How House Frey in A Song of Ice and Fire Showed the Benefits of Entrepreneurship

 

One of the most infamous Great Houses of Westeros in the A Song of Ice and Fire series is that of House Frey of the Crossing. They are unfortunately sullied forever in the eyes of the readers because of Walder Frey’s actions during the Red Wedding, but at least the founding member of that house still appears to have been an entrepreneur who bettered countless lives in the process. Those of you familiar with the series will doubtless remember how House Frey’s holdfast, the Twins, is located at the strategic northern Green Fork of the Trident in the Riverlands. There is a good reason that the castle bears its name, as it is divided by the Trident River into two separate castles that look identical. It is here where the entrepreneurship of House Frey’s founding member can be seen.

Six hundred years prior to A Game of Thrones, back when Westeros would not be united for another three hundred years under Aegon the Conqueror, the Riverlands were under the rule of House Durrandon of Storm’s End. The founding Lord of House Frey was granted the lands by the strategic river and showed the virtue of entrepreneurship by not seeking to simply collects rents and taxes from smallfolk, but instead to also create a profitable industry by building a long bridge connecting the two sides of the Green Fork that could have tolls charged for the use of the bridge by the public. The project was not completed until the time that House Frey’s founder’s grandson was in power and it was only then that identical wooden forts were built there that gave the future castle its name. This simple story and the responses to it from the Westerosi public can teach the readers a surprisingly good amount about economics.

            To begin, let us take into consideration what the first Lord Frey was imagining with this business plan of connecting the two sides of the Trident via a bridge. First, he must have known that there was some major demand for this river to be connected, particularly by noble houses who would need to transport armies between it if they were at war in the area. Perhaps he had seen boats being used for this task prior to the bridge’s construction. It is possible he even saw other failed attempts at building a similar bridge, assuming anyone else was up to the momentous task of connecting the wide river, and decided that he had it in him. Centuries later, Robb Stark would mention that there was a ferry offering transport between the different sides of the Green Fork. It is doubtful a ferry enterprise would last six centuries, but perhaps predecessors existed. Otherwise, there was no competition. If there was a demand to be filled, a lack of supply, and he had the lands and money to finance that supply, then it made economic sense for him to have at least attempted the project. In economic terms, Lord Frey had become an entrepreneur. Besides the likely funding of this task by feudal privileges, Frey had become a capitalist in the modern sense of the word.

Frey must have known that this plan would eventually prove to a smart investment, as he was willing to continue it throughout much of his own reign, the entirety of his son’s reign, and some portion of his grandson’s reign. Perhaps he and his offspring lived a relatively modest existence so that their posterity could prosper and House Frey would become a powerful noble house. His grandson’s building two forts where the river began likely indicated a desire to show status among a population who likely believed the endeavor doomed to fail due to the great length of the Trident, as well as doubtless wanting a better way to stop people from crossing the bridge without paying the owed toll. In short, what the original Lord Frey showed was that he had in economic terms, a low time preference. He was willing to defer a higher standard of living now in order to serve the consumers and advance the wealth of his new noble house later. In the centuries that followed, it seemed his decision very much paid off, as shown by the fact that the Twins are now large stone castles, the fact that House Frey is even more powerful than their nominal overlords, House Tully, both in wealth and in manpower, and the desperate measures that Robb Stark’s army takes in order to cross their bridge in A Game of Thrones.

Finally, a third risk that Lord Frey took was one of rocking the boat in the feudal economy that Westeros existed in. It was expected that a Great House in Westeros would be many centuries older and that they would have inspired loyalty through the generations, as had House Stark in the millennia that followed Bran the Builder when they were the Kings of Winter and came to rule the North. In the case of House Frey, however, it was a small house that eventually rose to greatness after a profitable investment in a bridge paid off and advanced the house to wealth and with it, greatness. This led to the house being looked down upon by other houses as an “upstart” and as “toll collectors”. This is comparable to real life contempt shown by nobility to domestic entrepreneurs, most famously among Russia’s nobility. Both fiction and fact thus show how capitalism was seen as a threat to feudalism and why the only way nobility could cope with this fact was via insults. As mentioned above, it is likely that state-privileges through the feudal system likely funded this bridge and presumably kept non-nobles from attempting to compete with the Freys, so it should not be seen as a total free market operation, but much in the same way that mercantilism preceded modern capitalism in our world, this was a step in the right direction for Westeros. One only hopes the coming winter doesn’t crush that potential.