Mole’s Town

Mole’s Town, a village south of the Wall, becomes the setting for a consequential encounter between Queen Alysanne Targaryen and women whose lives exposed the human cost of the right of the first night. By listening to them there, Alysanne brought a largely disregarded practice before the king and his council as a matter requiring action.

Setting and connection to the Night’s Watch

During the royal visit to the Wall, Lord Lothor Burley explained that there were no women living at the castles on the Wall. At his reluctant direction, Alysanne was escorted to Mole’s Town, where women could be found. The men of the Night’s Watch took no wives, but some sought relationships with women in the village. Its proximity to the Wall made Mole’s Town a place where the consequences of the Watch’s vows and the men’s continuing lives could be encountered beyond the castles themselves.

Alysanne’s women’s court

Alysanne insisted on hearing from the women despite Burley’s warning about who lived in the village. She held her women’s court there and listened to accounts of the first-night custom. The visit’s importance lies not in any formal office Mole’s Town held, but in the access it gave the queen to testimony that courtly life had not brought to her attention.

The testimony and its wider pattern

One woman described how, at fourteen, she had married a blacksmith’s apprentice with her father’s consent. Her lord then invoked the first-night custom. The marriage broke down in the aftermath, and when she became pregnant, her husband blamed and mistreated her. She eventually made her way to Mole’s Town, where she remained. Alysanne regarded this as the worst account she heard, not an isolated one: women at Mole’s Town, White Harbor, and Barrowton also spoke to her about their first nights.

From village testimony to royal petition

Before the Small Council, Alysanne recounted what she had heard and asked that the right of the first night be ended. She acknowledged that she had known of the custom but had not understood how strongly it endured. Jaehaerys Targaryen responded that taking a right which lords considered their own would provoke resistance; Alysanne answered by making the practice personal, asking him to consider what it would mean if a lord had claimed her on her wedding night. Mole’s Town thus marks the point at which the women’s accounts became a direct political challenge to the custom, though the cited account records her petition rather than the eventual decree.