Stable boys are not really criminals, but the underlying message is clear: the Night's Watch is mainly staffed by former criminals. Ser Alliser is an anointed knight, one of the few to take the black since I have been Lord Commander. " That seems to be all they send us these days.
"The Watch has no shortage of stableboys," Lord Mormont grumbled.
Even Jeor Mormont himself says so in the books: Sam Tarly did not go to the wall voluntarily (Randyll Tarly forced him to go), but it's important to note that he did not commit any crime which caused him to take the black.Īround the time of Season 1, there are many allusions to how the Night's Watch is made up of nothing more than criminals. Benjen Stark and Jon Snow are examples of this (it is somewhat of a tradition in the Stark family that younger siblings go to the Wall if they do not inherit the house, which is the main motivation for Benjen and Jon afaik). There are only a handful of people who still voluntarily take the black. It has always been the case that anyone convicted of a crime can choose to forgo sentencing, if he pledges his life to the Night's Watch. If my assumptions are correct, why is it manned at all or even been left to deteriorate/become a tourist attraction? I can understand that tradition and some sense of honour and duty would give The Night's Watch some momentum, but not enough to last as long as it has. Even if patrolling the wall didn't naturally diminish through complacency, it seems like "Military Strategy 101" and basic economics not to man hundreds of miles of wall, in bad conditions, against no obvious threat.Įnough time has passed such that any patrols would have dried up years ago. Can you imagine Hadrian's Wall or The Great Wall of China still being patrolled? The time span is so long that several empires would have been-and-gone and whatever threat originally existed has long since faded into legend. It's also my understanding that nothing has really happened there for a similarly long time.ġ,000+ years is a very long time, in human terms.
My understanding is that The Wall was built a long time ago - on the order of thousands of years - to keep all the nasty stuff from invading the more-developed parts of Westeros.
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