House Greyiron of Orkmont ruled the Iron Islands as the first hereditary kings, in the long centuries between the kingsmoots of the ancient ironborn and the coming of the Andals. The Greyirons of antiquity were rock and salt kings on Orkmont, and Archmaester Haereg writes that thirty-eight of their line were raised up as High King at the kingsmoot on Old Wyk — twice as many as any other house. The end of that custom came in the days of Urron Greyiron, whom the singers name Redhand. When the priests gathered the captains and kings upon Nagga's Bones to choose a successor to his great-uncle Urragon IV, Urron came down upon them with his axemen, murdered every claimant in their seats, and proclaimed himself king. So fell the kingsmoot, five thousand years before the War of the Five Kings, and so rose the black crown of the Greyirons.
For near a thousand years the Greyiron kings ruled the islands as their fathers had not — by inheritance, not by acclamation — and the salt and rock kings of the lesser isles were reduced to lords beneath them. Those who would not bend were burned out of their halls until the last of them was gone. The line was finally broken by King Rognar II, whom an alliance of Andal sellswords and reaving warlords brought down with the connivance of the Orkwoods, Drumms, Hoares, and Greyjoys — ironborn houses willing to wed Andal queens to share in the spoils. The black crown was struck from Rognar's head, the Greyiron line was put to the sword, and the Hoares of Orkmont were lifted up to begin a new royal line that mingled the salt blood with the Andal.