The Tollstone Moot

The Tollstone Moot has no glamour, which is why it rules more than proud men like to admit. Road towns, bridge keepers, ranger captains, lesser nobles, toll clerks, and winter quartermasters gather beneath smoke-black rafters to argue over patrol burdens, bridge repairs, food caches, and which wardstones must be raised first. Its ledgers smell of tallow, spilled ale, damp wool, and old resentment. Many restoration speeches end here, reduced to arithmetic: who pays, who rides, who freezes, who starves if the road fails. In the Marches, romance must eventually answer a bridge-repair vote.