Ser Alyn Cockshaw
A plump, well-born knight in the Fiddler's company, whose courtesy curdles wherever a certain hedge knight is concerned. Jealousy is an underrated poison.
The fuller tale
A plump, well-mannered knight riding in the Fiddler’s company to Lord Butterwell’s wedding, Ser Alyn presents himself, at first meeting, as exactly the sort of pleasant, unthreatening companion a traveling party is glad to have along — quick with a courteous word, generous with his opinions on jousting form, comfortable in rich company. The courtesy has a limit, and that limit turns out to be Ser Duncan the Tall.
What curdles Alyn’s manner around Dunk is, by every indication the tale gives, plain jealousy — resentment at watching a jumped-up hedge knight command the Fiddler’s easy regard and friendship, attention Alyn evidently believes should belong to men of better birth. It is a small, human motive dressed up in a wedding party’s finery, and it makes Alyn Cockshaw one of the tale’s more uncomfortably recognizable villains: not a schemer plotting a rebellion, just a man who cannot stand being outshone by his social inferior.
That resentment finds its outlet in a quiet, deniable scheme — luring Dunk to an isolated well at Whitewalls where hired steel waits to settle the jealousy permanently. It very nearly works. What Alyn does not account for is the presence of Ser Maynard Plumm, whose timing at the well proves considerably better than his own.
The page and the screen
As a Mystery Knight character, Ser Alyn Cockshaw has not yet appeared in any aired episode of the show, and his arc — petty jealousy escalating into attempted murder, resolved by another man’s uncanny intervention — remains adaptation work still ahead of the production.
Mentioned in the chronicle
- On the kingsroad they fall in with a wedding party bound for Whitewalls: sour Lord Gormon Peake, amiable Ser Alyn Cockshaw, and the golden Ser John the Fiddler, who laughs easily, jousts brilliantly, and says he has dreamed of Dunk before. (TMK 2)
- Ser Alyn Cockshaw draws Dunk aside to a quiet well — and pays bravos' wages for it. Ser Maynard Plumm proves quicker: Alyn goes down the well, and Plumm shows Dunk that he knows exactly who Egg is, and minds not at all. (TMK 8)
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The books: Went down a well at Whitewalls, with help (TMK, ch. 8)
Jealous of the Fiddler's regard for a lowborn hedge knight, he lured Dunk to a quiet well at Whitewalls with hired steel waiting. Ser Maynard Plumm was quicker: Alyn Cockshaw went down the well he'd chosen, and Whitewalls never missed him.
The trap Alyn sets for Dunk at the well becomes, through Ser Maynard Plumm’s intervention, a trap that closes on Alyn instead — Plumm arrives at exactly the moment needed to turn the ambush around, and it is Ser Alyn Cockshaw who goes down the well he had chosen for someone else, with help he never saw coming. Whitewalls, absorbed in its own larger crisis by the time his absence is noticed, scarcely pauses to mourn him.