A small, slim hedge knight from the village of Pennytree in the Riverlands, sworn to no lord but the road. For better than half a century he kept his own arms, a winged chalice on a brown field, and wandered the kingdoms between tourneys, taking what fees a hedge knight may at hall and holdfast. He was reckoned an indifferent lance and a worse swordsman, but a careful teacher and a man of his word, which in the years between the Blackfyre risings was worth more than skill.
His sister's son, Roger of Pennytree, served him as squire until the boy fell in 196 AC at the Battle of the Redgrass Field, where Ser Arlan rode in the host of Lord Bloodraven against Daemon Blackfyre and his sons. Some years later, chasing a runaway pig through the alleys of Flea Bottom, he found a great hulking orphan of five or six who knew neither his father nor his letters, took him on for a new squire, and made of him in a dozen years of road and dust the man the realm would one day call Ser Duncan the Tall. At the tourney at Storm's End in 199 AC he broke seven lances against Prince Baelor Targaryen, by his own count, though the prince claimed only four.
In the spring of 209 AC, on the road to the tourney at Ashford Meadow, he took a chill that worsened into a cough and would not leave him; he died beneath an elm before he could enter the lists, and Duncan buried him on the western slope of a hill, facing the sunset, and rode on to Ashford in his stead. Whether he had laid sword on Duncan's shoulder before the end and made him a knight in truth, no man living can say.