Ashford Meadow

The broad meadow across the river from Ashford castle, white with pavilions for the great tourney of 209 — silk tents, painted shields, and the viewing stand where princes sit.

The fuller tale

The meadow lies across the Cockleswhent from the castle proper, a broad stretch of river-bottom grass that took two hundred pavilions and half the Reach’s chivalry without complaint in the spring of 209 AC. Lord Ashford meant the tourney purely as a showcase for his daughter’s hand — a fair maid, a field of champions, the usual arithmetic of a marriage market dressed up in silk and heraldry. What he got instead was the hinge on which the whole Targaryen century turns, delivered by a wandering puppeteer’s broken fingers and a hedge knight too tall and too plain-spoken to walk past them.

The blow that Ser Duncan the Tall struck against Prince Aerion Targaryen for the puppeteer’s sake should, by every ordinary reckoning, have ended with Dunk’s head on a spike — striking a prince of the blood is treason under any name. What saved him was a law so old most of the lords on the meadow had to be reminded it existed: trial by seven champions a side, an Andal rite that calls the Warrior himself to judge, invoked so rarely that finding seven men willing to die for a stranger’s honor was nearly as hard as finding seven willing to kill him for insulting a prince. That the realm’s best knight volunteered for the losing side, on principle, is the detail the singers never let go of.

The trial itself is a battle in miniature, fought in front of the whole assembled chivalry of the Reach and the stormlands, and it ends the only way such things end — with more paid than anyone meant to spend. Baelor Breakspear takes a mace blow struck for someone else and dies of it within days; the hedge knight keeps the hand and the foot the law would have taken from him for false witness or worse; and the tourney itself is never finished, its melee abandoned, its champions scattered to more urgent business than a lord’s daughter’s wedding. Ashford Meadow’s odd distinction is that nobody remembers who won it — only what it cost.

In the first season

The heart of the season: the pavilions rise, the champions hold the field, a prince breaks a puppet — and thirteen men fight a trial of seven to decide a hedge knight's hand.

The chronicle here

• Dunk takes Ser Arlan's arms, armor, and horses, and rides for Ashford Meadow, where Lord Ashford has called a great tourney. (S1·E1)
• Ashford Meadow opens before them: a hundred pavilions, a painted viewing stand, and the fair maid of Ashford's five champions to come. (S1·E1)
• Ashford Meadow: a hundred pavilions on the banks of the Cockleswhent. Dunk camps beneath a great elm, meets the Dornish puppeteers and the tall girl Tanselle, and watches her wooden dragon die to a wooden hero's lance. (THK 3)

Souls the story brings here

The fallen of this place — if any, they are named here. Spoilers.

• Baelor Breakspear — Died of his brother's mace blow after the trial of seven
• Ser Humfrey Hardyng — Died of wounds from the trial of seven
• Ser Humfrey Beesbury — Slain in the trial of seven