Poor Fellows of the Faith Militant

The Poor Fellows of the Faith Militant were the less aristocratic armed branch of the Faith Militant, a religious order whose opposition to the Targaryens grew into a challenge to royal authority across the Seven Kingdoms. Their followers carried the conflict beyond formal battles: they attacked royal agents, organized on the roads, and found shelter among people who continued to support them even after the Crown outlawed the order. Their suppression under Maegor weakened the Faith Militant but did not instantly extinguish the loyalties that had sustained it.

Place in the Faith Militant

The Poor Fellows belonged to the Faith Militant alongside the Warrior’s Sons. The order’s armed presence formed part of the power of the Faith, whose authority extended through the realms, and its adherents could frame resistance to the Crown as a defense of the gods. In the rebellion against Aenys, that religious claim gave discontent a common cause: the rebels saw themselves not merely as opponents of a king but as soldiers in a holy war against what they regarded as godless tyranny.

The two branches had different profiles in the account of the conflict. The Warrior’s Sons were a fighting order whose members included knights and who fortified the Sept of Remembrance on the Hill of Rhaenys. The Poor Fellows, by contrast, appear as a mass movement of poorer, less formally equipped adherents. Their numbers and presence on roads and outside castles allowed the Faith’s opposition to reach far beyond a single city or battlefield.

Rebellion under Aenys

The conflict escalated after Septon Murmison, Aenys’s Hand, was expelled from the Faith for performing a forbidden marriage. When the king appealed to the High Septon to restore him, the response rejected Aenys’s right to rule. Less than a fortnight later, Poor Fellows attacked Murmison as he crossed the city. The violence was followed by a direct threat to the king: two Poor Fellows broke into Aenys’s bedchamber at his manse on Visenya’s Hill, and the Kingsguard intervened in time to save him. These attacks made the religious dispute an immediate danger to the royal household.

By the end of 41 AC, rebellion had spread through much of the realm. Dozens of pious lords declared for the Starry Sept, while thousands of Poor Fellows traveled the roads and pressed travelers to declare whether they stood with the gods or the king. They also gathered outside castles and demanded that lords publicly denounce Aenys. Their activity linked local pressure to the wider uprising: royal banners came down, and the authority claimed by the High Septon could be presented as an alternative to the king’s.

Maegor’s war and military defeat

After Maegor took the Iron Throne, he ordered the Poor Fellows converging on King’s Landing to surrender their weapons under threat of outlawry and death. When the command failed to disperse them, he called on loyal lords to take the field. The High Septon answered with his own appeal, urging the faithful to defend their religion against the Targaryen rulers. The struggle was therefore fought both through armed force and through competing claims about who served the gods and who threatened them.

The first major battle described took place at Stonebridge in the Reach. Wat the Hewer led nine thousand Poor Fellows attempting to cross the Mander. Their army was divided between the river’s banks when six lordly forces caught it. The Poor Fellows had little military training and were armed largely with axes, sharpened sticks, and farm tools; they could not withstand the charge of armored knights. Their defeat was severe, and Wat was captured alive, though he had killed several knights, including the commander of the royal host. He was taken to King’s Landing in chains.

The conflict continued beyond that defeat. At the Great Fork of the Blackwater, Ser Horys Hill assembled a still larger host that included close to thirteen thousand Poor Fellows, mounted Warrior’s Sons, and levies from rebel lords. The assembled Faithful numbered twenty thousand. The account establishes the scale of the confrontation and the coalition behind it, even as the subsequent campaign against the Faith Militant extended through the remainder of Maegor’s reign.

Dissolution and persistence

After Maegor’s death, the return of lords to Jaehaerys’s allegiance did not bring an immediate end to resistance. Hundreds of members of the Faith Militant remained at large, while lesser lords, landed knights, and smallfolk sheltered, fed, and aided them. Ragged Silas and Dennis the Lame led Poor Fellows in roaming bands that vanished into the greenwood when threatened. The continued support network meant that defeat in the field had not erased the movement’s capacity to survive.

The greatest remaining threat described at this point gathered near Oldtown under Septon Moon, whose followers numbered close to five thousand. Some had dispersed after Maegor’s death, but most remained. Moon called for the Targaryens to be slain or driven from Westeros and urged the smallfolk to rise. Jaehaerys’s need to travel safely to Oldtown for an anointing by the High Septon made dealing with Moon’s force a political and practical necessity. The episode shows how the Poor Fellows’ cause could persist through new leadership even when the identity or standing of that leadership was uncertain.

In Oldtown, a new High Septon formally dissolved both the Poor Fellows and the Warrior’s Sons and commanded their remaining members to disarm. Maegor gave them until the end of the year to surrender; those who continued in rebellion were threatened with bounties on their heads. The formal dissolution ended the orders’ lawful existence, but later accounts still describe wandering religious adherents and surviving supporters. The Poor Fellows’ significance lies in that distinction: the Crown could outlaw an organization, yet the religious conviction and popular assistance that had made it formidable proved harder to command away.