Free folk life beyond the Wall never organized itself into anything a maester would recognize as a single people: cave-dwellers of the Frostfangs, ice-river clans whose customs southron septons call unspeakable, barefoot Hornfoot men, raiders out of the northern mountains, and dozens of smaller bands loyal to no one beyond their own chief share little in common beyond a common tongue, a common enemy south of the Wall, and old, half-believed memories of the Long Night.
Mance Rayder, once a man of the Night's Watch himself, spent years persuading — and where persuasion failed, fighting — enough of these clans into a single host to matter, uniting bands that had never answered to any king behind the shared terror of what the deepening cold beyond the haunted forest actually meant. Even so, the chronicle records the alliance he built as a coalition of convenience, one that held together only as long as the true enemy loomed larger than any clan's own pride.
What finally mattered was not the Wall's strength against them but a fact the record states plainly: an army of the dead was coming for free folk and Night's Watch alike, and the clans who reached Castle Black arrived less as conquerors than as refugees the Watch — at no small cost to the standing of the man who insisted on it — chose to let through the gate.