On Friday 28 October 1216, the feast of Saints Simon and Jude, a nine-year-old boy dressed in ‘child-sized robes of state’ was anointed and crowned king of the English at Gloucester.Footnote ¹ At the end of the service, as Henry III and the congregation processed out of the cathedral, the knights present gathered the boy king up in their arms and carried him from the church to avoid having to match the child’s slow pace. Bearing Henry all the way to his chamber, they removed the clothes he was wearing – despite the robes’ small size, they were still too heavy for the child – and helped him dress in alternative apparel for the coronation feast. These details of Henry’s first coronation come from the Middle French verse biography of William Marshal written a few years later.Footnote ² This is a rare glimpse into the practical adjustments required to account for a boy king’s prepubescent physique and reveals how magnate behaviour had to change to compensate for the limits of the child’s physical capability. The anonymous poet had probably not been present at Gloucester, but the Marshal’s companions and friends had witnessed the boy’s inauguration. Men such as John of Earley relayed their memories to the writer in the years that followed. The Marshal’s biographer was the only near-contemporary commentator to suggest how aspects of royal ritual and ceremonial – in this case procession and dress – had to adapt because the new king was a child. This account of Henry’s coronation, alongside other examples, prompts us to consider an important, overlooked narrative of child kingship which resonates beyond ritualised ceremonies and into the day-to-day practices of rule: a young boy’s succession as king could compel adaptation, encourage innovation and foster collaboration.

The need for adjustment or innovation is a common theme in accounts of royal inaugurations involving young boys, but childhood is less commonly given the attention it deserves as a factor for encouraging adaptation and variability.Footnote ³ After Charlemagne placed his three-year-old son Louis on the throne in 781, the infant’s retinue supplied him with weapons ‘fitting for his age’ before his regal entrance into Aquitaine.Footnote ⁴ In the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, the nobleman Balian of Ibelin raised the seven-year-old Baldwin V (1177–86) on his shoulders in the procession from the Holy Sepulchre to the Templum Domini after Baldwin’s crown-wearing in 1185.Footnote ⁵ Two centuries later, Sir Simon Burley carried Richard II to his coronation as king of England in 1377.Footnote ⁶ The ten-year-old child lost a shoe on the way because it was too big, and one of the earls had to hold the heavy crown above Richard’s head.Footnote ⁷ Other rituals likewise required adaptations to account for a child’s age, smaller build or mental faculties. In 1214, the bishop of Pamplona, James I of Aragon’s maternal uncle, held his six-year-old nephew high above the crowds at a cort at Lleida so those swearing an oath of fealty to the boy king could see him better.Footnote ⁸ Child kings could necessitate alterations to the rituals and ceremonial associated with royal rule, but this does not make children’s participation incongruous with such occasions. Ritualised ceremonies, especially those containing a liturgical aspect, regularly encompassed children as well as adults within aspects of performance and witnessing.Footnote ⁹ Even though children were less frequently the centre of royal rituals, they would have been familiar attendants at and even participants in these occasions. Their contribution was neither improper nor inappropriate.

This chapter considers the close relationship between child rulership and innovative political and administrative adaptation between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Cases of child kingship prompted adaptations to some of the tools of governance, but the boy king’s presence and active contribution were often still crucial. What follows will consider, first, the diversity of experimentation within the documentary evidence and, secondly, the enduring significance of the child’s participation in rule. The third and final section turns to practical adjustments to and contemporary representations of counsel, a fundamental instrument of royal rule which could be even more crucial when a boy was king.

Adapting and Experimenting: Boy Kings, Charters and Royal Government

Periods of child kingship challenged rulership to be flexible and adapt, not only on the day of the boy’s coronation but also throughout the initial years of the child’s reign. Royal documents function as displays of kingship which capture fixed moments in time, meaning that even small shifts in their forms, content, formulae and preservation can be revealing. Following a child’s succession as king, clerks drawing up documents both within and outside royal writing offices often began to adjust the diplomatic forms used during the previous reign and to experiment with new processes. Small adjustments in formulae were especially noticeable in the initial years of Philip I’s reign, when slight alterations were made to inherited forms.Footnote ¹⁰ Other changes in administrative practices were more precautionary and may reflect heightened worries about controlling displays of royal authority when a child was king. The shift in charter enrolment practices early in Alexander III’s reign, for example, was a possible safeguard against the production of forged royal charters.Footnote ¹¹ Whereas documents had previously been enrolled in a post factum fashion, by the mid-1250s some outgoing royal charters began to be copied onto a roll.Footnote ¹² Even if these practical modifications were on a relatively small scale or may have occurred anyway, prompted by a new ruler’s succession or by developing administrative procedures, the king’s age served as an additional spark for change. In other cases, alterations to royal documents were unequivocally because the new king was a child.

Both those working for royal chanceries and petitioners approaching boy kings experimented with ways of accounting for the young ruler’s childhood. In a few eleventh-century cases, such experimentation explicitly altered the forms for addressing the king. The intitulatio of a diploma the thirteen-year-old Henry IV issued at Liège in April 1064 described him as puer. After invoking the Holy Trinity, the scribe gave the ruler’s full title as ‘the boy Henry, by the grace of God august king of the Romans’ (Figure 8.1).Footnote ¹³ Although the diploma was drawn up outside the chancery – likely at the instigation of the bishop of Toul or the abbot of Kornelimünster, the two parties whose exchange of goods Henry was confirming – doubts regarding the document’s authenticity have been refuted convincingly.Footnote ¹⁴ This was the sole occasion that Henry was titled a child in diplomas issued in his name, but it indicates that some of the German prelates viewed his childhood as an important aspect of his kingship. This alteration to a standard form did not necessarily compromise the king’s dignity. Drawing attention to Henry’s childhood could have been a means of distinguishing the ruler from his father, who is mentioned in the document’s narratio, or of clarifying why Henry was still only rex not imperator.Footnote ¹⁵ Alternatively, the title may have helped explain why the property exchange had had to be recorded and agreed at Jülich in the presence of Anno of Cologne. At that date, Archbishop Anno was one of the magnates most closely involved in educating Henry and governing the German realm. In a similar manner, when the eleven-year-old Philip I endorsed a notification in 1063, the scribe drew attention to the king’s childhood, noting the judgement which had taken place in the presence of Count Baldwin and ‘king Philip, who was still a boy’.Footnote ¹⁶ Reference to Philip’s boyhood here clarified the need for the senior magnate’s presence alongside the ruler in this judicial setting.

Figure 8.1 Diploma titling Henry IV puer gratia dei Romanorum rex augustus, issued at Liège on 15 April 1064. Lichtbildarchiv älterer Originalurkunden (LBA) no. 9262 (original in Düsseldorf, Hauptstaatsarchiv; published as MGH DD H IV, no. 127).

Photograph and permissions: LBA Marburg.

It is possible, at least in Henry’s case, that forms of address within external communications may also have incorporated the king’s identity as a child. The Byzantine emperor, Constantine X (r. 1059–67), purportedly asked the ‘Roman Patriarch’ (likely Cadalus of Parma/Pope Honorius II) to confirm a pact of friendship with ‘the boy Henry, king of the Romans’.Footnote ¹⁷ Benzo of Alba copied this letter as part of a fictional narrative of diplomatic exchanges between the Byzantine and Salian courts which Benzo himself created. Since a source similar to the letter was probably already circulating in the 1060s, Benzo’s decision to identify the king as a boy may have reflected contemporary epistolary practices for addressing the young ruler.Footnote ¹⁸ On the other hand, and rather more likely, this letter could simply provide yet another indication of the author’s personal penchant for emphasising Henry’s childhood. Throughout Ad Heinricum, Benzo repeatedly refers to Henry as ‘the child king, my lord’ ( puer rex, dominus meus). Reiterating the fact that the king had been a child in the 1060s appears to have been beneficial to an imperial agenda two decades later.Footnote ¹⁹

Charter references placing the king’s childhood within reflective or didactic contexts were more common than alterations to a ruler’s title to stress his identity as a child. Such public representations of royal childhood often served important political purposes. Under the former, reflective category are the youthful rulers recalling the years of their childhood, usually to emphasise their new-found independence from guardianship arrangements and to assert that they had left boyhood behind.Footnote ²⁰ The latter, didactic context was far more typical for documentary allusions to a king’s childhood while he was still in the life cycle stage of pueritia. Only a few months after Henry IV had been taken into episcopal care following his kidnap at Kaiserswerth, the eleven-year-old expressed a desire for the years of his childhood to be shaped by the models of his father, grandfather and other predecessors ‘who ruled rightly’ (qui bene imperaverant).Footnote ²¹ It was no coincidence that Henry’s announcement was embedded within a gift of the property of Forchheim and other goods in Bavaria to the episcopal church of Bamberg. The Bamberg community had been embroiled in a long-running dispute with Henry’s mother since late 1060 or early 1061. Empress Agnes had denied Bishop Gunther various property rights. Under her guardianship, her son had initially gifted land at Forchheim to the ministerial Otnand in 1061.Footnote ²² Henry’s gift a year later thus righted a significant wrong in the eyes of the episcopal community and the new circle of royal counsellors. The diploma offered them an ideal opportunity to chastise Agnes’s rule tacitly while further legitimising their custody of the king and realm. Moreover, this document overtly promoted the new arrangements for Henry’s education and rule, accentuating the important link between imperial authority and the church’s honour and enrichment. A similar shift in royal acts from early in Philip I’s reign placed new emphasis on the boy king’s role as the protector of churches.Footnote ²³

The year after Henry’s gift to Bamberg, two notaries developed an entirely novel formula for German royal diplomas. This stressed, once again, Henry’s desire to follow in his father’s footsteps by augmenting and protecting ecclesiastical properties. The clause expressed how the king’s ‘tender age’ (tenera aetas) might constrain his provision of royal protection until he had attained his ‘manly strength’ (virile robur).Footnote ²⁴ Although clerks working in the royal writing office drew up the formula, it cannot be fixed firmly to chancery usage and almost exclusively appears in records of gifts to the episcopal church of Hamburg-Bremen. In total, ten diplomas issued in Henry’s name employed this identical clause before the end of 1065, the year Henry turned fifteen.Footnote ²⁵ The documents cluster chronologically between June and October 1063 and then between October and December 1065, precisely the occasions when Archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg-Bremen exercised his strongest influence at court.Footnote ²⁶ Adalbert evidently did not deem the invocation of Henry’s young age as a destabilising factor in his church’s claims to new properties and rights. In fact, the repetitive emphasis placed on the king’s tender age may have helped further legitimise royal action in Hamburg-Bremen’s favour during these years.

When a boy was on the throne, documentary references to his childhood carried an authoritative weight which could be employed to political effect but, even by the thirteenth century, they could still reflect something of the child’s upbringing and education. Childhood instruction is emphasised in a gift the eleven-year-old Frederick II made to the monastery of Montevergine in March 1206. Contrary to Henry IV, who had focused on his father as a ruling model, Frederick instead praised his mother’s role in his education, especially in teaching him to honour the Virgin Mary. Frederick’s actions followed in his mother’s footsteps since he had been taught from his ‘tender years’ to imitate her piety.Footnote ²⁷ These comments had a rhetorical objective, to emphasise that monasteries such as Montevergine, in the region of Campania on the Italian mainland, owed allegiance to the Sicilian boy king through his maternal lineage. Yet the political purpose does not detract from the document’s affective overtones.Footnote ²⁸ Frederick’s comments about his childhood were effective precisely because they conveyed the importance of his mother’s care.

The ways royal charters expressly mention a ruler’s childhood began to shift from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Expressions couched in the culturally constructed terminology of a life cycle stage of pueritia – calling the king puer or parvulus or evoking his ‘tender years’ or ‘years of childhood’ – began to disappear. Terms which introduced a more explicitly legal context to the king’s age became far more commonplace in the record evidence instead.Footnote ²⁹ The means of incorporating a boy king’s guardians within royal decision-making also shifted over the same period. Although the visibility of guardianship arrangements in royal documents varied from case to case, we can observe a clear change in practice in France. In the 1060s, the inclusion of Anne of Kyiv and Baldwin V of Flanders within royal charters frequently necessitated alterations to diplomatic practices to acknowledge the queen’s or count’s participation in governing the realm. When Philip I confirmed a property exchange with the monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the first half of 1061, he explained in the narratio how he had received the kingdom as one with his mother after his father’s death and while still a small child.Footnote ³⁰ Four years later, after Baldwin helped Philip restore the abbey of Saint-Menge to the church of Saint-Étienne of Châlons, an elaboration to the charter witness list acknowledged the count’s aid (auxilium) in all things.Footnote ³¹ By the late 1220s and early 1230s, when Louis IX was on the throne and Blanche of Castile was guardian of king and kingdom, royal documents far less frequently acknowledged the queen’s participation in decision-making. Whereas the terminology of guardianship and royal rule remained fairly consistent between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries,Footnote ³² shifting diplomatic practices altered the methods for conveying guardianship arrangements within written records.

This change in documentary practices in France has traditionally been used to argue for the increasing importance, by the thirteenth century, of maintaining the ‘fictive presumption of the child-king’s capacity to rule’.Footnote ³³ Such an argument is problematic for two essential reasons. First, it works from the modern assumption that royal rule equals adult authority. At the time, childhood and rulership were not viewed in such broadly incompatible terms. The second issue is that the case for an inherent ‘fiction’ in child kingship takes its inspiration from much later legal traditions, rather than drawing on contemporary sources and terminology.Footnote ³⁴ Child kingship was not an absence of royal rule; instead, children were incorporated within a more flexible vision of rulership than modern scholarship has appreciated. Rather than reading the invisibility of guardianship arrangements in royal documents as evidence of a rigid ‘legal fiction’ concerning child kingship (for which there is little support over the central Middle Ages), it is far more informative to contextualise these changes alongside contemporary developments in diplomatic practices and intellectual traditions.

As royal documents became increasingly standardised, lengthy narrationes became less common within French acts, leaving little opportunity for a king’s guardian to be mentioned within this context.Footnote ³⁵ Another crucial change was a decline in beneficiary production, meaning royal chanceries came to dominate the production of written records issued in the king’s name. Of thirty-five acts issued by Philip I or bearing his subscription between 1060 and summer 1067, only five were drafted by the royal writing office.Footnote ³⁶ By the early thirteenth century, officials attached to the royal chancery produced most of the charters issued in Louis IX’s name, with few exceptions. This shift in practice helps explain the fact that Blanche did not feature more prominently alongside her son in his charters, as Anne had appeared alongside Philip in the 1060s. Now that most royal acts were written and issued centrally, rather than being drawn up beyond the chancery and brought to the king for confirmation, beneficiaries of the king’s favour had less opportunity to incorporate the guardian’s name.

Changes in royal diplomatic cannot be separated from shifting intellectual traditions, especially the emergence in France of an abstract notion of the ‘crown’ over the twelfth century.Footnote ³⁷ Although this abstraction appeared in a letter from Ivo of Chartres to Philip I in 1092 and was familiar in royal circles during the first half of the twelfth century, the term corona regni did not become more commonplace until Philip II’s reign. Theoretical conceptions of royal power and authority attracted new attention from the schools and scholars at the University of Paris, and their ideas influenced the thinking of those around the king and at court. Ecclesiastical foundations now began to use this abstract notion when appealing to the king.Footnote ³⁸ Similar abstractions of ‘crown’ and ‘realm’ developed in England over the same period, although under different circumstances.Footnote ³⁹ These emerging conceptual characterisations encouraged an increasing distinction between royal authority and the buttresses supporting it, such as guardianship during a time of child kingship. In France, this counteracted the need for Louis’s mother to be incorporated so conspicuously within formal royal diplomas. Elsewhere, these interrelated administrative and intellectual shifts by the thirteenth century influenced other changing practices of guardianship, such as tentative movement towards the formalisation of royal consilium which I will consider later.

Efforts towards greater standardisation in royal charters did not eradicate all opportunities for documentary experimentation when a child was king, but the formalisation of diplomatic practices did limit the scope for innovation in forms and content. Adaptation is often still evident, but changes were now smaller in scale or along standardised lines. It is beyond the royal chancery – for example, in letters addressed to the boy king rather than acts issued in his name – that we now see the clearest indications of the king’s childhood still prompting shifts in practices of rulership. Returning to Louis and Blanche provides some important examples, especially within the context of oaths of fidelity. Blanche was never entirely invisible in her son’s charters, and the fact that Louis’s acts have not yet appeared in a modern edition has limited attempts to study the full extent of the queen mother’s documentary prominence. Nevertheless, several historians have pointed out that it is in oaths of allegiance to her young son that Blanche is far more conspicuous than earlier French queens, with her name appearing alongside Louis’s.Footnote ⁴⁰ Additional examples from the initial years of Louis’s reign further strengthen this argument since they incorporate both the king’s mother and brothers centrally within assurances of loyalty. At the hands of the seneschal of Poitou, the abbot of Saint-Pierre in Uzerche promised perpetual and inviolable fidelity to Louis, his mother and unnamed brothers in 1229.Footnote ⁴¹ At around the same time, Guy, lord of Malemort, similarly performed and swore fidelitas to Louis and to the king’s mother, brothers and all their heirs, saving only the fidelity Guy owed to the bishop of Limoges.Footnote ⁴² The incorporation of Louis’s younger brothers and Blanche within promises and performances of fidelity from ecclesiastical and secular magnates reveals, once again, how routine actions of rulership adapted to accommodate a young ruler. In this case, the alteration was intended to reinforce recent territorial gains in Poitou during Louis VIII’s reign, cementing the French king’s authority in these southern regions.

Louis IX was not the sole child king to rely on his mother within the context of promises of allegiance in the thirteenth century. From England, Henry III’s counsellors saw Queen Isabella of Angoulême as a channel through which to secure loyalty to her son abroad. In a letter dated 1220, the twelve-year-old Henry ordered his mother and two local abbots to act in his place, loco nostro, and secure fidelity from the newly elected bishop of Limoges, Bertrand of Savène.Footnote ⁴³ Bertrand later confirmed that he had received his temporalities after performing fidelitas to Queen Isabella and the abbots of Saint-Maxent and Saint-Jean-d’Angély.Footnote ⁴⁴ It was not unusual for aristocratic women to perform and receive homage or to swear and accept fidelity in a lordship capacity, either in their own right or alongside their husband or son.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet, whereas Blanche appeared in transactions of fidelity alongside her son, Isabella acted as her son’s agent in his place, uniquely among the queen mothers in this study. Isabella’s position as countess of Angoulême, combined with her royal status and presence in Poitou, allowed her – supported by the two abbots – to serve as the boy king’s representative in a situation of absentee lordship. There is no evidence that secular magnates ever performed the same role in assurances of fidelity alongside or in place of a child king. Claims that the French princes swore an oath of fidelity to Baldwin V during Philip I’s minority are all derived from much later twelfth-century sources endeavouring to promote the history of Flanders and the Flemish counts.Footnote ⁴⁶ This is a striking contrast.Footnote ⁴⁷ Although practices of securing fidelity could shift under a boy king to accommodate royal women, hierarchies of secular authority were never compromised by incorporating magnate guardians within a similar position.

Participating in Royal Rule

Charters and other royal documents furnish evidence of the administrative adaptation and innovation taking place around a boy king, but they also provide crucial evidence of the importance of the child’s presence and participation in royal decision-making. In Sicily, the attendance and consent of child rulers were crucial for the legitimation of important royal actions.Footnote ⁴⁸ The same was true in the kingdoms of north-western Europe. Orders from the boy king’s mouth carried greater sanction than the words of his guardians, counsellors and officials. Being allowed to speak to the king could still be paramount.Footnote ⁴⁹ The authoritative nature of royal will was not entirely lacking under a child ruler, even if the boy could not wield this with the same force as most adult kings. The magnates closest to the child worked to represent his authority and involvement as the foundation underpinning decision-making, especially when they benefited from these decisions. When Baldwin requested royal confirmation of an endowment to his foundation of Saint-Pierre in Lille, the count stressed that the action would remain ‘firm and indissoluble for all time’ because King Philip himself was present, had signed the document by his hand and had attached his seal.Footnote ⁵⁰ A few sources indicate an acute awareness that conversations or altercations with the child ruler might elicit significant repercussions later in his reign. Upon hearing of the rebellious actions of some of the French magnates, the fifteen-year-old Philip II is purported to have said to those around him: ‘with God granting, those men will fail in strength and age, but I will grow in strength and age and wisdom’.Footnote ⁵¹ While we may doubt this reported speech, especially since the account was written much later in Philip’s reign with the benefit of hindsight, other examples provide clearer evidence that anticipation of the king’s future powers, whether of patronage or punishment, influenced how magnates acted around the child. This attitude emerges most vividly in England during Henry III’s minority. In a letter attested by Hubert de Burgh early in 1220, the archbishop of Dublin is told to act so that ‘you shall be deserving of such particular grace from the royal serenity when he has reached a more mature age’.Footnote ⁵²

Guardianship was not simply about taking the reins of power from a boy king and maintaining the status quo as it had been before his father’s death. It was also important to continue the child’s political education, introducing him to actions expected of the king and shaping his view of royal government. The hope was to ensure a stable transition of power as the boy matured and started exerting more of his own will in governance. There are significant examples of child kings present at the settlement of judicial disputes, continuing to serve as figureheads of royal jurisdiction despite their young age. Just after the Easter court at Worms in 1057, the six-year-old Henry IV publicised a judgment concerning the knight Udalrich’s seizure of property from Michelsberg monastery in Bamberg. After the abbot made his appeal in the royal court in the presence of Henry, his mother Agnes and the princes of the kingdom, they adjudged the case together (adiudicatus est) before imposing penalties on Udalrich.Footnote ⁵³ Counsels and assemblies continued to reach judgements during a child’s reign and court cases were still brought to boy kings to agree, even if the judicial proceedings had been carried out elsewhere. In France, at least one legal judgment took place in the presence of Philip I and Count Baldwin, as already discussed.Footnote ⁵⁴ There is some evidence, however, of the postponement of definitive royal confirmation of other judicial cases until Philip reached an older age and was no longer deemed to be under Baldwin’s guardianship. Sometime before 1066, a ‘public assembly’ of bishops and magnates at Compiègne had censured Aubri de Coucy’s attempts to claim certain customs concerning lands and people belonging to Saint-Médard Abbey in Soissons.Footnote ⁵⁵ Aubri had sworn an oath to Baldwin and provided the assembly with written confirmation that he would submit to its judgment. There is no record that Philip was present for this original discussion, but his absence did not delay the reaching of a judicial consensus. In the second half of 1066, the fourteen-year-old king harked back to events during his childhood when he confirmed the account of the assembly by hand. He ordered his seal to be attached so it would remain ‘authoritative and sacrosanct in perpetuity’.Footnote ⁵⁶ At around the same time, Philip confirmed another judgment which his nobles had reached concerning a grievance between the abbot of Saint-Médard and the count of Soissons.Footnote ⁵⁷

The idea that justice was lacking under a child ruler receives considerable support from medieval chroniclers, often reinforcing modern assumptions that a boy king was a variation on the rex inutilis theme.Footnote ⁵⁸ Comments about royal justice cannot always be taken at face value. Although good judgement and justice were sleeping in the Scottish realm during Alexander III’s minority, according to GA I, the author acknowledged that the situation shifted with the removal and replacement of the king’s counsellors. Alexander’s new advisors demanded the former counsellors account for their actions and accept responsibility for the state of the realm.Footnote ⁵⁹ Practices of royal justice differed from kingdom to kingdom and shifted over the central medieval period, so asserting that a monolithic notion of ‘justice’ was hard to secure under a child ruler is misleading.Footnote ⁶⁰ To provide just one example, there are very few documentary references to Malcolm IV, king of Scots, exercising judicial functions throughout the entirety of his twelve-year reign.Footnote ⁶¹ It is hardly surprising, therefore, that no surviving examples of royal justice date from the initial years of his kingship, but this absence likely had little to do with Malcolm’s young age at succession.

In thirteenth-century Scotland, Alexander III’s presence appears to have been especially significant in a case of mortancestry brought against Dunfermline Abbey by the widow Emma, daughter and heiress of the late Gilbert of Smeaton. The importance of the twelve-year-old king’s presence is stressed not only in Alexander’s announcement of the final agreement in 1253 but also in an act issued the same day by Clement, bishop of Dunblane.Footnote ⁶² Alexander embodied the authority of royal oversight by personally inspecting the twelfth-century charter pertaining to the case, in which King David had given Dunfermline the land that was now contested. The young king then ordered the document to be read in his presence to ensure his comprehension of events. Finally, Emma renounced all rights and claim to the land in the king’s presence and through the consilium of his magnates. The settlement of this case was only possible because the twelve-year-old king was there and was incorporated within the agreement of justice and its public performance.Footnote ⁶³ A period of child kingship could even see an increase in royal justice and an expansion of the judicial system. The law code Bracton and a salaried professional judiciary both had their origins early in Henry III’s reign.Footnote ⁶⁴ Of course, the boy king was not personally responsible for such developments, but we must remember that even adult rulers had become more removed from the day-to-day functioning of systems of royal justice since the later twelfth century.Footnote ⁶⁵

Positive characterisations of childhood made their way into descriptions of child kingship more regularly than has been appreciated, but modern scholars have tended to concentrate exclusively on negative impressions of a child’s rule, such as failures in justice or the lack of military leadership. It is undeniable that chroniclers blamed childish character traits or puerile behaviour for perceived failures of royal government when a boy was on the throne. A commentator at the imperial double monastery of Stavelot-Malmedy, after first praising Henry IV’s use of his royal authority to renew their privileges by the subscription of his hand, then criticised the boy’s pliancy at the hands of his counsellors because this failing had sanctioned the charter’s violation.Footnote ⁶⁶ Other writers in Germany likewise linked the king’s readiness to acquiesce to his young age, which made princely tactics of persuasion especially profitable.Footnote ⁶⁷ There was a prevalent belief, no doubt founded in personal experience, that a ruler’s childhood incited confidence from other political players regarding the ease with which they would achieve their own goals. Occasionally, however, this trope was reversed to stress the benefit of the king’s youth. Whereas Rigord claimed that the count of Flanders believed he could easily win over the young Philip II with ‘many promises and flattering addresses’, a few years later Andreas of Marchiennes (d. 1202) inverted this image.Footnote ⁶⁸ Andreas instead asserted that Philip’s boyhood had meant that the French magnates ‘moved like a reed to satisfy him’.Footnote ⁶⁹ In a similar fashion, Matthew Paris emphasises that Alexander III’s youth facilitated his ability to gain favours such as royal pardons from his father-in-law, Henry III of England. Alexander may have been a child but, as the author points out, this did not mean the king’s speech was entirely foolish.Footnote ⁷⁰ Once again, children and childhood were not to be equated with ineptitude. Boys who had been prepared since infancy for their succession to a position of political power would have been socialised to adjust their actions, words and behaviour for courtly settings and diplomatic exchanges.

Rather than immediately accepting a negative remark about a ruler’s childhood at face value, it can be more revealing to place such comments within a wider context. The Dunstable annalist alleged that Louis VIII felt assured in 1225 that his attempt to claim Poitou and other continental lands from the Plantagenets would succeed because the English king was ‘a child and pauper’.Footnote ⁷¹ Upon closer examination, this example discloses far more multivalent associations for childhood within the context of royal rule. First, the annalist supplemented another reason for Louis’s conviction in his success which was far more significant than Henry III’s young age alone: English nobles in these regions had already provided hostages and written promises of support to the French king. Secondly, the writer had expressed the view elsewhere that Henry’s ‘childish age’, on other occasions, had worked to English advantage within the context of Anglo-French relations. Philip II had ostensibly taken account of Henry’s childhood and innocence in 1220 when he agreed to extend their truce for five years without demanding any money to do so.Footnote ⁷² This is not the sole instance where a king’s boyhood was perceived to have prompted diplomatic concessions from neighbouring rulers. Matthew Paris claimed Henry III dropped his request that Alexander do homage for the Scottish kingdom in 1251 because the English king did not want to upset the ten-year-old ruler and his young spouse.Footnote ⁷³ Not only did Alexander’s boyhood work in his own favour, since it allowed him to refuse a request which would have compromised his royal dignity, but it also provided an honourable means for Henry to save face. The English king’s conciliatory efforts could be couched in a demonstration of generosity and magnanimity to a child, fulfilling the conventional expectation that rulers would take orphans under their protection.

Child kingship encouraged many other adaptations which influenced the practices of royal rule and government. Most notably, periods of child rulership are often marked by changes in the management and itineration of royal households. A boy king sometimes limited the distance or frequency of the royal household’s day-to-day itineration, but they could also inspire changes to preferred residences or encourage novel regional visitations. Philip I frequently visited Senlis, where his mother held her dower, during the 1060s and undertook an excursion into Flanders due to Count Baldwin’s influence, while Henry III spent time at Hubert de Burgh’s Welsh residence in 1222.Footnote ⁷⁴ More in-depth analysis of boy kings’ itineraries and households is beyond the scope of this book but deserves a comparative study in future.Footnote ⁷⁵ Another practical aspect of royal rule which faced adjustments during periods of child kingship was counsel, and I now turn to consider the especial importance of collaboration and co-operation when a child was king.

Collaborating and Co-Operating: Child Kingship and Counsel

Child rulership demanded greater recourse to collaborative decision-making and placed the political community under a heightened expectation to ensure magnate co-operation with royal actions. We have already seen how dying kings often encouraged co-operative groups of magnates and prelates to support their young sons.Footnote ⁷⁶ Collaboration then continued to be important after the child’s succession. Child kingship therefore provides an important lens through which to view changing practices of counsel and magnate consensus between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, helping to illuminate the shifting relationship between royal authority and childhood.

Consensus building has been praised as an important legacy of royal minorities, but almost exclusively from an English perspective tracing developments in conciliar guardianship throughout the later Middle Ages.Footnote ⁷⁷ Historians of thirteenth-century England, for example, have long viewed Henry III’s minority as a time of the utmost constitutional importance in expanding conciliar power and introducing the practice of securing common consent from great councils.Footnote ⁷⁸ Neither the pursuit of consensus in rule nor the idea of royal counsel was novel to the thirteenth century, and consensus was an important characteristic of early medieval kingship across Europe.Footnote ⁷⁹ There are clear indications in the mid-eleventh century that the political community drew parallels between child kingship and the heightened need for magnate collaboration. Shortly after Count Baldwin’s death in 1067, the bishop of Angers wrote to the pope to complain about the ‘sacrilege’ committed by Philip I’s appointment of the prelate Radulf as archbishop of Tours. The bishop appealed to those who belonged to the royal court and those outside the court alike ‘to return to sound judgement’ because the king was a child.Footnote ⁸⁰ Citing the words of Isaiah to ‘take counsel together (inite consilium), and it shall be defeated … because God is with us’, the bishop maintained that the kingdom’s magnates and prelates shared a responsibility to resolve troubles in the realm through collective decision-making.Footnote ⁸¹ By accentuating Philip’s childhood and status as rex puer – even though the king was at least sixteen years old and now governing without a guardian at his side – the bishop not only acknowledged the significance of magnate counsel in a situation of child kingship, but he also expected this argument would aid his appeal to the pope and to the French political elite.

Royal documents corroborate the amplified need for collaboration in governance when a boy was king. In France, a small and shifting group of fideles played a significant role in supporting or mediating Philip I’s earliest public actions. The king’s young age likely prompted the incorporation of these fideles within royal decision-making, since the term appears far more prominently in Philip’s early charters than it had in his father’s acts.Footnote ⁸² At Dreux, in the latter half of 1060, Philip added his signature and seal to a diploma which his father had recently confirmed to the local church of Saint-Germain of Brezolles.Footnote ⁸³ Penned in one scribal hand throughout, the extant document was likely rewritten in the royal chancery shortly after Henry I’s death in August. This provided an ideal opportunity to display the arrangements for the kingdom’s governance under a boy king, and to distinguish the new situation from his late father’s rule. At the foot of Henry’s diploma, the king states, in the first person, that he had handed over the document ‘to be reinforced by the hands of our nobles (optimates)’ and had himself ordered their names to be written below.Footnote ⁸⁴ A list of Henry’s optimates follows. When the scribe came to state Philip’s confirmation in the third person, he adapted, rather than duplicated, the wording of Henry’s attestation. Philip had confirmed the diploma with his mother, then handed it over ‘to be reinforced by Baldwin, count of Flanders, and others of their [Philip’s and Anne’s] fideles’, whose names follow.Footnote ⁸⁵ The increased importance of co-operative governance at a time of child kingship is clear: royal actions taken by the boy king and his mother received support from a group of men tied to them by social and political bonds of fidelity rather than by virtue of their noble status alone. Philip’s fideles here include some of his household officers as well as at least one of his peers, Simon, son of Count Raoul of Crépy and Valois (c. 1025–74), who was a similar age to the king.Footnote ⁸⁶ Simon became Philip’s stepbrother two years later when his father married Queen Anne.

Throughout the rest of Philip’s minority, his fideles frequently appear confirming royal diplomas or in the dispositive sections of charters. They are tasked with providing their assent to royal gifts or offering the boy king counsel (consilium) together with his mother.Footnote ⁸⁷ The impetus to incorporate fideles within royal decision-making originated from the king’s household, since the small but important group feature in three of the five charters known to have been drawn up by the chancery before 1067.Footnote ⁸⁸ The occasional charter which lists the names of Philip’s fideles reveals that this group encompassed powerful secular magnates such as Count Baldwin, prominent clergy such as Archbishop Gervais of Reims or Bishop Elinand of Laon, household officers and members of the king’s kin, especially his younger brother Robert (d. c. 1060) and, after 1062x3, his father-in-law Count Raoul. The importance of consulting this diverse group before certain royal actions – or at least being seen to do so – is highlighted in a charter Philip issued to Saint-Crépin-le-Grand in 1063. The eleven-year-old king granted the abbey two altars in Parnant and Colombes, towns close to Soissons, ‘with the consent of my fideles … and others by whose counsel my palace has been ruled’.Footnote ⁸⁹ These circumstances in France, where a small but significant group of magnates, prelates and kin co-operated in royal decisions from the start of the boy king’s reign, share several similarities with the concurrent situation in the Empire.

Child kingship provided the impetus for public displays of collaborative magnate support in eleventh-century Germany, but these were most visible in the record evidence following a change in guardianship arrangements several years into Henry IV’s reign. There are relatively few references to group counsel or consent in Henry’s diplomas during the first five years of his rule, when his mother, Empress Agnes, was overseeing his care and governing the German kingdom. Henry’s grant of the abbey of Drübeck to the episcopal church of Halberstadt in February 1058 provides a rare exception. The boy king made the bequest according to his mother’s petition and with the counsel (cum consilio) of two archbishops, five bishops, two secular princes and various others of his fideles.Footnote ⁹⁰ Since Drübeck was a royal convent, it is possible that Agnes consulted lay and ecclesiastical magnates to secure their approval before alienating royal property of such status while the king was a child. Further indications of magnate consent in these initial years of Henry’s reign are limited to references appearing in spurious documents and verbatim copies of earlier acts, or to records of a single bishop’s or abbot’s agreement.Footnote ⁹¹ There is little evidence for concerted co-operation among a group of princes.Footnote ⁹²

Mentions of collaborative counsel and consensus within Henry’s acts increase after Archbishop Anno and his accomplices took the governance of the kingdom into their own hands.Footnote ⁹³ Especially notable in this regard are a group of documents issued between June and October 1063 in which the boy king consented to petitions with the counsel of his fideles. These diplomas emphasise the significance of collaborative consensus among the named magnates by combining the phrase ‘resolving to consent’ (consentire decernentes) with notions of royal counsel.Footnote ⁹⁴ Chancery notaries introduced this formula into Henry’s documents much as, in the parallel French case, it had been a chancery initiative to incorporate Philip’s fideles within his acts. The first of the consentire decernentes diplomas named Henry’s fideles as the archbishops of Cologne and Mainz, the bishop of Halberstadt and Margrave Otto of Meißen (r. 1062–7). It was issued during an assembly of the German princes at Allstedt late in June, at a time when consensus and collaboration were pivotal. Magnates and prelates met to discuss new guardianship arrangements for the boy king and his kingdom, namely to approve Archbishop Adalbert’s augmented role in governance, and to agree military action to aid the boy king of Hungary, Solomon (1053–87), who was betrothed to Henry’s sister Judith/Sophia.Footnote ⁹⁵

One of the contemporary criticisms of Agnes’s former management of the kingdom had been her close reliance on the intimate advice of a few individuals, especially Bishop Henry of Augsburg (d. 1063). Lampert of Hersfeld reported rumours of a scandalous sexual liaison between the empress and bishop with pernicious relish.Footnote ⁹⁶ Similar allegations were commonly directed towards powerful women and their ecclesiastical confidants, but other writers verify Henry of Augsburg’s prominence in Agnes’s counsels independently of the gossip.Footnote ⁹⁷ Recent modern commentators have claimed, erroneously, that Agnes appointed the bishop ‘sub-regent’ after she had taken the veil towards the end of 1061.Footnote ⁹⁸ This course of events is highly improbable and relies on conjecture alone. Bishop Henry had received gifts for his episcopal church since Henry IV’s succession, but the sole evidence for his prominence at the royal court after 1061 is a diploma detailing a further gift in March 1062.Footnote ⁹⁹ Whereas Henry IV’s diplomas provide no indications of the bishop’s elevated involvement in royal administration, evidence is far more forthcoming for the German princes’ resentment towards the preferential treatment of a single magnate which diminished their collective authority.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Archbishop Anno could not ignore the demands of other prelates and princes for greater collaboration in royal decision-making after he had control of the king and kingdom. Responding to these pressures, Anno specified that the bishop in whose diocese the king was staying would have a special responsibility for cases referred to the king, further empowering episcopal collaboration in and oversight of royal justice.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Strengthening the central place of magnate counsel alongside Henry IV in diplomas was only one aspect of more concerted efforts to broadcast an image of political co-operation after 1062.

These eleventh-century examples reveal a heightened awareness of the importance of counsel following a child’s succession and especially, in Henry IV’s case, after a dramatic, conceivably contentious change in the arrangements for his care and custody. Publicising the participation of small groups of prelates, magnates and, in Philip’s case, close kin in the processes of decision-making alongside the child ruler became a prominent feature of royal documents. Less evidence is forthcoming for the interrelationship between child kingship and practices or performances of collaborative counsel during the twelfth century. This may, in part, be explicable with reference to the ruler’s age at succession. Malcolm became king of Scots in 1152, at the age of twelve, and Philip II became sole ruler of the French kingdom in 1180, when he was fifteen. Since both were nearing or on the cusp of adolescence, rather than still in the midst of childhood, they were likely able to exert more independence in choosing the counsellors they wanted around them, especially in Philip’s case. The early years of Philip’s reign have already been identified as a formative period which provided some magnates with a greater role in private counsel than they had been able to acquire earlier.Footnote ¹⁰² A letter from Philip to Pope Lucius III in 1184 offers a revealing insight in this regard. Explaining his reasons for keeping his uncle, the archbishop of Reims, in the kingdom despite the pope’s demand that William come to Rome, the eighteen-year-old French king claimed that men were ‘attacking our adolescence and striving powerfully to disturb the prosperity of our kingdom’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Philip praised Archbishop William as ‘a vigilant eye in our counsels’, an indispensable asset to the young ruler in the face of treacherous adversaries.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

When these youthful rulers took counsel, it was as part of the hidden background to royal actions. Counsel was no longer foregrounded as a public display of collaborative royal government, as it had been for earlier child rulers. Contemporary documentary evidence furnishes only brief allusions to informal arrangements for counsel around Malcolm and Philip II during the initial years of their reigns. Malcolm’s acts contain few explicit references to consilium, although there are occasional mentions of the king seeking public confirmation and testimony of royal actions from larger groups of magnates and prelates.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Moreover, an episcopal charter provides an external perspective of magnates counselling the young king. When Robert, bishop of Saint Andrews (d. 1159), granted the church of Tranent to Holyrood Abbey he stated that he had done so as Malcolm had previously granted it ‘with the counsel of his barones’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The corresponding royal act is extant but contains no record of the king publicly seeking this consensus before conveying the church to the Holyrood community. The charter’s witness list instead reflects a close-knit group around the boy king consisting of his mother, Ada de Warenne, officials in the royal household such as the constable and chancellor, and trusted clerics or chaplains.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In France, the sole reference to Philip explicitly seeking counsel during the first year of his reign is even more ambiguous because of its doubtful authenticity. The reference comes from a lettre mise included in formularies and is unlikely to have been produced by the royal chancery. The letter claims that, when Philip asked his barons to come to Paris for a crown-wearing in 1180, the fourteen-year-old ruler expressed his desire to take their counsel on confidential matters.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This example, like the Scottish case, firmly locates the counsel provided to a young ruler ‘behind the scenes’, and contrasts with the openly public nature of magnate co-operation alongside boy kings in the mid-eleventh century.

The nature of royal counsel was evolving over the latter half of the twelfth century and into the early thirteenth.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Reuter described the shift over this period as a move away from assembly politics towards ‘proto-parliaments’, while also noting differences between kingdoms in the date and form of these developments.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Unsurprisingly, these changes influenced the role and function of counsel when a boy was king. But we should not overemphasise the progression towards a conciliar form of government, seeing this as an inevitable path which achieved a formalised structure during the thirteenth century. Evidence from periods of child kingship endorses a more cautious approach. In England, while the workings of the royal consilium became far more apparent during Henry III’s minority, these arrangements were still largely informal, with the consilium gathering intermittently and its membership fluctuating.Footnote ¹¹¹ Analyses of the close circle of magnates surrounding Henry (VII) have likewise challenged the idea that the German boy king was supported by a permanent council with stable membership. The arrangements around the child were fluid and his counsellors never had any set, official responsibilities.Footnote ¹¹² Historians of thirteenth-century Scotland have similarly turned from emphasising the proliferation of ‘parliaments’ during Alexander III’s early reign to instead stress the informal structure of such meetings.Footnote ¹¹³ In light of these findings, we must avoid hastily attributing formalised features to consilium without sufficient supporting evidence. Even by the fifteenth century, it was not yet possible to describe royal counsel during a king’s minority as an ‘institution’.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Nonetheless, over the thirteenth century there were two clear shifts in how consilium functioned during a period of child kingship. Both had important implications for the interrelationship between childhood and royal authority. The first perceptible difference is that consilium came to be associated more openly with an ability to limit and redefine a ruler’s actions during a specified period of immaturity. For instance, in England, the restrictions imposed on Henry III to prevent him issuing charters and patent letters in perpetuity until he came of age were ‘stipulated through the common counsel of our kingdom’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Innovations in consilium were not unusual when a boy was king, as we have seen. Yet previous magnate efforts had centred on expanding the role of counsel or more widely publicising the significance of small collaborative groups, rather than adapting or amending counsel’s chief functions. The specification of age-provisional constraints on kings was an entirely novel step and will receive further attention in due course.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Collaborative counsel now expanded to incorporate magnate oversight of certain royal actions rather than constraining itself to the provision of consent and advice at the boy king’s side. Since the later twelfth century, there had been a trend towards specifying the range and order of royal responsibilities with greater definition than before.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Increasing awareness of the duties attached to royal office-holding, and the corresponding expectations these imposed upon kingship, likely encouraged magnates to take a firmer stand when the king was a child. They began to adapt the public functions of consilium at moments when they exercised greater control over the ruler, specifying with greater precision, and more publicly, the ways in which childhood was incompatible with full royal authority. On the one hand, these adaptations had some purported benefits to the boy king in preventing the alienation of royal property and safeguarding his financial and landed resources. However, this level of control over royal actions was precisely what adult rulers had been trying to circumvent by placing their eldest sons and kingdoms in the care of the queen mother, pope or collaborative magnate groups rather than entrusting them to individual secular nobles. Since initiatives to constrict and redefine royal authority were overwhelmingly magnate-led, this also explains why they cannot be observed in circumstances where queen mothers maintained a dominant position in royal government.

The second, interconnected shift was in the relationship between counsel and guardianship. In the eleventh century, counsel had supplemented other guardianship arrangements when the king was a child. Advisory groups of fideles provided support and advice to the boy and his guardian(s), but they did not possess any overt role in the custody of king or realm. Bishops, princes and kin served as royal confidants in decision-making, but they were neither the king’s representatives nor his custodians. Even after Louis IX’s succession in 1226, the arrangements around him and his mother bore a close resemblance to these earlier circumstances in this regard. Louis inherited a group of loyal counsellors and administrators from his father’s reign, including prelates such as Guérin, bishop of Senlis, and Walter Cornut, archbishop of Sens, as well as royal officials such as the chamberlain, Bartholomew of Roye, and the constable, Matthew of Montmorency.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Baronial counsel was less obtrusive and only acknowledged in occasional, exceptional circumstances such as the Ordinance of Melun’s confirmation in December 1230 or before the king and his mother acted against prominent aristocrats.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The first evidence for a magnate council created with the explicit, official task of providing for a child king’s care and for governing his kingdom comes from mid-thirteenth-century Scotland, at the very end of the period under scrutiny here. This Scottish example suggests a visible shift in the purpose of a collaborative group of magnate counsellors, but the evidence must be treated with caution. At Roxburgh in September 1255, the fourteen-year-old Alexander III issued a letter announcing changes to the membership of his council of magnates.Footnote ¹²⁰ The king first removed twenty-six named individuals from their positions, at the instance of Henry III, Alexander’s father-in-law, and through the counsel of twenty-five other named magnates (de consilio magnatum nostrorum).Footnote ¹²¹ Alexander then asserted that fifteen individuals appointed ‘to our council, the government of our realm, and the custody of our body and of our queen’ would remain in post until he reached his twenty-first birthday.Footnote ¹²² This letter clearly defined the council’s overarching responsibility for the guardianship of the royal couple and administration of the kingdom. It also specified age-provisional constraints on royal power, detailing the council’s involvement in protecting royal rights such as wardships and escheats, replacing officials when a vacancy arose and overseeing the care of royal castles. The document is not extant in its original form, however. It survives only as a copy written into the English charter and patent rolls, testifying to Henry’s desire to publicise the agreement after it had been finalised.

Contemporary chroniclers concur that the English king’s contribution was central to instigating these new governance arrangements in Scotland.Footnote ¹²³ This does not mean that the council was an entirely ‘English’ creation. Pre-arranged guardianship for boy kings was not an English custom.Footnote ¹²⁴ The royal consilium had certainly played an important role three decades earlier, during Henry’s own minority, but its purpose had never encompassed responsibility for the king’s custody. The council’s contribution to governing the realm was intermittent and its functions were not formalised in writing. The close association between counsel and guardianship in the 1250s was, therefore, entirely novel in a royal context, either English or Scottish. The provisions set out in September 1255 likely bore some relation to the way the Scottish realm had been governed since Alexander’s succession, even though the letter cast these arrangements in a far more formalised light. Responsibility for the affairs of the kingdom had already rested, informally, in the hands of a group of magnates. Royal documents had even occasionally acknowledged the broader collaborative context to royal decision-making. Alexander’s first charter, issued at Edinburgh in June 1250, invoked the counsel of the Scottish magnates (de consilio magnatum nostrorum) when the king gave licence to the abbot and convent of Paisley to repair a fishpond.Footnote ¹²⁵ This public resort to magnate counsel occurred within the context of a royal assembly at Edinburgh only a few weeks before the well-attended translation of Saint Margaret at Dunfermline.Footnote ¹²⁶ The appearance of Alexander’s unusual small seal around the same time suggests contemporary concerns regarding how to communicate the child ruler’s authority. Yet both Alexander’s seal and the representation of magnate counsel in the Edinburgh act reinforce the idea that the political community were willing to innovate to ensure childhood and royal authority were not deemed mutually exclusive.Footnote ¹²⁷ Another public indication of informal magnate counsel features within the record of Emma’s renunciation of rights to Dunfermline Abbey in 1253.Footnote ¹²⁸ Although the licence to Paisley is the sole surviving action from Alexander’s minority claiming to have been performed ‘on the advice of’ his magnates, this exact phrase reappears in the 1255 letter. This may indicate that a clerk from the Scottish king’s chapel drew up the Roxburgh letter, or at least played a part in drafting it.

Prior to 1255, Alexander’s acts had maintained the impression that the child had sufficient authority to carry out all the functions of royal rule, with the occasional support of magnate counsel when appropriate. Consequently, the decision to reorganise the council’s membership was distinctive both for its imposition of restrictions on the boy king but also for its articulation of the council’s role as custodian and representative governor. A clause within the Roxburgh letter hints at the Scottish political community’s wariness regarding such an explicit record and its implications for the king’s authority. Alexander requested that the document should be returned to him as soon as the period of guardianship was complete, at which point all the measures it documented would be null and void.Footnote ¹²⁹ The Melrose chronicler goes further in revealing that some of the Scottish magnates had refused to attach their seals to ‘a certain most abominable document’ which they feared would dishonour king and kingdom.Footnote ¹³⁰ In theory, this letter introduced a new purpose for the Scottish consilium, unequivocally linked to the king’s young age, which gave the magnates unprecedented official authority over royal decision-making. In practice, however, this does not appear to have altered expectations from within the Scottish kingdom that royal authority remained in Alexander’s hands alone. The personnel who had access to the boy king had shifted, but this did not alter the nature of the child ruler’s relationship with his counsellors. The newly appointed consilium did not become any more prominent within the written record of royal actions, and the Scottish magnates chose rather to maintain the accepted political hierarchy in which the king’s authority was paramount. This provides a pertinent warning on which to conclude. The political community did not always enthusiastically embrace moves towards greater formality in conciliar government even when it gave them greater powers. The notion that a group of magnates could represent and restrict the king, even when he was a child, challenged contemporary understandings of royal authority and, as such, was still viewed with apprehension and uncertainty.

Shifting the narrative of child kingship away from a focus on violence and political disorder to emphasise aspects of experimentation, adaptation and collaboration is by no means a unique objective. Historians have previously made similar arguments for individual royal minorities or specific kingdoms in the later Middle Ages. By taking a perspective across multiple realms and turning to an earlier period, I have made a comparable case for the innovative and co-operative aspects of child rulership before the late thirteenth century. This is not to transfer an idea of violent or politically volatile child kingship even further backwards onto the period before the eleventh century. Earlier medieval polities were not monolithic structures, and it may well be that – for these earlier centuries much as for the period between 1050 and 1262 – aspects of the association between a child’s rule and instability have been assumed and exaggerated rather than established and contextualised. What is apparent, nonetheless, is that fundamental structural changes to society and government over the central medieval period (such as those detailed in Chapter 2) brought a political stability to periods of child kingship which had been less characteristic beforehand. Such stability facilitated greater innovation. Once royal households and political elites did not have to concentrate their attention on simply keeping the boy on the throne, efforts could be taken to experiment with ways of representing child rulers. Incorporating the child within practices and performances of government was especially important within this context. Childhood even became another political tool which chanceries and royal writing offices wielded in the ruler’s favour. Chroniclers also occasionally associated a child’s rulership with positive political connotations, such as encouraging favourable concessions from neighbouring kings or endearing the boy king to their magnates.

Collaborative counsel was another facet of kingship which commonly underwent adjustments after a child’s succession. As the characteristics of royal government changed and the tasks of governing became increasingly administrative, the nature of collaborative efforts around a young ruler shifted. The relationship between child kingship and magnate counsel altered to accommodate some significant modifications to the role and function of consilium. Demarcations between counsel and guardianship gradually eroded while, conversely, distinctions between childhood and absolute royal authority became far more delineated. These were important changes which had a perceptible impact on children’s experience of royal rule,Footnote ¹³¹ but we should not exaggerate their official nature. Even by the mid-thirteenth century, arrangements for consilium were still relatively informal, lacking definition in membership, the stipulation of set functions or regular procedures for meeting. Magnates did not always greet movements away from this norm enthusiastically, even when it would have formalised their authority in royal decision-making alongside a boy king.

Across the central medieval period, the rule of a child consistently provided a catalyst for innovations in practices of royal government even if the form such experimentation and adaptation took varied from case to case. Taking account of such innovations and stressing aspects of political co-operation and attempts at consensus-building presents an alternative perspective on child kingship, moving away from dominant narratives of political disorder. Addressing the problematic association between child kingship and magnate violence helps further develop this narrative.