In the Europeanizing societies of the central Middle Ages the question of when kings began to produce charters in favour of lay beneficiaries, usually their own sworn men, is a salient one. That religious institutions dominated the early phases of the expansion of literate methods of record-keeping is well known, but one key milestone in the road that would eventually lead to widespread use and acceptance of written documents throughout most levels of lay society was when the king’s clerks began to produce charters recording gifts to lay subjects, because this appears to be when administrative literacy was first used in an exclusively secular context, although as we shall discover, the reality was more complex than such a simple linear development would suggest. In Scotland, the answer to this question ought to be straightforward. The first surviving Scottish royal charter to a lay beneficiary, giving Annandale to Robert de Brus, was almost certainly composed at Scone shortly after King David’s inauguration there in April 1124. There is a deceptively simple explanation for this development in that David had for the previous decade been an English earl in charge of a large southern honour – Huntingdon – in a region where administrative literacy was firmly established. According to Geoffrey Barrow, the editor of the acts of David I and his successors Malcolm (or Máel Coluim) and William, covering the period from 1124 to 1214, David’s reign (1124–53) was the pivotal period for the adoption of administrative literacy in Scotland; in a 1997 article he argued that ‘at least as far as the crown was concerned, the transition “from memory to written record” in Michael Clanchy’s phrase, may be said to have been accomplished by 1153’, adding that it was ‘clearly the normal practice … for the king to issue, and by means of his seal authenticate, a wide range of mandatory and dispositive documents’.

In Barrow’s 1960 edition of the acts of King Malcolm IV (1153–65), he discounted the fact that only 7 per cent of texts (eleven documents) were in favour of lay beneficiaries, arguing the ratio among ‘lost acts’, where 43 per cent ‘relate to laymen’, ‘suggest[s] that the practice of issuing written documents for laymen was in no way uncommon’.