The mastery that House Stark holds over the whole of the North was not won in a single reign, nor by a single sword, but across the long span of the Age of Heroes in a hundred wars whose particulars the singers have half forgotten. When Winterfell was young the North was a patchwork of petty kings, and the histories preserve the names of the greatest of the Starks' rivals: the Barrow Kings of the Rills, who once claimed the style of King of the First Men; the Marsh Kings who ruled the Neck from among their bogs and crannogs; the Warg King of Sea Dragon Point, whose beasts and greenseers fought at his side; the Red Kings of the Dreadfort, House Bolton, who flayed the skins of fallen Starks and hung them in their cellars. Against each in turn the Kings of Winter made war, and one by one the Starks broke them, wed them, or brought them to the knee.
The chronicles remember particular kings of that long labour. Jon Stark drove raiders from the eastern shore and raised the Wolf's Den at the mouth of the White Knife; his son Rickard Stark, called the Laughing Wolf, defeated the last of the Marsh Kings and took his daughter to wife, binding the Neck and House Reed to Winterfell. Theon Stark, the Hungry Wolf, made common cause even with the Boltons at the Battle of the Weeping Water to break the Andal warlord Argos Sevenstar, then carried northern steel across the narrow sea and back again. Later Starks warred with the Greyjoys for Bear Island, and Rodrik Stark was said by the singers to have won it back in a wrestling match, though the maesters doubt the tale. Proudest of all the trophies in the Stark crypts, it is said, was the submission of the Red Kings of the Dreadfort, who yielded to Winterfell only after a thousand years of war. By the time the last rival crown was broken, the Kings of Winter ruled unchallenged from the Wall to the Neck, and the grey direwolf flew alone over the North.