Ser Arlan of Pennytree
The old man: a hedge knight of the riverlands who served half a hundred lords and kept his honor through all of it. He took a starved Flea Bottom boy as his squire and taught him everything — the lance, the sword, and what a knight is for.
The fuller tale
Almost nothing about Arlan of Pennytree survives except what mattered to the boy he raised: he was old, he was patient, and he had spent the better part of a lifetime serving lords too minor or too forgetful to remember his name a season later. Hedge knights like him were the riverlands’ answer to a question the great houses rarely asked — who guards the roads between the castles — and Arlan answered it for decades without complaint, collecting scars, threadbare gear, and, eventually, a starving boy from the gutters of King’s Landing whom he judged worth the trouble of feeding.
What he gave Dunk was not, strictly, an education in swordsmanship — though there was plenty of that, delivered with a patience that never quite curdled into softness. It was an education in what the word knight was supposed to mean before fashionable people started using it as a synonym for well-born. Arlan’s own knighthood is left conspicuously undocumented in the tale; what he passes on instead is a working definition, repeated often enough that Dunk absorbs it without noticing: sworn shield of the weak, protector of the innocent, whether anyone official ever says the words over you or not.
By the time the road to Ashford Meadow finds him, Arlan is a very old man riding into weather no longer kind to old men, and the tale does not pretend otherwise. He is not present for the trial that makes his squire’s reputation, nor for any of the glories that follow — his part in the story is entirely the quiet, unglamorous work of turning a Flea Bottom orphan into someone capable of standing in that trial’s place at all, and then getting out of the way.
The page and the screen
Danny Webb plays Ser Arlan in the show’s opening episodes with the unshowy warmth the role requires — a man whose entire function in the narrative is to be worth mourning quickly and thoroughly, so the story can begin in earnest. The adaptation keeps his death exactly where the novella places it, in the first chapter’s closing pages, understanding correctly that delaying it would blunt the emotional shove that sets Dunk’s whole arc in motion.
In the show, season by season
Season One. In The Hedge Knight — The old man of Pennytree, gone to whatever field the good knights go to.
Mentioned in the chronicle
- On a hillside by the roseroad, Dunk digs a grave for Ser Arlan of Pennytree, the old hedge knight he has served since he was a boy of Flea Bottom — and decides to take the old man's arms, his horses, and his trade. (THK 1)
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Died of a chill on the road to Ashford (S1·E1)
The books: Died of a chill on the road to Ashford (THK, ch. 1)
The old hedge knight of Pennytree took a chill on a rain-soaked road and died as quietly as he lived, in a wayside camp with only his squire beside him. Dunk dug the grave on a hillside facing west, so the old man could watch the sun go down — and took up his sword, his shield, and his trade.
The chill that kills Ser Arlan of Pennytree announces itself gradually — a cough on a wet road, a fever that will not break, a night when the old man stops arguing that he is fine. He dies in a roadside camp with only his squire for company, having spent his last strength making sure the boy understood what needed doing next. Dunk buries him on a hillside with a westward view, so that whatever remains of Ser Arlan can watch the sun go down the way he always did on the road, and rides on to Ashford Meadow wearing the old man’s sword and shield because there was never really a question of doing anything else.