“Recorded outside the printed novels as “None So Fierce” — this chronicle has not located the phrase inside a novel, and flags it accordingly.”
The seat, the words, the line, and the tale of House Crakehall — drawn from the novels and the Citadel's fuller histories, with the television series set aside wherever it parts from the books.
House Crakehall's chief distinction in this chronicle's own century is a squireship rather than a battle: it was at Crakehall, under Lord Sumner's own roof, that a younger Jaime Lannister first learned the sword that would make his later reputation — training the family remembers, so far as it troubles to mention the fact at all, with considerably more pride than the Kingslayer's later years have generally invited from the rest of the realm.
Crakehall's seat along the westerlands' Ocean Road has stood, by the Citadel's best reckoning, since long before the current century's troubles gave the family any reason to draw notice beyond its own borders — a solid, unremarkable holding whose brindled boar arms mark a house that has generally preferred proving its fierceness on campaign rather than in court intrigue. That preference would matter a great deal to one particular boy sent to squire there.
Jaime Lannister spent four years as Lord Sumner Crakehall's squire, training alongside other highborn boys — Merrett Frey among them, sent from the Twins and, by his own household's later account, considerably less suited to the work than his fellow squire — before both were blooded together in Sumner's campaign against the outlaws of the Kingswood Brotherhood. Jaime's part in that campaign, this chronicle's sources agree, went well beyond mere squire's duties: he is credited with saving Lord Sumner's own life in the fighting, striking down an outlaw called Big Belly Ben before the man could finish what he had started. Merrett fared rather worse — captured once by the outlaw known as Wenda the White Fawn and ransomed back, then struck hard enough by a mace in a later engagement that Sumner judged him unfit to continue and sent him home to the Twins, his squireship at an end.
The Crakehall reputation for fierceness has carried into this chronicle's own present in the person of Ser Lyle Crakehall, called Strongboar for reasons this maester assumes require no further explanation, who rode with Ser Jaime Lannister's own campaign to relieve Riverrun from its Tully besiegers late in the War of the Five Kings. Whatever else the war has cost House Crakehall, it has not, on the evidence of Strongboar's own conduct in the field, cost the family the fighting reputation its boar has always claimed.
The lords, ladies, and branches of Crakehall the books name — the notable, the infamous, and the merely unlucky.
Lord of Crakehall, trained Jaime Lannister as a squire and led the campaign against the Kingswood Brotherhood
fl. reign of Aerys II Targaryen
knight in Ser Jaime Lannister's Riverrun campaign
fl. 300 AC
House Crakehall's chief distinction in this chronicle's own century is a squireship rather than a battle: it was at Crakehall, under Lord Sumner's own roof, that a younger Jaime Lannister first learned the sword that would make his later reputation — training the family remembers, so far as it troubles to mention the fact at all, with considerably more pride than the Kingslayer's later years have generally invited from the rest of the realm.
House Crakehall holds Crakehall, in The Westerlands. The chronicle traces the house from its founding down to its part in the present tale, marking legend as legend wherever the songs run ahead of the record.
Book canon. This history follows George R. R. Martin's novels first, then the histories — Fire & Blood and The World of Ice & Fire — and does not follow the television series where it diverges.