Smallfolk & Showfolk
The puppeteers, armorers, innkeeps, and diggers the tale moves among — the people a hedge knight comes from, and the people he is sworn, in the old words, to protect.
The fuller tale
Beneath every tourney's champions and every wedding's guest list runs the actual labor that makes the spectacle possible — puppeteers, armorers, innkeeps, diggers, the men and women a hedge knight is drawn from and, in the old words he still means, sworn to protect. The tales never let that labor stay invisible for long.
Tanselle Too-Tall, a puppeteer out of Dorne, and her small traveling show are what actually set the Ashford tragedy in motion — a wooden dragon, a performance meant only to entertain, and a prince's cruelty turning an evening's amusement into the excuse for violence against her dwarf assistant's hands. Steely Pate, the meadow's master armorer, represents the same class from its steadier side: a craftsman whose skill every knight at the tourney depends on and whose name almost none of them would think to learn.
That gap — between the show's importance to the realm's chivalric spectacle and its complete lack of standing within it — is the whole argument Dunk's own history makes personal. He came from exactly this world before anyone called him ser, and the oath he takes seriously enough to risk a prince's wrath defending is, in the end, an oath sworn on behalf of people very much like the ones he grew up among.
The page and the screen
Tanselle and her puppet show are dramatized in the aired Hedge Knight season largely as the novella presents them — the inciting act of cruelty that sets the trial of seven in motion — while Steely Pate and the meadow's wider working population remain, so far, more fully realized on the page than on screen.