Isidore of Seville was not the first writer to explain the (rather self-evident) etymology of the Latin word for king – ‘kings are so called from ruling’ (reges a regendo uocati) – but the popularity of his seventh-century Etymologies throughout the Middle Ages circulated this definition widely across Europe.Footnote 1 As a commentary on the nature of royal rule, Isidore’s explanation, as well as other comparable discourses, appear, at first glance, to pose a conceptual challenge to the legitimacy of underage monarchs. If it was the ability to rule which alone made a king, this is hard to reconcile with the reality of situations where the queen mother or non-royal magnates managed the kingdom for several years to compensate for a child’s incapability. Yet the terminology contemporaries use to describe child kingship in royal documents, letters, chronicles, annals and various other sources, suggests a different picture. Analysing this vocabulary rapidly reveals the inadequacies of the terms ‘regent’ and ‘regency’ before the fourteenth century at the earliest, especially in the context of child kingship. Those writing while a boy was king, or in the years immediately after, made a sharp distinction between the conception of royal rule, on the one hand, and the duties, actions and responsibilities of those supporting the child ruler, on the other. Such discernment between royal and non-royal authority is perhaps to be anticipated in charters, letters and records stemming from the royal household and court, but other near-contemporary Latin and vernacular sources represent the arrangements during a period of child kingship in a remarkably consistent manner.
This chapter interrogates how writers employed the vocabulary available to them to distinguish between royal rule, government and administration, education and nurture, and legal wardship and protection. The necessity of accounting for the care of king and kingdom, rather than the kingdom alone, means that accounts of child kingship draw on a broader range of terminology than in cases of absentee kingship. The administration and government of the realm attracted most attention, but pronounced concerns for the child’s upbringing, personal care and education are also apparent; indeed, the two aspects are often intertwined. As we have seen, there is little evidence that rulers enthusiastically embraced legal terms to describe the custody of their child heir and the care of his kingdom in their testaments or from their deathbeds.Footnote 2 The king’s death shifted the situation significantly, however, especially when the boy king and his realm then came into the care of magnates who more eagerly embraced aspects of aristocratic wardship as a model for their roles alongside the child ruler. Contemporary writers and royal officials did not shy away from explicitly legal vocabulary, framing the arrangements for the young king and realm in similar terms to the guardianship of other elite children. The intersection of childhood and kingship was, politically and legally, far less problematic for medieval audiences than it has been for many modern scholars.
Regency and the Child’s Rule
Terms such as ‘regent’ and ‘regency’ are inadequate for describing the arrangements when a boy was king. To begin with, this vocabulary is anachronistic when applied to the central Middle Ages. Regents, like kings, take their title from the Latin verb regere, ‘to rule’, but it was not until the fourteenth century at the earliest that this title appeared in an official context to convey the sense of royal rule in a king’s stead. Its introduction into the vocabulary of the French chancery in 1316 is linked closely to an uncertain royal succession which necessitated a resort to novel measures.Footnote 3 Louis X (r. 1314–6) died in June that year, survived by a four-year-old daughter, Joan, from his first marriage to Margaret of Burgundy (d. 1315).Footnote 4 Louis’s second wife, Clementia of Hungary, was still pregnant when he died, and the realm waited tentatively to see whether she would give birth to a son. As an interim measure and as the prospective successor to the throne, Philip the Long, count of Poitiers and the eldest of Louis’s brothers, adopted the title regens regna Francie et Navarre when he took charge of the government.Footnote 5 The designation of ‘regent’ was an innovation introduced in the circumstances of an absent ruler, not a child king. Within a royal context, this title initially referred to a member of the royal family with a legitimate claim to the throne himself. Intriguingly, it appears to have been around the same time, early in the fourteenth century, that the papal chancery began to use a similar term (regens cancellariam) to convey the sense of ‘ruling’ the chancery in the absence of a vice-chancellor.Footnote 6
In England, it was not until the later fourteenth or early fifteenth century that the title of ‘regent’ began to be used with any frequency in the context of royal rule. Its increased use coincides with greater legal clarity in the allocation of stipulated roles to specific individuals in the event of a child on the throne and, significantly, with the explicit delegation of the act of ruling. When Henry V (r. 1413–22) drew up the final codicil to his will on 26 August 1422, he left to his brother, Humphrey, the ‘guardianship and protection’ (tutela et defensio) of his nine-month-old son, Henry VI, and gave the duties of ‘ruling and governing’ (regimen et gubernatio) to Thomas Beaufort.Footnote 7 At this date, regent was also the title given to those ruling in France for the English king in absentia.Footnote 8 The vocabulary of regency therefore implies a conferral of the royal authority to rule upon a named individual. Such formalised procedures are absent between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Moreover, writers in this period clearly distinguished between regal and vice-regal authority when recounting arrangements for a boy king and his kingdom, as chronicle and documentary sources attest. It was the child’s presence as king which was crucial to the conceptual ideas around royal rulership during a period of child kingship, not the absence of an adult ruler.
Contemporary writers firmly associate children with royal rule while making no attempt to conceal their boyhood. Records of the new monarch’s age and indications of his childhood, such as puer or parvulus, appear in narrative sources directly alongside derivatives of the verbs regere and regnare, or other terms associated with rule, such as regimen.Footnote 9 This demonstrates the widespread acceptance of the principle that the king himself embodied royal rule, even when he was a young boy.Footnote 10 Explicit scepticism linking the king’s ability to rule, regere, to his age was rare, especially in accounts written within the first two or three decades of the child’s succession. Ridicule of a boy king’s rule was taken seriously, particularly if it may have constituted a denial of the child’s kingship. When the papal legate Pandulph reported abuses committed by the constable and men of Tickhill in a letter to Hubert de Burgh in 1219, one of the complaints against the men was their derision of Henry III for being ‘not king but boy’ (non rex sed puer). Pandulph’s unease, and his desire to consult with Hubert regarding how harshly such an ‘insult’ to the king should be punished, is understandable in this context.Footnote 11 The young ruler’s identity as king should have surpassed his physiological status as a child.
In general, even if a boy king was considered to pose an additional risk to the realm, royal rule was seen to be present nonetheless.Footnote 12 Far less common are remarks such as those of Hariulf of Saint-Riquier, writing a history of his abbey before 1088, who claims that the eight-year-old Philip I initially lacked ‘the ability and knowledge to rule’.Footnote 13 Even here, however, Hariulf still distinguishes between the act of ruling – something the writer evidently expected Philip to grow into – and the actions of Baldwin V of Flanders, who protected the boy and his kingdom while governing (here moderare). Chancery records reserve the vocabulary of royal rule for the boy king, never referring to non-royal magnates in such terms. Documents drawn up by petitioners seeking royal confirmation likewise separate the action of ruling the kingdom from the administrative capacity to do so. In a charter dated at Orléans in January 1065, Philip and Baldwin together confirm the knight Gobert’s donation to the abbey of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire. Gobert details the presentation of his charter to the king and to Baldwin, the individual through whom ‘the rule of the kingdom will be administered’.Footnote 14 Gobert still saw the count of Flanders as one step removed from royal rule, administering it but not, himself, ruling. It is hardly surprising that this separation exists in the record evidence, since both the royal writing office and the recipients of a king’s gifts and confirmations had vested interests in cultivating and upholding an image of royal authority in official documents. What is far more remarkable is that, on the whole, other near-contemporary sources follow suit.
The deliberate distancing of non-royal individuals from the act of ruling in cases of child kingship contrasts markedly with instances when a ruler was absent from the kingdom. Later in the twelfth century, for example, the community of Saint-Denis remembered Louis VII specifically entrusting Abbot Suger (d. 1151) with ‘ruling’ the French kingdom.Footnote 15 An adult king could permit others to exercise royal rule on his behalf, as Louis did during his absence on crusade in the 1140s. The same form of delegated responsibility was not feasible in the circumstances of child kingship, when a king resided in the realm and was both visible to and accessible by his court, officers and petitioners. The verb regere and nouns such as regimen are ambiguous to interpret,since they could express rule exempt from any royal connotations.Footnote 16 Nonetheless, when these terms appear in the context of child kingship to emphasise the rule of a people or kingdom, it is the boy king who exemplifies the idea of ‘rule’ rather than the magnates or prelates managing the affairs of the realm on his behalf.
Occasional resorts to the terminology of royal rule to describe non-royal actors in situations of child kingship only reinforce this clear hierarchy of authority, with the boy king at the apex. First, monastic authors writing closest in time to a child’s succession couple the exercise of royal power by non-royal magnates with a negative vocabulary of usurpation and abuse. In the empire, one of the earliest accounts of Archbishop Anno’s kidnap of Henry IV, written from the monastery of Stavelot-Malmedy less than a decade after 1062, claims that the archbishop ‘did not hesitate to transfer the right of power (ius dominationis) to himself with reckless audacity’.Footnote 17 Anno’s abuse of power was a theme the author was keen to impress upon his audience since it fitted his community’s protest against the archbishop’s usurpation of Malmedy.Footnote 18 Later in the narrative, the author blames Anno and other nobles – not the boy’s childhood – for Henry having become ‘as if dispossessed of power’ (quasi expotestatiuum).Footnote 19 In a similar fashion, Lampert of Hersfeld expressly links a declaration that Archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg-Bremen (d. 1072) and the local count, Werner of Hesse (d. 1066), ‘ruled in the place of the king [Henry IV]’ to the abuses the two men committed against abbots and imperial abbeys such as Hersfeld.Footnote 20 Lampert was especially hostile towards Adalbert for his abuses concerning the monasteries of Lorsch and Corvey, and towards Werner for taking a village belonging to Hersfeld with the king’s permission, embroiling the abbey in a lengthy fight to recover it. Royal rule was neither suspended nor distorted simply because the king was a child, but magnates such as Anno, Adalbert and Werner could pervert the norms of rulership by infringing the boundaries of expected behaviour, blurring the distinctions between royal and non-royal authority and power.
Praising a magnate’s proximity to the throne is the second way in which contemporary writers used ruling terminology to describe non-royal actors. Even in these circumstances, however, panegyrics are couched in caveats which maintain the hierarchical relationship between boy king and subject. A monk compiling the Saint-Amand annals describes Baldwin of Flanders as judging in the French kingdom quasi interrex during the initial years of Philip I’s reign.Footnote 21 Other Flemish sources of around the same date praise the count’s skills in governing the kingdom, but the Annales Elnonenses alone attribute the act of royal rule to Baldwin.Footnote 22 Through an expression which perhaps demonstrates the writer’s familiarity with Roman political systems, or his learning in Cicero or Livy, Baldwin appears to be raised to a status equivalent to a king, implying that the realm was kingless. Yet the addition of quasi to Baldwin’s title – a small word which can either convey an actual comparison or a more tentative ‘as though’ – already tempers the rhetoric with some ambiguity.Footnote 23 The writer further qualifies such a lofty impression of Baldwin’s authority by immediately adding ‘saving the fidelity of the boy king, Philip’, an almost comedic volte-face which modulates the praise with an assurance that the count had not acted out of place. Baldwin’s power in the French kingdom, even if interrex, derived from the child king. Aware of this, the Saint-Amand monk was careful to maintain the hierarchy and provide a rational and convincing exaltation of the count.
The description of Baldwin as interrex only survives in one manuscript, Valenciennes MS 343, where a twelfth-century hand has expanded the annal for 1061 in the margin of a computation table. The text may have earlier origins than the twelfth century, however. Philip Grierson, noting that the later hand does not supplement any annals in the manuscript past 1061 despite the computation table continuing for several folios, suggested that these additions to the Annales Elnonenses were taken from an earlier series.Footnote 24 That the original reference to Baldwin as interrex likely came from a contemporary author writing from within the magnate’s own territory, in an abbey with close political ties to the comital family, is significant. Baldwin’s father had encouraged the reform of Saint-Amand, and the abbey was an important political and administrative centre for the Flemish counts.Footnote 25 Even under local circumstances which we might presume would praise a non-royal magnate at the boy king’s expense, monastic authors were still concerned to represent royal authority, now embodied in a child, as supreme.
While contemporary scribes and chroniclers select their terms with care and purpose, those further removed from a boy king’s succession and rule – in time, in geographical location or in both respects – predictably employ ruling terminology with less distinction and deliberation. William of Malmesbury declares that Baldwin ‘ruled the French kingdom’ (regnum Francorum … rexit) during Philip I’s minority.Footnote 26 Writing more than fifty years later and from the other side of the Channel, William used ruling terminology which is absent from near-contemporary narratives written in France. This example, alongside others, further reinforces the fact that twelfth-century authors are not a reliable source of information for circumstances at the French court in the 1060s.Footnote 27 The necessity for exercising precision in terminology declined as the memory of arrangements under a boy king faded. Decisions near-contemporary authors made concerning the vocabulary of royal rule are therefore of far greater value for the insights they can provide regarding conceptions of royal authority during a period of child kingship. This is especially clear when we turn to the evidence for queen mothers ruling alongside their underage sons.
The readiness of medieval writers to associate queen mothers in rule alongside boy kings contrasts dramatically with the meticulous representations of non-royal magnates as subordinate to the child’s rule. Applying the terminology of royal rule to queens was conceptually more acceptable than adopting similar vocabulary to refer to non-royal men. Writing to the queen of France, Anne of Kyiv, on behalf of Pope Nicholas II (1059–61), Peter Damian praised her for fulfilling the ‘office of royal dignity’.Footnote 28 The letter – dated October 1059, and thus prior to Henry I’s death but shortly after their seven-year-old son’s coronation – demonstrates the extent of a royal woman’s association with regal authority by virtue of her anointed position as queen consort. Once a boy became king, charters and other official documents seldom contain explicit statements of the queen mother’s rule, but these records occasionally attest to her close association with the act of ruling from the perspective of petitioners approaching the king. Agobert, bishop of Chartres, obtained confirmation of an episcopal charter to the abbot of Marmoutier in November 1060 on the authority of Philip and Anne, whom he addresses jointly as ‘our lords, the most serene kings’.Footnote 29 The rediscovery of the original document in the Blois archives confirms that this is not a scribal copying error, but rather a rare example of a beneficiary’s appeal to queen mother and boy king together, equally, as kings.Footnote 30 Anne’s inclusion alongside her son in ruling terminology bears some resemblance to occasions when aristocratic women acted in their husbands’ absences. For example, two documents acknowledged the ruling powers of Adela, countess of Blois, using the terms regnantes (with her husband) and principans (for Adela alone), both issued while the count was in the Holy Land.Footnote 31
A more conspicuous administrative association of a mother and her young son in rule comes from Sicily in the year between September 1197 and November 1198, when Empress Constance and Frederick were the kingdom’s co-rulers. Emperor Henry VI had gained the Sicilian throne for his wife, daughter of Roger II of Sicily and Beatrice, in 1194. When Henry died, Constance began to rule both in her own right as her father’s heir but also for her son, who had been born in December 1194 and was anointed king of Sicily in May 1198 aged three. Sicilian royal acts were issued in Constance’s name alone from late 1197 until Frederick’s coronation, but dated by the reigns of both mother and son using the verb regnare.Footnote 32 The queen and boy king then issued charters together from Frederick’s coronation until Constance’s death in November 1198, using the formula una cum to emphasise the joint association of mother and son in rule.Footnote 33 Constance may have been following a precedent from the brief reign of William III, another boy king of Sicily. All of William’s surviving acts, dating between July and October 1194, were issued by the child together with his mother Sybilla using the same una cum formula.Footnote 34 Contrary to Sybilla, however, whose name always follows her son’s in royal documents, Constance’s name consistently precedes Frederick’s, emphasising her position as heir to the kingdom in her own right.
Medieval chroniclers and clerks drafting royal documents purposefully reserved the vocabulary of royal rule for the boy king alone unless his mother took a prominent role, in which case writers could use the same terms to unite the queen in rule alongside her son. When those writing in Germany in the 1070s and 1080s looked back on the early years of Henry IV’s reign, they recorded the boy’s rule with his mother, Empress Agnes of Poitou, using the exact terminology – the verbs regere and regnare and the noun regimen – which, in other cases, writers would have reserved for the child king alone.Footnote 35 Agnes’s association with this ruling vocabulary had begun during her husband’s lifetime. The Goslar Gospel book (Codex Caesareus), for instance, produced at Echternach Abbey c. 1050, includes an image of the imperial couple with the inscription ‘per me regnantes vivant Heinricus et Agnes’.Footnote 36 Accounts of queen mothers and boy kings present a consistent impression of equality in rule, often with reference to the una cum formula. The Life of Henry IV, written early in the twelfth century, describes Agnes governing ‘together with her son with equal right’ in the German realm.Footnote 37 In France, a charter issued in the opening years of Philip I’s reign uses a similar phrase, asserting that he had received the kingdom ‘together with my mother’ (unacum matrem).Footnote 38 A comparable parity in rule is absent from accounts of male magnates or prelates and boy kings. It was the queen’s royal status, therefore, which allowed her to represent the boy king himself, even to the extent of acting in her son’s place, expressed through phrases such as pro eo, loco filii or loco nostri.Footnote 39 Ecclesiastical and secular magnates are not associated with a boy king’s rule in a similar fashion.
Isolated calls have already come from scholars working on periods prior to the fourteenth century, both in royal and aristocratic contexts, to dispense with the modern terms ‘regent’ and ‘regency’. Contemporary evidence for child rulership further endorses these concerns, demonstrating the fundamental anachronism and inaccuracy of such vocabulary. David Bates rejected ‘regency’ as a label for the role played in England and Normandy by Matilda (d. 1083), wife of William I (r. 1066–87), opting instead for a more prolix description in which the queen was ‘sharing in rule, at the same time having an authority associated with kingship and subordinate to it’.Footnote 40 Similarly, Le Goff spurned ‘regent’ as a description of Blanche of Castile’s role in the thirteenth century, arguing that the responsibility of ‘regency’ was instead guardianship and tutelage, even when the individual in such a role had to govern the kingdom.Footnote 41 Looking beyond a royal context, Kimberley LoPrete pointed out that no formal office of ‘regent’ yet existed in French aristocratic households in the mid-twelfth century.Footnote 42 To date, modern scholarship has rejected the terminology of ‘regent’ primarily in the context of reinterpreting a woman’s position alongside a king, either a queen with her husband or a queen mother with her son. Although Crouch questioned whether ‘regent’ is an accurate translation of William Marshal’s role as rector of Henry III and the English kingdom – a title discussed in more detail later in this chapter – relatively few such concerns regarding vocabulary have troubled those writing about magnate guardians elsewhere.Footnote 43 This is despite the fact that terms such as ‘regent’ and ‘regency’ reflect contemporary conceptions even less accurately when applied to non-royal magnates. Writers deliberately avoided associating non-royal magnates with royal rule or with the express act of ruling on a boy king’s behalf. No similar qualms limited the vocabulary used to explain a queen mother’s role alongside her underage son. The title of regent, while anachronistic in all cases between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, is especially inaccurate when applied to ecclesiastical or secular magnates.
Governing the Realm and Administering Affairs
Child kingship was not an absence of royal rule in the eyes of those writing contemporaneously with events. Even after the term uicegerens (literally ‘acting in the place of’) came into use in France and England during the thirteenth century, it was not employed to describe individuals exercising political power around boy kings. Instead, this term referred to the actions of royal agents in the localities or to periods of episcopal absence.Footnote 44 Whereas the political vocabulary of charters and chronicles reflected that royal rule was, for the most part, the boy king’s constant remit, the tasks of governance and administration were seen to be beyond the child’s capacity and needed delegating. Writers gendered the exercise of these responsibilities less frequently than might be assumed, but gender did alter the means of identifying those involved in governing and administering the kingdom’s affairs.
Administrative titles such as rector, procurator, patronus (and even titles less obviously relating to government and administration, such as tutor and magister) exclusively describe non-royal men, never queen mothers.Footnote 45 For aristocratic women, titles such as domina, vicedomina, and legedocta embodied their powers, privileges, and responsibilities without the need for additional administrative labels.Footnote 46 Official royal or imperial titles used by queen mothers acting alongside their sons – mater regis, regina or imperatrix – perform the same function. We cannot discount a woman’s involvement in governance simply on the basis that her title obscures some of the nuances of her actions, especially considering the erratic and inconsistent use of titles to indicate a male magnate’s role in government and administration. In Germany, a royal diploma dated at Allstedt in 1063 named Archbishop Adalbert as Henry IV’s patronus and Archbishop Anno as the king’s magister.Footnote 47 The diploma does not expressly connect either title with the archbishops’ involvement in royal government. Adalbert’s designation as patronus is especially suspect. Besides the Allstedt act, only two other documents – both drawn up at Regensburg on the same day in 1063 – title Adalbert as the boy king’s patronus.Footnote 48 These three diplomas all record gifts to the archiepiscopal church of Hamburg-Bremen. The Regensburg texts do not match formulas discernible in the imperial chancery and were likely drawn up by a Bremen cleric. Adalbert’s community wanted to cast their archbishop as Henry’s ‘protector’, and it is likely that this is how Adalbert wished to be portrayed, but the term patronus can hardly be considered an ‘official’ title in this context.Footnote 49 The designation does not appear with any uniformity which might indicate an officially prescribed role, something which was intrinsic to the later term ‘regent’.
Likewise, in France, Baldwin V of Flanders appears in Philip I’s acts bearing a variety of titles, most of which did not relate to his management of the kingdom’s affairs. Sometimes the king simply addresses Baldwin as comes or marchio, or as one of a group of fideles.Footnote 50 When Philip confirmed his aunt Adela’s foundation of a college of canons in Harlebeke church in 1063, Baldwin, Adela’s husband and Philip’s uncle-by-marriage, appears as ‘the supporter of justice and peace’ (iustitiae et pacis cultor).Footnote 51 Three years later, Philip names Baldwin as his patronus, equating the title with a period when the boy king deemed himself to be under the count’s tutelage.Footnote 52 The dating clause of a Flemish charter likewise designates Baldwin as patronus in 1067.Footnote 53
Two further charters issued towards the end of Philip’s minority address Baldwin by the twin titles procurator et baiulus.Footnote 54 In the first, dated at Corbie in the second half of 1065 and extant only in two later copies, the title appears in the context of Baldwin’s son describing his father’s position. In the second charter, issued at Lille roughly a year later and surviving as an original, Count Baldwin proclaims himself to be Philip’s procurator et baiulus when the king confirms an endowment of land to the college of canons Baldwin had established in the church of Saint-Pierre. Unsurprisingly, since Baldwin had founded the church, the community’s necrology similarly identifies the count as procurator regiminis Francorum.Footnote 55 It is possible Baldwin intended the title of procurator to recall an administrative position associated with vice-regal powers in late antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages, but the designation’s limited circulation beyond Flanders cautions against reading too much into this possible aspiration.Footnote 56 More commonly, procurator was a title which implied that the individual was acting under the authority of the person, lord or corporation they represented.Footnote 57 In this case, authority rested with the boy king even if Baldwin managed the practicalities of royal administration. Aside from the two charters drawn up within or close to the comital household, neither the title procurator nor that of baiulus appear in any other royal acts from Philip’s minority (although the verb procurare is used once in 1065 to describe the count’s role).Footnote 58 Count Baldwin, much like Archbishop Adalbert, orchestrated a more formalised image of his role in governing the kingdom’s affairs while the king was underage. The repeated use of an administrative title was a common strategy to foster such an impression, but there is little evidence to suggest that these magnates’ preferred designations were used beyond very localised contexts.
Royal courts and chanceries display greater consistency in their use of administrative titles to refer to a boy king’s guardians from early in the thirteenth century. William Marshal’s adoption of the title rector regis et regni in England during the initial years of Henry III’s minority provides the most conspicuous example. These were initial steps only rather than a stampede towards standardisation. Even the Marshal’s title did not yet encompass any notion of the investment of royal authority or rule in a non-royal individual. Instead, the title rector regis et regni likely conveyed a more practical dual meaning, reflecting the Marshal’s responsibilities as both Henry’s instructor and the governor of the English kingdom.Footnote 59 The title rector commonly combined the idea of a leader or governor with the additional connotations of a more tutorial role, such as master or instructor.Footnote 60 In the seventh-century Irish tract On the Twelve Abuses, the term rector not only emphasised secular leadership but could also convey a paternal context because of its links to ecclesiastical and spiritual leadership.Footnote 61 The tract, written by an anonymous author but commonly attributed by medieval writers to the third-century martyr Cyprian, was incorporated into Gratian’s Decretum in the twelfth century and remained important for models of kingship and mirrors for princes throughout the Middle Ages.Footnote 62
William Marshal had not, initially, chosen the title of rector to convey his responsibilities as Henry’s guardian. In the month following the boy king’s succession in 1216, the Marshal appears in royal records solely as the kingdom’s (and the king’s) justiciar, a position which was not, as yet, associated with vice-regal responsibilities.Footnote 63 Unfortunately for William, another magnate already occupied this office. John had named Hubert de Burgh justiciar in 1215, and a child king provided a convenient excuse for Hubert to retain his title and office for as long as possible, in line with the agreement that all John’s officers should keep their positions until Henry came of age.Footnote 64 For that reason, William received the novel title rector regis et regni as an alternative in a council at Bristol in November 1216.Footnote 65 The title was undoubtedly a statement of the Marshal’s authority to act in the best interests of the boy king and kingdom as it had been agreed with other magnates and royal advisors. Nevertheless, its ad hoc introduction, and the fact it did not outlive William’s death, adds further doubt to the idea that the title can be equated with the same formalised designation of royal authority later associated with the position of regent.Footnote 66 After William died in May 1219, the three individuals most prominent in English governance – Hubert de Burgh, Pandulph and Peter des Roches (d. 1238) – all continued using their own personal titles (respectively justiciar, papal legate and bishop of Winchester) in royal documents, much as they had done when the Marshal was alive.
Overall, then, there is a distinct lack of evidence for any official conception of ‘regency’ in cases of child kingship across the central Middle Ages, whether through contemporary terminology, titles or ideas of office-holding. An example from the Scottish kingdom serves to highlight how the meanings associated with the title rector shift suggestively after the thirteenth century towards a more explicit connotation with royal rule. The succession of a seven-year-old boy as king of Scots in 1249 prompted a series of discussions among the kingdoms’ magnates regarding the correct order in which the child’s inauguration and knighting should take place.Footnote 67 Should Alexander III be made king, or knight first? When Walter Comyn, earl of Menteith (d. 1258), made his case for the inauguration to proceed ahead of the knighting, he added at the end of his speech: ‘without doubt, a realm without a king is like a ship in the midst of the surging sea without an oarsman or helmsman (sine remige seu rectore)’.Footnote 68 Comyn’s oratorical comparison of the kingdom to a ship – an analogy with a long history – appears in GA I.Footnote 69 The text’s recent redating to the mid-1280s makes it an important narrative for ideas of royal rule contemporary with Alexander’s reign.Footnote 70 Rector is synonymous with remex for the thirteenth-century compiler, with both terms conveying the sense of steering and guidance.Footnote 71 Moreover, Scottish royal seals, which frequently bear the legend ‘king of Scots by the guidance of God’ (DEO . RECTORE . REX . SCOTTORVM), suggest the same meaning for rector within a spiritual context.Footnote 72 When Walter Bower came to incorporate the earlier thirteenth-century annals into his Scotichronicon during the 1440s, at a time when he was intimately involved in the minority government of James II (r. 1437–60), he amended the aforementioned passage to read: ‘just as a boat is tossed about among the waves without an oarsman, so a kingdom without a king or ruler (sine rectore vel rege) is left in the lurch’.Footnote 73 In the altered fifteenth-century version, although remex still adequately describes the guidance of a ship through rough waters, rector had become more appropriate in the context of the direction, or rule, of the kingdom, and as a synonym for rex. No such overt statement of royal authority was yet ascribed to the title of rector by the mid-thirteenth century.Footnote 74
Comments on a boy’s inability to govern because of his age were more common than remarks about his incapacity to rule.Footnote 75 This helps to explain why the Saint-Denis monk Rigord, writing an ‘official portrait’ of Philip II during his lifetime, was so eager to emphasise that the fourteen-year-old had ‘taken up the sacred government (sacra … gubernacula) of the French kingdom’ at his coronation in 1179.Footnote 76 Such assertions were part of a public declaration of Philip’s adult capabilities. Contemporary writers, avoiding the vocabulary of ‘rule’ to describe non-royal magnates involved in the kingdom’s management, rely instead on the terminology of governing and administering, using variants of the Latin verbs gubernare or administrare. Contemporary vernacular sources do something similar, and the Old French gouverner is frequently applied in such circumstances. Within royal documents, it was rare for boy kings to deputise the act of governing to non-royal individuals unreservedly, and the record evidence furnishes only a few select examples. When Philip I confirmed his father’s donation to Saint-Martin-des-Champs in 1065, the king introduced Count Baldwin as the individual ‘governing [or managing] the responsibility of the royal household’ alongside his mother, who gave her approval to the act.Footnote 77 Nearly two centuries later, Alexander III, king of Scots, issued a letter shortly after his fourteenth birthday expressing that he could not take back his castles without the common counsel of his advisors, who had been assigned ‘for the wardship and government’ of his kingdom, his body and that of his queen.Footnote 78
In other narrative sources, such as letters issued beyond the royal court or chronicles, writers far more frequently associate non-royal magnates, councils of advisors or queen mothers with the tasks of government and administration. Meinhard, magister scholarum of Bamberg cathedral, contrasts Empress Agnes’s provision of advice and counsel on her return to Henry IV’s court in autumn 1064 with her earlier capacity, before 1062, of ‘administering’ the principal matters of the realm.Footnote 79 Meinhard’s comment implies a shared understanding of hierarchical responsibilities at court in which administratio represented the very highest level of involvement in royal matters. Lampert of Hersfeld’s claim that Anno conspired to take the ‘government of affairs’ (rerum … gubernacula) away from Agnes during Henry’s reign likewise demonstrates the empress’s central role in political governance.Footnote 80 Royal liturgy could underpin this practical image of a governing queen. A revised late eleventh- or early twelfth-century English coronation ordo, inspired by contemporary examples of governing women, added the formula that the people would be ‘governed by the providence of queenly virtue’.Footnote 81
Contemporary observers therefore employed the vocabulary of government and administration free of the caveats which accompanied the political terminology of royal rule, applying these terms similarly to non-royal magnates and to queen mothers. Whereas hostility towards a magnate’s prominence in government manifested in accusations regarding his encroachment on royal rule, conversely, for royal women acting as their sons’ guardians, it was their active management of the kingdom’s affairs which faced virulent opposition. The anonymous author of the Life of Henry IV defended Agnes of Poitou’s administration of the realm with reference to other queens acting in comparable ways. But the writer grudgingly admitted that princely discontent stemmed from the fact that they considered a woman administering the kingdom to be dishonourable.Footnote 82 These examples of administrative and governance terminology, which could easily be supplemented with many others, show a common appreciation across kingdoms of the political vocabulary appropriate to the context of child kingship. These terms remained relatively consistent between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries in both Latin and vernacular sources.
Child kingship allows an insight into the practical implications of semantic distinctions between regere and gubernare which complement theoretical considerations by historians of political thought and intellectual history.Footnote 83 A concern to preserve the ideological supremacy of regality lay at the basis of the tangible division between royal rule and the administrative act of governing. The need to distinguish between these two aspects had a heightened importance when a child was on the throne. Boy kings could rule because this was both a moral status and a divinely ordained responsibility, rather than a direct reflection of their current physical, biological and intellectual abilities to direct the affairs of the kingdom. The anonymous author of the poem Exhortatio ad proceres regni, writing at the imperial court shortly after Henry IV’s succession to the German throne in 1056, appeals to Italians and Romans to stand by their new king because God’s authority underpins the choice of a child as their leader.Footnote 84 The divine role in selecting young kings for rule is also emphasised in royal charters. In France, for example, several of Philip I’s early acts proclaim him to have been ‘ordained by divine providence’.Footnote 85 In Sicily, as soon as Frederick II had been crowned king in May 1198, his mother incorporated him into declarations of divine favour (divina favente) and grace (Dei gratia).Footnote 86 The resolve to maintain the conceptual and linguistic framework of rulership when a boy was king did not originate from royal chanceries or courts alone. There was a much wider audience equally invested in these ideas, from small religious communities to abbots and bishops, and from towns and urban societies holding royal privileges to the kingdom’s elites. Hierarchical notions of power and authority fully incorporated children, when necessary, and children’s firm association with the exercise of political power through rule was sustained irrespective of their young age. By contrast, the practice of governing, which – as Julianna Grigg has noted for an earlier period – was often inextricably linked to knowledge and education, was seen to be something a boy king needed to learn and develop throughout his childhood and adolescence.Footnote 87 Contemporary descriptions of child kingship thus often focus on the boy’s continuing education, nurture and care.
The King’s Body: Nurturing and Caring for a Child
Isidore’s writings make it clear that royal rule was about far more than simply bearing the title of king. Kings also had to conduct themselves justly (reges a recte agendo uocati sunt).Footnote 88 For this reason, a royal child’s education did not cease once he became king. Instruction became even more important after the boy’s succession to teach him how to conduct himself morally and to rule in accordance with law. Annals, chronicles and saints’ lives provide contemporary evidence of how the biological, social and cultural constraints of childhood necessitated practical childrearing arrangements to be put in place for boy kings.
Chroniclers commonly describe the relationship between young kings and their guardians in terms of education and childrearing, emphasising the latter’s pedagogical role. In the empire, Archbishop Anno began appearing as the king’s magister in royal diplomas only after he had kidnapped Henry IV from his mother, and some contemporary narrative accounts likewise adopt this title for the archbishop.Footnote 89 Although the title magister has a variety of meanings, from governor to official to teacher, here it is clearly connected to Anno’s recently gained responsibility for the boy king’s physical body. It is safe to assume that the archbishop’s role allowed him significant influence over Henry’s education. The Niederaltaich annalist maintained that, prior to Henry’s kidnap, the king’s education was seen to be lacking, specifically in teaching the boy what was good and just, because those around him were too involved in managing the affairs of the palace.Footnote 90 Although these comments were likely intended as a slur against the empress’s care of her son, Lampert of Hersfeld confirms Anno’s involvement in the king’s education (educatio regis) alongside the other bishops after 1062.Footnote 91 It is possible that Anno’s adoption of the title magister regis was a deliberate attempt to appease contemporary worries regarding Henry’s education. A more extensive, though inaccurate, story concerning Anno’s contribution to Henry’s princely instruction is told by Theodoric, a monk of Tholey near Trier, writing before 1080. Theoderic’s Vita et passio of Saint Conrad entirely omits Anno’s kidnap of the boy king, euphemistically claiming that Agnes invited him to educate her son. Henry was then ‘given initial instruction in both divine and human affairs and was educated appropriately as befitted the royal offspring’.Footnote 92 Anno was Conrad’s uncle and had secured his nephew’s appointment to the archbishopric of Trier in May 1066, although the nomination did not end well for the unfortunate Conrad, who was murdered on the order of the city’s advocate and burgrave.Footnote 93 Rather than lingering on unpleasant details concerning power struggles at court, Theodoric sought to praise Conrad through his familial connections to Anno, the man who had educated the king. In doing so, the monk indirectly reveals contemporary perceptions of the boy king’s instruction and the broader significance of the child’s continuing education.
Caring for a young royal child required the engagement of a range of instructors and educators with varying responsibilities for the boy, and these arrangements needed to continue even after the child was ruling as king. Within the context of royal childhood and child kingship, the title magister, and likewise the Old French meistre, implies a pedagogical role in the boy king’s upbringing, but does not necessarily denote that same person’s active participation in the government and administration of the kingdom. Although an Ingelrannus witnesses some of Philip I’s acts as magister regis or regis custos, little is known of what his role entailed in practice beyond these appearances.Footnote 94 The author of the History of William Marshal, writing shortly after 1220, names both Peter des Roches and William Marshal as Henry III’s meistres. Peter and William certainly played an active role in English royal government, but Ralph of Saint-Samson, whom the same author likewise describes as Henry’s meistre and norriçon, did not have any overarching administrative responsibility for the kingdom, although he was sent on a royal mission to Poitou in 1219.Footnote 95 The appearances of terms such as pedagogus and magister within the context of child kingship correspond with descriptions of non-parental figures in other royal and aristocratic households.Footnote 96
The boy king’s wellbeing and the kingdom’s safekeeping were intimately interconnected. Yet much of the authoritative, administrative or pedagogical vocabulary separates the skills required into two separate actions – educating or nurturing the child and governing or protecting the kingdom – even when one individual exercised overarching responsibility for both roles. The noun cura primarily refers to the ‘caretakership’ of the kingdom, or the affairs of the realm, alone.Footnote 97 On occasion, writers use cura, or the verb curare, to indicate the intertwined nature of the body of the king and the body of the kingdom and to unite the two concepts under a collective ‘duty of care’. Bruno of Merseburg, writing in the 1080s, spoke of Agnes of Poitou receiving both her son and the charge of the kingdom to be cared for together.Footnote 98 Even more revealingly, Bruno adds that after Anno had taken Henry away from his mother, the archbishop ‘took care to nurture him with every diligence, as befitted the imperial offspring, providing not so much for the king as for the kingdom’, once again demonstrating the overt bond between king and kingdom.Footnote 99 We have already seen how an eldest son’s spiritual and physical health could be interconnected with the condition of the kingdom.Footnote 100 The linking of good government and royal education sends an equivalent message: raising a boy king well was beneficial to the entire kingdom. The Crowland chronicler, writing in England in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, couples the cura of Henry III and the kingdom together under the collaborative guardianship of the papal legate Guala, Peter des Roches and William Marshal.Footnote 101 Cura, or ‘caretakership’, had connotations of the Roman law of guardianship for adolescents between the ages of fourteen (when Roman tutela ended) and twenty-five.Footnote 102 Although these ideas were influential within contemporary canonical discussions of ecclesiastical suitability for office, we should be careful not to overstretch such legal comparisons within the context of child kingship.Footnote 103 Medieval writers discussing child kingship never explicitly indicated the relevance of these Roman precedents, and the age of twenty-five held little significance for boy kings across the central Middle Ages.
The child king’s education and rearing were not the exclusive remit of his mother, nor was the maternal role solely a nurturing one. Louis IX’s hagiographers used the French vernacular nourrir to emphasise Blanche’s nurturing and educating role during her son’s childhood, but they equally reference her involvement in royal government.Footnote 104 Many of the examples already cited show how those writing from the Empire in the eleventh century saw Agnes of Poitou’s role primarily in terms of administering (administrare or gubernare) rather than nurturing (derivatives of educare or nutrire). The same is true for descriptions of the responsibilities of archbishops Anno and Adalbert after 1062. Kölzer claimed that the fluctuating concepts of ‘regency’ he found in early medieval evidence focused around the term nutrire and its derivatives or counterparts, supporting his assessment with a solitary example from Lampert of Hersfeld.Footnote 105 Discussions of a boy king’s upbringing and education were not unusual in narrative accounts, and vocabulary deriving from nutrire indisputably comprised part of this pedagogical terminology. Nonetheless, the evidence from the Empire in the eleventh century does not corroborate Kölzer’s assertion of the prominence of nutrire above all other terms. Nor do later twelfth- or thirteenth-century sources across north-western Europe support any such position. Writers used a broad range of terms to express the duties of care towards a boy king and his kingdom, incorporating various aspects of governing, administering, nurturing and educating. The principal semantic preference displayed by those writing concurrently with a period of child kingship was, instead, a legally charged vocabulary associated with aristocratic wardship and guardianship.
The Legality of Guardianship
Guardianship was a concept known to those writing between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries; regency, as I have already detailed in this chapter, was not. Writers show few, if any, reservations in incorporating explicitly legal terminology – either in Latin, using terms such as tutor, tutela, baiulus/balius, custodia or pupillus, or in the vernacular, for example bail/baillie,Footnote 106 garde and garder in Old French – into the conceptual framework around the care of child kings and their kingdoms. This does not mean that the arrangements made in cases of child kingship are indistinguishable from those made in cases of aristocratic wardship. We have already seen that kings attempted to differentiate their eldest son’s care from tenurial models.Footnote 107 Even when magnates became more intimately involved in the guardianship of a boy king and his kingdom, there were still clear practical, if not terminological, differences between royal and aristocratic cases.Footnote 108 The relationship between aristocratic wardship and child kingship was one of influence and adaptation rather than exact imitation. Changes in tenurial guardianship over the central Middle Ages contributed to an expansion in the range of legal vocabulary used when a boy was king. It also became increasingly important, by the mid-thirteenth century, for those in charge of a child ruler – whether mother, pope or magnate – to emphasise the legal aspects of their guardianship claim within the political context of child kingship.
The use of some legal terms, such as tutela, remained largely consistent over the period. The term tutela stresses the jurisdictional situation of guardianship under Roman law, in which an underage child could come under a ‘testamentary’ guardian, appointed by the dying male head of the family, an ‘agnatic’ guardian or a ‘statutory’ guardian when no other could be found.Footnote 109 Tutela continues in use across the early and central Middle Ages to describe a child’s legal protection or guardianship, supplemented by similar terms such as tuitio and tutor.Footnote 110 Contemporaries had no qualms in applying the same terms to boy kings. Eleventh-century writers commonly describe Anno of Cologne’s relationship with Henry IV using this vocabulary of guardianship.Footnote 111 Four years after Henry’s death, his son, Henry V (cor. 1099, r. 1105–25), recalled Anno’s involvement in his father’s minority in a diploma for Stablo monastery.Footnote 112 The diploma reinforced the legal connotations of Anno’s earlier role by combining a reference to Henry as pupillus, an orphan or ward, with a statement that both the king and the administration of his kingdom had been under the archbishop’s tutelage (in tutelam). When Emperor Frederick II made his son, Henry (VII), king in Germany early in the thirteenth century, chroniclers were still using similar vocabulary to depict an archbishop’s care of king and kingdom, this time Engelbert (II), archbishop of Cologne (1216–25).Footnote 113
The terms tutor and tutela were also prevalent in France. There is even a possibility that the royal chancery preferred these terms to describe Count Baldwin’s position alongside King Philip. When the fourteen-year-old Philip I confirmed a judgement concerning the abbey of Saint-Médard of Soissons in 1066, he referred to a past time when he had been under Baldwin’s guardianship (sub tutore), describing the count as meus tutor.Footnote 114 We cannot take this document entirely at face value, however, since the original is lost and the surviving thirteenth-century copy in the Saint-Médard cartulary shows signs of alteration and interpolation. Although authors writing in the decade or two after 1066 used legal terminology to assert that Philip and the kingdom had been under Baldwin’s tutela, it was later twelfth-century commentators who introduced the terms tutor and sub tutore into descriptions of the count’s actions.Footnote 115 Tutela and tutor remain central features of the legally inspired vocabulary in accounts of child kingship throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the poem Philippide, written in around 1220, William the Breton refers to a situation in the 1180s when another count of Flanders acted as tutor of an adolescent French king, this time Philip II.Footnote 116 Robert of Auxerre, writing a decade before William, claims that Philip’s chief advisor was the knight Robert Clément, who held the king in tutela.Footnote 117 Alexander Cartellieri dismissed any notion of Philip being under tutelage when he succeeded to the throne, but the use of legal terms in this near-contemporary evidence suggests contemporaries had a more flexible impression of the king’s (im)maturity.Footnote 118 The recurrent use of legal terminology firmly incorporates boy kings within a familiar sphere of aristocratic wardship, but these tenurial arrangements could be adapted, as required, to fit the royal context and ensure that the king’s rule remained paramount.
While the term tutela remains prominent in descriptions of child kingship across the central Middle Ages, another legal term, custodia, enters descriptions of a boy king’s guardianship from early in the twelfth century and was increasingly favoured by the mid-thirteenth century. Earlier writers had occasionally incorporated variants of the verb custodire or the noun custos into their descriptions of child kingship, but these terms had figured far less frequently in eleventh-century narrative accounts than other legal vocabulary such as tutela.Footnote 119 Lampert of Hersfeld, for example, firmly associates the expression in custodia with wrongdoing and captivity, to refer to rebellious monks being taking into custody, rather than in the context of a child’s wardship or the arrangements for Henry IV and the German kingdom.Footnote 120 It is only looking back from the early twelfth century that later chroniclers introduced the terms custodia or sub custodia to describe guardianship arrangements during the early reigns of Henry IV and Philip I.Footnote 121
Custodial terminology was appearing more frequently to refer to a royal child’s care by the early thirteenth century. Chroniclers seem to have incorporated these terms within their semantic registers before the same vocabulary began emerging within the record evidence. Rigord, when describing Philip II’s ordinance of 1190, claims that the king appointed his mother and uncle pro tutela et custodia of the entire kingdom and of Philip’s young son and heir Louis.Footnote 122 Yet neither of these two terms appears in the main body of the document, which Rigord copied into his chronicle. Variants of custodire in the ordinance refer solely to the individuals ‘guarding’ the royal treasury rather than describing the care of the child heir and kingdom.Footnote 123 Around the same time as Rigord was writing, a monk of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris similarly couples the titles tutor and custos to describe the role of Philip of Flanders (c. 1143–91) early in Philip II’s reign. The monastic author specifically relates tutor to the wardship of the young king and custos to the guardianship of the realm.Footnote 124 Pairing custodial terms with the vocabulary of tutelage accentuates the specifically legal context.
A growing preference for custodial vocabulary is discernible over the thirteenth century. Roger of Wendover repeats the phrase remansit in custodia to describe how, in England, Henry III was first under William Marshal’s guardianship and then, following William’s death, in the custody of Peter des Roches.Footnote 125 Terms derived from custodire appear throughout the letter recording Alexander III’s new guardianship arrangements in 1255, primarily to refer to the custody of the king of Scots and his wife.Footnote 126 It is likely that contemporary English practice inspired the application of this custodial terminology to Alexander’s situation, rather than the Scottish chancery being entirely responsible for introducing this vocabulary. Whereas English chroniclers such as Matthew Paris (d. 1259) and the Dunstable annalist consistently describe Alexander’s guardians as custodes and refer to the Scottish king’s custodia, near-contemporary Scottish sources like the Melrose Chronicle prefer the term tutores instead.Footnote 127 It is not until later in the thirteenth century, when Alexander appointed William Sinclair of Roslin as his son’s custodian, that the term custos appears more prominently in a Scottish royal context.Footnote 128 Whether the incorporation of guardianship terms in the 1255 letter was due to English involvement in its creation or not, the document still provides a clear indication of the primary inspiration behind the increasing application of custodial terminology in situations of child kingship. The letter claims that nothing should be done with Alexander’s ‘feudal wardships and escheats’ (custodiae vel escaetae) without the consent of his councillors, tacitly relating arrangements for the tenurial wardship of underage children to the provisions being made for the young king.
Changing ideas of tenurial wardship in aristocratic cases undoubtedly influenced the conceptual and linguistic framework around the guardianship of boy kings and their kingdoms, as already discussed.Footnote 129 Legal texts since the early decades of the twelfth century had increasingly applied vocabulary deriving from custodire and custos to cases of tenurial wardship.Footnote 130 Discussing the arrangements to be made for underage children, the author of the early thirteenth-century Très ancien coutumier poses the rhetorical question ‘who, then, will protect him?’ (Quis igitur custodiet eum?) before answering this firmly in favour of a lord’s right to wardship.Footnote 131 The English legal text commonly known as Bracton, written in the 1220s and 1230s with additions added until the 1250s, shows a clear preference throughout for the term custodia, on one occasion equating custodia with tutela.Footnote 132 The suitability of applying such legal terminology directly to situations of kingship was never a concern for contemporary writers. The adoption of similar vocabulary for boy kings and aristocratic wards does not appear to have compromised the distinction between royal and non-royal authority.
We should certainly be wary of claiming that child kings had legal guardians in an explicit sense of individuals who adopted the full legal personality of their ward. Nevertheless, the alternative – settling for an inaccurate and anachronistic use of a vocabulary of regency based purely on anxiety to avoid guardianship terminology – is equally problematic.Footnote 133 Linguistic differences between modern European languages exacerbate arguments such as these, reinforcing the need to return to an assessment of the contemporary vocabulary. It is problematic to base an argument against the terminology of guardianship in cases of child kingship on dogmatically demarcating what constituted ‘legal’ guardianship in the Middle Ages when these arrangements were themselves flexible and shifting over time.
Combing sources for evidence that child kings had representative guardians in law identical to non-royal examples is as incongruous as it is unproductive. Contemporary evidence presents queen mothers such as Agnes of Poitou, Anne of Kyiv and Blanche of Castile unambiguously ‘deputising’ for boy kings through their regal and administrative duties, management of royal government, provision of advice and supervision of their young sons’ education. These queens also represented and exercised royal authority in their own right. The proposition that a royal mother’s role alongside her underage son should be regarded as an irregular, intermittent, de facto regency – in which the mother was a support rather than a deputy – is therefore unsustainable.Footnote 134 Emphasising legal vocabulary could even work to the advantage of the child ruler and those governing the kingdom on his behalf, especially by the early thirteenth century. The bishops who reported Louis VIII’s deathbed wish for the care of his eldest son and the French kingdom strengthened the legal context of the decision by confirming that Blanche should hold both child and realm sub ballo sive tutela.Footnote 135 The deliberate combination of both customary law and Roman law terms for guardianship within the public declaration of Blanche’s role shows the conscientious selection of legal vocabulary which would be familiar to the wider political community and account for regional differences.Footnote 136 This expression of Blanche’s guardianship precisely in de jure terms of legal wardship provides additional evidence to counter the suggestion that queen mothers could only exercise ‘faktische Regentschaft’ for their underage sons.Footnote 137 Such overt emphasis on the legal basis of a queen mother’s guardianship claim had become increasingly important by the thirteenth century.Footnote 138
Focusing on legal terminology reveals further differences between child kingship and absentee rule. One example will suffice here, although this is a topic ripe for considerable future work. In England, significant disparities arise between the use of legal terms such as custodia when a king was absent and their use when a boy was king. A document issued in February 1214, during John’s absence from England, specifies that Peter des Roches was to watch over the land of the English and the peace of the realm in the king’s place.Footnote 139 I have yet to find an example during Henry III’s minority where the royal chancery affirms the same claim, that the king gave a non-royal magnate custody of the kingdom in his place, loco nostro. In part, this reflects the general desire to avoid attributing royal responsibilities to non-royal magnates when the king was a child, but it also suggests more of a conceptual divide between child rulership and absenteeism than those working on England have often suggested. Absentee kingship may well have provided an inspiration for how to manage the realm while the king was underage, but direct imitation of these practices would never have worked. Child kingship required guardians, counsellors and courtiers to adopt novel roles and responsibilities, to repurpose systems for governing or create new ones, and to underpin their actions with very different conceptions of royal authority and rule.
Narrative and documentary accounts of child kingship rely on a largely consistent terminology to describe the care of boy kings and their kingdoms across north-western Europe between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Child kings rule, sometimes with their mothers acting in rule alongside them. Non-royal magnates and queen mothers alike could govern and administer the kingdom’s affairs, nurturing the boy and educating him to take up the reins of government while acting as his guardian until an appropriate age of maturity. The political vocabulary of child kingship, and the conceptual framework in which boy kings were situated, changes less between kingdoms than might be expected. Instead, changes over time are more apparent. The range of legal terminology used to describe the care of boy kings and their kingdoms gradually expanded from the later twelfth century, and an increasing emphasis on legal aspects of guardianship can be seen during the thirteenth century. Whereas preferences for specific titles or terms earlier in the period expose intensely localised contexts, by the end of the twelfth century there is evidence for a more widespread acceptance and more uniform use of specific titles for non-royal magnates close to a boy king, especially baiulus and tutor, then later also rector and custos. These ideas still fall short of an ‘official’ conception of ‘regency’ since they lack any concerted sense of the exercise of royal rule in the child king’s stead.
Modern scholars of child kingship have devoted significant space to discussing the legal status of boy kings, largely because those most interested in medieval child rulers have often been legal historians following in the footsteps of their counterparts researching tenurial wardship. Both the a priori discussion of legal norms and the comprehensive rejection of concepts such as ‘legal wardship’ or ‘legal guardianship’ in kingship situations simply because they imply a compromise of the child’s legal capacity have, to a certain extent, distracted from the realities.Footnote 140 Legal ideas concerning the guardianship of minors prominently influenced representations of child kingship, but as one aspect of a much broader conception of a child’s rule and the protection they and their kingdom required. First and foremost, writers grounded their depictions of a child’s rule in contemporary ideas about kingship. Upholding the theoretical and symbolic concept of a boy king’s rule was of crucial importance to those writing during, or shortly after, a period of child kingship. How the child’s rule worked in practice, how the everyday business of kingship functioned with an underage ruler and how these arrangements changed over time are issues to which Chapter 8 will turn.
