The Night's Watch is no noble house but the ancient sworn brotherhood set upon the Wall at the end of the Long Night, charged to hold the ice against whatever gathers in the cold lands beyond it. Its brothers take no wife and father no children, hold no lands and wear no crowns, and forsake the houses of their birth when they say the words and take the black. Thieves and broken men, bastards and exiled lords stand the same watch in the same black cloaks, and are bound to it until death. The order is led by a Lord Commander, chosen for life by a vote of the assembled brothers, who keeps his seat at Castle Black between the ruined Nightfort and the Shadow Tower; under him the rangers hold the haunted forest, the builders keep the Wall, and the stewards see the whole brotherhood fed and clothed.
The Watch's own records are famously incomplete. When Samwell Tarly searched the library of Castle Black he found that the fullest roll of Lords Commander held but six hundred and sixty-seven names, and he could not say how many of them had ever been real men. What follows, then, are only those the chronicles actually name — out of some nine hundred and ninety-eight who have held the office, a bare handful are remembered at all, and of the maesters who served the Watch fewer still, with only Aemon Targaryen given any true attention.