Lucamore Strong

In the year 55 after the Conquest, to mark the completion of the Dragonpit, a great tourney was held in King's Landing, and Lucamore came out on top among the knights who took part.

Fair-haired and sturdily built, he was already a favourite of the smallfolk at the lists. His win did not go unnoticed by the crown: when Ser Willam the Wasp died the following year, King Jaehaerys I chose to hand him the vacant white cloak and bring him into the Kingsguard.

Two years later, now wearing the white cloak, Lucamore rode in the tourney held in King's Landing to celebrate the first decade of Jaehaerys I's reign. This time luck was not with him: he was unhorsed by Ser Ryam Redwyne, a fellow member of the Kingsguard.

Lucamore was standing guard the day Balerion returned to King's Landing bearing Princess Aerea Targaryen, who could barely hold on and arrived in a state that alarmed everyone who saw her. It was Lucamore who lifted her down and carried her himself to Maester Benifer to be tended.

The king summoned him not long after, not to thank him, but to command his silence: no one was to learn from Lucamore's own mouth what state the princess had come back in.

Near the end of the year 73, Ser Ryam Redwyne uncovered something Lucamore had long been hiding: the knight had secretly married three different women, none of whom knew of the others, and had fathered sixteen children between them.

Ryam brought the matter to the Lord Commander, Ser Gyles Morrigen, who had Lucamore seized and brought before the Iron Throne along with his wives and children. Word spread through court and city alike; the scandal was enormous, though the smallfolk soon turned it into a joke, and from that joke came the name he is remembered by.

Jaehaerys I and his queen Alysanne took the deceit personally, for both had been fond of him. Brought to his knees before them, Lucamore admitted his guilt and begged for mercy; the king hesitated, unwilling to break his own oath to protect him, until the queen pointed out that the knight had also broken his marriage vows, which left all three marriages void and made the sixteen children bastards.

The sentence drew a line between the guilty and the innocent: the three wives were shown some mercy and sent away from the capital — one into the care of Bywin Strong, Lucamore's brother, in the Riverlands; another to the Stormlands; the third, with her children, to Spicetown, where the children were forbidden to take the Strong name — while Lucamore himself was gelded and sent to the Wall along with his two eldest sons.

Generations later, Lucamore's memory was still vivid enough to serve as a warning: Ser Arys Oakheart invokes him to explain to himself why he must hold to his own vows.

His story is also known to have inspired a song, a sign that the episode did not stay confined to court records but passed into popular memory.