Gone Medieval - Boy Kings of Medieval Europe

Episode Date: October 4, 2022

Charles III recently became King at the age of 73 - the oldest man ever to become a British monarch. That might not seem so odd to us today, but had he been a child it would certainly have raised eyebrows. The idea of a child monarch is today practically unthinkable; in the Medieval period it was relatively common. But the rule of a boy king did not necessarily mean political disorder. In fact it posed far less of a challenge than having an adolescent king.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman finds out why from Dr. Emily Ward, author of Royal Childhood and Child Kingship: Boy Kings in England, Scotland, France and Germany, c. 1050–1262.The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. It was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg. For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.For your chance to win five Historical Non-Fiction Books (including a signed copy of Dan Snow's On This Day in History), please fill out this short survey.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm your host for today, Dr. Kat Jarman. When Charles III became king this September, he was aged 73 and that made him the oldest monarch to be crowned in Britain ever. Now that might not seem so odd to us now, but had he been a child, we would certainly erase an eyebrow or two. Today, the idea of having a child monarch is rather unthinkable, but throughout history, that's not been the case.

In the medieval period, it was actually rather common to have a young child on the throne, usually a boy. But what do we know about these boy kings, and what was the royal childhood really like? Today's guest is here to tell me all about that, because she has just published a book on this very topic. Dr. Emily Ward is the post-doctoral at the University of Edinburgh, and her book is called Rorylowe. Royal Childhood and Child Kingship, Boy Kings in England, Scotland, France and Germany, circa 1050 to 1262. Emily, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast here today. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to talk to you about this. Brilliant. I'm so pleased you can make it. I think this is such a fascinating topic.

Now, this is a period that's just beyond what I would normally research myself, but it is something that comes up a lot because we of course have these boys, really, children who become kings. And so to see that study that's a subject, I was really please. So congratulations and well done on the book. Thank you. Yes, it's exciting to sit out. I believe it's on a bookshelf somewhere in Cambridge University Press store. So, you know, out there in physical hard copies, exciting. That's always such a nice feeling. Brilliant. But I would just start out really. So I mean, obviously this is your research that you've been working on from quite some time this topic. But could you sort of say, why is it interesting and

important to learn about these child kings? Yeah, I think if we think about medieval kingship, we often go straight to the assumption that's male and adult kingship. And obviously a lot has been written more recently about medieval queens and quenship as a real central part of royal rulership. But I think children have perhaps got a little bit left behind. And one of the interesting things for me is that this is not a phenomenon unique to the 11th and 13th century, although that's the period that my book focuses on. We have children involved in royal rule across the entire period.

In fact, even into the modern day, still children are so central to ideas of royal dynasties. So for me, it's so important and so interesting because they've been a little bit marginalised figures within our understanding of royal families and royal dynasties, but also because they challenge what we even mean by kingship and rulership in the medieval period. I think we sometimes assume it's a contradiction to have a child on the throne. But actually, children are so central and so important, so integral to medieval kingship. And that for me is why they're so interesting. So you've focused on this period from Norman invasion, if it would be able to at the British history at least none was for a couple of hundred years. Is there anything particular

about that period that made you sort of focus in on it? Was that different from other periods specifically? Yeah. So one of the arguments that I'm really trying to make with the book is that this is a really important period for how children come to be involved in royal rule. It's a particular period where ideas about childhood and ideas about kingship are changing. And we're also seeing a change in how children are integrated within the systems of rulership. One of the big things, things that changes in particular is that actually children come to be far more centrally accepted within systems of rulership. So we don't necessarily get, I think, again, perhaps maybe your listeners might be thinking, oh, but boy kings, they're all killed off, aren't they? And at certain

points in the Middle Ages, absolutely, yes, you do see a far higher mortality rate for your boy kings. But the period that I'm focusing on, I think, again, is one of these really important periods for how children come to be involved more centrally. And they're not at threat of imminent death as soon as they come to the throne, there's a place for them centrally within those ideas of royal rule. So is it really simply a question of succession? The reason why you get these young boys, is it because they're the only candidate? Is it a very sort of straightforward reason behind it? Or are there other sort of motivations as well? In some cases there are, and the fact that ideas about succession over this period between sort of the 11th, 12th, 13th centuries,

the fact that ideas about succession are firming up to fundamentally promote the the idea that your boy will usually succeed their father, that is becoming much more of a stricter rule within most medieval dynasties. However, it's definitely not the only reason. I want to move away from that idea that Boy King's a worst-case scenario, or only when there's nothing else available. There's a real investment in those children from an early age, from both within their royal family, so the people at court, but also within the wider political communities and people who see them as heirs to the throne from a very young age, even in some cases from birth. birth and yeah so that's really important is that they're not just suddenly what do we do king has

died but there's a whole preparation underneath that's preparing them to come to the throne but there's also there's positive models of child kingship out there and I'm really interested particularly in some of the positive biblical models circulating around child kingship and they give us a sense that actually a child king wasn't necessarily the worst case scenario and actually that there were models for how child kings could actually be good for kingship as well as being negative and associated with those connotations of violence and conflict that perhaps are the more prominent things that we hear about when we read about medieval boy kings. Yeah, I thought that was really interesting. I was reading through your book, the sort of biblical cases, Jesus as a boy king as well. Yeah, there's some Old Testament kings like

Josiah and Jehoash, Kings of Judah. Then King David himself, who's one of these prominent biblical models that kings within the Middle Ages often go back to and permeates through all sorts of levels of sources and texts that we have, the model of David as king. But actually, he's anointed by God when he's a child. So his whole rule has begun when he's this anointed boy. And actually some of the coronation ordnese, the liturgy that's read at a medieval coronation, some of these actually do, and a lot of them, particularly in the period that I'm focusing on, a lot of them actually mention David as a humble boy king. So this idea of boy kingship is almost actually there at the point of coronation, even for adult kings, which is really fascinating. It's not a negative model.

That's a positive model of God-annointed kingship. That's really quite interesting. And I wonder how much of that is intended for the people to sort of accept that candidate as a sort of, yes, okay, he's young, but these are the precedents and these other examples. Is there something in that, do you think? There's definitely some lovely images, potentially. It's a lot hard to relate these to specific cases, but some lovely images of David as a child possibly produced in the context of in and around these boy king ceremonies. And you do just wonder there, is that part of the legitimisation of them as king, or is that a kind of response to the fact that you have just had a boy king crowned? So yeah, there is definitely that kind of trying to not necessarily convince

people of legitimacy, because I think that particularly in some of the later cases, people were probably already convinced that children were a part of rulership anyway. So it's not necessarily solely to convince, but it is to give that air that they are a full part of rulership as well. And so if we look at England, in this particular period that you've studied, how many are we talking about? Is it quite common? Do we have a lot of them? So I think it's far more common than people might assume. Some of the biggest studies that have been done across wider spans of time, and so one of the studies that was done back in 1970s put the number at about 80 boy kings for the period between the 11th and 15th centuries and that was across the whole European continent. So we've got something

that's common but perhaps not every day. If we're talking England, actually I only have one English case study in the book, Henry the 3rd in the 13th century. But child kingship is also still there underneath because you're actually getting, for example, Henry the second of England does crown his son, Henry the young king, as king alongside him. So you're getting the idea that children are involved in rule, even if they're not actually crowned, you're still getting them brought into medieval documents, you're getting discussions about their potential to become king and their places as air. So that's really important too, the sort of the idea of what they might become, as well as the actual process of coronation. I guess one of the things that we should probably define a

little bit here is what do we mean by a child or a boy? Are there specific age categories or you know, any point where this is no longer a child anymore. You know, are we talking about age 12, age 15, 18? What are the definitions of childhood here? Yeah, so it's really variable, and that is quite a hard question to pin down. In much as today, ideas about age are quite flexible, and they're also changing over the period. But one of the key definitions within the Latin world is the idea that Puarizia, the Latin term for childhood, ends age 14 or the 14th year. So you get the age of 14 and 15 being quite significant. And although those are sort of intellectual schemes and frameworks for ideas of age, they do seem to have this legal impact as well, because some of the

law codes that we have surviving also go back to these ideas about knighthood, for example, and when you would become a knight as a young boy, as often connected to that 14, 15, particularly in the 11th and early 12th centuries. So one of the things that's changing over this period is you get far more of a focus by the 13th century on the ages of 20 and 21. So it's not. It's not the end of childhood as such, but you're getting this idea that actually childhood doesn't end at 1415, you have more of an extended adolescence, perhaps, we might call it today, where there's more of a sort of flexible process of coming of age and coming into your independent rule than just suddenly your 14th birthday. But that was never the case anyway. It was never a one day event that one day you

were not a full king and the next day you were. And actually, I think one of the important things to realize is that these boy kings are recognised as full kings in their own right from the point of their coronation, even if the way in which they have to be involved within certain activities and certain aspects of government and administration have to change because of their childhood. So that's so interesting. And one of the things I also wanted to ask was about the sources. And do we get a really good insight into what life was like for these little boys? We don't have the first-hand diary of any of these boy kings. I really wish we did. that would be fabulous, particularly if it had a nice marginal drawings and things as well. Wonderful. Yeah, if anyone digs one of those up, please get in touch. But no, royal children are far more

prominent within our source materials than perhaps children at any other social status, but they are still definitely not as prominent as your other key political figures who are adults. There's an argument to be made that you need to expand your source net wider when you're looking at children. And that's not just for royal children, that's more broadly as well. But we do have a lot of evidence that can help us fill out a picture of what life would have been like for these boy kings. The main points of evidence are charters, so their documents are usually produced in and around the royal court. We have chronicle sources, so narratives written. I try in my book to focus on ones that are written as close impossible in time to when the boys were actually young boys, because by the time you

get to the end of their reign, you're often getting reflections looking backwards from the perspective of actually what the adult ruler has done. So they're a bit more complicated to deal with as evidence for what did it mean to have a child king and what was the child king's life like. But then you also get all sorts of others that help us round out that picture a little bit more. Letters, poems, vernacular sources, Henry III of England. There's a lovely vernacular biography of one of his guardians, William Marshall, and that has some really interesting details about the small robes the boy king was wearing at his coronation ceremony. So little things like that, snippets like that we wouldn't necessarily get if we stuck purely to just looking at the charters or

just looking at the chronicles. We still definitely don't have the firsthand evidence coming directly from the mouth of the boy king at all points. But part of what I'm interested in is the societal attitudes towards childhood and their involvement in rulership. And I think that's something you really can get quite a lot from, and particularly when you draw in all these different types of evidence. So you mentioned earlier that these are all kings from the word go once when they've put in that position. And you write a little bit about this in your book as well, how involved they are in royal life. Are they sort of typically, if you have a young prince or whatever, are they typically fully involved in royal life from an early age or will there be situations where they're taken out and educated elsewhere?

That differs obviously between the different case studies and different kingdoms. But I think the thing to remember is that medieval rulership is very much a family affair. So even from birth, and even if they weren't necessarily the eldest son who had been lined up to be heir to the throne, you're getting your children involved in all sorts of royal ceremony, royal administrative acts. You're getting them brought forward to be presented to certain groups and communities and networks. You're getting them put forward, even on an international state. This is my son, he will inherit, but also these are my children as well in various cases. So I think the preparation that they receive in their early infancy and then going into childhood is so crucially important.

There's lots of different evidence for that. One of the main sources of evidence that I focus on in the book is the charter evidence, which has some lovely cases of how, for example, the birth of a son might even be used as the dating clause for a charter. So you start to realise how significant even the birth of a child is within this close, dynastic context. And then you get things like prayers for children's health and well-being, both from within the royal court,

but also from people approaching the king to get maybe their gift confirmed or to get a concession for their monastery. So there's a real sense that children are not just being presented as, important for rulership to other people, but also that other people recognise that and incorporate them into their own approaches to the king and queen and royal family as a whole. Yeah, that's such an interesting point. And I'd like also that you mentioned briefly there this sort of international role. So sometimes these children had quite specific diplomatic roles, didn't they as well? Yeah, so you see that particularly in instances of homage and fidelity between different rulers.

one of the kind of really interesting examples is the relationship between the kings of France and the kings of England, because the kings of England during this period are also dukes of Normandy and lords of various other parts of France in various different periods, depending on when you pick. So they owe fidelity for those lands to the King of France. So the ways in which children are used and incorporated within those ceremonies of fidelity and homage are really interesting, because often kings of England would involve their sons. and that's always been presented beforehand as very much being the Kings of England bypassing doing homage as adults themselves and then getting their children in. And this is not my point.

Other people have made this, and I think it's really important. The idea that actually it's also beneficial to the children and to their preparation for rulership, and it allows you then to do the same. So the King of France responds by including his sons. So you get even very young infants, like the very young Philip Augustus being included in the ceremonies of fidelity and promises of fidelity between a seven-year-old on one hand and a four-year-old on the other hand. So it's a real mutually reinforcing. And you get something similar in the relationships in the 13th century between the kings of Scots and the English kings as well, where in some of these

key treaties, promises between the two kings that their sons will be involved. And sometimes we know that the boys would have been present there as well. Sometimes we're not quite sure whether they would have been. But it's still this symbolic incorporating them into the mutually beneficial relationships between two very important polities. Yeah, children are a central part of that. Death by Tiger Bites. Death by prodding. Death from overeating and over-drinking.

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Search for patented history of inventions wherever you listen to your podcasts. Another thing I was really interested in was finding out whether there are also some examples. here where a boy or a child would have been crowned king while his father was still alive or whether it was always just the case that the father had passed away. Or do we sometimes see it happening sooner than that as well? Yeah, absolutely. And that's a really interesting thing because that does depend on what kingdom we're looking at. So that's where actually it's a really interesting thing to compare across the different. So my book focuses on England, Scotland, France and Germany. And actually there's very different approaches within these four

kingdoms. So for example, royal inauguration looks very different in medieval Scotland at this point, and actually the kings of Scots don't yet have the right to anoint a ruler. So you get the idea of co-coronation or the crowning of young sons, that doesn't really appear. You get other acts of association, so what I mentioned about involving sons in treaties and other ways of showing that your sons are the next in line to the throne, but you don't get crowning of young sons during their father's lifetimes in Scotland. But elsewhere you do, and it's really important. So in France and in Germany, the idea that actually your king at some point will turn to his young son

and say, actually, it's time for you to be crowned. And one of the things that I find most interesting is the point at which they choose to do that, because it seems in Germany, for example, that it doesn't really matter what age. So we get Henry the 4th of Germany, so in the 11th century, crowned very quickly. He's still in his infancy, only a few years after he's born. And then when his father dies, when he's only five years old, he succeeds to the throne, but he's already been crowned before that. That's done very quickly. Now, in France, although it is common to crown your son during the father's lifetime, none of them are crowned anywhere near as young as three, four years old.

Instead, Philip I of France seems to be one of the youngest, and he's crowned basically on his seventh birthday. And that seems to be associated with some of these ideas around different stages of childhood and what it meant to consent and to agree to certain promises during your country. coronation and the ways in which different kingdoms perhaps viewed the idea of coronation and inauguration. So boys being crowned alongside their fathers does happen, really important, but in certain places and at certain times, because it seems there is also by the 13th century, even places like France, where it was quite common in the 11th and 12th century, it's becoming less common. Germany sort of holds out and still carries on crowning, but in part that's to do with the nature of the empire at that point as well. So if we don't have that situation and the king

passes away. What sources do we have to know what their wishes were for succession? Is that something that they leave in a will and testament or something like that? Or is it a decision made by others? How is that typically passed on that sort of decision making? Yeah, wills and testaments can be really important, but we often, for this period, don't have them, which is a little bit frustrating. But actually, we think that these would probably have been more oral arrangements around the deathbed, or if they were written down in any form, they're not surviving today. We do start to get the survival of written testaments, but we get these even before that, so if we think about David the first King of Scots, for example, there's evidence that he made a testament,

but the way that's represented to us in a chronicle is actually, was that an oral testament only, or was that written down? It's less clear, and it's probably likely to have been oral only, but the chronicle only tells us, oh, he changed a few things in his testament a few days before he died, or from his deathbed, really helpfully. I think it says a few things concerning the kingdom. Nice and specific. And when David the first died, his 12-year-old grandson, Malcolm the Four, succeeded him. So you really want to know there, if he was making changes to some form of testament, whether that's oral or written, what were those changes? Was that naming people to be involved in the administration? Was that setting any form of restrictions of boundaries? We just don't know. By the time we actually get Testaments written down, there's sort of two different forms. Some of them are written when a king decides to leave a kingdom, for example. So when Louis VIII of France decides to go down to the south. of France for the Albigensian Crusade. He writes a testament. He dies on the way back, so we have

quite a recent testament written down, but he's written that testament in the eventuality of his death, but not at the precise moment of his death. So what we then also end up getting in that case is a letter from some of the ecclesiastical figures close to the king who had been at the deathbed, then conveying the king's wishes. So it's not quite a testament. It's a sort of deathbed communication, but it's not one of those legal wills that we do see written down at other points. Perhaps the one that's written most closest to a king's death is King John's Testament, which we think, based on some of the terminology, was almost certainly written actually at the very point that he was dying.

But it says very little about how to deal with the fact there's going to be a child on the throne. It names people to be involved in the administration of the kingdom or to be involved in protecting the boy's inheritance. But it doesn't actually tell us who was to do what and what roles were being handed out to who. So you assume that's going on in the background, but again, that's not conveyed to us in a legal format or nicely colour coordinated to tell us who's doing which right. But that's such an interesting point, though. Who's actually involved? Because if you have a four-year-old or something like that on the throne, obviously, you will have to have quite a lot of people doing the actual work there.

So I'm really interested in who is involved and to what degree are queens and, you know, the boys' mothers involved. I know certainly in the slightly earlier period than you write about. We have Emma getting very involved. Knut's wife in her son's rule and so on. Who are they? And what do they do? Are there any sort of general rules around that? Yeah. Queen mothers are so important and I could have written an entire book about their roles in Boy King's reign because there's just so much going on there.

And I think really important to say that we can't expect them to all behave in the same way either. Just because they don't become guardians for their voice doesn't mean they've done anything dramatically wrong or there's nothing is never. necessarily firm and set in precedent. It's really interesting to see which women are able to take on those roles. And you can't even assume that they necessarily wanted that. They might have actually thought the best thing for their son at that point was an alternative arrangement. But mothers are so central, they're so central to the preparation that their children receive as they're growing up.

So they're integral to that helping to prepare the children for these positions of authority. We often get the Queen Mother linked with the Royal Children in documents. And mothers are very important to helping their sons build. relationships with ecclesiastical communities, monasteries, cathedral churches and things. But then there's a couple of cases in the period that I'm looking at where you actually get a claim to the kingdom coming through the mother as well. So that's perhaps less common. But in Sicily, for example, Empress Constance is actually the ruler of Sicily in her own right. She then marries the king of Germany and then that's how she becomes empress. And so their son, Frederick the second,

has a claim to Germany through his father. But he has a claim to Sicily. through his mother. And actually what he becomes is the boy king of Sicily, because his mother is still alive and definitely very keen to make that relationship work. But it seems like Empress Constance perhaps less fuss at that point about what's happening in Germany. She wants to get Sicily sorted and make sure that's secure for her son. What you get in Sicily is a situation of co-rulership, where actually the documents are issued jointly between mother and son, until Constance dies about a year after her son's coronation and then they're issued in his name alone. But that's a situation of co-rulership, and that's a bit different from when you get other queen mothers involved in the

guardianship arrangements, ruling alongside them in part, but not necessarily this exact same co-rulorship, because the claim to the throne doesn't usually come through those mothers. But they're important in so many ways, so you get women involved in lots of different ways with the rule and the administration of the kingdom, so doing things like helping lead military campaigns, involvement in judicial affairs, so in court, they might have been alongside their son in royal documents, assenting and consenting to these documents with them, and even perhaps also named in oaths of allegiances. So we get Blanche of Castile, named alongside her young son, Louis the 9th of France, and actually alongside Louis's brothers as well.

As when people are swearing fidelity to the new king, they're also swearing fidelity to the Queen Mother and her other children as well. So that's really interesting. You do get cases where Queen mothers don't necessarily stick around in the same kingdom that their son has just come to inherit. So a couple of cases that, perhaps, most prominent in England would be Isabella of Ongulem, the mother of Henry III. But you also get it, for example, in Scotland, Alexander III of King of Scots. His mother, Mary Ducci, goes back to her natal lands and her natal family in France. I don't think we can assume there, and I'm really anti the terminology of abandonment, because actually what's happening here is that women have lots of different choices to make

when their husbands have died. They might actually also be the heiress to another patch of land like Isabella was in Ongolm. And although they might leave the kingdom, they're often still in important and involved in some important ways in their son's reigns. Mary Ducci, for example, comes back for her son's wedding. But then Isabella Rongolam, we see instances where she accepts the fidelity of a bishop in France on her son's behalf, and we see communications between her and her son's guardians at that point as well. So there's a real range of ways that women can be involved, but really important roles, whether as guardians or in other ways as well. So I guess if you were really ambitious woman as well, then actually this could be quite beneficial then,

it if you were someone who actually were quite keen to rule than having a young child, your child, as the king, but underage. Yeah, absolutely. And one of the sort of prime examples for a woman being very ambitious is usually cited as Blanche of Castile, who ends up being involved in the government of the Kingdom of France, well past the point that her son has turned early 20s, past that age of 21, and on into his adult rule. I don't think that's just about ambition, though. I think that's also about this idea that power and authority and royal dynasties are family affairs. So actually, if you have a woman who's very competent at what she does, why would you not use her? And there are some cases where sons rebel against the fact that their mothers have had quite a key role, but you also get these quite productive relationships where it's very obvious that they're grounded on the fact that actually the young king recognises that his

mother actually is a good person to go to because of her own experiences of rule in her own right as well. Yeah, that's really interesting. I guess we tend to think of it with quite sort of strict gender terms and assume that that's something we have to apply. Yeah, I think also it doesn't help that often the medieval chronicle sources that we're using, the ways in which they represent women's power and authority are quite often in the sense that that's acting somehow out of line for what's expected within hierarchical norms of power. So you often get the representation, for example, of boy kingship as being an automatically bad thing because a boy is on the throne and his mother is ruling alongside him. My book is trying to really push back against that being the automatic assumption we make from a modern perspective when actually often the sources that tell us that are working from their own specific agendas or are written a lot later,

so I'll then influence by later events as well. So apart from the mothers then, what other people tended to be involved and helping these kings? There's a whole range of different people who can be involved. So in 11th century Germany, you get a really important role for the Pope at that point. in the early reign of Henry the 4th of Germany. The Pope is there probably actually at the deathbed of Henry the 4th's father, Emperor Henry III. So the Pope is there almost as a mediating figure.

In one of these lovely documents we have, the comparison of Henry IV's earthly father, who has just died, the emperor, and his spiritual father, the Pope. But the Pope is almost certainly there in the role to help mediate the acceptance of the Empress's role in government among perhaps a group of ecclesiastical and secular men who may not have been entirely all happy that the Empress was taking the reigns of power in that sense.

So people like the Pope, in other cases, papal legates play quite an important role in 13th century England. The papal legate guala is particularly important in the early years of Henry III's reign and in negotiating the peace at that point when Henry III comes to the throne at the point where there is actually a contender for the kingship in the kingdom. Other people, so archbishops and bishops, secular magnates as well. these are all roles that people can be alongside Boy King or in more collaborative groups and kind of councils around a Boy King as well and some people very much, particularly the secular magnates,

there's a real sense that they feel a need to big up their own position so we have a lot of documents where when you get someone like Philip I of France, for example, after the first couple of years of his reign when his mother is less involved in his rule, we get a prominent role for the Count of Flanders. And it's very clear from particular charters and royal documents issued around the Flemish Counts Court, that he's really trying to emphasise the fact that he has a more official role necessarily than he perhaps actually does in reality. And the titles used for him, which are often what is cited as his official role, because he's called specific names and

specific times, they all seem to be coming from around his own circle. So it's a bit of a propaganda campaign there to big up his own role in the Boy King's early rule. Yeah. I suppose it leaves a bit of a room, doesn't it, for that to happen quite easily? Because there isn't such a set system for who steps in. No, and I think the main thing is obviously that because at this point you do need a kind of collaborative response. So you can, and in certain cases, people do kidnap the boy king and run off with him, but you actually do, in order to have some form of rule and government, you need other people to be invested in that as well. So whether you're a queen mother,

whether you're a secular magnate, whether you're an archbishop, you need some form of other political support around you, you need to be having those relationships with other prominent political figures who accept that you are in that prominent role yourself. That's often the assumption, and we kind of associate child kingship as being quite a time of violence and conflict. Yeah, I know you just briefly mentioned there, and you touched on it right at the start as well. I mentioned kidnapping, and are these boy kings, particularly at risk of violence and opposition? I would say yes and no in answer to your question, I think. Yes, violence is a prominent part of medieval society as a whole, so we can't ignore that. But I think sometimes the extent to which

child kingship is automatically equated with disorder and political disruption has been over-exaggerated. So unlike at other points, what we don't get in the 11th to the 13th century is the murder of multiple boy kings. After a boy is crowned, he's then very unlikely to be removed violently from his position as king. That differs from other periods in time, so we can think perhaps the famous late medieval cases, the princes in the tower, but then we also get early cases like Merovingian in France, which is particularly dramatic time to be a child king, lots of violence, mutilation, etc, etc.

That doesn't seem to happen in the 11th or 13th centuries. So actual direct violent attacks on the king's physical body are less common. What is more common perhaps, and definitely more common than when you have an adult on the throne, is people trying to kidnap your boy king. Because who has physical control of the king is often who has control. of the government and the royal administration as well. You sometimes need to also kidnap the tools of power as well. So sometimes we have sources that tell us that the seal, for example, the royal seal

was kidnapped alongside the boy king because that's the impression that marks a document that has been issued in his name. Other points, so in Germany we have the idea that the royal insignia, so what would have been used at the point of a king's coronation is kidnapped with the boy king as well. So sometimes it's not enough to just have the boy, you need to take other items as well. But yeah, kidnap is more frequent, but it's more of a form of political protest about the person who's actually got charge of the kingdom at that point than it is necessarily against the king himself. It's not trying to remove the king, it's trying to remove the person who is acting as guardian of king and kingdom. And sometimes that is quite prominently directed towards women.

So Henry IV is kidnapped in this really dramatic event, which I use as the opening of my book. He's stolen on a barge on the river Rhine in the middle of a royal feast, but that's very much to remove him from his mother's oversight and undermine her involvement within the political manoeuvrings of the kingdom and the archbishop who takes him off to clone and then it's him who's suddenly appearing in charters from that point on rather than the Empress Agnes.

So kidnap is perhaps at one point where you do see an increase in violence but I think it's not particularly helpful to make these direct comparisons and try and quantify violence. That's really hard to do in the medieval period. We just don't have the source evidence for that and they're often written from particular perspectives. Monastries being particularly annoyed that during a boy king's reign, they've lost a particular patch of land.

So there's often quite localised context to why a source is telling us that the boy king's reign was violent. So assuming then that these boys have managed to stay in power and they've grown up and they've turned into fully-fledged grown-up kings, in those cases where they've gone through this process of a child kingship, in those particular kingdoms or countries, are there any sort of very specific effects of that that you can see? Does it have a sort of lasting impact that's perhaps different from if there wasn't a boy king?

That's a really great question and I think that impact probably differs in each case. One of the perhaps lasting impacts is if you are, and this is true throughout the period that I'm looking at, is if you make a boy king, that boy is likely to live a lot longer and rain a lot longer. So often actually the people who come to their thrones as children then actually are some of the longest reigning monarchs. The classic example of a long-lasting monarch because they come to the throne as a child, Henry III of England, who ends up reigning for 56 years, one of our longest reigning monarch.

So that's perhaps one of these lasting things is the fact that actually you're then dealing with a king for a lot longer than if somebody came to their throne in their late 20s or early 30s or even into their 40s, the amount of time you have them as your monarch is likely to be a lot shorter. I think there's mixed effects as well. I would say it's not a wholly negative or a wholly positive effect. Some of the things that it can do is it can encourage greater reliance on collaboration and collaborative governance, cooperation between different elements of the political community. But that can also come back to be a bit of a curse a bit later when the adult ruler tries to assert perhaps more of their own will.

And one of the interesting things for me is that childhood is perhaps less problematic than adolescence. When you get these young adolescent rulers coming into their power and child, trying to make statements about themselves and their own will, that seems to have more of an effect on the way in which kingship is viewed and the fact that you're getting more of a tension between different parties and the king at that point. But I think it's really hard to know the everyday effects for perhaps just somebody, I don't know, your average person in the kingdom, if there is such a person.

It's really hard to know what that might have been like for them. And I'd love to be able to access a little bit more about, because a lot of what I write about is perhaps what's going on at a court level. But actually, those snapshots where we do have perhaps more of an insight into what might people have thought of their boyking in the localities is really interesting. And sometimes that's quite clearly not positive. But at other points, I do wonder, what did they make of the fact that their child was only five years old or nine years old? And I really wish we could access perhaps a little more of that.

Yes, that would have been lovely, wouldn't it? Emily, thank you so much for coming along and sharing all of this. me today. Thank you. So just as a reminder, this has been Emily Ward talking about her book, which is called Royal Childhood and Child Kingship, Boy, Kings in England, Scotland, France and Germany, circa 1050, 1262. And that brings me to the end of this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. But before you go, I would just have to tell you about a very exciting offer over on History Hit. Just look in the episode notes below this podcast for details on how to get there. We're building the world's best history channel on demand and would love to share it with you.

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