Negotiating Youth, Old Age and Manhood: A Comparative Approach to Late Medieval Scottish Kingship

Corrine T. Field and Nicholas Syrett have suggested that historians tend to discuss age as a ‘neutral marker of identity without investigating its meaning…’ and, in so doing, have potentially missed important opportunities to better understand past societies. They argue that, as societies across most temporal and geographical boundaries divide life into chronological stages and associate these stages with roles in society, ‘[t]hese life stages have structured how human societies function’. With Field and Syrett’s suggestions in mind, this chapter positions age and life stages at the centre of a discussion about manhood and kingship . Taking the ‘early’ and ‘elderly’ stages of life as a particular focus, it identifies examples of when, how and why contemporary and near-contemporary chronicle and narrative history writers refer to age in relation to late medieval royal men. Using these examples, in conjunction with a fifteenth-century didactic poem, it analyses age-related expectations and the interplay with contemporary understandings of manhood to build on existing scholarship about elite male experience in late medieval Scotland. By drawing on theories about the hierarchy of masculinities, this discussion will also pose questions about how threats to the hegemonic masculine status of a king, especially from members of his own family, might shed new light on power and how it was performed.