Introduction

Towards the middle of the thirteenth century an unknown scribe used a blank space on one of the folios of the Melrose Chronicle manuscript to calculate the number of years that had passed between various historical events and his own day. The jottings date to the period between March and June 1264, and the scribe was apparently moved to set his thoughts down on parchment following the birth at Jedburgh, on 21 January of that same year, of a son to King Alexander III. The event was both joyous and, from the perspective of the Scottish political community, auspicious, for while the king had been married for more than a dozen years, to date his only child was a daughter. The birth of a son promised security in the future succession to the throne; certainly, this was how near-contemporary chroniclers viewed the event. One wrote that at news of the birth ‘God's praises rang throughout all the ends of Scotland.’ The cleric's effusive language almost certainly expressed genuine enthusiasm rather than empty verbiage, for in the later thirteenth century direct succession to the throne from father to son was still something of a new phenomenon; until relatively recently, in fact, primogeniture in Scotland had been regarded neither as ‘a fait accompli’ nor ‘inevitable’. The birth of a son, then, pre-empted the likelihood of dynastic conflict at the close of Alexander III's reign, and the boy was baptized immediately by Bishop Gamelin of St Andrews with the same name as his father and grandfather.

Historians have made extensive study of the many factors that went into the education and training of young men who were destined to rule the medieval kingdom of England. In the last decade, moreover, a significant amount of historical and literary work has been devoted to the study of how changing notions of love, friendship and affinity in the later Middle Ages influenced the lives and upbringing of royal and aristocratic youths in England and western Europe more generally. Collectively, this research has contributed to a new and much more nuanced understanding of the important place of childhood in framing and constructing fundamental ideas about gender, culture and community among the aristocracy.