We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Children and youth have tended to be under-reported in the historical scholarship. This collection of essays recasts the historical narrative by populating premodern Scottish communities from the thirteenth to the late eighteenth centuries with their lively experiences and voices. By examining medieval and early modern Scottish communities through the lens of age, the collection counters traditional assumptions that young people are peripheral to our understanding of the political, economic, and social contexts of the premodern era. The topics addressed fall into three main sections: theexperience of being a child/adolescent; representations of the young; and the construction of the next generation. The individual essays examine the experience of the young at all levels of society, including princes and princesses, aristocratic and gentry youth, urban young people, rural children, and those who came to Scotland as slaves; they draw on evidence from art, personal correspondence, material culture, song, legal and government records, work and marriage contracts, and literature.
Janay Nugent is an Associate Professor of History and a founding member of the Institute for Child and Youth Studies at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada; Elizabeth Ewan is University Research Chair and Professor of History and Scottish Studies at the Centre for Scottish Studies, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
Contributors: Katie Barclay, Stuart Campbell, Mairi Cowan, Sarah Dunnigan, Elizabeth Ewan, Anne Frater, Dolly MacKinnon, Cynthia J. Neville, Janay Nugent, Heather Parker, Jamie Reid Baxter, Cathryn R. Spence, Laura E. Walkling, Nel Whiting.
On the last day of April 1508, a gift of 3s was presented ‘to ane pure barne that tuke the King be the hand’. We know that the king and the child were in St Andrews, and we know that the king was James IV, king of Scots; we do not know the name, sex or age of the ‘barne’, nor do we know what kind of conversation, if any, happened between the monarch and his young subject. The one fleeting glimpse of this encounter is provided by the Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, in which someone recorded the poor child's holding of the king's hand. In terms of monetary value, the king's gift of 3s was a long way from the lavish expenditures made for members of his own family, such as the sum of over £57 spent on the ‘gret cradil of stait’, a princely cradle covered with cloth of gold and lined with scarlet that was provided for James's infant son in February 1507. Although the king's gift to the child who took his hand was much less extravagant than the ‘gret cradil of stait’, nonetheless, the record relating this moment of human contact between the most powerful person in the kingdom and a poor child remains a rather touching report of a young person's interaction with his or her king.
When records from the court of James IV are considered together, several notable aspects of childhood and youth emerge. The first is a lack of clear chronological boundaries denoted by the words used to describe childhood and adolescence. These words seem able, at least in some cases, to refer to a person of any age from before birth to approximately twenty years old, or older still when the child-related vocabulary associated with servile occupations is taken into account. Another notable aspect of childhood and youth to come to light is that the day-to-day experiences of young people differed significantly according to social status, and that social status was, in turn, influenced by a variety of factors including gender, place of origin, and publicly recognized parentage.
