Cultural, social and legal markers of elite maturity were shifting over the central Middle Ages, generating changes which affected how young people experienced late childhood and early adulthood. This chapter examines how some of these developments unfolded in relation to child kingship. It reinforces an argument which recurs throughout the book: that change over time was more substantial than cultural and political differences between kingdoms. First, the chapter examines the shifting significance of a boy king’s knighting. The acceptance of arms had been part of a child king’s rite of passage to young adulthood in the mid-eleventh century but, a century and a half later, knighting had instead become a crucial element in a royal child’s rite of passage to kingship. Then the chapter turns to consider the seals produced for and used by boy kings, emphasising the increasing diversity in seal forms and their creation from the thirteenth century. A crucial theme throughout the entire discussion is how kingship altered a child’s progression from boyhood to manhood, distinguishing a boy king’s experience of adolescence from other elite youths.

Kings could propose an heir, but they could not guarantee his (or, more rarely, her) succession. They could, however, prepare heirs for the moment when they would have to convince the people at large that they deserved to inherit the throne. Chapter 6 follows the several stages in which heirs demonstrated their suitability for the throne, and the means they had at their disposal to ensure that they had the backing they needed. It does so by tracing the ideal type of royal heir from designation (often in childhood) to a ruler’s death. Topics discussed include the political and literary education of princes, the entry into adulthood as signified by knighting and marriage, and taking charge of the funeral proceedings for a recently deceased king. Each demonstrated adherence to abstract norms of royal lordship – that is, moral suitability. Each also served more pragmatic ends. They allowed an heir to gain experience, allies and resources with which to pursue a claim to the throne. As in the creation of kingship, suitability and might went hand in hand with right.

The defining feature of Western warfare in this period was knighthood. This was not because horseback warfare was in any way new in the Frankish lands, or even because the technology of the equipment and use of cavalry had changed in any radical sense, though it is generally assumed that the stirrup appeared as a feature of cavalry equipment at some time in the ninth or tenth century, thus allowing the saddle to become a more effective fighting platform. But the stirrup did not by any means create the knight. What the knight represented was a new social phenomenon which grew progressively more important as generations passed and read new meanings into the status and potential of knighthood.

The chapter reconstructs the grand themes of the social history of the Roman scribae. It tells stories of low social origin and subsequent high social mobility, of social upstarts entering the senate and the equestrian order, and of local notables acting as generous patrons of their hometowns. It analyses known lives and careers of scribae to arrive at a picture of social opportunities and possibilities of scribae in any given period.

Viewed, as it often still is, from a neo-Romantic perspective, chivalry becomes a force for order and hedge against violence, but this represents decidedly post-medieval conceptions. European medieval chivalry actually constituted the ideals and practices of the warrior elite, elaborating views on licit violence, lived piety, valorized status, gendered relationships, and the distribution of wealth. This chapter takes chivalric violence as its focus, carefully distinguishing when medieval sources are describing reality and when they present idealistic plans for reforming knighthood. The search is for authentic knightly frames of mind and courses of action. Clearly, they needed some framework to guide their demanding lives and as elite warriors obviously essential in their world, they could choose and shape working codes that met their needs and simply ignore or modify troublesomely restrictive conceptions thrust at them. Of the many sources close to practicing knights used in the chapter, two receive special emphasis, the History of William Marshal (the biography of the manor cross-Channel knight of late 12th and early 13thC) and the Book of Chivalry (written by the leading French knight of mid 14thC). Both show the powerful role of this warrior code emphasizing the role of prowess in the search for honour, sustained by religious piety showing divine blessing on knighthood as one sustaining society.

Chaucer lived in a society that was aware of childhood and adolescence as distinctive stages of human life and which inherited practices whereby young people were brought up and trained for adulthood. Informally, at home, children were introduced to social norms, religion and work. Those from wealthier families underwent more formal education, mastering literacy at home, in schools or in great households, where they learnt reading, rules of courtesy, French and, in the case of some boys, Latin. Chaucer’s works refer in passing to most of these processes, with particular attention to adolescents, including university scholars. During the fifteenth century his works in general came to be seen as having educational value. The Astrolabe, first written for his son Lewis, seems to have been used for teaching reading to other young children while his major writings were recommended as suitable literature for older ones.

This chapter explores the relationship of Chaucer and his literary work to the wider chivalric culture in which he lived. It discusses the developments over the course of the fourteenth century to the status, significance and remit of the gatekeepers of chivalric knowledge, the officers of arms. Heraldry, the language of chivalry, was omnipresent in the late medieval world and encapsulated status, genealogy and affinity. During the fourteenth century it emerged from exclusively aristocratic usage to include widespread adoption by the gentry and the urban patriciate. Chaucer was himself armigerous and operated at the practical fringes of chivalric culture through work such as overseeing the erection of scaffolds for the Smithfield tournaments of 1390, providing witness testimony in the Court of Chivalry in 1386, and through his wider social life with prominent officers of arms such as his father-in-law, Guyenne King of Arms.