Infancy and childhood were important stages in a boy’s political and social maturation. For royal children, it was often during these early years, typically between the ages of three and five, that parents began to introduce them to royal rule and to include them in collective decision-making, ensuring they were part of, and party to, matters deemed significant for the family, dynasty and realm. Incorporating children in the written output of royal governance – in transactional charters issued for ecclesiastical or, less frequently, secular beneficiaries – introduced them to a wide range of political, spiritual and social networks. It was one of the most immediate and consistent ways in which mothers and fathers could associate their young sons with the throne.Footnote ¹ Select studies centred on eleventh- or twelfth-century aristocratic examples have revealed that boys’ regular presence in their fathers’ acts was neither perfunctory nor trivial. Routine inclusion in charters and the sociolegal events these documents record could crucially facilitate children’s introduction to local networks at the centre of familial power and authority.Footnote ² Parents encouraged their sons’ participation in judicial affairs and dispute settlement, even from a relatively young age;Footnote ³ and children’s presence at, and witnessing of, ceremonies which granted land are clear indications of the value adults placed on children’s memories and testimonies.Footnote ⁴ Royal children – much like their noble and aristocratic counterparts – were not peripheral bystanders when their parents bestowed land, gifts or privileges. Children’s early socialisation and political education were crucial aspects of royal dynastic and familial strategies.

This chapter sheds light on children’s integration within royal transactions, focusing on three significant aspects of so-called ‘informal’ practices of association: documentary celebrations of children’s lives; children’s incorporation within intercessory prayers; and children’s active participation in assent and testimony. One-off ‘formal’ ceremonies which designated or elected a child as heir or king – mass oaths from magnates, performances of homage or a boy’s coronation during his father’s lifetime – were still events of great consequence (and form the subject of Chapter 5), but we should not privilege these actions because of their singularity.Footnote ⁵ Families and beneficiaries valued children’s involvement in conveying land and privileges. They commemorated children’s contributions within the written record of these events, at least until the late twelfth or early thirteenth century. The fourth, and final, section of this chapter considers how shifts in documentary culture altered children’s status in royal charters. Young boys still had important roles to play in spiritual intercessions, familial actions and dynastic celebrations, but by c. 1200, royal documents were no longer as prominent a forum for displaying their centrality to rulership, especially not on an individual testimonial basis.

Celebrating Royal Children

A son’s birth could be a time of great joy for the king and queen, inspiring acts of commemoration and demonstrations of royal munificence. In Germany, the birth of the future Henry IV on 11 November 1050 almost immediately prompted his father to make several gifts of property to the church of Saints Simon and Jude in Goslar, an important centre for Salian dynastic memory and the site of the imperial chapel.Footnote ⁶ In France, Louis VII joyously welcomed the birth of his ‘much-desired heir’ in August 1165 by gifting an annual donation of wheat to Queen Adela’s sergeant, who had brought the king news of his child’s birth.Footnote ⁷ Although the emperor and king made these donations in different kingdoms over a century apart, both men had experienced comparatively lengthy delays in celebrating the arrival of their first son after multiple marriages and the births of several daughters. Louis acknowledged the toll this wait had taken when he expressed his relief for ‘a shoot of the better sex’.Footnote ⁸ Henry’s joy was less conspicuous within his donations, but his actions adhered to the recent tradition of marking important family events with largesse to the Goslar chapter.Footnote ⁹ Moreover, the gifts celebrating the boy’s nativity were distinctively tied to the ‘eternal commemoration’ of the emperor and his wife, Empress Agnes of Poitou. This was an expression rarely encountered in Henry’s diplomas, and it did not feature in the gifts made to Goslar in 1052 following the birth of the couple’s second son, Conrad.Footnote ¹⁰ The phrase appeared only once more, in a further gift to Goslar in January 1055. The recently crowned boy king again appeared alongside his mother and father in a request for the eternal commemoration of the ruling triumvirate.Footnote ¹¹ For the empress, as also for Queen Adela and for other royal women, the birth of a son cemented the permanency of their dynastic standing. Celebrations of the child’s life were bound to commemorations of their mother.

Joy at a prince’s birth rippled out beyond the royal household. Communities and individuals recognised the event’s significance for the kingdom, celebrating the completion of an idealised ruling family of king, queen and male heir. According to Louis VII, the kingdom had been united in its ‘sole, implacable desire’ for God to grant him a son to rule and guide the regnum after his death.Footnote ¹² Petrus Riga echoed similar sentiments in the verse he wrote to commemorate the child’s birth, emphasising his personal joy for the royal couple and the entire region.Footnote ¹³ The city of Paris certainly greeted the young Philip’s nativity with exuberant festivities. Bells rang out and citizens took to the streets for celebrations and dancing by torchlight, as eyewitnesses and near-contemporary accounts attest.Footnote ¹⁴ In England, a few decades later, news of the birth of Henry III’s first son in 1239 kindled celebrations across the city of London. Similar festivities took place after Henry’s first grandson was born in 1266.Footnote ¹⁵ The shifting civic interest in celebrating royal nativities from the latter half of the twelfth century finds a parallel in enhanced efforts to record royal children’s births and to remember rulers’ nativities.Footnote ¹⁶ Whereas the monk recording events in the Chronicle of Melrose in the mid-twelfth century had not thought the delivery of King David’s grandsons worthy of note, towards the end of the century a conscientious scribe returned to the years 1141 and 1143 to insert retrospective notices of the births of ‘king Malcolm’ and ‘king William’.Footnote ¹⁷

Charters which use the birth of the king’s eldest son as a dating marker signify how the royal family and beneficiaries of their favour continued to celebrate a young prince’s progression through the initial years of his life.Footnote ¹⁸ Late in 1059, Henry I, with his son Philip’s approval (favor), endorsed a charter by which Helinand, bishop of Laon (1052–96), had conferred privileges on the newly founded Benedictine church of Nogent-sous-Coucy.Footnote ¹⁹ The act’s dating clause initially follows a conventional pattern, noting the day, month and Henry’s regnal year. Following this, and far more unusual, was the acknowledgement that this was in the tenth year of the life of the king’s son, Philip.Footnote ²⁰ The record of Philip’s age is inaccurate – he was only in his eighth year – but this does not diminish the importance of the boy’s participation or his appearance in the dating clause. The king consented to this public confirmation of his son’s prominence within an episcopal act, and Bishop Helinand deemed it valuable for a new ecclesiastical foundation to establish a connection to the royal child’s life. A century later, Louis VII likewise celebrated his only son by using the boy’s birth to date royal actions, at the same time bolstering the child’s relationship with prominent ecclesiastical supporters of the crown. In 1166, Louis dated his approval of an acquisition and exchange of properties for Saint-Victor to the first year of the future Philip II’s life.Footnote ²¹ The child’s early association with the abbey was a statement of enduring Capetian favour towards the Victorine order, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, both of whom had patronised the canons generously.Footnote ²² There was an additional, personal incentive to mention Philip’s birth in this instance. Saint-Victor’s abbot, Ernis (d. c. 1172), was the boy’s godfather and had carried him to the baptismal font the year before.Footnote ²³ The charter’s dating clause reminded the community of their close relationship with the young prince as well as their dynastic and spiritual obligations towards him. Further concessions to other churches and abbeys between 1166 and 1169 were likewise dated by Philip’s birth in addition to his father’s regnal year. These transactions often referred in some way to the indissolubility of crown property, tying the young heir to an abstract notion of corona regni.Footnote ²⁴

Children’s incorporation within charter dating clauses placed them on a level with, although still subordinate to, their fathers’ kingship, associating their lives with the royal dignity and asserting their place within a conception of time shaped by both divine and royal authority. Documents dated by a prince’s childhood were infrequent, but they were not confined to France. In 1208, the abbot and convent of Kelso dated an act by the regnal year of William I, king of Scots (r. 1165–1214), and ‘the tenth year from the birth of Alexander, son of King William’.Footnote ²⁵ The inclusion of the year of the prince’s birth is especially remarkable since private Scottish charters only incorporated the king’s regnal year intermittently.Footnote ²⁶ Alexander’s incorporation within the dating clause likely benefited both the Kelso community, as the act’s grantor, and the monks of Melrose Abbey, as the intended recipients. Only a few years earlier, in 1204, William had announced his judgment in Kelso’s favour after a long dispute between the two institutions over pasturage rights.Footnote ²⁷ Kelso’s gifts to Melrose in 1208 were part of this final settlement. Tellingly, when William confirmed another agreement between the two abbeys a few years later, the king’s eleven-year-old son headed the list of witnesses.Footnote ²⁸ In both cases, Alexander’s inclusion alongside his father was a crucial assertion that the two communities would abide by the royal judgment even after William’s death. It was also a declaration that the king’s heir would uphold the agreements. In France, Louis VII likely had similar intentions when, in 1171, he dated a lengthy notification of the settlement of disputes between the bishop of Pui and the viscounts of Polignac by the seventh year of his son Philip’s life.Footnote ²⁹

Significant ceremonies throughout a boy’s childhood could also become dating markers in charters. In Germany, when Conrad III issued a diploma from the Frankfurt assembly where his ten-year-old son was elected as king, the act’s dating clause mentioned the event.Footnote ³⁰ Kings may have exerted pressure on beneficiaries to draw attention to specific ceremonies, but beneficiaries likely also perceived a value in associating their charters with such occasions, especially since charters witnessed by the king had the same authoritative weight as those issued in his name.Footnote ³¹ Two diplomas witnessed by Henry I in spring 1059 – confirmations of the count of Anjou’s foundation of a priory of Marmoutier and a donation to Marmoutier from the count of Blois – notified the listener that the French king confirmed their content ‘in the same year that his son, Philip, was to be ordained as king, only a few days before the ordination’.Footnote ³² Accentuating the immediacy of Philip’s coronation while Henry confirmed the actions of prominent territorial princes did not inspire these nobles to attend. Geoffrey Martel, count of Anjou (1040–60), sent representatives to Philip’s inauguration but was not there himself, and there is no record of the presence of Theobald III of Blois (d. 1089) or his envoys.Footnote ³³ More likely, the king and the Marmoutier community were simply anxious to foster wider recognition of the royal family’s dynastic and hereditary ties to the throne during a prolonged military campaign which threatened Henry’s authority. Henry witnessed both documents at the siege of Thimert, where the Norman duke had installed a garrison in summer 1058.Footnote ³⁴ Privileges for an abbey beyond the usual remit of the Capetian ruler’s authority were combined with details of the young prince’s forthcoming coronation to exert Henry’s sovereignty. This emphasised both the persistence of Henry’s dynastic line in the face of a serious challenge and the enduring royal protection of Marmoutier’s rights.Footnote ³⁵

Other references to a child’s coronation within non-royal charters are less revealing of dynastic anxieties and more demonstrative of ecclesiastical investment in these events.Footnote ³⁶ Following Philip I’s coronation at Reims on Pentecost Sunday (23 May) 1059, his father confirmed several royal donations to the monastery of Saint-Philibert of Tournus. The accompanying diploma acknowledged the significance of the child’s coronation by referring to the ceremony in the dating clause.Footnote ³⁷ This was a public statement that the monks of Tournus had been present at Reims for the important event and had been among the first, if not the very first, to benefit from the new king’s favour. Only a year or two later, the relationship between the boy king and the Saint-Philibert monks garnered further rewards for the community when Philip, now sole ruler since his father’s death in 1060, issued a further confirmation to the abbey.Footnote ³⁸ Philip’s mother, Queen Anne of Kyiv, appeared in the pro anima clauses of the two royal confirmations to Saint-Philibert, together with her husband and son in both cases. Anne’s prominence in these requests for prayers complements the other examples discussed here, and is a further indication of the role mothers played in facilitating their sons’ initial engagement with ecclesiastical communities.Footnote ³⁹

Familial Intercessions and Anxieties

It is often within the context of prayers for spiritual health and salvation that young boys’ names begin appearing in royal documents, underscoring the importance of children’s reception within the community of God. Donations pro anima record requests for heavenly intercession for the souls of family members either living or dead.Footnote ⁴⁰ Children’s names commonly appear in this context across the eleventh and twelfth centuries, typically alongside the names of their father, mother and/or other relatives. In the diploma Henry issued to Saint-Philibert of Tournus on the day his seven-year-old son was crowned, the king expanded upon the dual benefits of entrusting religious communities with the salvation and spiritual well-being of souls (remedium et salus animarum). Gifts made pro anima were not only temporal actions which increased the royal dignity but they also secured a place in heaven for the donor and for those included in the community’s prayers.Footnote ⁴¹ Incorporating young sons within these intercessions could associate them with the earthly dignitas and help secure their heavenly futures. Even if the child mentioned was not physically present as the donation was made, the record of their name enabled their introduction to wider social and spiritual networks. It placed them centrally within the politically and spiritually beneficial ‘friendships’ which their parents were cultivating with religious communities.Footnote ⁴²

Spiritual intercessions were opportunities to celebrate the ruling family and they often foregrounded the trinity of father, mother and eldest son as king, queen and heir. Additional sons were sometimes accommodated within this rigid vision of the royal family, but infant daughters were almost always excluded. Requests for prayers made a clear statement about who was at the core of a conception of dynastic rulership and who was sidelined. When Frederick Barbarossa took the Premonstratensian abbey of Weissenau under his protection shortly after his eldest son’s birth in 1164, the king tied intercessory prayers for his own prosperity and salvation (pro … prosperitate et salute), as well as that of his wife Beatrice and their new-born son Frederick, to a specific hope for future peace and calm.Footnote ⁴³ Barbarossa issued this act at Ulm in southern Germany while his son was in Pavia, in the care of the margrave William of Montferrat.Footnote ⁴⁴ At around the same date, the forms used in imperial diplomas to address Barbarossa’s cousin, Frederick of Rothenburg (d. 1167), changed, no longer acknowledging the young man’s position as duke of Swabia. This Frederick was the son of Barbarossa’s predecessor, Conrad III. Only a few years earlier, Barbarossa may have recognised Frederick of Rothenburg as his heir in the case of his death, but the emperor never named the youth within familial intercessions.Footnote ⁴⁵ Further endorsement of the specific dynastic and imperial significance of Barbarossa’s salvatory prayers can be seen a few months after Beatrice had given birth to the couple’s second son in 1166. At the celebration of Charlemagne’s canonisation – an event of immense magnitude imbued with imperial symbolism – the new-born child appeared together with his father, mother and elder brother in intercessions for the family’s spiritual health within a confirmation of Aachen’s privileges.Footnote ⁴⁶

Donations pro anima were not the only ways in which religious communities came to include royal children within their prayers. Young children and adolescents had, in earlier centuries, occasionally featured in liturgical prayers such as the laudes regiae or the exultet, usually as unnamed proles regalis.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the first half of the thirteenth century, the Cistercian order began to offer corporate prayers for the king and queen of France and their children.Footnote ⁴⁸ This prescription required all Cistercian monks and nuns, regardless of whether their religious houses were in the French royal domain or elsewhere, to pray habitually for the royal children (liberi). At the time of the promulgation in 1228, the king, Louis IX, was a fourteen-year-old boy, unmarried and childless, but the action symbolised the central role children played at the heart of a Capetian ideology of kingship, tying them to the peace of the realm. A charter Louis had issued a year earlier complements this perspective by associating the king’s future liberi with the prospect of the realm’s stability.Footnote ⁴⁹ English kings likewise incorporated their children within corporate prayers at around the same time. When Henry III was on a pilgrimage to East Anglian holy sites in 1242, he asked archdeacons across his realm to ‘cause prayers to be offered for our children (liberi) so that the Lord will safely preserve them’.Footnote ⁵⁰

The eldest son’s physical and spiritual health, from a young age, was frequently bound to the condition of the kingdom. As noted earlier, a boy’s birth could be associated with divine provision for the realm, and his continued welfare was linked to the kingdom’s peace and stability. In the document issued for the Tournus monks at Philip I’s coronation, the shift from the single first-person meus to the plural nostra within the pro anima clause echoed the inauguration ceremony to stress that Philip was now, alongside his father and mother, part of the public vision for the realm’s perpetual prosperity.Footnote ⁵¹ Children’s association with the condition and safety of the realm was more than a diplomatic topos or incidental formula. These clauses could be part of a deliberate response to political uncertainty or royal insecurity. At moments of political instability in England, King Stephen frequently referred to the spiritual welfare of his wife, Queen Matilda, the couple’s eldest son Eustace (b. c. 1129) and their other children. When the king was facing significant difficulties in both England and Normandy in 1137, he granted land to Reading abbey for his own soul, the souls of his wife, children and brothers, ‘and for the condition and safety of my realm’.Footnote ⁵² Children could be crucial components in demonstrations of royal authority. Other rulers, in England and elsewhere, likewise responded to fears for the realm’s cohesion by incorporating their offspring within acts of monastic patronage. After a military campaign in Hungary in 1051, Emperor Henry III’s preoccupation with the security of the German realm moved him to stress the partnership between his wife, Empress Agnes, and their nearly one-year-old son when granting border properties to Hainburg church. The child’s felicitas and salvation were interlinked with his mother’s imperial and spiritual well-being and with the kingdom’s stability.Footnote ⁵³

Children’s documentary appearances alongside their parents were spiritually and politically significant, but they may also respond to important thresholds in children’s activity and therefore exhibit aspects of childhood development. Archaeologists have deemed developmental changes in infancy and early childhood, such as weaning, walking and talking, far more significant for children’s early socialisation than explicit age markers.Footnote ⁵⁴ Hagiographical texts emphasise weaning as an especially crucial indicator in a child’s early development, sometimes associating this threshold with the commencement of education.Footnote ⁵⁵ There were certainly no hard-and-fast rules regarding the age at which it was appropriate for religious communities to incorporate infants within their prayers, or for scribes first to mention children within royal documents. Nevertheless, the broader impression is that eldest sons were named in documents initially when they were between one and three years of age, although they could feature earlier as unnamed infantes, proles, filii or liberi. Firm evidence for boys’ presence alongside their parents as transactions were conveyed comes later, sometimes within a few months, in other cases not until a few years have passed.Footnote ⁵⁶ Although their explicit consent or testimony could be documented during infancy, it was sought and recorded with greater frequency towards the end of infantia or once the boy had reached pueritia, as we shall see. The process of weaning a child in the Middle Ages usually took place before the age of three, although geographical, demographic and environmental factors all affected the precise timing of weaning.Footnote ⁵⁷ Once infants were weaned and no longer so reliant on a wet nurse for regular sustenance, their presence alongside their parents may have become more routine, prompting mothers and fathers to seek intercession for their children’s souls. Patristic thought and theological debates regarding the soul’s development may also have influenced when and how rulers and religious communities incorporated young boys within donations pro anima.Footnote ⁵⁸ These debates were interrelated to the contested topic of sin’s inherited nature, which became an especially important issue throughout the twelfth century and into the early decades of the thirteenth.Footnote ⁵⁹ High infant mortality, even among elite royal children, would have provided further encouragement for parents to wait a year or two after their son’s birth before progressively introducing him to wider social networks and spiritual communities.Footnote ⁶⁰

Royal charters could flag broader parental concerns for an eldest son’s personal safety and good health. Empress Constance’s anxiety for the security of her infant son, Frederick, late in 1197 is evident in her confirmation of possessions and privileges which her husband, Emperor Henry VI, had bestowed upon the order of Saint John in Jerusalem. Constance requested prayers for the remission and salvation of the souls of her husband and father, asking God to ‘preserve the safety (incolumitas) of our blessed son Frederick, the most illustrious king of the Romans and of the kingdom of Sicily’.Footnote ⁶¹ This was the sole occasion on which Constance referred to Frederick’s safety, signifying the mother’s heightened concern for her two-year-old son’s welfare as he was brought from Foligno, the town north of Rome where he had spent the initial years of his life, to the island of Sicily for his coronation.Footnote ⁶² An original and striking image illustrating a near-contemporary praise poem to Frederick’s parents depicts the empress entrusting her swaddled son to the duchess of Spoleto before leaving for Sicily in 1195 (Figure 4.1). Intercessions for a child’s incolumitas refer to protection from harm or injury in the earthly world and are found in royal documents less frequently than spiritual intercessions, but the two aspects could be interrelated. References to a boy’s salus are especially ambiguous and can pertain to physical health, spiritual well-being or both. When Louis VII announced his construction of a new hospital in Senlis in 1170x1, he proclaimed his generosity towards the establishment for the remission of his sins and those of his royal ancestors, as well as for ‘the health and life’ of his son, Philip, then four or five years old.Footnote ⁶³ A handful of Louis’s acts mention Philip’s salus when the boy was between nine and twelve, usually when Louis bestowed patronage upon prominent religious communities such as the canons of Bourges cathedral or the monks of Clairvaux.Footnote ⁶⁴

Figure 4.1 Empress Constance leaves her infant son, the future Frederick II, in the care of the duchess of Spoleto. Peter of Eboli, Liber ad honorem Augusti (c. 1195–7), Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Cod. 120.II, fo. 138r.

Photograph: Codices Electronici AG, www.e-codices.ch.

Charter references to the safety or health of an eldest son convey something of the precarity of infancy and childhood in the central Middle Ages and highlight parental anxieties. Louis VII’s fears for his son’s mortality proved prescient in 1179 when Philip became so gravely ill that his father had to postpone the fourteen-year-old’s coronation. According to Rigord, writing a few years later, it was the frightening experience of spending a night lost in Chartres forest after getting separated from a royal hunting party which triggered Philip’s illness.Footnote ⁶⁵ In a scene saturated in contemporary literary tropes, Rigord describes how the boy, guided by prayers to the Virgin Mary and Saint Denis, encountered a coal-encrusted, axe-wielding peasant who was struck by the child’s lordly manner and guided him home.Footnote ⁶⁶ Despite the young prince overcoming his childlike fears while journeying through the forest, he still fell ill. The English chronicler Roger of Howden conveys Louis’s distress. The king refused to be consoled, ‘preferring his own life to end than to see his son being tormented so’ and spending day and night in ‘tears and incessant sighing’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Howden’s account was written forty years later, but Louis’s fear for his son undoubtedly motivated his exceptional decision to cross the Channel and pray for the boy’s recovery at Thomas Becket’s tomb. In this case, a child’s illness dictated the revision of not one, but two, royal itineraries: Louis to undertake his overseas pilgrimage, and Henry II (r. 1154–89) to accommodate the French ruler and escort him to Canterbury.Footnote ⁶⁸ When, the following year, Philip confirmed the gifts Louis had bestowed on the monks of Holy Trinity during his brief stay, the young ruler stated that his father had visited the tomb ‘for the salvation of [my] soul and for the health of [my] body’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Rigord, keen to dispel any notion that Becket had usurped Denis’s role as the saintly protector of the Capetian dynasty, omitted all references to Louis’s visit to Canterbury, but he was quick to acknowledge the power of a father’s prayers and the supplications of the universal Church in speeding Philip’s recovery.Footnote ⁷⁰

Most of what I have detailed so far in this chapter concerns the ‘passive’ involvement of young boys in royal transactions: records of festivities at a child’s nativity, parental requests for prayers for their young sons, or churches and monasteries accepting royal infants within their spiritual communities. Children were not dynamic actors on such occasions. They did not have agency to dictate events or to shape their written representation, and most would have been oblivious of their incorporation within charter dating clauses or pro anima entreaties. Yet these aspects of documentary culture are still important for understanding the web of interwoven obligations, influences and expectations around royal children, especially eldest sons. Children were conduits for parental anxieties, for royal displays of authority and for future hopes for the kingdom’s security. Adults – mothers, fathers, the beneficiaries of royal favour, urban communities and scribes – collaborated to assimilate infant boys within social and spiritual networks and friendships, to proclaim their dynastic place within a rigidly conceived ‘ruling family’ and to uphold an ideology of perpetual royal authority which depended upon them. Children’s initial appearances in charters, although passive, laid the groundwork for their more active participation in royal rule as they advanced through childhood.

Children’s Participation in Royal Actions

Charters reveal children’s importance as political actors and show familial support for young sons as they begin participating in the transactional business of royal rule. In northern France, children’s active contribution before c. 1200 is most apparent within the context of the laudatio parentum, the approval relatives routinely provided to gifts of land and other donations.Footnote ⁷¹ A king’s eldest son became increasingly likely to feature in the laudatio to royal acts during late infancy and early childhood, especially after the age of five, possibly when they were able to speak and provide verbal assent more articulately.Footnote ⁷² Philip II, for example, first provides his consent in August 1170, only a week after his fifth birthday, when Louis VII founded the priory of Nemours and granted the community a perpetual annual rent.Footnote ⁷³ Philip’s regular presence in his father’s acts from early childhood brings into contention the claim that Louis ‘resisted … associating his son in government’.Footnote ⁷⁴ There was no barrier to children’s active participation before the age of five, and even an infant’s assent to political decisions could be socially significant. In cases where children were too young to play a speaking role, their ceremonial part was still important, often through the medium of touch or with a substitute speaking the words of assent on their behalf.Footnote ⁷⁵ The child’s inclusion in the laudatio could form another phase in their political instruction, marking their progression through the early stages of the life cycle. Philip did not assent to his father’s actions regularly until he was at least eight or nine years old. By this age, the prince was more prominent alongside his parents as the court travelled around the royal domain. The boy’s name now appeared in donations to religious houses and hospitals located near royal residences when these communities received tithes on the bread and wine consumed by the family during their itineration.Footnote ⁷⁶ A document issued in 1176x7 further emphasises the incremental nature of Philip’s involvement in royal documents. Louis attested that, at an earlier date when he had had the castle of Dammartin in his possession, he had given a grange to the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris for his soul and the soul of his son.Footnote ⁷⁷ When the new count of Dammartin reclaimed possession of the castle and grange in 1176x7, Louis subsequently compensated the Paris hospital with a different grange. Philip was now ten or eleven years old, and had a central role in the ritual act of compensation as he provided his assent to his father’s actions.Footnote ⁷⁸

Incorporating a child within the act of consenting or assenting to a transaction tacitly acknowledged their legal significance, but the action also had social and religious implications.Footnote ⁷⁹ Children’s participation in royal actions helped maintain relationships with ecclesiastical communities and reaffirmed social ties for the future. Through their active involvement, young boys learnt about their dynastic responsibilities and their position and obligations within hierarchies of lordship. Written documents then projected their status throughout the realm, commemorating children as contributors to royal actions. At some point in the 1050s, most likely in 1059, the dean of Saint-Genès of Thiers approached Henry I to request royal confirmation of the community’s foundation. Saint-Genès was located west of Lyon, outside the royal domain and thus beyond the usual sphere of the ruler’s action, but there was a firm tradition of Capetian kings upholding the community’s privileges. After Pope Benedict VIII had signed the church’s original foundation charter in 1016, King Robert, Henry’s father, had confirmed it. Henry provided his confirmation as his father had done (simili modo) and incorporated his own son’s affirmation in the same way (simul).Footnote ⁸⁰ The document survives only as a later copy, but the subscriptions at its foot are further testament to the vision of dynastic and political continuity implied by the young Philip I’s inclusion: after Robert’s signature comes Henry, son of King Robert, followed by Philip, son of King Henry.

Parents were especially eager to involve their young sons in events with specific dynastic significance. When Louis VI restored his father’s crown to Saint-Denis in 1120, he did so ‘as much for the health of our soul as for the administration of our kingdom, [and] for the preservation of [our] wife and offspring’, incorporating his four-year-old son’s consent immediately after the record of the regnal years for both himself and his wife, Adelaide of Maurienne.Footnote ⁸¹ The care with which adults sought and recorded children’s active participation implies a greater significance to children’s involvement than has been assumed, and warns against dismissing their appearances in charters as merely formulaic.Footnote ⁸² In 1179, Louis VII promised the bishop, clergy and people of Langres that their town, and all the properties which the bishop held from the king, would never leave the royal domain.Footnote ⁸³ Langres was an important urban centre on the border of Champagne and Burgundy, and Louis had a close relationship with Bishop Godfrey de la Roche (r. 1138–62x3), who had been an influential advisor on the king’s crusade.Footnote ⁸⁴ Louis’s promise to the town concerned land belonging to the crown (corona nostra). He emphasised that he acted in response to the bishop’s petition and with his son’s assent and will.Footnote ⁸⁵ The reference to voluntatem is pertinent, indicating that Philip’s consent needed to be an independent decision rather than the result of familial obligation or his father’s enforced wish.Footnote ⁸⁶ Nearing adolescence, the king’s thirteen- or fourteen-year-old son provided an additional witness to the binding nature of the royal promise, but the efficacy of this statement relied on the prince upholding the same concept of crown property as his father. Evidence that Philip did just that can be found less than two years later, when the fifteen-year-old king – ruling alone since his father’s death in September 1180 – issued his own charter for Langres, confirming all the privileges his father had so recently granted the town.Footnote ⁸⁷

Royal children in Germany acted as ‘interveners’ in imperial diplomas during the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, a role which, like the laudatio parentum, emphasised children’s active contribution to the ritual and symbolic communication underlying written transactions.Footnote ⁸⁸ Young boys’ names regularly appear in the intervention clauses listing those who had persuaded the king or emperor to act in an individual’s or community’s favour.Footnote ⁸⁹ Detailed studies of children’s interventions are uncommon, but important analyses of Otto II’s and Henry IV’s interventions have revealed the significance of their involvement in imperial acts at a young age.Footnote ⁹⁰ Emperor Henry III valued his son’s participation, and Henry IV’s interventions indicate his presence at the legal act underpinning the document. The boy’s interventions are a visible, external marker of the emperor’s policy to secure his son on the throne.Footnote ⁹¹

The overt pairing of Henry IV’s intercessory activities with those of his mother highlights another, important aspect of the boy’s preparation for rule: Empress Agnes’s central involvement in her son’s political education.Footnote ⁹² Mothers had a crucial part to play in their children’s early instruction in royal rule, and diplomas across north-western Europe commonly feature the intervention or assent of mothers and their eldest sons together. It was not fathers alone who instigated and directed children’s incorporation within royal transactions. Mothers could also initiate or assist with this aspect of a son’s education, or ruling couples may have conferred about such familial strategies. When Louis confirmed an exchange of land between his wife and the abbey of Saint-Aignan in Orléans in 1174x5, he did so in response to Adela’s request and with the agreement (consentire) of their son Philip, who was then eight or nine.Footnote ⁹³ This act was issued at Boiscommun, close to Orléans, and the addition of the phrase id ipsum stresses the significance of Philip’s presence alongside his father and mother as this exchange was made.

Children’s participation in royal business and documentary culture had a clear pedagogical value in teaching young boys how to behave at court and in instructing them in the actions expected of a ruler. Unsurprisingly, the documents themselves rarely express the educational significance of a child’s contribution. Yet an extraordinary clause in a select handful of Emperor Henry III’s diplomas does exactly that, drawing attention to his son’s upbringing. The emperor issued several documents from Italian provinces between April and November 1055 for the salvation of his soul, through Empress Agnes’s intervention and for the four-year-old Henry’s development or growth (propter incrementum filii nostri).Footnote ⁹⁴ This formula was created by a notary from the Italian chancery, Gunther A, and appeared exclusively in diplomas issued during the imperial visit south of the Alps. It later features in Henry IV’s diplomas, but only once, with reference to the ten-year-old prince Conrad in an act issued at Verona in 1084.Footnote ⁹⁵ Struve claimed the propter incrementum clause indicated that the young Henry was left behind in Germany while his parents were in Italy, but it is far more feasible that the child accompanied his parents on their itinerary.Footnote ⁹⁶ This formula was a celebration of the prince’s first visit to the northern Italian territories – an important region of the empire he would one day rule – and it emphasised the trip’s didactic and commemorative significance for the young boy.

Charters also document a testimonial role for children as the witnesses to royal actions and contributors to what Brigitte Bedos-Rezak describes as ‘the performance of consensus’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Children, who appear as named actors, witnesses and those marking documents with their crosses, deserve to be incorporated more fully within an understanding of diplomatic practices of attestation.Footnote ⁹⁸ Explicit references in royal charters to children’s touch, usually with the phrase per manum, suggest that their tactile participation was important and conveyed a symbolic meaning for beneficiaries.Footnote ⁹⁹ When Henry I confirmed properties to the monastery of Coulombs in 1059, the diploma recorded his own endorsement (manu propria) as well as the act’s confirmation at the hands of his wife and sons (et manibus uxoris et filiorum nostrorum).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ It was common for children to act as named witnesses after the ages of six or seven but, as with children’s assent in the laudatio parentum, even infants could attest charters.

Rather than dismissing records of very young children as peculiarities detached from the ‘reality’ of rulership, the attestations of infants can help signify a transaction’s solemnity and the import rulers and beneficiaries vested in the action. In 1144, David I, king of Scots, granted the church and land of Lesmahagow in perpetuity to Kelso Abbey to become a dependent cell of Tironensian monks.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The text of the grant is extant only in later cartulary copies, but David’s two grandsons, William and Malcolm, then around one and three years old respectively, were among the witnesses whose names appear at the foot of the document. There is no reason to doubt they were present at Edinburgh with their grandfather; indeed, the addition of the word coram before the list of names accentuates the significance of the boys’ presence.Footnote ¹⁰² G. W. S. Barrow identified the appearance of these infants as a unique royal case, but he did not dwell on why David may have wanted his young grandsons associated with this specific act.Footnote ¹⁰³ The grant further promised the king’s firm peace in upholding Lesmahagow church as a place of sanctuary for those who fled there. Although sanctuary provided churches with legal privileges outside a king’s authority and could conflict with attempts to impose royal justice, David’s act brought the refuge of Lesmahagow within the protection of royal authority.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ He promised royal action if his peace was infringed in future. The attestations of David’s grandchildren therefore bound them to the new Kelso cell both as witnesses to a perpetual transfer of royal property and as partners in a consensual pledge to ensure that peace was kept. In the decade or so following David’s death, Malcolm and William both separately confirmed Kelso’s liberties and possessions, and again agreed to uphold the ‘distinct rights’ of the church and land of Lesmahagow, sustaining a commitment they had first made as young boys.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Charters celebrate the eldest son’s place within contemporary conceptions of royal rulership, testify to the prominent maternal role in children’s political education and reflect concerns about children’s instruction and development. They hint at how children first became acquainted with the exercise of royal authority and workings of royal administration, while also revealing the value adults placed upon children’s participation and testimony as key components of kingship. Charter evidence can inform an understanding of royal children’s lives in a variety of ways, but significant shifts were occurring in documentary culture over the central Middle Ages which altered children’s incorporation within royal records. By the mid-thirteenth century, familial strategies for preparing young sons for rule were also changing.

Children, Charters and Changing Cultures

Historians have long characterised the period between c. 1000 and c. 1300 as a time of significant change in documentary culture and diplomatic practices, encapsulated in memorable academic memes such as ‘from memory to written record’ or the ‘rise of administrative kingship’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The considerable changes to royal children’s inclusion within documentary culture over this period have largely gone unremarked, even though these shifts occurred within a similar time frame across the kingdoms of north-western Europe. Practices of naming children in royal records declined as generic terminology such as heres and successores became more standardised. Charters and diplomas now placed less emphasis on the royal family as a political unit, meaning routine transactions no longer furnished the same insights into a son’s preparation for rule, or their mothers’ presence alongside them. Shifting administrative and pedagogical environments did not eradicate all efforts to involve children in political action, nor did it expunge the crucial significance of preparing boys for political power. Closer scrutiny of these shifts is imperative to understand how change over time distinguished children’s experiences of rulership between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.

Young sons had become far less frequent participants in their fathers’ acts by the first half of the thirteenth century. There is no evidence that Louis IX ever assented to his father’s privileges or was named in pro salute clauses before his succession, a picture which contrasts dramatically with the experience of Louis’s grandfather, Philip II, less than a century before.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Louis VIII placed greater weight on reminiscing about his father within his actions than on incorporating the name of his eldest son, suggesting that royal attitudes had shifted alongside diplomatic practices between the 1180s and the 1220s.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ A comparable shift can be seen in other kingdoms over a similar period.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In England, the name of Henry II’s eldest son had appeared in various ways in charters issued during the 1150s and early 1160s.Footnote ¹¹⁰ After John succeeded to the throne in 1199, he prioritised the procurement of magnate oaths to his eldest son and integrated the boy within royal treaties,Footnote ¹¹¹ but the future Henry III never featured in John’s charters. The disappearance of children’s names from their father’s acts did not mean a dwindling interest in involving children in royal actions. Instead, the changing nature of royal records – in particular, their increasing standardisation – partly explains the shift. References to underage sons in royal documents were more likely, by the mid-thirteenth century, to be stylised using generic terminology than to mention a child’s personal name. In Scotland, Alexander II’s acts do not appear to name his eldest son, but instead refer to the king’s unnamed heirs or successors.Footnote ¹¹² This contrasts with Alexander’s own childhood experiences, since his name had featured in several documents issued by his father.Footnote ¹¹³ Written definitions of power were shifting over the twelfth century from personal, individualised terms to generalised and abstract ones.Footnote ¹¹⁴ As general terms with overtly legal connotations, especially heres/heredes, came to express hereditary kingship’s power in writing, the individual roles children had played in documentary culture were gradually eroded.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Related to the increasing standardisation of legal roles and royal documents were other changes to diplomatic forms and content, which removed many of the documentary features which had previously incorporated children so readily. The laudatio parentum which had been so common in northern France became more restricted after 1200, now less frequently acknowledging the authorisation of close relatives such as sons, then disappearing almost entirely after 1250. Stephen White identified several possible reasons for this decline, including changing diplomatic formulae, shifts in the kinds of religious houses receiving gifts, the increasing prominence of genuine sales of land from the latter half of the twelfth century and the ever more commercial character of transactions which no longer required the strengthening of ongoing ties between donor and beneficiary.Footnote ¹¹⁶ White placed particular emphasis on the growing prevalence of a new type of warranty clause, which obliged donors and their heirs to defend transactions in perpetuity. This is an especially decisive change for understanding children’s dwindling appearances in charters. The new warranty clause weakened the legal rationale for the laudatio by endorsing the idea ‘that an heir could be bound by his ancestor’s promises and should therefore assume at least some of his ancestor’s obligations’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ As it became more widely accepted that charters obliged even unborn heirs to uphold their predecessor’s actions, there was much less need to incorporate children in royal transactions as part of their education. Likewise, there was less necessity for mothers to appear alongside young sons as a pledge to their future behaviour. A child’s consent was no longer as vital to prove intentions for an act’s longevity, and their participation lacked the same social and cultural meanings as it had before. Moreover, naming a specific child became far less of a legal safeguard for benefactors and beneficiaries than using generic terms which encompassed all future heirs. Royal children therefore experienced the shift from memory to written record as a move from specificity to anonymity.

Changing practices of attestation altered or even eradicated children’s testimonial role in royal documents. The attestations of royal children and queen mothers faded from the record in France as the act of witnessing royal charters became a responsibility restricted to the king’s chief household officers.Footnote ¹¹⁸ At the same time, the use of signature crosses as a form of diplomatic authentication was declining. Over the twelfth century, sealing became the principal means of authorising royal documents, with the king’s seal providing the ‘unique source of authority’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The shift to sealing affected children’s participation in transactions as well as their visibility in graphic and visual displays of royal authority. Seals were rarely created for royal children, except on their accession to the kingship or once they held another office of secular or ecclesiastical responsibility.Footnote ¹²⁰ Henry the Young King, son of Henry II of England, was fifteen when he received his first seal following his coronation in June 1170. The seal was single-sided, and its legend (HENRICVS REX ANGLOR’ ET DUX NORMANNOR’ ET COMES ANDEGAVOR’) clearly linked the seal’s creation with Henry’s inauguration.Footnote ¹²¹ In Germany, Henry (VII), Frederick II’s eldest son, received his first seal at a far earlier age, probably when he was six or seven. Once again, however, the seal’s creation reflected the child’s promotion to a position of secular authority. Henry’s first seal titled him duke of Swabia, but it was quickly replaced with another, by the end of 1220, bearing the title king of the Romans.Footnote ¹²²

If a prince’s father was still alive, the boy typically had to wait until adolescence or youth before acquiring a seal. In France, the future Louis VI was the only prince ever to use a seal as ‘king-in-waiting’, but he was in his twenties when this was created. Its legend (SIGILLVM LODOVICI DESIGNATI REGIS) corresponded with the title he used in letters and in his father’s acts.Footnote ¹²³ Similarly, when Alexander III, king of Scots, first provided his son with a seal in 1281, the prince was seventeen and soon to be married. Before this date, the younger Alexander had instead authenticated acts using his father’s seal or the seal of his custodian, William Sinclair of Roslin.Footnote ¹²⁴ Unlike signature crosses and witness lists, seals became markers of office-holding or of legal maturity; their creation signified a prince’s induction into a world of official authority and overwhelmingly adult identity. The dwindling role for children in attestation practices evokes Bedos-Rezak’s observation that the spread of seals detached the written word ‘from the limitations of direct human testimony’.Footnote ¹²⁵ The shift to sealing almost entirely eradicated children’s testimonial participation in royal transactions, concealing the value which kings and beneficiaries had earlier placed on young boys as witnesses.

In the empire, the decades between the 1180s and 1220s do not seem to have marked as much of a shift in children’s diplomatic presence as elsewhere in north-western Europe. Instead, the most significant change came earlier, from the later eleventh century, when witness lists gradually replaced intercession formula.Footnote ¹²⁶ Records of royal children acting as interveners vanished and, although children instead began to attest their father’s diplomas, their roles as witnesses were less consistent. Conrad III’s eldest son, Henry (VI), first attested his father’s actions in 1142, around the age of five, but he only appears in three diplomas before his election and coronation as king five years later.Footnote ¹²⁷ Nevertheless, royal children in Germany do not disappear entirely from documents in the same way as their contemporaries in England, Scotland and France. Frederick Barbarossa’s son Henry was eight years old when he first witnessed one of his father’s diplomas in 1173.Footnote ¹²⁸ Half a century later, in 1219, Frederick II’s son, another Henry, can be seen attesting his father’s documents from the same age.Footnote ¹²⁹

While the eldest sons of German kings and emperors no longer feature in imperial diplomas as consistently during childhood as they had in the later eleventh century, charters still record their active participation on a more sporadic basis. Enduring imperial reliance on crowning young sons as kings of the Romans and kings of Sicily, practices which persisted well into the thirteenth century, likely explains why children continued to be incorporated within imperial documentary culture.Footnote ¹³⁰ Although Emperor Henry VI died before his son Frederick’s third birthday, a document issued during the final weeks of Henry’s life suggests that Frederick’s coronation would have initiated a more prominent role for the child in imperial transactions. Henry issued the diploma from Sicily in September 1197 after having sent his brother, Philip of Swabia, to escort Frederick to the German realm and secure the child’s coronation.Footnote ¹³¹ The emperor pre-empted Frederick’s accession to the royal title, promising that neither his son, ‘the illustrious king of the Romans’, nor his brother, nor any other person would disturb his concession of the estate of Monzingen to the count of Spanheim.Footnote ¹³² Frederick’s eldest son, Henry (VII) (b. 1211), likewise played an increasingly prominent part in his father’s documents in the lead up to his coronation in Frankfurt in April 1220.Footnote ¹³³

Where charters no longer furnish the same insights into a son’s preparation for the throne, a variety of other records begin to provide rich details regarding royal children’s upbringing and instruction. These give less information concerning children’s political education, but they add to an understanding of the practical arrangements involved in raising a royal child, providing glimpses into aspects of personal care and nurture, food and nourishment, the provision of wet nurses, tutors and teachers, and even early military training. In England, financial records such as the pipe rolls supply a much fuller picture of household payments pertaining to royal children from John’s reign onwards, and close and patent letters bring to light further minutiae. John gave alms to Winchester when his eldest son Henry was ill, robes were bought for women attached to the infant’s chamber and payments were made to Henry’s wet nurse, Helen.Footnote ¹³⁴ From the mid-thirteenth century, more evidence survives for the arrangement of separate households for royal children.Footnote ¹³⁵ In Scotland, Alexander III assigned money and lands to support his eldest son’s household.Footnote ¹³⁶ In France, the royal children’s household comprised forty-two people by 1316.Footnote ¹³⁷ The details of exactly when and how such distinct households came into being remain rather vague, and a comparative study is sorely needed. Nevertheless, the appearance of separate households for royal infants marks a distinct shift from an earlier period. Formerly, most of the arrangements for young children had been incorporated within the day-to-day management of the royal court or of other aristocratic or episcopal households in which they were raised.

The dwindling presence of royal children in documents, except in highly standardised forms, should not be read as evidence that educating children in the actions, activities and affairs of kingship was any less important. There were, however, shifting ideas about which aspects of royal behaviour and performance should incorporate children and which actions it was most important for them to witness. The inclusion of young sons within ritual household practices such as royal almsgiving, or ‘maundy’, became far more prominent in both England and France from the mid-thirteenth century. Virginia Cole has shown that almsgiving practices played a central role in instructing the heir in the behaviour which would be expected of him as king.Footnote ¹³⁸ Edward, eldest son of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence, was eight when he first took part in almsgiving alongside his parents in 1247. Even before this date, Henry had linked his own pious actions, such as feeding the Franciscans, to the support of his wife and children.Footnote ¹³⁹ The royal family together made offerings on saints’ days and attended church dedications.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ The importance of almsgiving as part of a ruler’s moral behaviour is likewise emphasised in the letter Louis IX supposedly wrote in his own hand for his eldest son Philip. Louis instructed his son to ‘have a compassionate heart toward the poor … and aid them willingly with comfort or some alms’.Footnote ¹⁴¹

The thirteenth century also saw an increasing emphasis on the formal education of royal children and the gradual emergence of a more programmatic structure to a prince’s learning. There was already a long tradition of didactic and moral writings for young rulers or heirs, texts which modern scholars often group together under the umbrella term ‘mirrors for princes’.Footnote ¹⁴² Many of these writings are addressed to adult men rather than children, but they reinforce the multifaceted nature of the eldest son’s instruction in the behaviour, conduct, expectations and practices of rulership.Footnote ¹⁴³ Writers stressed the responsibilities of fathers, mothers and tutors in raising boys to become good princes, while also acknowledging that preparing a child for rule was no easy task. The imperial chaplain Wipo claimed that Emperor Conrad II had ‘endured the greatest troubles to know that his child was prepared for rule with learning (studiis)’ because, if the boy was to be a leader of people, he had to act with discernment.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ It is beyond the scope of this study to expand upon the evolution of educational literature over the central Middle Ages, but it is worth highlighting two significant developments. First, the earlier stages of childhood tend to receive more attention in didactic tracts and writings by the thirteenth century, a change which is suggestive of a broader awareness of the significance of more formal education in infancy and early childhood. Vincent of Beauvais, writing before 1249, claimed that Queen Margaret sought his help in compiling a work for her children’s instruction during their ‘tender infancy’ so that ‘such wisdom would be retained in their perpetual memory’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The Siete Partidas produced at the instigation of Alfonso X of Castile and León claimed that tutors had to teach small boys to act with propriety because they were ‘like wax on which an engraved seal could leave its mark’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Secondly, educational literature from the second half of the thirteenth century indicates greater attention to the creation of pedagogical programmes structured more rigorously by age and ability. Carola Föller’s recent study of texts produced around Louis IX’s court has been especially welcome in illuminating elements of this programmatic framework in action.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Although neither attention to early childhood nor structured educational programmes were entirely new, and writers took inspiration from much earlier texts such as Aristotle, Augustine and Quintilian, the education of royal children had an important role in shifting intellectual environments at royal courts over the thirteenth century.

Royal charters from the eleventh and twelfth centuries show that kings and queens took care to include their sons in acts of kingship and to represent them in a way which reflected their position and status. Integrating eldest sons from childhood within the networks of power and authority upon which medieval kingship relied was especially important in preparing them to adopt the responsibilities and duties of rule later in their lives. Despite the changes to administrative and diplomatic practices by the later thirteenth century, many of the same themes continued to be important in the formative years of a prince’s childhood even as charters no longer provide the same insights into these practices. A prince’s birth still provoked celebration, with festivities flourishing in cities such as Paris and London. Churches and religious houses likewise continued to pray for and commemorate royal children within their communities, with regular masses being said for children’s health and spiritual well-being.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Mothers maintained a prominent influence over their children’s education even as educational environments at court shifted, and parents continued to work together to incorporate their young sons within some of the symbolic actions and rituals associated with kingship.

Parents were not the only adults with an interest in children’s political education, nor were they alone in viewing royal children as political actors. As young boys participated in solemn transactions, providing their assent or witnessing actions, the beneficiaries of charters and the larger audiences in attendance at these events shared in the act of recognising children’s involvement in royal rule. Abbeys, churches and urban centres eagerly incorporated children within networks of friendship, looking forward to future possibilities for royal patronage and protection. Preparing the wider political community to receive a boy as king was therefore just as significant as educating the child for rule. Chapter 5 expands on the importance of securing wider investment in young boys as current and future rulers, but shifts attention to more formalised, less habitual actions – magnate oaths, acts of homage and coronation – by which kings gained the acquiescence of individuals, communities and wider networks to their son’s political status. The imposition of a contrived binary between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ association is not especially helpful when considering how rulers consolidated magnate support for their child as heir. Rather than the strict division implied by these artificial categories, the ‘formal’ usually built on the more quotidian ‘informal’, and the latter responded to and evolved in light of the more ceremonial and ritualised former. Land transactions and other gifts and privileges were, at heart, legal procedures, but they also encompassed elements of performance, ritual and ceremony. Events such as magnate assemblies or coronations also provided common settings for the transactional business of royal rule.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Royal families used various different means of incorporating children within the processes, rituals and networks of rule, but children’s active participation remained a significant part of their early political education.