Vargo Hoat of Qohor led this company under a standard of a black goat with bloody horns, and earned it the nickname the Footmen for his habit of striking the hands and feet from captives who displeased him. Taken into Lord Tywin Lannister's service during the War of the Five Kings, the Brave Companions garrisoned Harrenhal alongside Roose Bolton's northmen — an arrangement that suited neither lord and pleased Vargo Hoat least of anyone.
A hunting party of Hoat's men captured Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth in the riverlands, and Vargo Hoat, hoping to drive a wedge between his employer and his rival Bolton, ordered Jaime's sword hand struck off — a mutilation the maimed knight was meant to carry home as a message, though which message, and to whom, this chronicle leaves the reader to judge for themselves.
Hoat's ambitions outran his position: promised Harrenhal as Bolton's parting gift, he had barely settled into the castle before Lord Tywin sent Ser Gregor Clegane north to retake it in the crown's name. Clegane repaid the goat lord's own cruelty in kind, cutting the hands and feet from a man who had made a practice of exactly that, and kept him alive to suffer the rest a good deal longer than mercy would have allowed. The company scattered in the ruin that followed, its captains dead, fled, or hanged.