House Hayford of Hayford

An unnamed Lord Hayford was among the few lords who did not desert Maegor I Targaryen as the throne slipped from his grasp. At the king's final council in King's Landing, with barely a handful of great lords still at his side, he dared urge Maegor to abdicate and take the black.

Maegor had him beheaded on the spot and his head mounted on a spear behind the Iron Throne, while the rest of the council went on around it.

Generations later, another Lord Hayford — likewise unnamed in what survives of his house's story — was raised to Hand of the King under Daeron II shortly before the battle of the Wheat Meadow. He died on that field at the hands of Lord Gormon Peake.

When Lord Brynden Rivers marched on Whitewalls to crush the Second Blackfyre Rebellion, spears raised by House Hayford rode among the forces at his back.

The current head of the house is Ermesande, still a nursing infant and the last of her blood. She was wed to Tyrek Lannister so that the Lannisters could claim her lands through the marriage.

Tyrek vanished before the union could be consummated, and is presumed dead.

By the time of A Feast for Crows, Hayford's own lands seem to have escaped the War of the Five Kings untouched, though the same was not true for one of its vassal's lands, which were razed by Ser Amory Lorch's forces.