apples are just really good for
you. The digestion, it's really it.
It makes you feel more full than you are.
So you might have a lot of just like really felt well digested
regular peasants and they might have some pride in that.
I don't know, like, yeah, we're the we're the best common folk
around. We got the best situation here.
And it's such a big tie to who they are, right?
Like the Arbor come back to them.
This particular produce, it's a big association with who they
are. It makes them their money.
It's on all their the apples are on everything.
It's their sigil, right? It's just, yeah, they they've
really leaned into it. So there's also a little bit of
extra pride probably in being a food producer in a realm that is
particularly afflicted by long winters.
And this isn't a region also Speaking of being a great place
to live. It's not the farthest S, but the
reach doesn't get hit by winter as badly as, say, the Riverlands
or the West or certainly not the north.
So it's got that going for it too.
Meanwhile, in addition to sitting back on their wealth and
drinking their cider, the kind of things that the Lords and now
Knights of Cider Hall could be proud of is just how many kings
and Queens and other Lords and ladies have partaken of Cider
Hall Cider. How it's been consumed by the
vast majority of all nobles who've ever existed.
You know, especially if you just focus on the Reach or the, the
close, the houses close by, because there's obviously other
houses making cider. Cider is ubiquitous.
It's made all over Westeros. They make it beyond the Wall.
They make it. It's just, yeah, apples.
Apples are like that, yo. They can grow almost anywhere,
which might be a symbolic thing for fossa waste latch onto.
We can handle anything. We fossa waste apples.
They can handle anything. They can grow anywhere they can.
We're diverse, we're tough. We're able to adjust to whatever
you throw at us or wherever you throw us 'cause we're apples and
were easily hurled. Yeah.
Let's talk about the coming of the Andols.
That changed things. Yet it also made them into what
we're more familiar with today because some of this pre Andol
stuff is just, well, we don't know, It's so far ago and it
wasn't written down. This could theoretically be a
huge section of history because it is a huge section of history.
There's a lot that's implied here, thousands of years, but
it's just so hazy. It's just a lack of detail that
makes that hard. Maybe one day we'll have a lot
more. There's a lot there, but it
yeah, it isn't particularly developed, but it seems the
fossa ways, like so many other houses, made that transition and
it might have gone easier for them in some ways, maybe not,
might have been harder. They had maybe had more to fight
over their wealth and their really excellent positioning,
their great intra reach location being as excellent as it is.
This would have been when their motto A taste of glory would
have appeared. Because house words are A and
all cultural thing. It may also be that the and alls
were very familiar with all this.
Like I suppose it's likely that apple trees existed in Andalose
too. It's possible that they came
from there. You know Garth Green is one of
the things he brought over, was one of the many food stuffs they
brought. Apples are particularly good for
that sort of thing because again, they're really adaptable.
We'll talk about that more later and then we'll get to the
biology of it. But it's a smart thing to bring
along because of that reason, because it's so diverse and and
able to handle a lot of climates.
So I prefer the theory that the Fruit First Men brought them
meeting apples with them as part of their migration rather than
finding apples already in Westeros.
But that is very possible too, because animals spread apples by
consuming them and animals love apple a lot of them because,
well, they're good, they're sweet, they're tasty and animal
just the same reason humans like apples.
And of course, any if you're eating the seeds, you're
spreading them around when you when that when that passes
through you because the seeds don't get digested by most
animals. The faith of the seven might
have held more power as an institution.
That would be a reason why a lot of first mint houses liked
analyzing. Same reason a lot of real world
kingdoms turned Christian or Muslim or what have you.
Because it's a more centralized religion.
It gives you more power over your people.
Pantheons don't give you as much power over the common folk.
They just don't. There's too many too much
variety. There's too much difference in
what they want and what they believe is correct.
Too many different laws. And yeah, if it's all focused
into a central figure, you're easy to say, well, this God like
being demands this. It's harder to say that and get
to and have it mean something when you have 12 different God
like beings all demanding different things.
You can pick the one you want, be like, well, my God doesn't
demand that, right? But when there's one God, every
one person or one king or queen can be saying, hey, all the God
wants this and you all have to do it, right?
It's just more power. So that's, you can easily see
why existing power structures existing first man houses were
like, yeah, they might not have resisted so much.
Like, yeah, this is actually more power for us.
They might have actually, yes, they may have married Andal
princesses as so many of them did, rather than falling to
conquest because they saw this as the right path forward for
them to a hold their power, not lose it to the end dolls and B,
increase their own power at the same time.
And in fact, it was probably a no brainer for a lot of them
when they really sat down and thought about it.
Those of them who bothered to do that, those of them who could,
having not been violently ejected from their lands.
So the first one in fossil ways probably had some very
substantial differences. Obviously talking about things
like polygamy is a is a massive difference, but it's clear that
and all culture really took I mean tourneys, knighthood,
chivalry. This is stuff the reach loves
these things thousands of years laters and it and they loved it
then. So yeah, there's always people
who hate change, but I think the first man houses saw the writing
on the tree and they could get ahead more by going with the
flow rather than fighting against the inevitable.
There had to have been a point if it wasn't early on, where a
lot of first men, kings and warlords and dynasties would say
there's just too many of these damn and dolls.
It's it's it's team up with them or die, you know, and there will
be some who'd be saying, yeah, die.
Well, let's die. I, I will never join them.
But most of them, obviously, that's just too anti pragmatic
in a business minded house, a house that's, you know, having
to go with the flow of market forces.
And yes, market forces existed thousands of years ago.
They were different, but there's still things that affect that.
Seasons plague, population migrations.
Yeah, war, obviously. So houses that are used to going
with the flow and having to change their business
arrangements based on what's happening out in the world.
A lot of noble houses would be too stubborn to do that.
They were like, no, we're in charge.
We set the flow, we set the tone.
We don't go with it. Well, houses that make their
money from selling things, then they can't force the issue as
much. So they might have a little more
flexibility, but that of course, always depends on who's in
charge. And we're talking about
thousands of years of different Fossaways.
I'm sure there was a very wide array of characters in charge in
the Targaryen era. We definitely have a lot more to
say about that. There's a lot more detail to the
Targaryen era in general, not just about House Fossaway, as
you all are pretty familiar. Do you have houses with
thousands of years of history? This is a bigger adjustment
phase and it's more recent. So in terms of analyzing
happened so long ago, it's it's a haze.
Like we said, it's hard to say what was forced on them and what
they've just adapted to now or what they were like.
Yeah, let's do that. We like this change.
Targaryen era came so recently, relatively speaking.
Then it's arguably was still they never fully adjusted to it
and now we are already perhaps past it or in the process of
going past it. The Reach had a bigger
adjustment than most too, because unlike the North, unlike
the Vale, unlike the West, unlike the Stormlands, well the
Stormlands sort of. The storm was like 1/2, a bit of
half and half. There wasn't as big of a change
at the top right. The Starks were still in charge
after the field of fire and the burning of Harrenhal.
The errands were still in charge.
The Lannisters were still in charge.
The Durndans became the Baratheons.
But that was Durnd in blood. However, the Tyrells, that was a
much bigger promotion than any of these, any of the ones who
were promoted. The Tyrells were the steward
House of Garth agreement of House Gardner, right?
So that was not a good thing for the reefs.
They didn't like it. They didn't like having the
Steward House placed above them after for eons following
probably the proudest lineage in all of Westeros, certainly
according to them. But it it makes a good case,
given the way that all of Westeros looks at lineage and
put such importance on it. Aren't you descended from Garth
Greenhand? Yeah.
That seems like a pretty big claim to fame.
I can understand why that's important, even if I wouldn't
necessarily agree with it. It's certainly consistent.
So the Tyrells being placed above them, that's a big drop
off in their procedure. Like, now we're ruled by dudes
who were stewards for thousands of years before it was the first
kings, the first kings of Westeros, the proudest.
Like it's hard to be more than that.
And then now it's the Tyrells. Now, of course, people have kind
of gotten used to the Tyrells now 300 years later, but it
still comes up a little bit. It's still like, yeah, those
Tyrells, they're a little up jumped, aren't they?
Like, they're still a steward house, you know, now they're now
they're a royal house, sort of. So they're they're, they've
raised their profile in some ways, but that's now going back
then when the gardeners were a recent thing, that would have
been a big adjustment period. And this was part of the point,
though, as I've said, when we've analyzed Aegon the Conqueror,
he'd rather not have the reach have the ability to rally under
a single leader or a single family and come at him.
He'd rather have the Reach mad at who there's in who's in
charge of them, meaning the Tyrells instead of him.
They they'll take out their anger against the Tyrells and
they'll never unite behind the Tyrells to come after him or his
descendants. So pretty smooth move by Aegon,
and we wonder about how that translated into bitterness and
bad feelings in houses like the Fossaways and how that played
out. Certainly the TV show gave me
some ideas. The book's a little different.
So don't take Raymond Fossaways and Stephen Fossaways rantings
about the Targaryens, which are surely the valid feelings that
many people in the book world would have.
Not necessarily those two characters, but there's good
reasons why they would too. I just want to be clear that the
hatred of House Targaryen is amplified in House Fossaway in
the TV show. So I'm not saying it's not
there, but they definitely went farther with it.
Still, it was backed by good reasons like Raymond and
Stefan's reasons for disliking the Targaryens or if not hating
them in the show was backed by events that would make you hate
them. So it was very believable and
that's part of why I'm clarifying because you could,
you could easily fall into the trap of thinking that the two
are completely In Sync on that book and show not quite.
It's close though. And and if you did conflate
them, I wouldn't really press the issue because it's it is
probably that close because some fossil waste probably did die at
the field of fire. They were very loyal to the
Green Hands, like to the Gardeners, like so many others.
There were probably fossaways in the order of the Green Hand,
that order of Knights that was all but extinguished at the
Field of Fire. So yeah, some fossaways probably
burned alive that day. You won't forget that easily,
especially when it's fairly recently after.
But you also don't go wanting to repeat what happened at the
Field of Fire. You say, OK, we gave it our
shot. It went very badly.
There was no apples shot off of any Dragons heads that day.
Only one arrow landed on any of them.
Vicenya got hit by an arrow in the arm.
It would be funny if that was a fossil way arrow but we don't
have any idea. So you can see where the bad
feelings would come from. Yes and that's part of why Aegon
made the arrangements he did. That those bad feelings would be
there'd be some separation between him and the and the
ideas of vengeance. Fast forward to Jairus.
When he was young the Lord Tyrell was Lord Bertrand and
this Tyrell was exactly the sort of Tyrell overlord that the
Reach would be very displeased with.
After all those proud Green Hand kings, gardeners they had this
guy not a king of course but an alcoholic.
So alcoholic that he one time got really sick and then when he
recovered, he fell off his horse drunk and died.
He died falling off his horse. Like, yeah, that's woof.
Lord Manfred Red Wine, who was on the small council at the
time, thought Lord Bertrand was adult.
He said so in the histories recorded.
Quote. Bertrand had a younger son named
Martin. Martin's wife was a Florence
Fossaway, and Martin was put in charge of the Reach's income.
So I mean, this is an interesting little tidbit about
how the Tyrells transitioned to ruling.
They had so much experience as stewards that the lower ranked
Tyrells, the the second and third sons could still get that
job. They'd still be quite well,
potentially well suited for that role, given it was their
family's role for literally thousands of years now.
Martin under him, he didn't seem like necessarily such a smart
guy. He, you know, he didn't seem
like he was real bright, not adult like Lord Bertrand, but
not bright yet. The incomes did really well
under him, like really well. Improvements at High Garden
elsewhere in the reach, like profits were up, efficiency was
up. Lots of things were going well.
And Sept and Barth took note of this cause Sept and Barth, man
from the Reach, he is familiar with reach politics, Reach
families, and just obviously a very smart and well read person
in general. He sussed it out.
He realized that it was Lady Florence behind the scenes, some
sort of math genius. You've been growing up counting
apples. Her nickname was the Apple
counter. And she basically was telling
him what to do or giving him all the good advice.
And so all these great moves made by Martin were actually her
idea. Now you got to give the dude a
little credit. This is just some dummy just
doing what his wife says because she's not even in the council
meetings. So he has to at least be able to
communicate what's going on to her.
But she's the one making all the really snap smart calls here.
And so it's a kind of a teamwork thing where she's the front and
she's the brains. Barth figured this out.
He understood. He he, he's sussed it all out.
He's like, you know what? It's her.
But he didn't blow that up. He decided to let them have
their secret and when the time came for a replacement, because
Jairus had a really gifted Master of Coin named Rigo
Draves. He was Pentashi, his nickname
was the Lord of Air. He was very good at being a
Master of coin, but he got murdered during a plague.
Things were bad, people blamed him 'cause he's a foreigner and
after punishing the perpetrators personally, Jairus went and
searched for a new one. And Barth put forward Martin
Tyrell to be the new Master of Coin at the Red Keep.
And Jairus always willing to listen to Septon Barth always
took his advice well, often took his advice, certainly considered
it, because the man gave good advice, said, OK, let's do it.
And he didn't actually tell the king what the deal was.
He's he's like, you know what? I don't need to.
Nothing good could come of me spilling the secret.
Let's let them keep their secret.
Let Lady Florence keep running things from behind the scenes.
The realm will benefit Septon Barth did the right thing, I
suppose, by keeping that under wraps.
And it worked. Martin sat the council, passed
on the information to his wife and then Lady Florence would
make these really good decisions and he would get the credit and
those people in the know would know what was really going on.
But she effectively ran the treasury.
I mean, this was she was in charge of the purse strings of
Westeros for a good stretch during one of the most prominent
times of the most prominent reign, meaning, And I mean
prominent in terms of Joharius was doing a lot to improve the
realm at this point, spending money, building things,
logistics, that sort of thing. Nina points out that this
happened again many years later with Darren the second.
Ronald Penrose was master of coin, but it was actually his
wife, Elena Targaryen that running the ship.
By the way, Elena Targaryen and if I recall correctly, was one
of our winners for topics with this year.
So we'll be doing an episode on her as well.
There's also a hope that Lady Florence would become friends
with Al San, Queen Al San because Queen Al San was was
grieving over the death of her daughter Daenerys.
And but unfortunately there's no real follow up on this.
We don't hear if they did become friends or not, We only hear
that there was a hope of such. We do know that Lyman Beesbury
was eventually made Master Coin by Jay Harris.
Remember, Lyman Bazeberry is still Master Coin when the Dance
of the Dragons breaks out, so he's probably the one that took
over after Florence and Martin. I suppose it could have been
Martin's death that ended that whole arrangement.
It's possible she died first, which would have also ended it,
but it seems that they held the post for a very long time and
the realm benefited. The biggest direct benefit of
her being the behind the scenes manager of the Crown's money is
that this was the Rd. building era, right?
This is when the Kings Rd. the River Rd. the Rose Rd. the Ocean
road, the Gold Rd. were made from paths into roads, real
roads with stones and markers and in some cases defense and
probably other like mile marker. Just things like infrastructure
right? This money came from her
management. They would not have been enough
for it otherwise. So when any W trusty person is
wandering the roads, they should thank the old King, yes, for
pushing this in the 1st place, but Lady Florence Fossaway the
probably the person who facilitated it the most.
It was an old King's decision, but her effort, her
calculations, her quality management of the treasury.
Chatty Lumpkin sends a big super chat from Canada and says Happy
Easter. This should get you at least 4
chocolate bunnies or better, a bunch of chocolate covered
apples. I have to go make dinner but
we'll catch up later. Well thank you very much Chatty
Lumpkin and thank you all to the rest of you.
I'm hopeful that we can be a part of your Easter while you're
hanging out with your friends and family, listening to us
either this episode or something else from our catalog.
And we're very privileged to be a part of that, to be part of
y'all's holiday celebrations or just traveling to and from the
holidays. Maybe you're listening to us in
the car as you're driving to be with your family for Easter.
Maybe you're catching this later as you're driving home.
Either way, I feel very thankful that we can be a part of that.
Such a important time for everyone's families getting
together like that. The Reds Stay Green is our next
section. The Fossaways fought with the
greens, like most of the Reach did during the dance.
I mean, Apple's turning black. Yeah, that's that's kind of
gross, right? The black apple, I would not eat
that. Actually, maybe I would.
It might look really cool if it's kind of like a purplish
dark, maybe I would show me this black apple.
Then I will decide whether I want to eat it.
But usually that means rotten, right?
Like So he marched with the host under Lord Orman Hightower,
meaning whoever the Fossaway Lord of the time was.
And this would have been supported by Prince Daron and
the Blue Queen Tasarian. So they would have been part of
the army that did it right. The one army that had a dragon
with it that used that dragon properly.
They had a good management of roles there.
The dragon worked well with the army, the army worker, the
dragon, they, they fought in concert together, things that
Caraxes and Vergar and the other Dragons didn't do so much of.
But this didn't last very long, right?
The fight. They may have been at the Battle
of Honeywine, the fossil ways, but they may have just been
waiting farther N at their castle to join Lord Ormond as he
marched N 'cause that's where he was headed.
Ormond's headed north to go to King's Landing.
I don't know why necessarily the fossil ways would March S to
join and then just March right back N with them.
May as well just, hey, we'll join you on the way.
That's probably what happened, but I don't know for sure.
The most famous apple of the era was a member of the Caltrop, so
it wasn't his battlefield work that we're familiar with.
And this is Owen Fosseway. Lord Owen Fosseway.
And he may have been the final Lord of Cider Hall.
He's certainly the last Lord we know of, cause at some point
after the dance but before Ashford, they get demoted to
Knightly House. So this, like I said, might have
been the last one. Now, what happened with him
specifically Lord Owen? 1st, we have the first battle of
Tumbleton, which goes well for the Greens, and they take the
city. They flip the two betrayers to
their side at some point, probably prior to the battle,
and then they expect to rule over the two betrayers and
dominate them. And because they're lowborn,
right? And Hobart Hightower takes
charge because he's the highest ranking guy there.
Ormond was killed in the first battle.
Excuse me, Houbert. Excuse me.
Houbert was killed. Houbert was killed in that, or
was rather Ormond was killed and Houbert took over.
And Houbert was just not very, shall we say, a strong
personality. And that's why the two betrayers
started to get more and more uppity, especially Hugh Hammer
started making royal pretensions and all that.
And that got people upset. The nobles of the Reach who were
still there and alive, formed the Caltrops.
Lucky 13 of them. I don't know if they, they don't
have the same idea of lucky numbers as we do here in in the
real world. So maybe maybe they didn't
recognize the unlockitude of 13. Anyway, as we know, the whole
Caltrops thing didn't work out so well for the Caltrops or for
anybody really. They were getting ready to
murder Hugh Hammer. And but before they could do
that, the second Battle of Tumbleton broke out and eight of
the 13 Cal traps were killed during it, including Lord Owen.
So very ignominious fall there trying to work behind the
scenes, trying to do murder. Just poor leadership all around.
He wasn't in charge. That was it was usually Lord
Peak before that, Lord Orman Hightower.
So we can't blame him for too much, but he certainly doesn't
come out looking good either. Now, if we look forward to the
next major civil war, it would be the Black Fire Rebellion,
just as it was during the dance. Foster White.
You can't go black, right? Black apples again.
They just no, no, no, no. Stay.
They're already red. Stay that way.
But again, this has to be filtered through the lens of
their legion Lord. It's possible they didn't do a
whole lot because Leo Longthorne and Tyrell, he fought some
battles, but those battles were in and around the Reach against
houses that did go black. The Fossaways were not at the
red grass field. Leo Longthorne was not at the
red grass field. So it's possible the Fossaways
were actually there. But we're 99% chance.
No because they would have been following Leo Tyrell.
He's their Liege Lord. He was the battle commander.
Since he did take the field, they'd be with him, right?
Well, I don't know why they'd break off and head to the Red
Grass field. We don't really hear about
Reachman on the Red Grass field for the most part.
It's mostly Damon's host, which would have had some Reachman in
it, but not on the side of the Reds.
The Reds were Rivermen, Dornishman, Stormlanders.
It's unveilment. That was the majority of the
force that fought at the Red Grass Field for the Loyalists.
But yeah, there was a lot of fighting in the Reach and it was
marcher houses that lesser marcher houses that fought for
Damon. So, and a lot of them are
Marshall. They wanted to they joined him
because they were like him or of his cut from the same cloth,
like they were warrior types nightly, maybe even chivalrous.
They liked fighting and they saw it as a way up, a way to maybe
rise the ranks, you know, fight for the winning side, get
promotions, get new lands, get new titles.
So that's interesting because we do know that it was probably by
this time that the fossil ways had lost their status as Lord
have been demoted tonight's if they had already lost again, it
happened between 1:30 and two O 9 if they lost their status.
So we don't know when it's just it's a pretty wide range there.
But if it was prior to the red grass field, it's interesting
that they stayed loyal because that would have been a way like
Sir Eustace Osgrey. That's one of the reasons he
took up with Damon Blackfriar was to get lands back that his
family had taken away from him because of prior reverses.
This could have been a good opportunity for the foster to
say, Hey, Damon will join you if you put us back up on the lordly
level. That's our that's our ask.
But apparently that's not what happened.
Either their demotion hadn't yet happened or it it was not the
opportunity they started like no, I don't think so.
I think we're we're going to stay loyal.
The Lord Foss away at the time or the Sir Foss away at the time
stayed red. Now there might have been
multiple factors, but Damon blackfires, the call of Damon,
the the allure of Damon Blackfyre was not sufficient.
All right, I've talked about it quite a few times, brought it up
here and there. Let's actually talk about this
demotion with some focus as directly rather than speaking
around it. This could be an under radar,
under the radar aspect to what Sir Stefan was doing.
Remember, he wanted to be made a Lord by Aaron.
That was the deal. He he he probably asked for
that. It wasn't say, hey, what will
you give me for this? He's like, so that adds a whole
extra dimension to it. He wasn't seeking to gain a
lordship so much as he was looking to have it restored,
right? So that's a, that's a smaller
ask too, when you think about it, like being promoted to
Lord's a big deal. But if it's a house that was a
lordly house for thousands of years and has only not been for
a few decades, that's a, that's a smaller change.
The the problem is we don't know what put them in that place in
the 1st place. What exactly are you reversing?
What decision? Which king?
Probably was probably a king that did this.
It might have been a Lord Tyrell, but probably a king.
What it why? What was the reason?
It could have been something really serious, in which case
it's a hard thing to reverse. But it could have just been like
egg on the unworthy. Didn't like apples, maybe drank
too much of their cider, had a bad hangover and blamed it on
them. You know, like, I would not put
anything past that guy. Maybe some Fossaway girl he
didn't like. She treated him badly.
Badly. You know, You know what I mean
by that? Like didn't please him, failed
to please him properly. So it could be something real
petty, like the the teats being given back and forth between the
Blackwoods and the brackets, That kind of nonsense that Aegon
the 4th engaged in. That could easily be it.
Now, on the other hand, if that was it, you'd think it would
have been reversed. Why?
Like that guy did it just let's just forget that happened.
Let's let's make you Lords again.
So maybe it's not that because the argument for reversing it
would have been pretty strong. As we said, it wasn't because
they fought for the black fires. That doesn't explain it.
Maybe it was cheating the crown of tax revenues.
They're a mercantile operation. Maybe there was some very long
still, like some Enron level accounting fraud, some very
substantial amount of money withheld from the crown or from
their Liege Lord or both. I could see that being and
that's a pretty big shame. You know, something that gets
them demoted, but they can't pay it all back because we're
talking about such a huge amount of money that was swindled over
the centuries. Maybe something big.
Nina has another idea that I like.
There are false Darrons. If you recall after or during
the reign of Aegon the third. Remember Prince Darren the
daring the story of his death is told many different ways at the
second Battle of Tumbleton. It was and then because his
death was uncertain, there were false Darrons that appeared
claiming to be him and there were some small to do's about
that. And these happened in the Reach.
So maybe, yeah, maybe Cider Hall got mixed up in one of these
false Darrons and and it went very badly for them.
Didn't go well for them if they. None of these went well for
anyone who got involved, except for the ones who stayed loyal of
course, because that's who won. But.
Yeah, I mean, if the Hightowers were in on it, like the
Hightowers are the ones who knew Prince Darren, he lived there,
He squired there. And so if a Hightower comes out
and says this is Prince Darren, that is believable.
You know, that's at least credible.
Even if it's not true, it has the ring of truth to it because
these are people who would have credibility on that.
So on the other hand, the Hightowers didn't get demoted
for any of these false Darren things.
Maybe they lost status and prestige, but it's it'd be a lot
to make the Lords of Old Town a nightly house.
Maybe that's that's a that would be a huge demotion.
So maybe that's part of it. Either way, it's a good theory
that they were involved in one of these smaller revolutions or
rebellions that didn't go very well, and that was what got them
demoted. Maybe they were scapegoated too,
because no one else seems to have been demoted.
We've got all these houses that descend from Garth Greenhand,
the his first children. And this is the only house
that's nightly. The rest are all lordly.
And of course they were lordly. So, yeah, it's it's a little
unusual, a little confusing, but something to think about.
Ashford Meadow. Yeah.
Let's talk about Ashford itself. Here is one of my favorite
introductions by way of pun. Puns plural quote.
I may not be ripe, but my good cousin is rotten to the core.
Knock the seeds out of them. I'm always going to remember the
way Sean Thomas delivered that line too.
It was great. It was like, oh, that's exactly
how I wanted that line to be delivered.
I didn't, I didn't even know it, you know, knock the seeds out of
him. So many puns all in one line
there. Yeah, maybe.
I can't think of a Punnier introduction in all of A Song of
Ice and Fire, slash Night of the Seven Kingdoms, slash World of
Ice and Fire, all the all the Martin verse stuff.
I don't know of a Punnier one. There might be one.
I'm I'm open to nominations. Please throw your Punnie
nominations at me. I will judge them and laugh at
them, not at you, because I love puns.
But it's actually 100% accurate, right, Sir?
Stefan does turn out to be the second biggest villain, rotten
to the core of the story after Aryan, who of course he teams up
with, you know, villains playing with villains here.
Now Aryan is the villain you see coming.
Stefan's introduction, He's more like, this guy's a jerk, he's an
ass. He isn't necessarily an
antagonist. He isn't necessarily the bad guy
or not the bad guy, but he is. He's actually an example of
corrupted nightly values, someone that uses the cover of
knighthood for to do kind of crappy things, which is very,
very, very against what Dunk is. Right.
That's the anti Dunk right there.
Like Dunk again, isn't probably really a knight, but is more one
than any other. And and Raymond comes along and
is like, hey, we have a lot in common in that regard.
Raymond wasn't a knight, but he acted more like 1 than anybody
else there except for perhaps Dunk, and then became one
because of that behavior and earning it and being worthy and
stepping up when the time came when someone needed to step up,
he did it. I mean, right.
So here you see coming, I think more so so it it's just to me,
it's really neat and fun how big a part of the story the
phosphaways are not just as their characters and their
presence, but what they stand for and how they're flip two
sides of the same apple. I don't know coin whatever, like
Stefan and Raymond, just very opposites, yet so close to each
other. They've the apple does fall far
from the tree. Let me address that real quickly
because it's kind of a funny backwards thing.
The phrase the apple falls far from the tree or never falls far
from the tree is a euphemism for people are like their parents,
like people are like their families.
You grow up, you end up a lot like the tree you came from.
What's funny about that is that is really not true for apple
trees. Apples that grow from seeds
don't turn out like the trees they came from.
It's you have to use the rootstock to get the to get them
to have genetic copies. So seeds don't do that way.
Seeds are very random, which is a good thing I'll explain later,
but here it's not. And it's funny because if an
apple grow, if an apple doesn't go far from the tree, it's not
going to grow because it's going to attempts to sprout under
another tree that's already big, grown fully and taking all the
light. So that's a bad place for you
need to get farther away to grow.
So the apple should fall far from the tree.
The better apples do fall farther from the tree, the more
successful apples work out that way.
If you don't leave the tree, you're not going to, you're not
going to thrive, y'all, if you're an apple.
So back to Stefan, it looks like he's going to fight for Dunk and
it's really clever just the the writing here, because you see
that he's doing it for the wrong reasons.
That's not him. You're like, oh, this guy, he's
out for glory, a taste of glory. It's their freaking motto for
for gosh sake. But that works.
You're like, I'll take it. You know, I don't, I don't
necessarily want him fighting on those terms, but I need people
to fight for me. I, I, I, that's the first order
of business here. Why he's fighting for me is less
important than the fact that he's going to fight for me.
And that just sets aside all your suspicions.
Like, all right, well, this guy's in, you know, he's not in
it for the right reasons, but his reasons are 1000%
believable. He wants glory.
Absolutely believable. A bajillion percent believable.
So you set your suspicions aside.
Most of us do. So when his turn comes, it's
like, wow, I should have seen that coming.
But the writing was so good. You thought you had a motivation
nailed down for this guy. And no, his motivation was much
bigger. His motivation from the
beginning, from the moment he offered it to Dunk, was to gain
favor with Aryan. He may have had the idea to get
that lordship. The moment he saw what was
happening, the moment the trial for combat, trial by 7 was
announced, Stefan might have had that idea.
He's like, oh, I got a move I can make right here.
His villainous wheels were turning in his brain, the little
gears shifting here and there. He found that play and it
worked. He says he's like, yeah, well,
Aryan wouldn't have given me much for it if it didn't screw
over Sir Duncan. I think the show line was it
wouldn't have. He wouldn't have accepted but
for it for did Sir Duncan? Yeah, it it only worked because
he had gotten an an arrangement in the 1st place.
I can't screw over Sir Duncan if he doesn't think I'm on his
team. So yeah, it was very, extremely
well done. Raymond doubts his motivations.
Don't doubts his motivations. We doubt his motivations.
But then we see, oh, it's glory that that fits.
But no, that was lordship restoring a lordship.
If if the topic of the lost Fossaway lordship had been
thrown into the mix in the hedge night, people want to suss that
out. You may be like, that's what his
angle is, but just make me a Lord that's coming after the
fact that you don't necessarily tie that together, yet it still
fits. It's a it's a kind of reward a
man like that would seek. Just you don't know that there's
a history behind that reward. So the fossil ways were huge in
the story, as we saw. There's no subtracting that.
I mean, they're as big as anyone.
Not literally. Dunk was taller, but actually
Raymond's taller than Shawn Thomas.
All of them are like, everyone's smaller, right?
Except for maybe Egg. You know, like Dunk is 6 inches
shorter than Book Dunk. Laughing Storm, Ditto.
Raymond, Ditto. They're all like just smaller
anyway. But whatever, that's Makar is
smaller. That's just how it goes.
All TV characters, you just kind of have to go with that.
So Dunks, Dunk had a very diverse group with him, right?
You had people there for a variety of reasons, for honor,
for dunks friendship, for revenge, for just to test
themselves against the Kingsguard.
Maybe in Lionel's case Aryans was not though.
He had three Targaryens, 3 Kingsguard and a Fossaway.
So yeah, that's just kind of stands out doesn't it?
And then after the fact it stands out for the wrong
reasons. We had Targaryens and Fossaways
on both sides, but everybody already kind of hated Aryan.
And Dunk was, I mean, and, and Daron was kind of like a, well,
people don't have strong opinions on him one way or the
other. He's kind of forgettable.
But Baylor, that would have had a big effect because, yeah,
despite what the show gave us, Baylor was popular, just not as
popular with some people as we might have thought.
So Stefon was aiming to regain that lordship instead of his
taste for glory and his rise. It probably backfired horribly.
We don't know the full extent of it, but Ashford became very
famous after the fact. And man, what is he?
He looks like the biggest heel, right?
He joined the other side, which isn't going to make him popular.
He was reneged on a deal to Sir Duncan.
That's bad because Sir Duncan goes on to become more and more
famous, popular with the Commons, and this is the guy
that betrayed him. That's a bad look.
So he looked like a heel for nothing, in fact, for negative
value and he probably broke some ribs apparently.
So for a man who wanted a taste of glory, he he bit into a wormy
apple instead, and it I'd like to think that his life was
permanently a tied to this deed of his.
You know, he may have aimed for some sort of redemption to try
to look good in the longer. This doesn't seem like the kind
of person he was. He just probably eventually
inherited the Cider hall and became an even worse person
because he had even more power to throw around.
And yeah, I don't suppose his reputation among the nobility
was good either. Though.
I mean, going against Dunk, I don't know if people cared about
that too much amongst the nobility.
Some of them would, certainly his cousin did, and some of the
other people that fought with Dunk.
But overall I think it'd be a lot of shrugging about that.
Kind of like how the nobility laughed at Dunk or farted at him
or whatever. But joining Aryan, though, I
don't know about that. That's just especially after the
fact. Especially saw what kind of
person he was. More time passing.
And Aryan just continues to not be a good person.
I don't think that's a good look.
He looks ambitious. He looks opportunistic, doesn't
look honorable. It doesn't come out looking like
a great fighter either. He couldn't beat his cousin who
had just been knighted, in fact, lost to him.
Yeah, it just went it backfired horribly.
I mean, he didn't die that that would have been worse, I guess.
But his reputation may have been in the toilet like, forever
because of that. Now, of course, his no one
should feel sorry for him. He's almost certainly still
inherited Cider Hall. And I don't know why you'd feel
sorry for a jerk like that anyway.
But he probably had a a life that was a a mixture of people.
Everybody hated him, but he also just had mostly what he wanted
all the time. But he probably wanted more.
He probably wanted to be seen differently and would have never
had that. So karma my man, Just karma.
He might have become even more hated over time because of as
dunked popularity, raised and eggs popularity as well and
other things. Then that could translate to an
even bigger dislike of a man who was such a villain towards him.
On the other hand, Raymond's behavior would paint quite the
contrast. People would love to remember
this guy. The stories people would tell
about these two fossaways, night and day.
You know, the good apple, the bad apple, the green and the
red. It just, it's very gossipy.
It's the type of thing you would talk about.
It's it's interesting, like these two family members that
divided at such an important moment, creating such a great
story. Like in World Story, it's great.
The hedge Knight's great, but I'm talking about what it meant
to people in World. Raymond made a name for himself.
He made a friend for himself. And we know their relationship
has more to come. We don't know what it is, but
there's zero chance there's not more to come.
George has said there's more to come.
We we would have guessed confident that there was anyway.
But George has flat out said we'll see Raymond again.
There's plans to see Raymond again anyway.
So he's the sort of friend everyone needs.
Like there's very few characters like him in A Song of Ice and
Fire. We love comparing him to to
Podrick. And there is a lot of parallel
there, lots of parallels there. But it's different the way the
need is, right? The Dunk really, really needed
this more. He's new in the world.
He's trying to find his place. He needed help more than Brienne
did. Now Brienne needed help for
sure. But Dunk, this guy's coming in
there naive without any ideas, way less, way more naivete than
Brienne. He was pretty naive.
But Dunk is also younger. So also they're linked
thematically. There's just a lot of things
that George aligned with them personality wise that makes
their friendship, I guess, more believable.
Not that it isn't not that it was never unbelievable, just it
just fits really well. Little things that make it work,
like Duncan Egg are both kind of animals in book and show.
That's a green flag, right? And here we have green apple
Raymond doing similar things like taking care of Dunk's
horses for him, maybe more for Dunk than for the horses in the
book version. But in both versions, he takes
care of the horses. And then of course, sweet foot
gets that very sweet send off in the show as well, which got to
love that. Having that associated with
Raymond just does even more for making us love the guy.
Now, you know, speaking about the stories that would be told
about Ashford afterwards. I mean, throw the telephone game
in there afterwards and you have the most villainous Stefan
stabbing dunk in the back at the at the last minute and the
heroic Raymond stepping forward to try to erase or at least
stand in contrast to his cousin's dark deeds here.
Just this, the barge, the musicians, the just the guy who
sits at the bar and loves to be the center of attention when
people are buying him drinks, like ulf the White would love to
tell stories. Like this is a great story,
right? There's multiple stories.
The stories of Baylor, the stories of Duncan Egg, the
stories of Raymond, the stories of Stefan, the stories of them
together, the stories we don't know about that happened
afterwards. People would be talking in the
world about these stories that we haven't yet heard, that the
Raymond's devotion would be just the the example, the example,
the guy to be be like Raymond. Yeah, be like that.
That's how many Knights told their Squires be like Raymond
Fosseway, Right. Or how many Knights when they
came nice saying I want to be like Raymond Fosseway.
Yeah, they might even have these conversations over a cup of
cider that might be even what starts to be like, you know,
what's cider? Yeah, fossil ways.
How about that Raymond guy? Or how about that villainous
Stefan? Yeah, there's just a lot to say
there. And it's a real statement on
people and families, a big thing of what A Song of Ice and Fire
is about. Yeah, mostly we're dealing with
noble families, but noble families have that going for
them. They have the power and wealth
to make world shaking things happen when they have conflict.
They can be the best friends, they can be the worst rivals.
They can be big heroes, they can be big villains.
Sometimes they can be multiples of those things, even the ones
that don't really align. So his frustration with House
Targaryen and Book Raymond's amplified in the show would be a
nice fit for their demotion. That could be a little extra
angle to why Raymond and Stefan hate the Targaryen so much
because of that demotion, because it's almost certainly
who did it right. We we throw out some guesses as
to why and and book Raymond didn't necessarily hate the
Targaryens. He may have felt sorry for them,
like Makar's sons. The vibe's a little different in
the book version. Either way, it's the thing
people gossip about. They're the Royals, right?
And he was complimentary to Baylor and wasn't didn't say
negative things about Eris and Ragal, meaning Raymond did so.
So yeah, the the tone's a little different about his Targaryen
takes in the book. And he even had reasons to pity
Makar. He himself knows what it's like
to be down the line. You know, not he's Raymond's not
even a second son because he's not in the main line, not in the
main branch. He's in the junior branch.
Of course, he ends up forming his own branch, but not at the
time that hadn't yet happened. So off page, even if Raymond
was, even if Buck Raymond was more anti Targaryen than we may
have realized, that would have changed a bit after the fact,
right? He would have seen the kind of
person Egg was and that Dunk was now tied to them.
And you know, you're the friend of my friends, etcetera.
And also, after splitting with his family, Raymond might have
started thinking ahead more. I mean, like, you know, I need
some land. I need, if I want to do my own
thing, I need to get a parcel of land, which I don't know if
going against the royal house is the way to go about that.
So just from pure pragmatic angle, he might have been one of
the one of them on his side. And and just one last tidbit
about Raymond and his shield change.
You can't just decide to make a cadet branch on a whim.
So in both book and show and he's like green apple fossil
ways or I'm not this anymore. That's unofficial.
That's just him saying I want to distinguish my I mean, we've
seen a bajillion lesser second sons, third sons, whatever, just
do a different version of their sigil Bloodraven the younger
phrase, like everybody does it. So this is not necessarily a
sign of new house exists. Now.
Now, when he did found the house and they like established the
founding story, they 1000% include him changing his sigil
and she's like that was the moment you could say the house
actually began, but it wasn't official until they got a
charter. They got land.
You know new barrel wasn't new barrel until he had a writ A
deed, right? Let's take a quick break and
then we'll come back with a bit more couple of questions from
you all. Adornish Dame 383 says.
I wonder if the fearsomely strong cider served at the Quill
and Tankard is sourced from the Fossaways.
I wonder that too. We have a little section on
where else cider is served here near the end of the episode or
actually not near the end of the episode here close to the middle
actually. And yeah, it could be maybe they
get a stronger version from them or maybe they just still it a
little bit. Distill the cider.
Distilled apple cider is apple Brandy.
Brandy is just distilled wine. So I don't know what the
difference would apple wine and apple distilled apple cider
would be. But either way, yeah.
So they could have, they could distill it a little bit, or they
could just make it their own either way.
But it's possible. Yeah.
Guilty Undertaker said if The Hobbit taught us anything, you
can just float barrels of apples downstream.
Hey, that's a good point. I mean, people might steal
those, but I mean, the apples are awfully plentiful, so they
could afford to lose a few given the savings they would rack up
by not having to use boats, just throwing the barrels downstream.
You can afford to lose a few Cost of doing business.
You know, Shay and I were joking right before the episode here
about Stefan teaching Raymond, you know, And like, that's not
the fossa way to do things, you know, like there's a proper way
and there's a fossa way. You know, given all the apple
puns, I'm surprised there's no Adam Foss away.
I mean, there's no Adam's apples in Westeros.
That's a, you know, that's too specific to the real world, too
specific to Christianity or whatever as a, as an origin for
that. Phrase apple.
What's that? Your Garth's.
Your Garth's apple. Your Foss's apple.
Yeah. But yeah, that would be funny to
have a little Adam Foss away as a little Easter egg joke.
I was once in Santa Fe hanging out with one of George's
assistants and we went to his theatre where we saw some
comedians and it was a very funny setup.
I think I've described this once before, but this is a good time
to bring it back because of the content.
Now, the the setup was this 16 local comedians, 15 of whom are
high, they'd smoked pot right before the show.
The audience had to figure out using the, you know, eliminate
thing like a like a vote people off kind of deal just by
applause, which comedian was sober.
So to figure we actually did it, I wasn't that good at it.
I thought I'd be better at it. But the crowd as well.
I was part of the crowd. And we succeeded in sorting out
which comedian was sober. The first of the 16 was so
blatantly high. He didn't last at all because we
figured the process was they would answer questions and the
way they answered the question, would you be like, OK, this
guy's high or isn't? And the first guy was like, what
would you do if you had $1,000,000?
That was the question. And the first comedians like
apples. I do something with apple
everything. That guy is high as hell.
He just blurts out the word apples.
When asked what he would do with $1,000,000, he just says apples.
Yeah, anyway, so not that relevant, but apples so and
funny. Let's give a shout out to those
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it. Let us move on to the red stern
green. So yeah, the offshoot of
Ashford, of course, was the formation of house, fossil wave,
new barrel. Let's talk about how that might
have gone down because all we know is just those little
tidbits that were dropped sort of as Easter eggs or Easter
apples in both book and show about what was to come.
But the actual formation of the house wouldn't have been so
simple. Like I said, it couldn't just be
Raymond Change's sigil. And there you go.
This is where the nicknames Red Apple Fossaway and Green Apple
Fossaway came from. There would no there's no reason
to differentiate when there was only one kind of Fossaway, the
greener nightly. Also, since they came along
after Ashford and the Reds were also already a nightly house.
Not lordly anymore. So they became green also
nightly. We don't have house words for
them though. Nina chose Ripened by trial.
Nina's so good at coming up with fun house words.
A really good one. I hardly even need to explain
what the implication is there. Ripened by trial.
He spoke of not being ripe enough that he fought in the
trial. And then soon after they have
their own house formed a cadet branch.
So yeah, ripened by trial. It all happened because of
Ashford Meadow. I like that.
So sometime after Ashford is when these things became
official. Obviously Raymond didn't just go
home and have land after Ashford.
In fact, it may have been a big to do given that the two
fossaways at Ashford were on opposite sides of the trial.
That may have caused some family strife.
Now, Raymond was the guy in the right, but Stefan's the higher
ranking one, so I don't know how it went.
It may have been a serious dividing line in the family,
maybe not, but it's more fun to assume conflict in these
fictional settings, right? Nina's guess, and it's my
favorite guess, is that Raymond fought in the third Black Fire
rebellion and performed well. And of course, whenever there's
a big civil war like this, there's a lot of houses that get
stripped of their lands. There you go.
There's your very straightforward opportunity for
the green apple fossil ways to get land, fighting for the
loyalists, winning, getting rewarded from lands taken from
the losing side. That's super standard, very
believable. We don't actually know where new
Beryl is, but of besides being in the reach, but I'm would
guess that it was taken from a Lord or knightly house on the
losing side. So this is 10 years after
Ashford when the third Black Fire rebellion was that is.
So once again just like previous engagements like in the Dance of
the Dragons, they would have fought under their Liege Lord.
Now Leo Longthorne was sick in 212 so he might have been dead
by the time of the third Blackfyre rebellion, but still
it would have been the Tyrell banners at the top.
Now by the time this happened he may have Raymond may have had a
different attitude about Aegon. And this is King Aries, the
first in charge. And the great spring sickness
had already happened. So a lot had changed.
Raymond may have been a different person by then.
He'd be a little bit older, a little more experienced.
His, his views on politics might have been a little different,
Who knows? Either way, that's, it's pretty
straightforward. There's rebel lands to, to
redistribute after the war. Robert's Rebellion, that's how
Davos probably got his lands from Connington lands.
Lothor Brune got lands there. Damon Blackfar had a castle for
a while. It's gone now probably, or given
to somebody else. So there's just lots of examples
like this. We we we don't need more it
even. It's even possible that the
great Spring sickness wiped out a few houses entirely.
So there could have been new land to redistribute before the
third black fire rebellion, given that and that may have
been where the green ample phosphorus got their land.
But I feel like there has to have been something he did to
earn it and it fighting for Dunk might not have been enough.
Although because, you know, egg might have given that land, but
Egg doesn't become king for so much longer.
Maybe Egg convinced Makar to do it, maybe Egg convinced King
Aries, maybe Egg convinced Makar to convince King Aries.
Either way, it's a very good place to plant our flag in the
ground as the most likely possibility for where New Barrel
got its lands. It's even possible nowadays it
hasn't been that long, right? In terms of Ashford Meadow,
let's say New Barrel was founded roughly 10 years after Ashford
Meadow. So around 2:19 we'll we'll round
it to 2:20. That means 78 years before Song
of Ice and Fire. In that time, given the Reds
were demoted, it's possible the Greens had overtaken the Reds in
terms of prominence. In turn, overtaking them in
wealth is maybe unlikely given how long the Reds have been
accumulating cider money. But having more land and being
richer doesn't mean you have a better product.
It's possible that they innovative and came up with some
better cider, right? Are they in competition with
each other? Do they share recipes?
Is the green apple Fossaway cider different than the red?
I would you would hope so because more options seems like
a good thing. Like everybody doesn't want just
the same cider all the time. And then and when we get to our
little brief section on real world cider, Oh my God, there
are so many varieties of ciders and ways to make it, in part
because there's just an absurd number of apple species out
there. So part of this leads to the
possibility of given such a wide variety of options and
possibilities and theoretical recipes for cider, the greens
could have gotten ahead. They're like, hey, our cider's
just better. The Reds might have had less
reason to innovate. It's they're the biggest game in
town. People are going to buy their
cider no matter what. But here comes the upstart green
apple fossa ways they needed. They need a way to get ahead.
We can't just be the same smaller version of the same
house selling the same cider. That's not going we're going to
get a leg up doing that. We need to innovate and that
might be what happened. And and maybe they innovative so
well that they overtook the Reds.
Maybe not. I mean, maybe just the IT helped
to get them on equal footing. And when we see in current time,
we get to the song of ice and fire section of this episode,
the fossil weighs in. Modern times are working
together. The greens and the Reds seem
kind of inseparable. It's almost like they just kind
of went back to being one house in some ways, which maybe
implies new barrel is not super far from Cider Hall.
You'd be hard pressed to find a reader who would guess we'll
never see Raymond again, and when we say Black Fire 3 is very
likely, we don't think it's the only time.
In fact, more recent comments by George indicate that they'll be
several opportunities to see Raymond if things go the way
they're planned. Yes, when I said hard pressed,
it was a cider pun. Let's talk about the bad apple,
Sir Derek Fossaway. He was an exception to the
colorful pattern 'cause he had a so-called black reputation,
which we just got through saying these black apples sound very
untasty. But you know, what does it mean?
What does a black reputation mean?
Ambitious and and one is certain for a certainty.
Now ambition isn't necessarily a bad thing, but this guy's
ambition was murderous, ruthless.
I don't know. But not a good person, but
successful in being not good. He couldn't have just been an
ordinary knight because he's in the Band of Nine.
The Band of 9 was Melee's the monstrous captain general of the
Golden Company, biggest cell sword company there is.
It ever has been. There's pirate captains.
There's other famous cell sword captains.
There's Aliquo, Silver tongue, Right?
This guy was like a major political operator.
So how was a knight get into this company with cell sword
capped at 10,000 strong like merchant Prince's pirate cat?
Like how does just a knight get in there?
So the implication is that he was more than just a knight.
That may have been his highest title, but he had done something
of note or several somethings of note to establish himself.
For one thing is one thing's a certain that he was exiled from
the Seven Kingdoms. So something that was like a
capital, not a capital charge, but got him kicked out, you
know, something bad, but not bad enough to be executed for.
I don't know. I mean, that's that's not super
uncommon for the nobility to get to evade the death penalty.
But exile is less common than just some severe penalty or
taking the black, right? Like taking the black is more
common. You're sent to the wall.
So, so maybe implies that he was exiled in part because they
didn't catch him. He got away and so they declared
him in exile. He's unlawful as a resident of
Westeros, but this wasn't a penalty inflicted on him after
he was caught and tried, right? Because if he was, maybe he
would have been, he probably would have been sent to the
Wall. I mean, there's exceptions like
John Connington and things like that.
But but that brings us to another point.
Most exiled Knights from Westeros join the Golden
Company. They don't become a
contemporary, a someone on equal footing within this group, the
Band of Nine, the Ninepenny King.
So Sir Derek Faso somehow is on relatively equal footing within
the Band of Nine to Melis and these other big deal bad guys in
the Band of Nine. So what did?
I have no idea what he did, but something substantial, something
criminal. Maybe he was a underworld figure
and the others are mentioned as cell sword captains and pirate
captains. So he's not that because why
would they be famous cell swords and him just Sir Derek Fossaway,
who? Oh yeah, I know he was a cell
sword guy also. It just isn't mentioned.
I don't believe that. So something else.
But but what? Something substantial to put him
on equal footing with these other big players.
Maybe he made off with some of his own family's wealth.
Maybe he stole the big portion of Fossaway wealth and did
criminal things with it. It doesn't just have to be one
thing too. He could have done a lot of
different dastardly things that brought him to the attention of
the other members of the band. Maybe he had a powerful mother.
Maybe he was a Tyrell by birth on his mother's side.
So that gave him extra clout and wealth, potentially access to
things. Let's look at the timeline.
This guy, Sir Derek Fossaway was active in the Band of Nine.
The Band of Nine invaded Westeros IN259260.
That's when the 9 Penny Kings war began.
That's only, you know, 51 years after Ashford, which isn't
exactly a lot of space for like a lot of different generations
to squeeze in there. We don't know whether he's red
apple or brown or green apple. I would lean red because it's
tempting to lean towards him having been influenced by
Stefan. Right.
Like Stefan was a a jerky guy who might have gotten jerkier as
his reputation for such became well known as his taste for
glory attempt backfired horribly.
It may have had an effect on his immediate family.
If Stefan inherits has a son, maybe it's this guy or maybe he
has several sons and this is one of them.
Yeah, this Sir Derek Fossaway could be a direct descendant.
Not just direct descendant, but the son of Sir Stefan Fossaway.
He could be a son of Raymond too.
Just a, you know, a good guy has a bad son.
What can you do? But it's, it's just tempting to
lean Stefan because you could see a guy raised by Stefan
turning out like this, right? Someone who takes after his
father, and his father's a real piece of work, a real rotten
apple. And this guy's a real rotten
apple, right? He just really fits.
I mean, think of the examples Stefan set for his own children,
assuming he had them, trading his honor for a lordship,
throwing his lot in with Aryan of all people.
And especially if the Targaryens are somewhat unpopular amongst
some of the nobility of the Reach.
We don't have to take the show's word for that.
It's it's believable anyway. And then you got that like,
yeah, that doesn't that's not a good look.
None of this looks good for for House.
Floss away. It could be that this is where
Sir Derek came of age during this semi tumultuous time within
the family and it had an effect on him.
Or it just made him see opportunities.
He saw dollar signs. He saw his own opportunity for a
taste of glory, even though bad apples don't taste very good.
Well, I'm sure he could figure out a a workable metaphor there.
Maybe he was the first born, got exiled and lost his inheritance
for that reason. But he had done things with it
before losing it. Maybe he yeah, maybe he got rich
from Fossaway cider. Maybe he was made arrangements,
did deals with other people farther away.
Maybe he expanded the business and then started doing
villainous things with it. Given the band of of Nine
invaded Westeros not that long after Aegon the 5th's death,
maybe whatever villainous things he did, in fact, probably
whatever villainous things he did to be on that footing with
the band was during Aegon's reign, during Aegon the 5th's
reign. So it may have been while Aegon
had his long reign. There's this bad apples out
there doing things of note. And Stefan is like, sorry y'all,
or that's my kid. That's my boy or Raymond's like,
sorry y'all. I, I tried to raise him better.
But you know, I don't know what happens.
You know, the apple did fall far from the tree.
We don't know if any Fossaways fought on the step stones
against the band would have been a good way for them to show that
their loyalty. So I I would suspect yes more
than I would be more likely to guess yes than no.
Especially because the Fosseways are so numerous too.
Like what are the odds that there's no Fosseways of age able
to fight in that war? It seems unlikely.
It'd be interesting if one of them actually crossed swords
with Sir Derek, you know? How do villains like that view
the notion of being seen as a kinslayer?
Do they care? Do they think it maybe makes
them even more villainous? Is it something they want as
Rep? Either way, after the death of
Melees to Sir Barristan, the band just kind of gave up on
Westeros. So you wonder what Sir Derek
would have gotten out of it. Like maybe he would have been
Melees Hand or something like that.
Because Cider Hall only seems like a kind of a small reward,
forgiven what the band's aims were they aimed really high.
Melees wanted all of Westeros. He wanted the Iron Throne.
So I don't think Sir Derek his his, you know, ally who would
have helped put Melees on the throne, would have would have
wanted something so small. So, yeah, maybe he handed the
king like what Illyrio wants for master of coin or something big
like that, something like that. He could really leverage and
office. He could really leverage for
future villainy, further villainy, further gain.
I'll gotten gains. It's also possible he's older
than our guest because I'm I'm guessing he was born within 10
to 15 years after Ashford. It could have been sooner than
that. I'm just guessing.
He I, I just happened to guess. I prefer the guesses that have
him near Mele's his age and Mele's was probably in his early
20s when the band broke out. So, but it's possible Derek
Fossaway was like a 50 year old man, long criminal career, in
which case that he would have been born like a year after
Ashford, right? So that's entirely possible.
There's a pretty wide range of opportunities here or of options
here, and it's a but it's a pretty compelling character.
We heard about what the Fossa ways thought about the
Targaryens, right? The fossa ways would probably
have some words about this guy, about their own bad apple.
I guess this guy gives us a bad name.
So it's another example of a fairly interesting character
whose full story is yet to be written.
Even though he's historical but not that far back.
He may have survived for quite a while.
For all we know, this guy survived the collapse of the
Band of Nine and just went maybe he went farther E like Miro of
Braavos did when the Second Sons couldn't find work because of
his reputation. Well, he went and found work in
Slavers Bay. There's always somebody willing
to hire you when you go go when there's worse people out there.
So maybe Sir Derek just went east towards Slavers Bay and
found kind of a place where he was things were more to his
liking. But quite possibly he was just
killed during the collapse of the band when they stopped
working together. Guilty, Undertaker adds.
If it's clear and yellow, you got juice there, fella.
If it's tangy and brown, you're in Cider town.
Ned Flanders. That's right, Ned Flanders.
Very quotable, even when it comes to apples.
Now let's talk a little bit about real world apples and
symbolism and history here. It's pretty cool.
They're a symbol. They're a trope in the story in
the real world, and there's some cool real life fun facts about
them too. Now, what I told you on our
first appearance of a Fossaway, right?
We always do first mentions, right?
But, but, but the first actual apple, real apple, the fruit
itself is the first one we see. It's Littlefinger is eating an
apple. Of course it's the the apple
villain trope. He wasn't peeling it.
That would be a little more on the nose cause the peeling an
apple villain thing is just that's the most ubiquitous apple
symbolism on TV's and movies. Yeah.
So little fingers leading Ned towards the brothel and little
fingers just like is moving quickly and Ned is trying to
catch up. And by the time Ned catches up,
little fingers just leaning on a wall eating an apple.
And then he's like, you're so slow.
And then he throws the apple core into the into the river
there. So Christian, Greek, Norse,
Celtic, Christian, y'all know that one?
Most certainly Adam and Eve, right?
Greek. You probably know that one too.
It's the apple of discord, the apple of heiress that led to the
Trojan War, right? The apple said for the fairest,
a golden apple that was rolled into the party where all the
gods were AT. And they argued over who the
fairest was, like I'm the fairest Afro.
He said no. Athena said no, it's me.
Harris said, you kidding? It's me.
So they go to ask Paris, Paris, judge this contest for us.
Paris should have made me like I decline.
But he didn't and the Trojan were followed.
And Norse, the Norse world, there's the apples of Edun, and
this is probably the origin of the phrase.
An apple a day keeps the doctor away.
The apples of Edun. Edun was one of the goddesses,
and her apples kept them immortal.
If you eat the gods and goddesses would eat the apples
every day, and it would keep them young and and vital and
they'd live forever. Funnily enough, while I was
searching for lore on this, I discovered a painter who
depicted Edun as young and beautiful.
Of course she's eating the apples, but her husband, the God
of poetry and scalds and related things.
Broggy pictured is old. What is she not not giving him
the apples? That's not a very Good Wife.
She's not sharing her youthful apples.
She gives them to all the other Norse deities but her husband.
Damn you dude, that's that's rough.
Avalon from Celtic King Arthur legendarium.
It was the Isle of apples. Druid wands could be made of you
or apple. Not you.
As in you the tree, you, not you the person.
So as I alluded to earlier, apple seeds are not very
reliable. They will grow apples, but they
will. They're very random.
They do not. They're not like clones of the
tree they come from. It's just huge varieties of
apples come from the seeds of apples.
So Johnny Appleseed, I made a joke that Johnny Appleseed was
doing it wrong, but he wasn't really doing it wrong.
The there's a huge benefit to just throwing apple seeds
everywhere now. It's, it's, it's, it's an
establishing thing that you're doing here.
You're spreading all these apple seeds everywhere.
Some of those apples seeds are going to make trees that will
actually work well in that place because variety of climates,
weather, humidity, all that other stuff, soil quality.
Given the huge random outcome of apple seeds, some of them are
going to actually work out really well.
Some of them are going to produce crappy apples.
Some of them won't even grow. Those are forgettable.
But the few that work out really well, you take the root stocks
and you use those to produce clones.
So you can find once you get the best apple, you can then start
cloning them properly. But until you get the really
good apple, you just keep planting seeds.
But once you get the good apples, the one you want, you
stop using seeds because those are very random.
But the randomness can be a benefit when you're getting
started. See, so Johnny Appleseed didn't
create great quantities of apples.
He created great variety of apples, which locals from a
variety of regions could then select the best ones and make
them permanent. So he gets credit, but it's the
story has a lot more nuance to it and and you think this isn't
a this isn't a legend. No, there really was a Johnny
Appleseed. This is a real person.
John Chapman. Yeah, John Chapman, he was a
religious dude, so. Yeah.
And he was certainly seems like one of those very good people
that was just trying to spread food everywhere.
Like, apples are great, right? So good job, Johnny Appleseed.
Good job, John Chapman, Real person, did good work.
But. Yeah.
But the story isn't quite what we're told.
So in China, the Johnny Appleseed of China wasn't a
single individual, it was the species of brown bears.
Brown bears are uniquely well suited for spreading apples or
apple trees. And it is part of what you
think. Yeah, they eat the apples and
they poop the seeds out and the seeds grow.
But it's better than that. The the few animals can digest
seeds, but something about bears digestive systems sets the seeds
up to germinate properly. Like if you just drop there.
They don't necessarily work because apples require cross
pollination and all those other stuff that isn't worth
explaining. The biology isn't quite
straightforward, but the bottom line is brown bears love apples
and they eat the crap out of them and then they crap them out
and spread them all over Asia. And that was probably where
apples began. Apple trees began in Asia maybe
just like millions of years ago, possibly until humans started
working with them maybe 12,000 years ago and like replanting
and making orchards, all that. In modern times, there's like
7500 cultivars, which I think is the basically the same thing as
species. But you know, scientific terms
vary when they're, there's nuance as to what type of life
form they're describing. So cultivars apparently is the
right term. That's how many apples there are
in the world. Species of apples.
It's crazy, right? And there's, there's ones that
are grown in winter, there's ones that are grown in high
climates. It's a very, very diverse,
adaptable fruit, which is why it is so ubiquitous in symbolism,
because it's the part of so many cultures formed a grew alongside
or because of certain crops that enabled them to get going.
Without this certain foodstuffs, they would never have been able
to become a whole civilization or a city or a town or whatever.
And apples are a part of so many of these stories because they
are so big and widespread in so many places around the world.
Some really funny anecdotes that have added to the spread of
apples. And as I said, it's probably
about 10,000 BC that humans started spreading apples around.
They got to Egypt around 1800 BC and they never were huge in
Egypt but they because Egypt obviously is much older than
that. But they apple trees in Egypt.
Even Alexander the Great sent some apple specimens back from
Persia to Aristotle. Just here Aristotle take these
apples and plant them at your Lyceum.
Julius Caesar, 270 ish years later, wrote the first recorded
reference to apples native. He observed native Kelts
fermenting crab apples. Yeah, you can make cider out of
bad apples. Like the apples you wouldn't
want to eat can still make cider out of or Jelly or compote or
whatever. By the time Caesar's army was
headed back to Rome, his men were making and drinking that
cider. They were like, that's a good
idea, That's a tradition, That's a technique we're going to
immediately bring back to Rome with us.
Of course, Caesar also brought the end of the Republic back
with him. So but but they at least they
had some nice beverage to celebrate the the giant
political transition that occurred around that time.
The term cider originated around the 9th century AD English monks
and Irish monks were big in propagating it, experimenting
with it, coming up with different ways to make it,
trying out different apples, trying out different brewing
techniques and that's it. It.
It may have had a precursor in Greek Roman times called Secara,
which you can kind of hear, you can kind of hear the word cider
in that, like you could sort of see the origin there.
Per capita, the UK drinks the most cider.
No one's surprised about that and has the biggest cider
producing companies too. But it's also very big in the US
and as I said, you know, Ireland and the UK LinkedIn that regard
the UK, Commonwealth nations like Australia and other places
drink quite a lot of cider too. There's a there's so many ways
to make it now. Not all these things are old
school, but nowadays, other fruits, tannins, sugar, honey,
hops, cinnamon, ginger, rose petals, hibiscus.
Aging it, not aging it now, modern times, carbonation, not
carbonation. Winters come.
Frozen apples are a thing to make cider.
You actually have apples that are intentionally frozen and
then pressed to make cider. That's the thing.
Yeah. Cold, cold brew coffee.
Cold brew cider. Yeah, and not a lot of the
similar techniques used to make wine were tried on cider and
vice versa. Certain certain ingredients that
were put in wine or also put in ciders, hey, that worked in
wine. Why not try and vice versa?
This worked in cider. How does it taste in wine?
So a lot of overlap there. What's crazy about this is
there's techniques that people are still using that were
developed in ancient times, yet they're also still making new
techniques. It's it's really neat the the
combination of really long held tradition things that just it
ain't broke, don't fix it to a combination of hey, there's so
many new things we could try and some of these are going to work
out really well. Earlier we had the example of
the personally strong cider in the cool and tankard at Old
Town. Couple other examples.
Brienne has cider at the end of the kneeling man, but when Arya
gets to the end of the kneeling man, they're out.
All the cider's gone. Too bad Brienne and Podrick also
have cider at the quiet aisle and that's where they call it
Far Fame. They have really good cider
there apparently, so good for them.
They have cider. They have cider Castle Black.
Usually they warm it up, chill the bones away.
Well, not usually, but often taught cider.
They even have cider beyond the wall.
There's apple trees beyond the wall.
Goes to show, you know, apples grow in such a wide variety of
places. That's a great example of it.
That's not unrealistic at all. It's actually Varamir who
mentions it. It's one of the things he would
get tribute. He had all these villages that
gave him food and women and cider periodically or food and
fodder and cider and he would just take the women whenever.
But either way, they were giving him cider.
Bringing all this back around to House Fossaway, it's not hard to
see how the green apple Fossaways could have overtaken
the Reds and wealth given all these varieties and this
innovation stuff we talked about.
Maybe the greens just had some real talent in innovation and or
not, maybe I'm just making all this up.
It's just an idea. But the point is, brewing better
cider gets you better customers, more customers.
And it's different than the usual ways that noble houses
overtake each other and procedure and prominence.
It's usually to do with violence or politics or both.
This is mercantile operations, which is as, as we've said a few
times here, is usually not how these noble houses compete with
each other. Maybe Raymond even had the
talent. Maybe Raymond himself is the one
that is good at it because he was not a highborn.
Well, he's highborn. He wasn't high up in the
rankings of the fossil ways. So you got to think that's a
lot. That's what a lot of lower
ranking fossil ways do is they take jobs in the family
business, right? Like so maybe Raymond actually
had a lot of boots on the ground type skills that someone like
Stefan as the heir to the house would not have ever learned
because that would be a job for some more.
It's beneath him, but it wouldn't necessarily be beneath
Raymond. These are also advantages to
starting fresh with a new house. A cider hall has its thing.
It's been doing its thing for so long, starting a new house, not
only do you have an opportunity to, to come up with some fresh
ideas, but you're not, you don't have these entrenched business
arrangements that are really, really old and, and old in, in a
sense that is kind of unfathomable to us on earth
because we don't, we don't have nations this old or even close
to it that, that are, you know, still relatively similar to how
they started. What I mean by that is the Cider
Hall Fossaways, they've been dealing with the same families,
same merchants, same organization for so long.
And that's when corruption and old boy network stuff types
starts to set in. A fresh start with a fresh house
and making new business deals, new arrangements with new people
and positions. They aren't entrenched, they
haven't gotten used to, they haven't gotten fat, lazy and
corrupt or whatever euphemisms you want to apply to it.
I'm speaking metaphorically, of course.
With a new start, you may have less corruption.
That's the shorter version of this.
So that's another reason why the green apple fossil waste could
have gotten ahead, because they're not all deeply into
this, into a industry that's grown corrupt.
All right, our final section is the apples of A Song of Ice and
Fire. Having a double branch allows
them to represent the entangled nature of noble marriages,
right? That's already such a thing in
the noble houses of Westeros that they've all married into
each other so many times. It's even harder to parse here
with the fossil age, which is part of the point.
And I think it's part of why George has them still so tied
together because it it really speaks to that.
Now, here's a famous example that most of us didn't catch the
meaning that it included a Fossaway.
I know you caught the main thrust of this point, which is
that when Melisandre shadow baby assassinates Sir Courtney
Penrose with Davos's help at Storm's End, it's done in part
because Stannis knows who is going to take Sir Courtney
Penrose's place. He knows that replacement will
yield the castle as he says here quote.
Sir Courtney's Lieutenant is cousin to the Fossaways, Lord
Meadows a green boy of 20. Should some I'll chants strike
down Penrose, command of Storm's End would pass to this
stripling, and his cousins believe he would accept my terms
and yield up the castle. Stannis wasn't truly sold on
Melisandre till he could see what she could do.
He saw OK well that's real sorcery.
Now, we all know Melisandre picked up on that and
exaggerated her abilities, which is probably something she was
doing long before Stannis anyway, but she certainly saw
him as a target for that sort of manipulation.
And you wonder how a lot of these other Lords understand us,
perceive Melisandre in that regard.
Like, they're all very suspicious of Sir Courtney's
death too. I'm sure it wasn't just people
like Tyrion or Varus or whether he was like, that doesn't make
sense. That dude was staunch.
He was yelling at them and threatening to fight them,
willing to duel them, and then he just jumps.
Doesn't make sense, does it? So that reflects on Melisandre.
So I kind of wonder what are the foster ways and these other
houses that are that were behind.
What do they think of Melisandre?
Yeah, they these are their trajectory.
Not the most noble as also as Sir Courtney called them out for
before his murder. He's like you guys fought first
Renly and now for Stannis and you change cloaks as often as I
change my boots or whatever. And then they lost on the
Blackwater and Bentoni to Joffrey, so they now he's dead.
So now the all these Lords and Knights focus on the Fosse ways.
So the Fosse ways are now Bentoni to Tommen.
So Renly, then Stannis, then Joffrey, now Tommen.
Yeah, that's counting Robert. That's 5 kings, as many as the
war of the same name. Now they have had the same Liege
Lord throughout all that, five different kings, but Mace
Tyrell's been the Liege Lord for all of it.
Although I wouldn't necessarily bet on Mace holding it for the
rest of the story. I think maybe he's going to exit
stage left. On the other side of that coin
is a very difficult character moment that's devoid of politics
or the supernatural. It does take place at a very
political wedding. It's the Purple Wedding.
But this moment is very human. It's about Tyrion, and it's
about what he can never be. And there was one woman sitting
almost at the foot of the third table on the left.
The wife of one of the fossaways, he thought, and heavy
with his child. Her delicate beauty was in no
way diminished by her belly, nor was her pleasure in the food and
frolics. Tyrion watched as her husband
fed her morsels off his plate. They drank from the same cup and
would kiss often and unpredictably.
Whenever they did, his hand would gently rest upon her
stomach, a tender and protective gesture.
He wondered what Sansa would do if he leaned over and kissed her
right now. Flinch away, most likely, or be
brave and suffer through it, as was her duty.
She is nothing if not dutiful, this wife of mine.
So this is a lot he yearns for and believes he's undeserving of
or even capable of. Now remember this is not that
long before Jamie reveals the truth of Taisha.
So he's currently still thinking the Taisha thing was a ruse.
So he has in his experience, his perception of his experience is
that he's never experienced true love.
Actually, he had his family lied to him about it.
So there's a lot of cynicism here in this moment as well, but
it's still like really hits hard.
I think the Purple Wedding is a really powerful scene for a lot
of reasons. This maybe is a moment that gets
overlooked a little bit given there's so much going on.
I've pointed out during Valoritis, it's also one of the
longest chapters in all of the Song of Ice and Fire.
So it's a big part of who Tyrion is and and part of what's moving
him towards the thing he does. Killing his own father here
because of treatment like this, because of who he is and because
of how his own family has made this worse for him rather than
made it better for him, rather than rather than like uplift him
and, you know, speak to his abilities rather than point out
his flaws. Especially Tywin does this a
lot. Jamie to was pretty good about
this, but of course was forced into this lied by his father as
well. And it's just not a place that
the Tyrion feels like a he belongs, a world he doesn't
think he belongs in. Love is just not a thing for
him. It's pretty damn sad.
Even these thoughts on Tyrion aside.
I mean, I don't think anyone deserves that, but there's some
parallels here too, right? Raymond and Rowan in the show.
It's not just because that Dunk is uncomfortable about the
implication of of Rowan potentially misleading Raymond
about a baby. It's just Dunk is uncomfortable
with that whole thing. It's not the baby thing only
that didn't help. Dunk is uncomfortable with the
idea of relationships. He has no idea what a
relationship would be like. Look how he was with Tanzel.
He had no idea what to do. He had that endearing but
notably naive and shy approach. He just didn't know what to do.
He didn't know how to talk to her.
He's like, I got nothing, you know?
He's he has no idea what he's doing.
So make the whole thing makes him uncomfortable.
He sees these two, Raymond and Rowan, just ease into it.
So naturally, like love came to them so naturally, perfectly
just it happened and they went with it.
Like Duncan's like, am I ever going to have that?
I don't know. His life is going to be on the
road. Sir Arlen never had a love.
Sir Arlen didn't have a wife. He doesn't see that for him.
So the idea makes him uncomfortable because it's not
his future. So it's different from Tyrion
because, you know, he's not like ugly.
In fact, he's quite handsome. So the reasons are different.
But it's, it's still a world he doesn't feel a part of.
And I think that's neat. It's a parallel moment.
And there's Fossaways involved in both.
And the Fossaways are unusually well suited for this as an
example of an idyllic lifestyle because of what we've been
saying about how their castles positioning their income.
They're unusually well, unusually well set up to avoid
some of the worst things that happened in Westeros.
If I didn't make the point before, I think I did, but I'll
repeat it if I didn't. If you're a peasant born in
Westeros, being born at Cider Hall or in New Barrel, probably
one of the best places to be, right?
Like, not that likely to have war.
Food's plenty, weather's great. Your Lords aren't particularly
known for going to war. They're known for kind of going
along with it, but they're not the ones who start it.
So at least not as far as we know.
So it seems like, yeah, there's a lot going on there.
A lot of the the fossa ways are an example of things that we
might not have clocked before. They're they're maybe perfect
example of the most idyllic people to be.
And that's what makes it so perfect for that Tyrion scene.
And even Tyrion doesn't necessarily realize just how
privileged that couple is and just how that moment is fueled
by their upbringing and just how they they have experienced so
little setbacks, so little adversity in their lives that
they just don't have cares. They don't have stress.
Like, you know, they're just like everything is cool and
everything the rest of their lives is rosy.
The outlook is great, right? Lady Leonette, a good example
here. Too late.
Leonette Fossaway, she's wife of Sir Garland, the gallant Tyrell,
one of the most likeable Tyrells, maybe the most likeable
Tyrell in terms of not the most entertaining, that's probably
Elena. But just in terms of this guy is
actually pretty upstanding seemingly.
Now, he was also at the Purple Wedding, of course, Tyrion
speaks a lot with Lady Leonette Fossilway and Garland Tyrell.
He's sitting next to them. So that scene where he observes
another Fossilway and the tender protective, all the love and
romance and all that, he's sitting next to another
Fossilway when that's happening. And Leonette Fossilway seems
pretty cool too. She laughs at his jokes.
She makes some jokes with him. She's like, man, that was a good
line. You just, you're a better singer
than this guy. And Garland's like no my lady,
he was made to do great deeds and Tyrion is like honestly off
put in a good way by how nice they're being and how praising
his disease is not used to it. People are usually a Dick to him
right? And not just Garland, but Lady
Leonette is being really nice to him.
It makes you wonder if there's an ulterior motive.
And the ulterior motive is lulling him in his into a false
sense of security, like making him not pay attention so they
can pull off this poisoning and blame him on it.
However, I still don't really think Garland was in on it.
I don't see why they would need to have him in out.
Olenna doesn't need his participation.
Why include more people in the conspiracy if you don't need to?
I think Marjorie probably needed to know 'cause she needed to
avoid drinking from that cup, but Garland wasn't gonna drink
out of it. Lee and Yat wasn't gonna drink
out of it. They weren't going to be the
ones to place the poison in the cup.
They didn't need to know. Don't add people to a conspiracy
if you don't need to know them. Lady Oletta is probably smart
enough to know that. Why would she need to tell?
Maybe she'll tell later, but she didn't need to tell then, I
mean. If Garland the gallant is really
such a noble, upstanding dude, she's not going to tell him
that. Let him let him believe the best
about their family. She can do The Dirty underhanded
work and keep it to herself right.
So it may have been well known, but the the alternative view
here is that they did know they were very much in on it.
Absolutely possible. I'm my whole they didn't have to
know thing. You can only take that so far.
That's not hard proof. It's just a solid thought, you
know, logical. I think Nina suggests that very
possibly this was exactly the plan.
Keeping Tyrion occupied, complimenting him, one of the
best ways to throw him off his game because he's just so unused
to that. And he would actually, it would
actually work on him. He's starving for it.
Did. He was very happy.
He was oddly pleased by their compliments.
And, yeah, they knew the right things to say, so maybe that was
arranged. Anyway, she first arrived at
court with Marjorie so well before the Purple Wedding.
She came in the Clash of Kings, and Sansa took note of her.
And then she was cool to Sansa. And this is part of why we might
be a little extra suspicion was that she tried to comfort Sansa
knowing when she was about to marry Terry.
She's like, yeah, sorry about that.
A sis, you know, you got to marry that guy.
I know that's not great, but make the most of it.
And she taught Sansa the high harp.
A little tidbit there, Sansa. And Lady Leonette working on the
high harp together, very lovely instrument.
Now, remember, Garland Tyrell was given bright water.
Keep the castle to Florence. That's a big one.
But of course, there's still Florence there, so he can't just
walk in and take it. So he was besieging it with
Tyrell army, with a Tyrell army. But that was interrupted, right,
because the Ironborn took the shield Island.
So Garland's like, all right, pause this.
We'll keep the siege intact, but a smaller amount of men and then
go off and try to deal with the iron board.
So Lady Leonette may actually never be the Lady of Brightwater
Keep in in reality, she may have the title, but and not because
Garland's claim is going to be lost necessarily, but because he
might be, he might die. And he is a great fighter and we
haven't seen him actually fight yet.
But I'm not sure that's in the cards for us, you know, like
what POV would we see him through?
You know, no one's at Brightwater Keep that's got
Apov, nor is anyone at the Shield Islands have a POV.
So I feel like whatever happens with Garland we'll hear about
off page and we'll be able to kind of deduce what happens with
lady Lady Leonette through that. I kind of hope they have a nice
ending. Lady Leonette seems OK even
unless he was really in on this whole poisoning thing.
Is it possible Garland was in on it and not her?
That seems unlikely because you can't really trust A.
You wouldn't really be able to trust a lot of husbands and not
tell their wives, right? So just either include both or
neither. Green Sir John Fosseway, he's
the first mentioned Fosseway in A Song of Ice and Fire.
He's probably the Knight of New Barrel, AKA the Green.
He's married to Janet Tyrell. That's Mace's sister.
So another just deep connection here.
Everybody's entwined. Good marriage for him, probably
a good marriage for her too, given what we've been saying
about the the incomes and solid living situation that the
Fosseways seem to have. And not every lady gets to marry
the Lord or the in this case the the knightly title holder.
So most, even Tyrells and highborn ladies like that don't
get to marry into someone who owns the castle.
So for both of them good marriage and it's pretty
typical. Other than that though you know
Tyrells leads Lord marrying one of the more important vassals.
Obviously there's tons of Starks that have married Manderlees and
Bolton, well, not Bolton's, that's a notable exception, but
pretty much every other Northern house Umbers, especially
Dustin's, all that. Looking to the other regions,
you see some of the same. It's also possible that
Highgarden wanted to rebuild the bridges between the Fossaways.
Maybe the Fossaways had problems after the split.
Maybe after Stefan and Raymond there was a period of unease, if
not worse, between the two houses and Highgarden, as their
Liege Lords would seek to end that disputing.
Maybe try to bring them back together.
And you can't bring them back together through marriage.
That's too, it's too incestuous. But you could do it this way.
Both of them marry Tyrell. A green apple Fossaway marries a
Tyrell, so does a red apple Fossaway or some other close
connection like that. You have them hang out a bit,
you know, make sure you talk to them firmly about everybody
getting along and all that stuff, and eventually maybe it
works out. John Fossaway begged Renly for
the honor of commanding the Vanguard against Stannis.
So not actually that brave of a thing to ask because this was
like a massive disparity in soldiers.
Guyard the green said, beg all you want, it belongs to blah,
blah, blah, blah. Guyard the Green versus John
Green Fossaway. Yeah, this is green versus green
there. Let's move on to a little bit
about what we know about the current Reds, the red apple.
Fossaway that starts off with another example of humor.
Here is a quote. Sir Tanton of the Red Apple
Phosphways climbed on the table and swore to slay Sandor Clegane
in single combat. The vow might have been taken
more solemnly if Sir Tanton had not had one foot in a gravy boat
when he made it. I don't think the vow would have
been taken more solemnly in any case, but it would have been
less funny. Yeah.
So that's, yeah, that's it. It's just funny.
What's up with this guy? Challenge.
What's the challenge, Sir Sand Oracle Gang.
Definitely drunk, clearly. I mean, this guy was drunk as
Hex or Canton. We don't know what this guy's
role in the house is. He's not the red apple.
Fossaway Knight. That's probably Sir Brian, but
well, that requires some updating because we have Sir
Brian and Sir Edwin who were mentioned as Reds.
These two guys were around. They also were with Renly and
Stannis, and then they fought at the Battle of Blackwater
together. As we've been saying, the
Fossaways were fighting together, not against each
other. But fighting together wasn't
enough, as we'll see in a second.
Here now, Sir Tanton, he survived the battle, gravy boat
and all. He's now a sworn sword to Mace
Tyrell. More on him in a minute.
But Sir Brian and Sir Edward, there didn't go quite so well.
Someone seems to have picked the Fossaways as an enemy, someone
who shakes them to their core. Lo Thor.
Apple Eater In the aftermath of the Battle of the Blackwater, we
hear of the deeds of certain notables, and this is one of
those notables quote. The free rider Lothor Brune,
who'd cut his way through half 100 Fosseway Men at Arms to
capture Sir John of the Green Apple and kill Sir Brian and Sir
Edwin of the Red, thereby winning himself the name Lothor
Apple Eater. The biggest killer of apple
since worms. I think we just had an episode
called 3 Baratheon Bastards 2 weeks ago and this guy appeared
because he's very much into Mia Stone.
Not so much into apples apparently though.
He certainly hasn't tried to shoot any fruit off of any of
Mia's body parts. Maybe a fasaway should come
after him instead of after Sandor Culgain.
Tanton should be like no no Lothor.
Apple Eater is the big enemy of this house now forget about
Sandor. I don't think Tanton could beat
either of them. Gravy boat guy, but maybe Tanton
is a little more formidable when he's not drunk sworn sword to
Mace Tyrell. He's got to be at least a little
competent, although maybe not given who his employer is.
But isn't that interesting, right?
The the concept of a guy who's one of the many houses in the
Reach. And we know that the Reach might
be split soon by the so-called friends in the Reach, right?
We might have a division of Reach Lords who decide to stick
with Mace Tyrell versus those who sign on with Young Griff,
AKA Aegon the 6th, AKA, you know, along with Jon Connington
and all that. So where is that going to go?
Is there going to be, you know, some of these Fossaways might go
with, might turn and go with the Black Fires or the Aegon the
6th, whatever you want to call them?
Or are they going to stay loyal? And maybe, well, maybe it's a
little of both because there's multiple Fossaways and multiple
branches. But the idea that Mace Tyrell
has his sworn sword, that amongst one of the other houses
of the Reach, which of course he should, he'd have lots of those.
It's just a reminder that when the friends of the Reach do
their thing, some of them might be literally standing right
behind Mace Tyrell. Like literally one of them could
just draw a dagger and stab him. You know, like, ha ha, gotcha.
That's not the most nightly thing to do.
But don't think that's going to be so much of an argument to say
it won't happen, is it? So now, I'm not saying it's
Sirtantin, because the Fossaways probably aren't among the
friends in The Reach, and this final character is where the
clue for that comes from. The brown apple.
Sir Franklin Flowers is a captain in the Golden Company,
one familiar and relatively friendly to John Connington.
He also already knew Halden Hafmeister when when we first
introduced to Franklin Flowers. He knows these people already.
They've already been acquainted. He'd been in the Golden Company
for a while. Obviously so did Jon Connington,
so they were friends. Now at this point, he's a
captain. He was more of a regular exile
knight, followed A somewhat standard pattern to join the
Golden Company. He's not necessarily descendant
of an exile, but Fosseways aren't exiles here, at least not
other than Sir Derek Fosseway. Now the bad apple, that is.
We have the bad apple on the brown apple.
Contrast here. So Franklin's mother was a
washer woman at Cider Hall. His father was a fossaway who
forced herself, forced himself on that woman.
He says this makes him a brown apple fossaway, very much in
line with Westerosi sigil humor, word play and all that.
Here he is in a very important scene in a Dance of Dragons
quote. If my aunt wants Marine, she's
welcome to it. I will claim the Iron Throne by
myself, with your swords and your allegiance.
Move fast and strike hard and we can win some easy victories
before the Lannisters even know that we have landed.
That will bring others to our cause.
Rivers was smiling in approval. Others traded thoughtful looks
then. Peak said.
I would sooner die in Westeros than on the Demon Rd.
And Mark Mandrake chuckled and responded me I'd sooner live
wind lands and some great castle.
And Franklin Flowers slapped his sword hill and said.
So long as I can kill some Fossaways, I'm for it.
Now, given that last comment, it kind of does imply that the
Fossaways aren't their friends. Like this guy, Laswell Peak,
he's the one who says we have friends in the Reach.
And that's like the source of a lot of the conspiracy, which of
course that's there's more clues for it than that.
Randall Tarly's acting kind of sketchy, for example.
So he's a, he's a major candidate for being one of those
friends in the Reach. So the fact that the Fosaways
are a target of Franklin Flowers, a captain who's in the
know, sort of implies the Fosaways are not on that side.
They are going to stay loyal. Now, maybe something unexpected
will happen and they'll join up and they'll be like, hey, 'cause
I mean, that will bring others to our cause.
Aegon says here if they if they perform well, others will join
them. So yeah, maybe frankly, it won't
go Franklin's way and the Fossaways will join it.
But like, hey, they're all on our side.
How can I kill Fossaways when they're all our allies?
But honestly, you know who we would love to meet and praise
and buy a cup of cider for? It would be Lothor Apple.
You're like that, dude. Well played, man.
You killed how many Fossaways? Dude, I'm so jealous.
You captured one. Also.
I don't know if I'd have been able to do that.
I might have had to kill him, you know?
So Franklin is also like the Fossaways are emblematic of a
lot of things we've shown in this episode.
They're a house that's a bit idyllic.
They're a house that's really rich, a house that represents
the entanglement of noble houses.
We also have this side of things, a good example, the
hatred that the Exiles have for their distant cousins.
Especially his circumstances. His circumstances are more
extreme. He isn't just someone that got
exiled while the rest of his family got stayed behind.
He was brought into this world by violent sexual assault and
hates the man that did it. He hates his father.
He hates the family that did that to his mother.
Of course he's taking his mother's side, which I think all
of us would too. I mean, that's easy.
It's this isn't conflict. This isn't one of those like,
Gee, what side am I on on this one?
You know, like, no, you're we're on the side of the victim, not
the rapist. It's pretty straightforward.
It's about as straightforward as it gets.
So Franklin Flowers, you get why he's that way.
The other Fossaways aren't guilty by association.
You don't have to condone that, but you get it, right?
He hasn't named his father. We would love to know which
Fossaway it was so we could direct our ire at him too.
But I think for now, it's maybe George hasn't decided or it
isn't important, or maybe it is important.
It would be, it would be really something if it was a named
character or a direct descendant of a named character that we're
familiar with. Tanton Fossaway, again, that
comes back to him. What if whoever those friends
are going to go after the friends are going to turn on
Mace Tyrell? Well, they got to get through
Sir Tanton. Sir Tanton, he should change his
personal sigil. We're on the subject of personal
sigils. He should change it to an apple
in a gravy boat. A Tanton's perhaps the only
fossaway that decides. Maybe Sir John, who is a
candidate to be killed because we don't know the other names
like Franklin, might want to kill Sir Tanton.
Maybe he'll do that. And after he does that, well,
his, his appetite won't be, won't be satisfied.
You know, 1 apple, that's not enough.
Who, who's full off of 1 apple, especially not a soldier, you
know, got to travel all the way from Essos to kill Fossaways.
One's not going to be enough. So there's a lot there.
There's a lot going on with the Fossaways.
A lot. They're attached to their, their
branches are everywhere. Appropriate for a house
represented by apples, appropriate for the house that
has for a fruit that has such random diverse outcomes amongst
its own, its own existence, one that's so successful and
prominent and widespread. George loves these kind of
themes and this is such a great example of it.
It's so very fleshed out. I like the flesh of an apple.
It's so very fibrous and regular.
So outlook between Derek, who's maybe not the most popular
character, but definitely one we're really curious about,
Raymond, who is a very popular character and one we're very
curious about, and Stefan, there's a lot of stories
potential for us to still have that we haven't gotten yet.
What's unusual about that is is when we point this out, it's
usually something to come maybe in Fire and Blood to or A Song
of Ice and Fire. In this case, yes, Fire and
Blood 2 and probably Song of Ice and Fire as well.
But it's mostly Dunkin Egg where we have to look forward to this.
So it's different than our usual expectation.
And we are, at least at this point, most of us more
optimistic about the TV show. So because of George's
involvement in it, which means there could be an expansion or
some two way streets, George might say, hey, I don't
necessarily want to run with this whole lady Rowan, the sex
worker origin for Raymond's first Green Apple Fossaway Way
or for the founder, the matriarch of Green Apple
Fossaways. But he might be like, but he
might do that, or he might just go halfway and be like, yeah,
the first lady Green Apple Fossaways was named Rowan.
And just leave it at that. You know, it's a connecting
point. And the rest of us can kind of
we can fill the gaps in where we want.
That's what happens when George is pleased with what he sees on
TV. He'll actually like let them
give them a little leeway and and make it a two way St. even
though it's mostly one way still, they're still mostly
taken from him, but he may occasionally take a few things
from them and be like, hey, that was a good idea.
And the better the show is, the better the quality, the more he
likes it, the more likely that is to happen.
So I think it's it's not unlikely that the raiment of the
book starts to look a little bit and act a little bit more like
Shawn Thomas perhaps, which I'm all for that.
Either way, there's stuff to look forward to.
Now a couple more comments from you all.
I guess the saying absolutely is a few bad apples can ruin the
whole bunch. A rotten apple releases a
chemical which makes other nearby apples ripen and rotten
faster. Rotting flute fruit releases
ethylene gas which accelerates the ripening and decay of nearby
fruits. OK, so yeah, you're right, that
is the thing that happened. However, it's not always true.
Here's some additional explanation.
Looks like a Shia did some some on the fly research to help out
here. The bad apples metaphor
originates from the proverb. A rotten apple quickly infects
its neighbor. First recorded as used in
English in 1340. Linguists such as Ben Zimmer
have pointed out that the proverb began to be used in the
opposite sense in the 20th century, instead stating that a
few bad apples are not representative of the group.
OK so it's it's kind of had different iterations and back
and forth like the the the apple pendulum has swung both ways on
how this has been used. Interesting.
According to Zimmer, this usage may have corresponded to how
grocery stores changed the display usage of apples.
Modern shops would sold apples individually and of course, just
wouldn't display the bad ones. That's just common sense.
Yeah, just don't put your bad apples on display.
Zimmer also suggests the change in usage may have been
solidified by the band The Osmonds.
In 1971. They had a song called 1 Bad
Apple, which includes the line 1 Bad Apple.
Don't spoil the whole bunch, girl.
Yeah, songs can really spread lines like that, can't they?
So, So I guess it's a kind of AI was partly wrong, partly right.
There's just mostly there's just more to the story and that is a
lot of it right there. Randabir Mitra.
Hey, Randabir, how you doing? He says, could Franklin Flowers
defect a Danny's 'cause if Fagon chooses to be peaceful towards
House Fossaway, we did. Meaning me and Steven Atwell
contemplate this idea a few years ago and randomly reports
that out. Yeah.
I mean, the Golden Company aren't, they're not like,
married to each other. These are all exiles that are
united by a common goal. If that goal starts to fracture
and if that goal doesn't is no longer insight for a lot of
people who signed up with that goal in mind.
If that is taken away from them, then, yeah, they would
absolutely switch sides. I don't they're none of them are
married to the Golden Company in that sense.
They don't, I don't think. I think very few of them have
that level of loyalty to it. They all want what the Golden
Company can do for them. Maybe they want it as a fall
back, like if nothing works, they want to be able to stay
employed. But yeah, I think most of them
are willing to put it on the line to get lordships.
And absolutely Franklin could defect to Danny for that reason.
If if she's his best chance, if she if he's like, maybe just
because he doesn't want to be on the losing side.
I mean, a lot of Golden Company folk might defect because
Dragons. I don't want to fight that, you
know? So it might be not quite so
straightforward as this helps me accomplish my goals.
It might be I don't want to die, but also I can't accomplish my
goals if I'm dead. So there's both of that.
Good catch. Ran a beer.
I have not. I don't remember everything I
said about with Steven, Steven Atwell, when we talked about Sir
Derek back when we did that episode.
So folks, you should check that out again too.
It's one of my recommendations. Check out our episodes on the 9
Penny Kings. We did two of them, and the bad
apple comes up there as well. Our trivia question, Who
mentioned an apple while on their deathbed?
Robert Baratheon, Y'all. I think a few people probably
got that right or no. Did anyone get that?
Yeah, cool. Yes, someone did the scene.
Kolnitsky. Kolnitsky did 1st I believe.
Cool. Good job Kolnitsky and anyone
else who got it. The of course the scene is
Robert telling Ned to bake, to roast the boar that killed him,
and to put an apple in its mouth.
Yep, he didn't. It wasn't to do with the
Fossaway. Don't put a Fossaway in that
boar's mouth. In addition to the 9th Penny
Kings episodes, our Fire and Blood coverage as some relates
to some of the anecdotes we discussed here, the Fossaways
that were relevant during the times of the earlier Targaryen
kings. Valar Ritas of course, has a lot
of these, has a lot of analysis of different little tidbits
here, including Lothor, Apple Eater, Sansa, Leonette,
Fossaway, other things here and there.
Also our Night of the Seven Kingdoms coverage.
I assume most of you already caught that.
But if not, we certainly talked about the fossa ways, a good but
dare, and the Hedge night itself.
We did 4 episodes on the Hedge night and then 4 episodes each
on the Sworn Sword and the Mystery Night.
Or maybe it was 5 for some of them because we did wrap UPS.
But either way, lots of coverage of the Duncan Egg series, and
there's more fossa ways in there as well.
Thanks Anita for a lot of great takes today.
As usual, don't forget to check out good Queen Alley with
1l.tumblr.com. And thanks to Joey and Jesse for
our intro music and Michael Clarkfeld for the video.
Shout out to Brand the Builder as well, who has done so much
work for us in that regard. In terms of videos and intros,
we always want to make sure he gets credit.
On behalf of Oshea, I'm Aziz. Happy Easter, everybody.
This is the day we're recording it, whether you celebrate it or
not. We wish you good things and
we'll see you next time for more Valerie Ritas, folks.