Placing their new boy king in a cradle at the front of the battle line, the Macedonians – still reeling from their humiliating defeat by the Illyrians and Thracians – resumed the fight against their enemies with renewed vigour, spurred on by their king’s presence. Compassion for the infant ruler guided the battle-weary soldiers, who feared the horrors the child would endure if they were conquered and he was captured. Eventually, having routed the Illyrians with great bloodshed, the Macedonians proudly proved to their foes that they ‘lacked a king, not virtue, during prior combat’.Footnote ¹ This captivating story of an infant on the frontline, as recounted by John of Salisbury (d. 1180) in the Policraticus, is of little historical use if read as a record of an ancient battle. Who was the unnamed boy king? When and where did the battle occur? What happened to the child afterwards? John provides no answers and moves on swiftly.Footnote ² Yet his decision to incorporate this Macedonian tale illustrates the importance he vested in the political and symbolic leadership of kings in mid-twelfth-century England. While John admits that a child’s rule was far from the paradigm – ‘Therefore, how great should [a king] be who has already achieved age and dignity, if one who has [yet] to achieve either of these is so great?’ – there is a king, nonetheless.Footnote ³ This is more significant for the realm’s security and the safety of its inhabitants than the ruler’s age. John of Salisbury overtly accepts child kingship, celebrating the presence of a king, no matter how young, over a previous period of absentee rulership.

This anecdote of the Macedonian infant king provides an all-too-rare insight into children’s roles within the institution of monarchy, as envisioned by an educated cleric familiar with the royal court, but it is by no means exceptional. Writers commonly incorporated models of kingship into their works. Biblical or ancient exempla furnished good examples of rulership and moral behaviour for their readers or tacitly chastised contemporary rulers. Child kingship was no different. Artists and writers placed the figure of a boy king centrally, using images and stories of historical and biblical child rulers as exempla. Employing these models of child kingship was not a novel feature of the central medieval period, and some of the following examples illustrate the much longer history of archetypal boy kings. Nevertheless, the range of models in texts and artworks and their wider circulation between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, especially in vernacular writings, suggest that greater political stability for child rulership over this period corresponded with a shift towards more positive cultural associations between childhood and kingship.

John’s affirmative historical model of child kingship – in which an infant king united his subjects, inspired military might and enabled the defence of the realm – warns against automatically equating a child’s rule with political disorder, disaster and distress. The writer’s immersion in what we today call political theory, as well as the Policraticus’s wide circulation and enduring influence in England and France, make this commentary especially significant for understanding how child kingship fitted within broader ideas of political authority and rulership.Footnote ⁴ Consequently, it is surprising that the story of the Macedonian infant king has failed to attract much modern commentary, even from those mining the Policraticus for concepts of royal ideology and child kingship.Footnote ⁵ This oversight reflects a general assumption that the only medieval model of a boy king is decidedly negative. Modern scholars routinely present Ecclesiastes 10:16 – ‘Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child’ – as a clear statement of the undesirability of a boy king and the threat a child’s rule posed to political stability. The passage has been seen, in turn, as a text quoted ‘with real meaning in the Middle Ages’, an explicit acknowledgement of the fatality of a child ruling the land, an invocation against boy kings and an equation of child kingship with bad kingship.Footnote ⁶ Gerd Althoff suggested contemporaries feared the fulfilment of this biblical lament.Footnote ⁷ The frequency with which the Ecclesiastes verse features in modern scholarship assumes its applicability to all cases of child rulership, but we should not presume the uniformity of the negative model of a boy king.Footnote ⁸

Medieval writers, by contrast, used this biblical verse more selectively, placing the Ecclesiastes passage within a much broader commentary on just kingship. Though the verse could attach to specific anxieties regarding an adolescent’s rule, it was not a blanket proclamation of misery to apply in all cases when a child was on the throne. Cultural representations and political conceptions of kingship across the central Middle Ages unanimously accepted and incorporated children. Placing historical and biblical models such as the Macedonian infant king and the Ecclesiastes passage within a fuller contemporary context helps explain how and why they did so. Contextualising various models of child rulership which figure prominently in textual and artistic traditions – Old Testament kings, the young David, the Christ child and the oft-cited, politically destructive boy king of Ecclesiastes – demonstrates a far more complex, optimistic impression of child kingship than simplistic tales of woe presuppose.

Boy Kings and Old Testament Kingship

The Old Testament supplied a rich source of archetypal models of child kings from which medieval writers could draw inspiration, though historians have taken polarised stances on the scriptural representation of child kingship. Where Theo Kölzer found distrust in the idea of a boy king in the Old Testament, Charles Beem instead saw ‘a striking justification for minority reigns’, especially among the rulers of Judah.Footnote ⁹ More balanced perspectives have drawn attention to the characteristic multivalence of biblical exempla,Footnote ¹⁰ and the adoption of such divergent positions partly depends on whether one approaches child rulership through the lens of earlier or later medieval sources. Whatever the motivation – perhaps suspicion of, or concern to legitimise, boy kings – the Old Testament inspired medieval authors. Writers had long employed archetypal biblical boy rulers to praise the actions of mature kings or to counter adult concerns, but narrative works from the eleventh century onward show how resolutely conceptions of biblical kingship had assimilated child rulership in a positive light. This conceptual framework foregrounded ideas of magnate co-operation, consensus in rule and ecclesiastical counsel and guidance when a boy was king. It even encouraged some writers, by the thirteenth century, to begin introducing these cases as ideals for contemporary royal children to emulate.

The seven-year-old Jehoash’s succession as king of Judah inspired the cardinal-bishop of Ostia, Peter Damian (d. 1072), when writing to Archbishop Anno of Cologne in June 1063.Footnote ¹¹ The year before, Anno had successfully seized possession of the boy king Henry IV from his mother, Empress Agnes. Damian applauded the archbishop for protecting the ‘abandoned’ child and strengthening the German realm, restoring Henry ‘to the command of his paternal right’.Footnote ¹² Anno is a new Jehoiada, the high priest who led a palace coup against the regnant queen, Athaliah, to place the boy Jehoash, her grandson, on his rightful throne.Footnote ¹³ As well as relating the biblical tale in his letter, Damian connects it to current political events, rhetorically asking Anno ‘what need is there to resort to this account from the holy scriptures except that, in you, I see a likeness of the same deed which is fitting for our time?’.Footnote ¹⁴ With Anno occupying the starring role of high priest, Damian casts the twelve-year-old Henry as the child king who can rule his kingdom well, but only with the aid of the Church. Empress Agnes’s part is far less flattering. She is the re-embodiment of Queen Athaliah, the ‘cruel Bellona [Roman goddess of war]’ whose vindictiveness almost destroyed the line of David.Footnote ¹⁵ The six years of Athaliah’s unrightful rule parallel the length of Agnes’s guardianship before Anno and the other princes acted to remove Henry from her. Damian intended Agnes’s association with Athaliah to criticise her prominent role in sparking a papal schism through her support for the anti-pope Cadalus of Parma, who is the target of a vitriolic paragraph later in the letter. Modern historians have generally viewed Agnes’s backing for Cadalus, who took the name Pope Honorius II, as a fundamental motivation for the German princes to plot against her. Many of them preferred the reformer Anselm of Lucca (the elder) as Pope Alexander II.Footnote ¹⁶ Queen Athaliah’s exclamation of Coniuratio, coniuratio! on discovering the conspiracy against her could equally have been Agnes’s cry as the boat carrying her son pulled away from Kaiserswerth palace.Footnote ¹⁷

Through scriptural exempla of boy kings, writers communicated their visions for the administration of a kingdom with a child at the helm, shared ideals of royal rule and raised concerns regarding aspects of child kingship. Biblical texts fundamentally structured the values (Werte) referred to in medieval narratives, meaning that resort to biblical models conveyed more than simplified topoi. Behind narratives ‘stood the immensely weighty system of values elaborated in, and through the scriptures – biblical models of behaviour and biblical reflection on rulership’.Footnote ¹⁸ Since many monastic writers shared similar value systems and the common goals of commenting on or influencing contemporary rulers, the same models recur time and time again. Nearly four centuries after Peter Damian, the Benedictine monk John Lydgate (c. 1370–1449x50?) deemed the biblical episode on Jehoash just as relevant when writing his didactic poetic history The Fall of Princes during Henry VI of England’s minority.Footnote ¹⁹ Damian was not alone in relating Jehoash’s story to his personal experience of a boy king’s reign, but writers contextualised this positive model in different ways.

Peter Damian’s recourse to the Jehoash model was reflective, used to praise an archbishop’s political foresight which had, in his opinion, restored good rule to the German realm. Elsewhere, Jehoash served as an admonitory tale in the hopes of encouraging future behaviour. Writing very soon after the death of David I, king of Scots, in May 1153, the Cistercian abbot Ælred of Rievaulx turned to Jehoash in his Lamentatio David to legitimise the succession and rule of David’s grandson, the twelve-year-old Malcolm IV:

Biblical precedent here provided Ælred with a defence of child kingship grounded in combined clerical and common consent. An account of Malcolm’s succession written a decade or so later likewise asserted that ‘all the people of the land’ had established the boy as king.Footnote ²¹ More significantly, Jehoash’s story offered a template for Ælred’s entreaty to the Scottish nobles that the collaborative support of ecclesiastical and lay magnates could result in good rule under a child king. After first depicting the old ruler’s model death, Ælred proceeded to call for the new king’s model rule.Footnote ²² By appealing to the proceres to maintain harmony among themselves and to preserve their love for King David through loyalty to his grandsons, Ælred hoped that the nobles of his day would imitate the leading men of Judah in their co-operation and counsel.Footnote ²³ Ælred incorporated the Lamentatio into a lengthier genealogical work, which he finished at the end of 1153. He addressed this work to David’s twenty-year-old great-nephew, the future Henry II of England, whom King Stephen had only recently acknowledged as his heir. Ælred may well have seen the tripartite regime underpinning Jehoash’s rule – king, clergy and secular leaders – as a model as fitting for the future English ruler as it was for the young king of Scots.Footnote ²⁴

Josiah, another boy king of Judah, was a more frequent figure than Jehoash in contemporary discourse on political rule.Footnote ²⁵ Patristic and medieval political theology incorporated multifaceted models of Josiah as rex-sacerdos, just king and legislator.Footnote ²⁶ Josiah had become something of a ‘go-to’ biblical model of child rule before c. 800. Bede saw Osred, king of Northumbria, as a ‘new Josiah’, a comparison underpinned by the fact that both rulers had succeeded to their thrones at the age of eight.Footnote ²⁷ Josiah was the sole biblical figure mentioned in Charlemagne’s Admonitio generalis to the Frankish elites in 789, where he was evoked as the ideal of a king bringing his realm and people back to the correct worship of God.Footnote ²⁸ It is telling that the Josiah model then appears to have fallen out of popularity in political literature for several centuries,Footnote ²⁹ perhaps in part due to less positive political associations of a child’s rule. Josiah never reached the same lofty heights of exegetical and moralistic popularity as the biblical David, but some medieval commentators followed Ecclesiasticus 49 and placed both men within a comparable sphere of distinction. For Gerald of Wales, writing in the closing decade of the twelfth century, Josiah was the privileged member of a trinity of outstanding biblical rulers ‘numbered as the three chosen ones’, alongside David and Hezekiah.Footnote ³⁰

Thirteenth-century France provides an example more pertinent to the period under question here, since writers emphasised Louis IX’s affinity with the biblical Josiah, especially in hagiographical tracts justifying the king’s canonisation.Footnote ³¹ Geoffrey of Beaulieu, a Dominican friar and Louis’s confessor, opened his Vita et sancta conversatio by entwining Louis’s reign with the model of Josiah through a comparison of the two rulers’ devotion to God.Footnote ³² Recollections of Louis’s childhood were central to the biblical comparison even though Geoffrey wrote half a century after the king’s succession as a twelve-year-old child. Later hagiographers, copying Geoffrey, adopted the same exemplum, as did liturgical offices for Louis’s canonisation.Footnote ³³ Like Josiah, Louis had sought God from a young age and, becoming king while still a child, had dedicated his kingship to following the Lord and walking in the ways of his father. Geoffrey lingered over the boy king’s religious education. After directly comparing Louis’s father, Louis VIII (r. 1223–6), to Josiah’s forefather, King David, Geoffrey evoked Jedida, Josiah’s mother, as a fitting model for ‘the mother of our illustrious king, the lady queen Blanche’.Footnote ³⁴ In the righteous Jedida – incontestably a more positive biblical example of a queen mother than the murderous, throne-grabbing Athaliah – Geoffrey may have found not only a paradigm for Blanche of Castile’s pious instruction of her son but also a prototype, albeit hypothetical, of a queen’s active role in royal administration alongside her young son. Josiah served here as a legitimising example of child kingship but also as a testament to successful parenting which provided for a royal child’s moral and religious education.

Reliance on the Josiah model in the context of educational programmes for royal children and as a defence for a child’s rule appears to have been less common during the earlier Middle Ages. A prominent exception can be found very early, towards the end of the fourth century. Ambrose, archbishop of Milan, incorporated the idea of Josiah as a king-priest, rex-sacerdos, in funeral orations for Emperors Valentinian II (d. 392) and Theodosius I (d. 395). At the same time, he sketched the ideal of governance for the latter’s two heirs, who were seventeen and ten. Isabelle Rosé interpreted Ambrose’s recourse to the figure of Josiah as a unique response to the critics of the two new emperors, who contested the boys’ power because of their young age.Footnote ³⁵ Elsewhere, it is Josiah’s attributes as an adult ruler which are more prominent within advice literature. Josiah was one of several examples of Christian kingship which Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel employed in his Via regia, composed between 811 and 814 for the future Louis the Pious, who was then in his thirties and ruling in Aquitaine.Footnote ³⁶

Josiah’s significance within the context of princely education resurfaced at Louis IX’s court where the model now overtly acclaimed the good rule of children. At the request of Queen Margaret of Provence (d. 1295), Vincent of Beauvais wrote an educational tract dedicated to Margaret and Louis’s second son Philip and the boy’s tutor, the clericus Simon. In De eruditione, Vincent deploys a range of positive biblical examples of childhood which invite explicit comparisons with Louis’s own succession and kingship.Footnote ³⁷ Chapter 24 is a manifesto of children’s importance within the divine plan. Pueri were chosen as prophets, stood firm in the face of idolatry, died as martyrs and even, in the form of the Holy Innocents, had the first triumph in Christ’s spiritual fight.Footnote ³⁸ Where Ambrose’s model of Josiah had served a defensive purpose, attempting to legitimise the rule of a child and an adolescent, Smaragdus had instead emphasised Josiah’s didactic purpose, though only within the context of an adult’s rule. Vincent’s De eruditione in the thirteenth century did something different, responding to a new, pressing desire, at least at the French court, to teach children more explicitly about their biblical counterparts and to incorporate these models within an educational programme appropriate to their age. Writing for royal mothers, children and their tutors, Vincent demonstrated that boys had not only been biblical rulers but also that ‘the first and best kings were children elected by the people of God’, namely Josiah and David.Footnote ³⁹

The Humble Child David

The adult David is one of the enduring biblical models of medieval rulership. The king’s earlier experiences provide an influential model of child kingship by emphasising the divine selection of children for rule. Liturgical recollections of the child David feature in many of the coronation ordines produced and in use from the later tenth century. The royal elevation of the humble child David (humilis … dauid puer) serves as a manifestation of God’s power within the prayer beginning Omnipotens sempiterne Deus which immediately preceded the ruler’s anointing. In other contexts, the word puer could simply mean ‘servant’ but, within these inauguration rites, David’s childhood is central to the impression of his humility. Of the biblical figures mentioned in the ordines, David alone is puer, and the word famulus instead conveys the servile status of prophets such as Abraham. Coronation ordines across north-western Europe therefore praised God’s elevation of a humble child, liturgical symbolism which contemporaries would surely have viewed with even greater significance if the ceremony raised a royal child to the throne. Both the so-called Second and Third Recensions of the English ordines, produced in the late tenth and twelfth centuries respectively, refer to the child David, as do the Royal Ordo in Cologne, Dombibliothek, MS 141 and the French Ordo of 1250, the former probably originating in the diocese of Cambrai in the first half of the eleventh century and the latter produced during Louis IX’s reign.Footnote ⁴⁰ The prophet Samuel had chosen and anointed the shepherd boy David, son of Jesse, as a future king during his childhood, but the boy’s humility was an appropriate model for child and adult rulers alike. David’s defeat of the giant Goliath during his adolescence further affirmed the Lord’s divine plan for youths he anointed as earthly rulers.

Writers composing narratives of young rulers of their own time turned to the model of David as child and youth. Guy of Bazoches (d. 1203), chanter of the church of Saint-Étienne at Châlons-sur-Marne, evoked the theme of young Davidic kingship when writing towards the end of the twelfth century.Footnote ⁴¹ Echoing a verse from Psalm 143 – David’s lyrical prayers for deliverance and victory against Goliath – Guy praised the early rule of Philip II of France, who had been crowned at the age of fourteen in 1179 and ruled the kingdom alone from his father’s death the following year. Although ‘still a new plant’, Philip was ‘neither small, nor timid’ and embraced warfare ‘more because of his spirit than his strength’.Footnote ⁴² The idea of the young king as novella plantatio makes explicit the connection to David’s song since the psalmist suggests ‘new plants [from the Greek neophytes] in their youth’ will be the reward for his victory.Footnote ⁴³ If Philip was not quite a young David himself, Guy’s comment casts the newly crowned French king as a ruler in a Davidic model entirely compatible with his youthful age. This perception of Philip as the fulfilment of the Davidic ideal of youth endured well into the thirteenth century. Alberic of Trois-Fontaines copied the same passage verbatim in the 1230s.Footnote ⁴⁴ A decade later, Vincent of Beauvais incorporated similar imagery in his educational tract for the royal children of France, anticipating the ‘new plants’ who would cause the church to bloom.Footnote ⁴⁵

Visual representations of David as a young boy or youth are a prominent theme in medieval art, notably in representations of Samuel’s anointing of David, a popular image choice for psalters.Footnote ⁴⁶ Artists often depict David’s anointing either in the full-page image cycles prefacing the psalms or, particularly between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, in historiated initials commencing Psalm 26, David’s song before his anointing.Footnote ⁴⁷ Portraying David as a child within this context may simply have been an attempt to remain faithful to the biblical narrative of 1 Samuel 16. David, the youngest of Jesse’s eight sons, was called in from tending his sheep when the prophet visited his family. Samuel anointed him with the horn of oil as his father and brothers watched.Footnote ⁴⁸ Practical convenience and stylistic devices provide further possible motives for manuscript illuminators to depict David as a child, since the boy’s youthful, beardless visage is a striking contrast for the wise, elderly prophet. Considering the frequency with which biblical imagery intermingled with political commentary, however, a third possibility is worth exploring in more detail, namely that depictions of the anointing sometimes responded to contemporary situations of child kingship.Footnote ⁴⁹

Lucy Freeman Sandler identified a group of psalters produced in England in the first two decades of the thirteenth century which especially emphasise David’s youth in the initial which opens Psalm 26.Footnote ⁵⁰ Other English psalter manuscripts of a similar date likewise incorporate interpretations of the anointing scene while featuring a less childlike, though undoubtedly youthful, David.Footnote ⁵¹ These psalters are all roughly contemporaneous with Henry III’s minority, and there is a strong possibility that at least some of these images were drawn with the boy king’s recent succession, coronation(s) and anointing in mind. Henry’s initial experiences as English king find close parallels in many of David’s cries to the Lord in Psalm 26, especially for courage in the face of armies and battles and for guidance after his father and mother had left him. There is a recurrent pattern of children’s royal inaugurations inspiring psalter production and illumination across medieval Europe. The seven-year-old Cnut VI’s coronation as king of Denmark in June 1170 likely motivated the production of the Copenhagen Psalter, as Patricia Stirnemann established.Footnote ⁵² Two centuries later, in England, Richard II’s inauguration aged ten galvanised those working on the Bohun Psalter to return to an image of David’s anointing and coronation despite the relative unpopularity of this biblical imagery by the late fourteenth century.Footnote ⁵³

There are more persuasive indications that Henry’s succession in 1216 heightened interest in the biblical model of the young David. These were already years of renewed debate regarding anointing’s significance and symbolism. Pope Innocent III attempted to distance royal anointing from its episcopal counterpart by demarcating the attributes associated with the anointings of bishops and kings in a letter to the archbishop of Trnovo in Bulgaria in 1204.Footnote ⁵⁴ At least one thirteenth-century English churchman knew Innocent’s pronouncement, as Johanna Dale’s analysis of marginal glosses in coronation ordines has shown.Footnote ⁵⁵ Stephen Langton’s expansion on the meaning of royal unction in one of his questiones, in which he flatly denies the sacramental character of a king’s anointing, provides further evidence that the topic was contentious around the time of Henry’s succession.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the same passage, the archbishop also considered the propriety of conferring ordination on a child. He concluded that, so long as the child was worthy (dignus), his anointing conferred the same grace as any other. Langton’s arrangements to crown Henry a second time in 1220 provoked additional discussion of practices of royal inauguration, especially since the archbishop had to seek papal permission in this case.Footnote ⁵⁷

This leads into the second reason David provided an especially germane exemplar of kingship for Henry’s minority: the biblical ruler’s multiple anointings were an encouraging precedent for the English king’s multiple coronations. Henry was crowned first at Saint-Peter’s, Gloucester, on 28 October 1216 and then at Westminster on Pentecost (17 May) 1220. An illustration of Langton placing his hands on Henry’s head as part of the later ceremony appears in Matthew Paris’s Chronica maiora (Figure 3.1).Footnote ⁵⁸ In the biblical case, David’s anointing by Samuel as a child had been followed by his anointing as king of Judah at the age of thirty and then a third anointing as king over all Israel. In a glossed psalter produced c. 1210–20 (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 284), Alexander Neckam’s commentary detailing the three anointings accompanies the image of an especially childlike David in the historiated initial opening Psalm 26 (Figure 3.2).Footnote ⁵⁹ Although Neckam wrote his gloss on the psalms while theology master at Oxford in the 1190s, this passage must have acquired new significance considering the events of Henry’s early reign. Another psalter produced in London around the same time even varies the standard titulus accompanying Psalm 26 to show that the image (of a less childlike ruler) referred explicitly to David’s second anointing.Footnote ⁶⁰ Such a change from the regular rubric could suggest that contemporary political circumstances inspired the scribe writing in the lead up to, or immediate aftermath of, Henry’s second coronation. Recalling David’s multiple anointings may have helped allay ecclesiastical concerns regarding the propriety of Henry’s second coronation, but the Davidic exemplar could also provide some solace to Henry’s guardians and counsellors in the face of continued disturbances across the kingdom. In a letter from April 1220, the papal legate Pandulph (d. 1226) possibly evoked Psalm 26 when condemning the ‘evil days’ (dies mali) in which he and the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh (d. 1243), were living.Footnote ⁶¹ Henry, like the child David, would make it through his days of evil with faith and hope in the Lord.

Figure 3.1 Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury, places his hands on Henry III’s head in a depiction of the boy king’s second coronation at Westminster at Pentecost (17 May) 1220. Matthew Paris, Chronica maiora (c. 1240–55), CCCC 16, fo. 60r.

Reproduced with kind permission of The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Figure 3.2 Historiated initial commencing Psalm 26 showing Samuel anointing an especially childlike David. Glossed psalter with Alexander Neckam’s commentary (c. 1210–20), Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 284, fo. 53r.

Photograph: © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Digital Bodleian: digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/58143738-39b4-4556-9fdf-38d4e920937e/). Terms of use: CC-BY-NC 4.0.

The unusual pairing of two full-page images in the Glazier Psalter (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS G.25) provides a final argument for the significance of biblical models of the young David during Henry’s minority. The psalter’s prefatory images contrast the youthful David playing the harp at the bedside of an elderly, enfeebled Saul with a more mature, enthroned David being crowned by two figures in contemporary episcopal dress.Footnote ⁶² Meyer Schapiro was confident that the right-hand painting of David enthroned depicted an English king’s coronation. His dating of the manuscript to the 1220s places the image within the immediate political context of Henry’s inauguration in 1216 and second coronation in 1220.Footnote ⁶³ Stirnemann has recently built on Schapiro’s conclusions, emphasising the increased political significance of the paired images of David within the context of Henry’s minority. Focusing on the left-hand image of Saul lying in bed, possessed by an evil demon, Stirnemann suggested the artist was drawing a parallel between the biblical Saul and Henry’s father, King John.Footnote ⁶⁴ This comparison would have been especially germane in the context of the concerted campaign to distance the boy king from his father’s actions and reputation, epitomised within the pope’s admonishment of rebel barons in 1216 and in the decisive reissues of Magna Carta in 1216, 1217 and 1225.Footnote ⁶⁵ The succession of a nine-year-old boy was far from the sole reason for the proliferation in the 1210s and 1220s of psalter images of the child David, but Henry’s early kingship certainly rekindled contemporary interest in the model of young Davidic kingship.

Christ: Child and King

Christ was both the quintessential child and the epitome of a king. Although seemingly contradictory aspects of the Christocentric model, Jesus’s childhood and kingship were often inextricably entwined, as can be seen in the Ezzolied, a German vernacular poem originally commissioned by Gunther, bishop of Bamberg (1057–65), during Henry IV’s minority. The poem tells the story of Creation to Christ’s birth, then turns to the saviour’s life on Earth, before ending in a hymn to the miracle of salvation.Footnote ⁶⁶ For the anonymous poet, Christ’s imperial rule is evident from birth: ‘At that time a child was born to whom all these lands belong’. The Christ child’s power and wisdom are juxtaposed with his unassuming beginnings and adherence to the human life cycle.Footnote ⁶⁷ The Ezzolied says very little of substance regarding Christ’s upbringing, reflecting the meagre material contained in the canonical biblical Gospels. Yet the poem may still be testament to the early stages of an important shift in ideas about Christ’s childhood. The first surviving version of the Ezzolied, in a late eleventh-century Strasbourg manuscript, does not contain the section concerning the child Jesus. This portion of the poem is only found in the later, expanded, version in a Vorau manuscript from the 1120s.

Christian thought began to place far greater emphasis on Jesus’s childhood and youth during the twelfth century. Only a few decades after the Vorau Ezzolied, Ælred of Rievaulx – writing from the north of England to Ivo, a monk of Warden in Bedfordshire – focused on Christ’s maturation through childhood and adolescence in another of his works, De Jesu puero duodenni. Extemporising on the passage from Luke’s Gospel detailing how Jesus’s parents found him in the Temple speaking with the elders, Ælred uses the allegory of Christ’s progression through his early life cycle to explain the process of the soul’s conversion.Footnote ⁶⁸ Ælred imagines devotional questions regarding how the young Christ would have spent the three days he was missing in Jerusalem: ‘Who gave you shelter? Whose company did you enjoy? Was it in heaven or on earth, or in some house that you spent the time? Or did you go off with some boys of your own age into a hidden place and regale them with mysteries…?’Footnote ⁶⁹ The author’s principal concern was the spiritual insight revealed by an exposition of the boy Jesus, but De Jesu puero seems remarkably pertinent to its contemporary political context when read with an awareness of Ælred’s interest in recent Scottish events. As we have already seen, the Lamentatio David reflected Ælred’s significant concern that the boy king of Scots, Malcolm, should succeed his grandfather without disturbance and receive the full support of the kingdom’s magnates. De Jesu puero was the very next work to which Ælred turned after the Lamentatio and Genealogia, completing it early in Malcolm’s reign, likely before 1157. Ælred claims Ivo originally suggested the subject matter for De Jesu puero, but Ælred’s recent investment in a twelve-year-old boy’s succession may have provided additional motivation for his novel interest in Christ’s experiences at the same age.

It is suggestive that the author describes twelve as a ‘very fitting age’ for Jesus to leave his childhood home in Nazareth to go to Jerusalem, a city symbolic of biblical royal power.Footnote ⁷⁰ In presenting the age of twelve as the figurative peak of an individual’s spiritual progression, Ælred also implies that this literal age marked an important shift between childhood and adulthood. Contrary to Donald Watt’s suggestion that Malcom was regarded as ‘fully adult’ when he succeeded, contemporary monastic commentators acknowledged the king to have been a child at his accession.Footnote ⁷¹ It seems highly plausible that a desire to seek examples of boys like Malcolm instructing much older men and exercising authority and power beyond their years led Ælred to contemplate the puer Jesus, even if the wisdom he drew from this exemplum was predominantly spiritual. A later chapter of De Jesu puero is especially revealing if read with an eye to Malcolm’s recent succession and the problems he faced early in his reign.Footnote ⁷² Ælred encourages those facing persecution and terrors, who fear that they might be overcome, to turn to Jesus for help. Comfort can be found in the knowledge that the Lord ‘will come to your side as a most powerful king’.Footnote ⁷³ Once again, Christ’s childhood was inseparable from his omnipotent kingship.

The growing popularity of the Infancy Gospels and other apocryphal infancy stories, which circulated across Europe throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, epitomises the increasing conceptual and cultural interest in Jesus’s life cycle and the cult of Christ’s childhood.Footnote ⁷⁴ Although recent research has shown a far longer history of devotion to the Christ child, the Vorau Ezzolied and Ælred’s De Jesu puero were, in many ways, forerunners of a trend which developed gradually over the period.Footnote ⁷⁵ The Infancy Gospel of Thomas had been written down within a century of the canonical Gospels, at some point during the second century.Footnote ⁷⁶ From the mid-twelfth century, the Latin translation is frequently transmitted as an addition to the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew in a group of manuscripts identified as Family Q, many of which were of English or French origin.Footnote ⁷⁷ Two forged letters attributing the text to Matthew via Jerome often prefaced the Gospel, cultivating an aura of authenticity around these legendary stories. These texts, and other apocryphal materials, imagine Jesus’s childhood between age five, when his family fled to Egypt, and his visit to the Temple at age twelve. The Infancy Gospels relate incredible stories of the boy Jesus taming dragons, bending nature to his will, walking on sunbeams, murdering childhood playmates whom he later resurrected, and responding angrily when provoked by his schoolteachers. Many of the stories contain vitriolic, anti-Jewish elements.Footnote ⁷⁸ All of them centre on the honour and obedience Jesus is owed despite his childlike form, some with explicit reference to Christ as both child and king. The Vita beate virginis Marie et salvatoris rhythmica, written c. 1230, incorporates a story in which Jesus’s childhood friends in Egypt raise him up as their ruler by placing a crown upon his head, bending their knees to him and honouring him in a fittingly royal manner.Footnote ⁷⁹

Fascination with Christ’s infancy was not a feature of Latin texts alone. Collections of Jewish stories about Jesus’s life and childhood had been circulating in Hebrew as the Toledot Yeshu since the tenth century.Footnote ⁸⁰ The Leben Jesu of Ava (c. 1060–1127), the first female writer in the German language known by name, is further testament to early vernacular biographical interest in Christ at around the same date as the Vorau Ezzolied, although neither text incorporated apocryphal infancy material.Footnote ⁸¹ From the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, vernacular translations and verse epics began disseminating apocryphal stories from the Infancy Gospels, such as Konrad von Fussesbrunnen’s Kindheit Jesu (c. 1190–1200), the Middle English Childhood of the Saviour (c. 1275–1300), the Old French Évangile de l’enfance (mid-thirteenth century) and the Anglo-Norman Les enfaunces de Jesu Crist (c. 1325, although likely preceded by an earlier Anglo-Norman version in rhyming couplets).Footnote ⁸² Strong oral traditions underpinned many of these vernacular works. Phyllis Gaffney has situated the appearance of the latter two texts alongside the increasing popularity of so-called Enfances narratives, in which authors devoted greater attention to the childhood and upbringing of heroes from chansons de geste or romances.Footnote ⁸³ Growing interest in the Christ child was part of a broader shift in both intellectual and popular interest in childhood from the mid-twelfth century onwards.

Evidence for visual representations of Christ’s childhood increases as apocryphal tales circulated more widely in oral and narrative forms. A fully illustrated cycle of the childhood of Jesus, containing fifty-two miniatures, was produced in Italy in around 1270.Footnote ⁸⁴ Several decades earlier, two South German psalters had represented Mary taking Jesus to his first day at school as part of the prefatory image sequences of Christ’s life. A fresco from c. 1235 in the choir of the Marienkirche in Gelnhausen depicts a similar scene.Footnote ⁸⁵ Gelnhausen was near Frankfurt, where Frederick II had made his nine-year-old son German king in April 1220. The education of Henry (VII) under a series of nobles and ministeriales occupied court circles for the next decade, though by 1234 Henry was in open rebellion against his father. The following year, Frederick deposed and then imprisoned his son.Footnote ⁸⁶ There is a possibility that recent lived experience of a boy king’s rule inspired the consideration of Jesus’s childhood as suitable material for ecclesiastical wall paintings in Gelnhausen. More substantial evidence that periods of child rulership could inspire new graphic representations centred on the Christ child’s kingship comes from the Iberian kingdoms. Elizabeth Valdez del Álamo has shown close links between the appearances of monumental images of the Adoration of the Magi in the Castilian kingdom from the mid-twelfth century and the contemporary political circumstances of the succession of the three-year-old Alfonso VIII to the Castilian throne in 1158.Footnote ⁸⁷ In this Castilian case, as with the English psalter depictions of King David, artistic responses to child rulers typically drew on biblical parallels to convey ideas about child kingship and to affirm the positive intersection between rulership and childhood.

Curiosity about Christ’s childhood was piqued almost entirely independently of contemporary instances of boy kings, but contemplation of kingship and power always accompanied stories of Jesus’s upbringing. Rather than depicting Christ as either divine or human, the apocryphal model of the boy Jesus provided a median position between the deific and the humanised images of Christ.Footnote ⁸⁸ Child kingship neatly aligns with a conceptual framework which stresses the inherent compatibility of a child’s humanity with the embodiment of authority and power. For those acquainted with Latin or vernacular narratives, oral accounts or vibrant imagery of Christ’s childhood – an audience who expanded considerably over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – the concept of rex puer would have posed a familiar and surmountable conundrum. Children could exemplify both divine and secular authority; kingship and childhood were far from incompatible.

Child Kingship and the ‘Woe’ of Ecclesiastes

The wide circulation between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries of written, oral and graphic references to the Christ child’s kingship, David’s humility, and the successful rule of Jehoash and Josiah are far removed from the traditional narrative of calamity following a child’s succession. These positive models of child rulership prompt a reconsideration of the negative prototype in which a boy’s rule only represents political calamity. The biblical book of Ecclesiastes appears, at first glance, to proffer a robust warning against child kingship in this regard: ‘Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child, and when the princes feast in the morning’.Footnote ⁸⁹ But this passage must be put under a more rigorous spotlight, especially where historians have based their assertions of its applicability on chronologically disparate sources. Lioba Geis, for example, asserts the negative political connotations of child kingship in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Sicily with reference to a poem written three centuries earlier.Footnote ⁹⁰ Shortly after the seven-year-old Louis the Child’s succession as king of East Francia in 900, Bishop Salomon III of Constance criticised children’s weakness as rulers and their unsuitability for warfare or law with reference to the ‘eulogium’ of Ecclesiastes and its prophecy of woe.Footnote ⁹¹ Such a direct attack on child rulership and on an infant ‘performing the name of king’ came not from Louis’s enemies, as we might suppose, but from the boy king’s closest allies and supporters. Salomon was one of the leading political figures during Louis’s reign and he addressed his poem to another prominent bishop, Dado of Verdun.Footnote ⁹² Salomon’s assurance in attacking the concept of child kingship was a distinctive feature of the political struggles of the late Carolingian period. It cannot be applied to subsequent periods of child rulership uncritically.

Writers across the Middle Ages instead employed the passage in more nuanced ways, even to the extent of associating it with vigorous defence of a boy’s kingship early in the thirteenth century. There are some noticeable continuities between Salomon’s censure of Louis and political rhetoric in the following centuries, namely in the endurance of emasculating descriptions of young rulers. Salomon’s complaints bear some resemblance, for example, to Pope Innocent III’s condemnation of the imperial candidacy of Frederick, the infant king of Sicily, in 1200 or 1201. The fact that both a Carolingian bishop and a thirteenth-century pope turned to the same biblical lament against a boy king is hardly surprising, but it requires further investigation as to whether this passage was imbued with the same meanings in both cases. Innocent’s use of the Ecclesiastes passage to denounce Frederick as candidate for the imperial throne is not necessarily evidence of active prejudice against a boy king, as has been claimed.Footnote ⁹³ There were several other, far more significant factors underpinning the condemnation of Frederick’s candidature, not least Innocent’s desire to prevent the unification of the German Empire with the Sicilian kingdom and thereby avoid the encirclement of papal lands by a Staufen emperor. Innocent was rejecting a particular boy emperor rather than proclaiming open intolerance for all child rulers. In fact, the pope also used his appeal to the woe of Ecclesiastes 10:16 to justify his assumption of the boy’s tutela and proclaim support for Frederick’s kingship in Sicily.Footnote ⁹⁴ Consequently, although both the tenth-century bishop and the thirteenth-century pope employed rhetoric dismissive of child kingship to justify their own political prominence when a boy was king, Salomon’s disparagement of Louis was decidedly more vehement and explicitly targeted the ruler’s childhood. There is little evidence between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries for the public circulation of views similar to Salomon’s, nor for their communication at court among those advising boy kings or governing their kingdoms (though, of course, it is impossible to determine what officials and courtiers thought or said about child rulers more privately). Bishops and senior clerics within the political community avoided so openly disparaging the state of royal rule under a child and displayed grave concern when others questioned or challenged the child’s royal status. The ruling elite’s perspectives of child kingship – or at least what they deemed appropriate to say openly about their boy kings – had shifted between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. Differing interpretations and applications of Ecclesiastes 10:16 were part of this evolving picture.

The heartfelt cry of Ecclesiastes, believed throughout the Middle Ages to be the words of Solomon himself, carried the authoritative weight of wisdom literature. Monastic writers would have been familiar with this passage through several widely disseminated patristic works, chiefly Augustine’s De civitate Dei, Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Iob, Jerome’s commentaries on Isaiah and Ecclesiastes, and Isidore’s Sententiae.Footnote ⁹⁵ A purely literal interpretation of the biblical text would have been at odds with the patristic writers’ intention of uncovering deeper meaning in the scriptures. Consequently, they showed little interest in reading the Ecclesiastes passage ‘politically’ and rarely related the verse to ideas of rulership. Jerome alone comments on a literal interpretation, but his concern was with the childish ways of rulers, not with rulers who were children in age, a distinction which medieval authors frequently echoed.Footnote ⁹⁶ Later writers departed from patristic models by integrating the verse into both political debates and personal grievances, but they still seldom related the passage to actual cases of child kingship despite its popularity in early medieval tracts and treatises.

The Ecclesiastes verse instead became part of an exegetical framework of just rulership from at least the seventh century, when the anonymous Irish author of Pseudo-Cyprian’s On the Twelve Abuses (De duodecim abusivis), building on the patristic tradition, incorporated this biblical passage within a discussion of the ninth abuse concerning the unjust king.Footnote ⁹⁷ At the end of a list of ideals of royal justice, the king was requested to forbid his sons from plundering wickedly, to persevere with the hours of prayer and not to enjoy food before a suitable time, because ‘O woe to the land, when the king is a child and its princes eat in the morning’. The passage provided a timely warning, perhaps even a threat, of the negative consequences for the rex iniquus who did not follow appropriate models of kingly behaviour. The verse circulated widely throughout the ninth century. It appeared in Carolingian political tracts and was cited at the Council of Paris (829) amid episcopal concerns regarding royal justice.Footnote ⁹⁸ Writers did occasionally link the passage to contemporary personal circumstances, as in Salomon’s verse to Dado, but it largely remained in a static form copied from the Pseudo-Cyprian text. Ælfric of Eynsham’s late tenth-century English translation of the tract influenced a series of Middle English poems known collectively as The Abuses of the Age. These, in turn, became associated with Æthelred’s reign, but not until several centuries after his succession as a boy in 978.Footnote ⁹⁹ Haimo of Auxerre (d. c. 870) was unusual in engaging with the Ecclesiastes verse more dynamically in his commentary on Isaiah. He followed Jerome in explaining the scriptural reading of puer or iuuenis allegorically to mean not only a child in age but also men who acted in childish ways.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In this context, Solomon’s son Rehoboam, although well over the age of childhood at his succession, was the perpetual ‘child king’ in signifying someone who conducted themselves childishly and negligently.

Later writers such as John of Salisbury similarly connected the woe of Ecclesiastes 10:16 with the childish behaviour of Rehoboamesque rulers. Writing three centuries after Haimo, John cited the verse to chastise the disregard of wisdom by adherence to the counsel of the young. Later in the same book, John expanded upon the multiple meanings of ‘old age’, a state which could denote mental capability and wisdom as much as chronological age.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In Germany, although several commentators related the Ecclesiastes passage to Henry IV’s kingship, it was the tumultuous events of his later reign which prompted the connection rather than his childhood. Lampert of Hersfeld appears to have been the first to link Henry’s rule to the verse, in his history of Hersfeld abbey, likely produced in 1076 but now extant only as fragments.Footnote ¹⁰² This was a period when royal involvement in the Thuringian tithe disputes had caused the abbey acute financial injury.Footnote ¹⁰³ The Hersfeld community felt the woe of Ecclesiastes personally, so it is telling that Lampert did not associate the verse with his account of the boy king’s minority. Instead, the monk invoked the passage to describe the early 1070s, situating it between a complaint about the degenerate customs of the palace and a report that the empress, Bertha of Turin, had given birth at the abbey in February 1074.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ A few lines earlier, Lampert had acknowledged Henry’s attainment of an age of maturity and exertion of his own will, mocking the king who, though attempting to rule as a new Charlemagne had instead become a new Rehoboam. It was not a child king who brought woe to the realm but rather an adolescent or youthful king beginning to wield greater will, especially if he abandoned the counsel of older men who had guided his earlier rule.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ A comparable combination of localised ‘woe’ and the forsaking of prudent counsel led a chronicler at Ebersheim abbey in thirteenth-century Alsace to recall the Ecclesiastes passage when recounting Henry (VII)’s accession to the German throne in 1220. Although Rehoboam was not invoked in this case, the young king’s failure to respect paternal advice was followed by an account of the injustices he committed against the local bishop of Strasbourg.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Exegetical understanding of age as an allegorical judgement of adult actions meant that writers used the Ecclesiastes passage just as often to castigate bad counsel as to rebuke irresponsibly ‘childish’ rulers. Eleventh-century polemicists inextricably entwined these two aspects in their accounts of Emperor Henry IV’s behaviour and his disputes with Pope Gregory VII, combining ideas of age and suitability which Gregory and other reformers had promoted.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Because Henry had received the government of the kingdom in his infancy, following his father’s death, what Solomon had prophesised was then fulfilled in the king, wrote a member of the household of Anselm of Lucca (the younger) as he composed the saint’s vita in around 1087. The author proceeded to blame the adult king’s immorality and enmity towards religion and justice on his recourse to ‘childish counsels’ which had taught him ‘all varieties of wicked filth’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Hagiographers writing in the 1120s and 1130s, much further removed from events and well after the deaths of both pope and emperor, continued to turn to Ecclesiastes 10:16 but used the verse as a damning condemnation of Henry’s entire reign and his actions towards the Church and clerics in particular.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ These polemical writers resorted to the Ecclesiastes passage as an attempt to explain the political events they were currently witnessing or had recently lived through, rather than to rationalise or condemn a child’s succession.

The popularity of the Ecclesiastes passage persisted into the thirteenth century, but it still only occasionally appeared within the immediate political context of a child’s rule. The increasing prominence of sapiential books in teaching and study may account, in part, for the verse’s popularity in thirteenth-century sermons where it became part of a commentary on pleasure and worldly desire.Footnote ¹¹⁰ According to Jacques de Vitry (c. 1160x70–1240), a rex puer was someone who conducted themself childishly by taking pleasure in the milk of carnal delight.Footnote ¹¹¹ Bonaventure’s commentary on Ecclesiastes, written during the 1250s, once again placed an understanding of the passage within ideas of kingship and government. The author’s denunciation of the disorder created by the promotion of an evil ruler, a foolish ruler, or a useless or negligent ruler used Ecclesiastes 10:16 to illustrate the final category. Bonaventure’s advice on remedying the ‘problem’ of a rex inutilis makes it clear that the age of boy kings alone would not place them in this category automatically. The writer employed a definition of puer similar to Jacques de Vitry, treating the word as a synonym for laziness, negligence and carnality.Footnote ¹¹² Edward Peters’s classic study of the rex inutilis reiterated this point: the term was never applied to child rulers and childhood was not equated with incompetent or inept rule.Footnote ¹¹³ In the second half of the thirteenth century, Thomas Wykes used the Ecclesiastes passage to condemn the baronial takeover of London during Henry III’s reign, an event which had little, if anything, to do with child rulership. Instead, Wykes’s use of the verse fitted with other contemporary commentaries on the childish desires of Simon de Montfort and his nobles.Footnote ¹¹⁴

There were various ways of interpreting and understanding Ecclesiastes 10:16 between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, therefore, many of which disregard the straightforward, literal equation of child kingship with political disarray. Even writers who were generally hostile towards their rulers do not appear to have used the Ecclesiastes passage to discredit, undermine or de-legitimise a child’s succession. Those writing while a boy sat on the throne, or shortly afterwards, instead employed the verse broadly and ambiguously. Lampert of Hersfeld, as we have already seen, believed the passage to be applicable more to the period of Henry IV’s youth than to the years of his childhood. In France, the Tours chronicler, writing shortly after Louis IX’s succession in 1226, ostensibly uses the passage to condemn child rulership. He laments that the kingdom’s enemies saw the realm destitute of counsel and aid since governance was in ‘the hands of a woman and a boy, and of a certain old man’, recalling the Ovidian trio during Ulysses’s absence: Penelope, the old man Laërtes and the child Telemachus.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The whole point of this passage, however, is to show that the kingdom’s enemies were mistaken. After having lamented the lack of military capability embodied in the trinity of Blanche, Louis and the chamberlain Bartholomew of Roye (d. 1237), the chronicler confirms that the queen mother and boy king came to Tours accompanied by a very large army, held a parlamentum at Chinon and proceeded to secure peace.

The author of GA I appears more pessimistic when looking back from the mid-1280s at Alexander III’s early reign. Because of the list of miseries which had then afflicted the Scottish kingdom – oppression of the poor, disinheritance of nobles, compulsory services imposed upon citizens and violations of churches – the chronicler claimed one could rightly say ‘Woe! to the kingdom whose king is a child’. Once again, there was more to this author’s resort to Ecclesiastes than initially meets the eye. The chronicler cited the passage centrally within an account of the disgraceful behaviour of Alexander’s advisers (‘there were as many kings as there were counsellors’) and their removal and replacement under the watchful guidance of the king’s father-in-law, Henry III of England.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The boy king was not himself at fault, nor indeed was the concept of child kingship under attack. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when Walter Bower and Adam Abell were writing, Ecclesiastes 10:16 had become more of a literary trope to be rolled out in accounts of any Scottish royal minority.Footnote ¹¹⁷ At around the same time in England, the records of a treason trial against Henry VI even stated Thomas Kerver’s citation of the verse as one of six charges brought against him, suggesting that the Ecclesiastes passage had evolved more blatantly negative connotations in circumstances of child kingship by the later medieval period.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In the late thirteenth century, by contrast, the author of GA I used the verse to revive a familiar political theme which had similarly occupied Ælred in his Lamentatio: the necessity for the Scottish nobles to work together in counsel to govern the realm when a child was on the throne.

GA I’s anonymous author likely relied on material written contemporaneously with Alexander’s minority, but this passage was just as pertinent a warning to the political community at the time of the text’s compilation in the mid-1280s. Following the deaths of Alexander’s three adult children between 1281 and 1284, the Scottish magnates promised their support to the king’s infant granddaughter Margaret, then resident in Norway, as Alexander’s heir. When Alexander died in 1286, Margaret’s claim was challenged only by the unborn child of the ruler’s second wife, Queen Yolande. A group of guardians were appointed to rule for the interim until Yolande gave birth, but these arrangements lasted years longer than intended since the queen’s child did not survive. Margaret became ill en route to Scotland and died in Orkney in 1290.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Appeals to the ‘corporate responsibility’ of a kingdom’s nobility were not exclusively a feature of later medieval minorities.Footnote ¹²⁰ In Scotland, as elsewhere, the Ecclesiastes warning could form a rhetorical and biblical inducement to unite the political community. If the princes did not collaborate and co-operate but were instead driven by their own self-interests, any kingdom, wrought with factional divisions, was bound to suffer.

Old and New Testament kingship both furnished positive biblical models of child rulership, in which young boys ruled with the help of wise counsel and divine support. These exempla provide exegetical counterparts to the more negative representation in Ecclesiastes of misfortune under a child ruler, but even this is not a straightforwardly pessimistic tale of woe. Considering each author’s intentions and the contemporary context in which they were writing reveals a far more complex response to the biblical verse. Ecclesiastes 10:16 was not a ‘standard complaint about the rule of minors’ during the Middle Ages, especially not in our period.Footnote ¹²¹ Instead it was a criticism of the unruly and opportunistic behaviour of noblemen and royal advisors who should know better. Regardless of the ruler’s age, if reprehensible morality or poor counsel surrounded him, he was likely to bring anguish to the land and be unable to live up to the epitome of just, moral kingship. During periods of child rulership, the Ecclesiastes passage often became a means of chastising those who should be defending the kingdom on the boy king’s behalf. Only very occasionally did the verse serve to attack a child ruler himself. In these rare cases, writers typically directed their criticism less at childhood and more at the life cycle stages which followed, condemning royal adolescents and youths who turned away from wise counsel, like Rehoboam, to seek the company of incompetent and childish advisors. Recurrent condemnation of ‘childish’ counsels and the equation of puer with negligent kingship are indictments which demonstrate the timelessness of childhood’s adverse political connotations. Although they hint at some of the obstacles which had to be overcome when a boy was on the throne, these tropes were used to criticise adult kings far more than child rulers.

Representations of child kingship and conceptions of children’s significance within the context of medieval rulership were shifting between the early and central Middle Ages, as both this chapter and Chapter 2 have shown. Increasing attention to childhood in exegetical, apocryphal and romance traditions altered how writers wrote about royal children and boy kings, reinforcing the formative influence of children’s education and upbringing. By the mid-thirteenth century, not only did writers and artists turn to biblical models of child rulers to make sense of and comment on contemporary political circumstances, but educators also began to introduce royal children to these models as part of their preparation for rulership. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 explore how royal families prepared children for kingship, how political communities were primed to receive boys as their rulers and how kings facilitated arrangements for child kingship from their deathbeds.