Understanding life at the margins matters. It matters in part because the very delineation of ‘mainstream’ as against ‘marginal’ tells us a great deal about a given society's self-perception and dominant value-systems. Similarly, reconstructing the mechanisms used to police these borders offers significant insights into the nature of power and the ordering structures underpinning it. More importantly, however, we should heed the central lesson emerging from the growth of ‘history from below’: ordinary people, including those living at the margins, matter quite simply because they were, and are, part of their community. If we overlook their experiences by constantly diverting our attention towards noisier, showier elites, then we cannot hope to achieve a full or comprehensive understanding of past societies. The margins are part of the picture, and they demand our attention for that reason.

The essays in this collection have suggested a number of recurring dynamics in the experience of social marginality in early modern Scotland. The first of these is the challenge of observable difference. Whenever a group or individual was visibly distinctive, suspicion and unease tended to accompany them, particularly when that variation was of a kind that challenged accepted social standards or expectations. In this volume, we have seen such dynamics emerge from Holmes’ study of disability, Tyson's work on the Romani, Lee's analysis of enslaved Black children, and Kennedy's discussion of itinerants. Something similar, moreover, emerges from Doak's work on executioners, another group that was very publicly singled out, albeit by their work rather than their identities, and from Hall's discussion of the consequences of behavioural irregularity. In none of these cases was the handicap of visible difference necessarily insurmountable; other considerations or pressures often mitigated it. Nonetheless, it is clear that people pushed to the margins of early modern society in Scotland often ended up in this position because of the anxiety and discomfort with which visible difference was instinctively met.

Legal disadvantage is an equally prominent recurring theme. As Tyson and Kennedy remind us, the marginalised position of itinerants and migrants was enshrined and reinforced through legislation and regulation, much of it designed to quarantine the ‘other’. Allen and Weston have shown that the world of work was heavily regulated, ensuring that those labouring on the ‘wrong’ side of the divide faced not just stigma, but active legal disadvantage, up to and including criminal prosecution.

The relationship between selfhood and identity has perhaps never received as much attention, either critically or in the mainstream media, as now. The proposed changes in the Gender Recognition Act (2004) address the process of how an individual can have their acquired gender recognised without having to undergo intrusive medical procedures or complete overly complicated bureaucratic processes, and aim to redress the balance between how an individual identifies themselves and the way in which an individual is treated publicly. At the same time, discussions surrounding the process of self-declaration have raised questions about how an individual can receive public recognition of the person they are internally, the way in which public services should be amended to allow for this, and how the rights of different groups can be simultaneously protected by law. That the sense of self is not necessarily a permanent construct is mirrored by the request to remove the clause ‘until death’ from the Statutory Declaration, in acknowledgement of the fact that ‘there are some cases where some individuals might regret their decision to transition’. At the centre of these conversations are the relationship between internal and external markers of identity, the difference between self and identity, and the problems that can exist when the two do not correlate.

While current conversations about self-identification frequently focus on gender, the disjunction between self and identity and the tensions that these conversations can raise are topics that have long literary pre-histories. Not only did Sir Thomas Malory live through a period of civil strife during the Wars of the Roses (overtly referenced in his speech addressed to ‘ye all Englysshemen’ at the end of the Morte Darthur) but his own life and personal circumstances were markedly volatile.3 Peter Field notes that documentary evidence of Malory's life ‘records accusations of violent crimes that many readers have felt were incompatible with the ideals of chivalry that they saw embodied in Le Morte Darthur’. This contradiction between Malory's personal identity (as defined by the criminal acts for which he was charged but never convicted) and Malory's authorial identity (as a champion of chivalry) is reflected by similar tensions between public and private, exterior and interior, and collective and individual actions throughout the text.

The opening of Sir Thomas Malory's tale of ‘Sir Gareth of Orkney’ immediately establishes an interest in requests and the conditions that are necessary for them to be granted. When Gareth, whose identity is unknown to the Arthurian court, arrives as they are about to hold their Pentecost feast, he tells Arthur he has come

By setting out his requests in such detail, Gareth draws attention to the complexities bound up in the act of asking. For the Arthurian court, requests should be ‘resonablé’ asked and able to be ‘worshypfully graunte[d]’, involving ‘no grete hurte nother losse’ to the granter. Gareth also uses two different terms for both the gift he requests and the manner in which he makes his request. While such doublings are often thought of as tautologies typical of – and deprecated within – late medieval prose romances, in this instance both doubled terms may indicate an awareness of the varied kinds of interaction a request can entail. ‘[D]one and gyffte’ may reflect the two very different types of gift Gareth asks for: firstly, a year's worth of food and drink, and subsequently the responsibility for a quest and the privilege of having Launcelot knight him – two kinds of gift that the court views very differently, as respectively unworthy or noble. ‘[P]ray’ and ‘requyre’ may further indicate different ways to make a request, as ‘pray’ suggests a more subservient ‘plea’, while ‘requyre’ can include its modern connotation of ‘demand’ or ‘require’ (though it can also be more neutral in Middle English). Requests, in ‘Sir Gareth’, come in varied forms; they are not as simple as Arthur suggests when responding to Gareth: ‘Now aske ye […] and ye shall have your askynge’ (224.12–13). Indeed, when Gareth does ask for his first gift of a year's food and drink, Arthur does not immediately grant his wish. Instead, he tells Gareth to ‘aske bettyr, I counseyle the, for this is but a symple askyng’ (224.17–18).

In the First Book of Discipline (1561), Scotland's Protestant reformers committed themselves to caring for the poor. While insisting that the Kirk would not be ‘patronis for stubburne and idill beggaris’, the First Book was clear that offering succour to ‘the wedow and fatherless, the aiged, impotent, or laymed’ was a special commandment of God , and that therefore the new Protestant Church must make it a priority to offer ‘such provisioun’ that ‘of oure aboundance should [the poor’s] indigence be releaved’. Despite such high-flown rhetoric, the conventional historiographical assessment was that the poor relief system Scotland eventually developed, administered wholly by the Kirk and almost completely reliant for its funding on voluntary giving at the church door, was essentially a failure. For T.C. Smout, it was ‘weak and mean’, and indeed ‘the very opposite from what had been intended by the reformers’. Larry Patriquin is still more dismissive, arguing that there was effectively no poor law in early modern Scotland. This he attributes to the country's social, economic, and political under-development, and it meant that no reliable assistance was offered to the poor until the nineteenth century. Much of the most important articulation of these ideas has come, however, from Rosalind Mitchison. For her, the inadequacy of the poor laws meant that Scotland was left with a chaotic, disjointed system, marked by chronic under-funding and inefficiency and consequently unable to offer proper care for the needy. This structure, Mitchison suggests, looks even worse when Scotland is compared to England, which over the same period was developing exactly the kind of statutory, secular poor-relief system to which Scotland unsuccessfully aspired.

These pessimistic conclusions were, however, unduly influenced by the rhetoric of poor-relief legislation. It is certainly the case that Scotland's formal poor laws, especially as embodied in the key 1579 ‘Act for the Punishment of Strong and Idle Beggars’, were notably harsh, focusing largely on the punishment of beggars and making only vague and minimalistic provision for the genuinely needy. It is also undeniable that Scotland, lacking the relative centralisation or bureaucratisation of England, was never able to build a secular or statutory system. Yet more recent scholarship, in focusing on the real-life mechanics of poor relief rather than the theoretical or legislative framework, has presented a less gloomy picture.

The ‘lockman’, or public executioner, forms a shadowy figure in histories of early modern Scotland. He stands namelessly on the scaffold alongside the noted rebels, accused ‘witches’, and others so often written about by historians as he enacted the penalties dealt by well-studied systems and regimes. Most often, he is nameless in both primary and secondary literature alike: ‘the lockman’; ‘the hangman’; ‘the executer’. It is even easy to overlook the lockman's existence as a real person or, rather, a series of individuals whose lives were united by employment in a grisly role that their contemporaries deemed brutally undesirable, yet simultaneously imperative for maintenance of law and order. Considering their existence in the context of these contradictory social demands, this essay uses three core case studies to explore the lockman's role and his relationship to the community he served, underscoring the need to appreciate such marginal characters in order to better understand early modern Scottish society as a whole.

Named after the ‘lock’, or small measure, of meal he was conventionally entitled to from each sack in the local marketplace, the lockman was responsible for a variety of grim, arduous roles. Contemporary records note lockmen clearing latrines and recovering corpses, as well as constructing gallows, pillories, and other apparatus of public punishment. Precise duties often varied, but one common task was driving ‘uncouth beggars’ from burgh or parish bounds. At Edinburgh, Dumfries, and many other towns, lockmen were also commonly responsible for cleaning the blood of slaughtered animals spilt in marketplaces, and killing nuisance stray dogs, cats, and swine. On occasion, therefore, the role may have overlapped with that of skinner, as was far more common elsewhere in Europe. As in Germany, Scottish lockmen also occupied the pseudo-legal role of torturer, an apparent contradiction only further entrenched with time since, by the end of the eighteenth century, the position of executioner often became merged with the court office of dempster.

It was the enacting of corporal and capital punishment, however, for which the executioner was best known and by which, indeed, he continues to be defined.

Early modern religious institutions were undeniably patriarchal. The Scottish Kirk vested men with religious authority, and expected women to subjugate themselves before both God and their husbands. Visions of John Knox raging about monstrous regiments, or the notion that the witch hunts were primarily a mechanism by which the Kirk policed women's sexuality, have shaped popular conceptions of post-Reformation religion and gender. As Callum G. Brown explores, early waves of scholarship similarly envisaged post-Reformation Scotland as an ‘empire of patriarchy’ in which both theology and ecclesiastical structures perpetuated the ‘demonisation of women’. However, historiography since the 1980s has painted a more nuanced picture. Kirk sessions worked to protect women as well as punishing them, and many ministers – including Knox – had circles of female confidants. In a discussion of the role of women in Scottish divinity between 1590 and 1640, David Mullan highlights women's role in protests, and suggests that women ‘had a real impact on other women and on men through their spiritual counsel’. In her analysis of the Covenanting movement, Louise Yeoman similarly underlines how women participated both in prayer groups and in riots, with Presbyterianism promoting ‘a brand of female activism and assertion which is rarely seen in other seventeenth century contexts’. Against a backdrop of conflict, early Covenanters encouraged zealous devotion to the cause, and exalted godliness above all – a democratising approach, for men and women from across the social spectrum might be redeemed by God's grace. The relative stability of the early eighteenth century furnished fewer opportunities for women to take on the mantle of saintliness, but both sexes continued to debate and resist the status quo in prayer societies, as Alasdair Raffe has demonstrated. Thereafter, the evangelical revivals of the 1740s captivated a largely female audience with fresh promises of glorification. Ecclesiastical structures and teachings upheld gendered hierarchies, but religion nevertheless offered some degree of empowerment.

The difficulty of assessing whether religion was a liberating or constraining force is thrown into stark relief when we consider spiritual writing. Before the eighteenth century, Scotswomen's reading and writing almost exclusively focused on religious topics.8 The project of spiritual growth legitimised – indeed necessitated – the act of self-reflection. In his study of autobiographical writing by Scots born in the early eighteenth century or before, Mullan identifies some fifty works, of which sixteen were produced by women.

In August 1636, Henry Ghretsone, a skipper and ‘stranger’, complained that, while he had previously ‘belived that the Scottes had bene gude people’, he had now changed his mind. His volte-face resulted from an incident that had occurred while he was sailing towards Dumbarton from Glasgow. Another boat, carrying many heavily-armed men, attacked him, shooting multiple holes in his sails before taking him captive. Having dragged him ashore, they demanded customs dues that he could not afford to pay, and he was accordingly held in prison for a number of days until somebody else agreed to pay the fees on his behalf. Such treatment of strangers, Ghretsone protested, ‘will do wholl Scotland no gude’. Ghretsone's experience spoke to the fraught and uncertain place of the ‘incomer’ in early modern society, a society rooted in the ideal that people ought to live in settled, relatively non-porous communities. This theoretical standard, however, did not match reality: early modern people in fact moved around readily and frequently, as a substantial body of scholarship now readily attests. Within a specifically Scottish context, however, migration as a research theme remains unevenly developed. While there is a very considerable stock of work elucidating the experiences of Scots moving to other parts of the globe, we remain surprisingly under-informed about mobility within and to Scotland itself, especially before 1700.

Our lack of detailed knowledge notwithstanding, there is a general recognition within the scholarship that ‘strangers’, as they were typically termed, whether in the form of vagrants, economic migrants, professional people, or foreign visitors like Henry Ghretsone, were very often marginalised figures, their activities subject to significant restriction and their socio-economic opportunities curtailed – as, indeed, has tended to be the general experience of ‘outsiders’ in other geographical and temporal contexts. Building on these tentative foundations, this chapter seeks to interrogate the basis and nature of migrants’ social marginality in early modern Scotland, focusing especially on seventeenth-century evidence. It begins by discussing the various challenges that migrants and immigrants were thought to pose for their host communities, before moving on to survey the mechanisms – some formal, some not – by which such individuals were confined to the fringes. It then assesses how, and why, this marginal status might be challenged or mitigated.

‘The colliers, in all countries, are generally an unruly set of labourers; and those of this work were like their neighbours.’ So declared the minister of Alloa in his 1793 entry into the Statistical Account of Scotland when describing the coal mine which had been in operation there since around 1623. The minister recorded that he had recently observed a reformation among the colliers, who had hitherto only been ‘remarkable for their ignorance and dissoluteness of manners’. The catalyst for this reformation in the colliers’ moral character was the so-called (partial) ‘emancipation’ of forced or bound labour in 1775, albeit this was not fully abolished until 1799. This concept of miners’ wildness has often been accepted in the topic's limited historiography, which tends to focus mainly on the eighteenth century. It can be boiled down to two main schools of thought. The more traditional school has tended to focus on parliamentary statutes on collier serfdom in addition to court cases concerning these. Such scholarship largely takes a high industry approach, rather than focusing on mine workers. Contrarily, the more recent, revisionist school, inspired by both social history and history from below, has focused on manuscript sources. In doing so it has uncovered colliers’ independent action and active engagement with the legal system. However, this has been rooted mostly in limited use of account books (largely confined to the Clerks of Penicuik's voluminous records) and reactionary modes of collier agency, tending to exalt the proto-capitalist diversification of the mine own- ers rather than focusing on the influence of the workers in that respect. Also, both schools have concentrated chiefly on male colliers, without sufficient weight being given to those workers, especially coal bearers, who were often women or children.

Scottish coal mine workers of the early modern period can be difficult to trace through primary sources. Civil and church court records are excellent sources for following these people, but by their very nature they rely on actionable offences being carried out or at least suspected. Utilising just this source-base may lead to skewed conclusions which buy into the depictions of coal mine workers as they appear in statute. Coal mine account books, which became increasingly regularised and widespread in the later seventeenth century, offer different perspectives. They are invaluable sources, but are too often tantalisingly laconic, simply recording payments in and out of the mine.

At the end of the section of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur that P. J. C. Field titles ‘Uther Pendragon and Merlin’, Arthur famously has a group of infants slain, all to avert a prophecy that one of them – born on May Day (46.8–10) – will eventually destroy his kingdom (36.15–17). One of these children is Mordred, who survives the deliberate shipwreck and who, the reader is told, will be seen coming to Arthur's court ‘as hit rehersith aftirward and towarde the ende of the Morte Arthure’ (46.18–19). This apparent promise to tell the story of how Mordred arrives at Arthur's court is never kept. Mordred in fact appears throughout the Tales of Lancelot and Tristram, the very middle of the Morte, but he is already an established knight by that time. It might be that what Malory signals here is that the end of the Morte will involve Mordred, as is traditional and central to the Arthurian legend, but his wording seems very specific, and this would also not be the only narrative promise Malory makes early in his book and then fails to keep. In 2019, Elizabeth Archibald published an article dealing with Malory's apparently broken promise. Entitled ‘Mordred's Lost Childhood’, the article was part of a special issue of the journal Arthuriana dedicated to ‘Malorian and Scholarly Retraction’. In a fundamental sense, the retraction article is a long-awaited answer to a question she herself posed in 2002: ‘So what about Mordred's recognition scene?’

This interest in Mordred and his destiny, indeed his childhood, also occurs in conversation. I recall discussing, to take one example, the cover of Haydn Middleton's The King's Evil (1995), the first book in Middleton's Mordred Cycle trilogy. The cover depicts a naked young man, curled in a fetal position against what appears to be a pitch-black background. Held to the light, the cover reveals that the background is not an empty black but rather filled with the glossy outlines of dead babies, the victims of Arthur's plan. Mordred is a haunted figure, vulnerable rather than villainous, traumatized by his father's murderous actions.

The domestic sphere was the basis of early modern Scottish society. It was the place where a person ate, drank, worked, prayed, and slept. To complete the ordinary tasks of living, members of the household negotiated the space of the house and the surrounding area. The heads of the household, usually a husband and wife, held responsibility for their dependants, including the provision of care, which fell mostly to the housewife to accomplish. Depending on the wealth and needs of the household, dependants could comprise children, servants, animals, or all three. It was where people lived, including people with disabilities.

Discussions of disability have influenced British historical studies from at least the 1990s. Since then, disability historians have worked to bring people with disabilities into the historical narrative. A large amount of the resulting disability history focuses on the nineteenth century with its increased documentation and urbanisation. Scholars have looked earlier, however, using creativity and a variety of sources to find a relatively hidden portion of a population. For example, monster studies has been used to make sense of the historical position of the disabled. These scholars are careful to emphasise that using this lens is not intended to conflate the categories of ‘disabled’ and ‘monster’. Rather, they contend that disability can be found encoded in descriptions of the monstrous in pre-modern Western Europe.

In Scotland, there are at present two major strands of early modern disability history. One is the care of those with disabilities. Christopher Langley devotes a chapter to disability in his Cultures of Care, exploring the interactions between ecclesiastical institutions and parishioners with disabilities during the seventeenth century. Langley looks at informal networks of care, but the construction of devoted sick hospitals and institutions in the late eighteenth century encouraged more formal care of those with disabilities. In his seminal book on madness, Rab Houston discusses this development, but also notes that studying disability helps scholars to understand how early modern Scottish people defined their own mental world in relation to those they deemed mentally incapable. This argument points to the second strand within Scottish disability studies, which highlights early modern and Enlightenment philosophical writing and its use of disability to help define what it is to be human.

This work began life as a call to arms for the discussion of bisexuality in the era of James VI and I. In the process of development, it has come to be a consideration of early modern Scottish scholarship itself, and the ways in which the truth can be obfuscated, made wilfully opaque, implied in the margins. It is an examination of the ways in which marginalised histories are maintained in the status quo through decades of scholarship which elides the obvious, shies away from the reality of lived queer experiences, and dares not to label or name that which is discusses.

Throughout this work, the term ‘queer’ will be utilised. In considering the use of this term, the following definition becomes useful:

When we erase queerness, we do more than just flatten our historical understanding. In the case of James, we eliminate the potential for consideration of the influence of his parents, Mary, Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley. We further limit the potential for deeper analysis of the complex and stylistically nuanced work of poets such as Alexander Montgomerie. We deny the full lived experience of the people who shape these narratives. We wilfully push to the margins.

Indeed, there is an ever-present pushback against the retrospective labelling of concepts such as homosexual or indeed bisexual. Michael B. Young states in James VI and the History of Homosexuality that ‘strictly speaking, in early modern Britain, no one was a homosexual because the word, and arguably the connotations that went with it, did not exist’. As such, at no point does Young's initial study of James, one of the only studies in which James’ sexuality is the focus rather than a hushed sidenote, name James as a homosexual. Nor, it should be said at the outset, will this chapter. Instead of focusing on the labels of homosexual or bisexual, I wish to reclaim and instate the concept of queerness at the court of James and in his personal life.

In his controversial polemic published in 1996, An Intelligent Person's Guide to History, John Vincent argues that the main concern of historians should be ‘the role of power in society’. Force and compulsion were, for Vincent, the primary drivers of human development, and for that reason, the heart of all historical study should be the use and negotiation of power. Or, as he put it, co-opting a phrase associated with his intellectual opponents, ‘king and battles’ must remain the order of the historiographical day. Vincent's assertion encapsulates the ‘traditional’ view of what ‘History’ as a discipline should be. It is a view stretching back to the very emergence of academic History in the days of Leopold von Ranke: it should concern itself with great men (and occasionally women), high-level developments, and above all, politics and diplomacy. That such a formulation now sounds impossibly quaint is down, in no small part, to the development in the mid-twentieth century of social history, a subdiscipline which insisted that the structures and rhythms of society, as well as affairs of state, were legitimate targets of the historian's interest. Prominent within the initial ferment of social history was the concept of ‘history from below’, a phrase particularly associated with the Marxist-inspired work of E.P. Thompson. Deployed to its fullest effect in Thompson's seminal The Making of the English Working Class, ‘history from below’ posits that ordinary people should be centred within historical analysis, and from this premise contends that the power to shape history lies just as much with the teeming masses as it does with great men or abstract processes.

Working within, or inspired by, the ‘history from below’ tradition has allowed scholars to open up whole new areas of historical inquiry; it is, for example, hard to see how scholarship of the ‘kings and battles’ mould could have allowed for recent growth in the field of emotion history. At the same time, ‘history from below’ has helped to demonstrate that non-elite actors have always played a crucial part in ‘big’ historical developments. In a British context, this is perhaps most obvious with regard to the Civil Wars of the 1630s to 1650s, research on which – particularly their English dimensions – now pays a great deal of attention to the experiences and importance of ordinary and middling folk.

Offered in memory of the distinguished medievalist and founder of the D. S. Brewer publishing imprint, part of Boydell and Brewer Ltd, the Derek Brewer Essay Prize is awarded annually for an as-yet unpublished scholarly paper based upon original research on an Arthurian topic within the broad remit of Arthurian Literature.

Candidates for the Prize are normally expected to be either doctoral students in a recognised institution of Higher Learning or within two years of having completed a doctorate (from the date the degree was awarded). The paper should be written in English, between 7,000 and 8,000 words in length (including footnotes), and be prepared according to MHRA Style. The winning paper will be awarded a prize of either £150 in cash or £300 of Boydell & Brewer books, in addition to publication in Arthurian Literature. It is a condition of the Prize that the paper be submitted for exclusive publication in Arthurian Literature.

Candidates should send a covering letter, an abstract (between 200 and 250 words) of their paper, and their entry itself to both editors, Dr Megan G. Leitch and Professor K. S. Whetter, as an email attachment to LeitchM@cardiff.ac.uk and kevin.whetter@acadiau.ca, with the three documents combined into one file. The letter should make a statement as to the originality of the work; an indication of how the candidate qualifies for entry to the competition; agreement to the terms of the Prize competition; and name, postal address, email address, and institutional details.

The entries will be judged by a selection committee composed of members of Arthurian Literature's Editorial Board; their decision will be final and no correspondence will be entered into. The Board reserves the right not to make an award should no essay of sufficient quality be entered in a given year.

Entries for the Prize should be submitted to the editors by 31 March each year; the winner will be announced by May of the same year, and the essay will be published in the following year's issue of Arthurian Literature. The inaugural 2022 Prize Essay, for instance, appeared in the 2023 issue (Volume 38).

Enslaved and free people of colour lived in Scotland during the early modern period. The enslaved in Scotland were put to work, sold as property, and, in some cases, fled from their enslavers. Children born in the Americas to Scottish fathers – some born enslaved and then manumitted, others born free – were sent to Scotland for education or work purposes. They occupied the same spaces as the people with whom they lived, learned, and laboured. Their wider community would have been aware of their existence. Yet, as Dolly MacKinnon has argued in her work on enslaved children, they have been a ‘visible yet invisible presence’ in Scotland. Until recently, Scots forgot, ignored, or disavowed the historic presence of enslaved and free people of colour in Scottish society. Historians have begun to reverse that process by paying closer attention to enslaved and free people's lives in Scotland. New evidence about these people continues to emerge through individual case studies and larger repositories of information like the Runaway Slaves in Britain database. These studies highlight the historic Black presence in Scotland. Early modern Scottish society was not racially homogenous. Centring this idea provides a basis for a more diverse and nuanced account of Scottish history.

This chapter contributes to this growing historiography by examining enslaved and formerly enslaved young people in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland. It reconstructs aspects of the lives of these young people through adverts in the Runaway Slaves database and hitherto under-examined archival material. The second half of the chapter details the early life of James Innes, a formerly enslaved child who spent time in Jamaica and Shetland. A determination to ‘give voice’ to the marginalised has spurred attempts to produce histories of childhood. The interaction of age, race, gender, class, or sexual orientation can compound a young person's social marginality. The youths this chapter discusses were marginal because of their age, race, and enslaved or formerly enslaved status. This acute marginalisation provides the rationale for examining this cohort.

However, examining the history of the marginalised through a study of children and young people has its limits. A dilemma inherent to the history of childhood is the relative dearth of source material produced by children. A further issue is whether historians can ascribe to children the agency possessed by adults. Sara Maza has noted that individual children have exerted their desire for autonomy throughout history.

Elizabeth Archibald has long been a fine scholar of Arthurian Literature in general, and for many years also a particular friend and supporter of this journal and of Boydell & Brewer. Elizabeth is also, as most readers will well know, a previous co-editor, with David F. Johnson, of Arthurian Literature. And Elizabeth's positive impact on so many other scholars’ careers has made it very easy to gather contributors to honour her retirement from teaching and service – but not, happily, from research! – with a special issue of the journal dedicated to her own interest in, and many influential contributions to, Arthurian studies. As co-editors, we are both grateful for Elizabeth's friendship and scholarship and mentoring: she is a model academic and a terrific human being, and it is both an honour and a pleasure to dedicate this issue of Arthurian Literature to her.

Elizabeth's energy and generosity were matched by Derek Brewer, and like Derek, Elizabeth has always been very supportive of both the Arthurian community and of early career scholars. Now that we have the Derek Brewer Essay Prize in motion – see the announcement at the back of this volume – it is a privilege to open each volume of Arthurian Literature with the award-winning essay named after the generous and insightful founder of the D. S. Brewer half of the Boydell & Brewer Press to which so many Arthurian and romance scholars are indebted. We begin this volume, then, with a less well-known Arthurian tradition associated with a different but equally powerful Elizabeth: this year's Derek Brewer Essay Prize is Felicity Brown's fascinating study of the uses to which the Arthurian Legend were put in sixteenth-century Ascension Day tournaments celebrating not only Queen Elizabeth I's rule but also the importance of her sailors as the early modern counterparts to medieval Arthurian knights. Although the Derek Brewer Prize is separate from the papers written explicitly to honour Elizabeth, it is a happy aventure that we open our celebration of Elizabeth's excellence with Felicity Brown's study of Arthurian elements in the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

When Gawain finally sets out for the Green Chapel in the fourth Fitt of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, he is shown the way to his long-desired destination by an otherwise unnamed guide. The words spoken by this man as he tries to dissuade our hero from going on to meet the Green Knight appear in the fifth stanza of this Fitt, lines 2091–117: