Introduction: Court and Household in Scotland

Summary

‘In time I exist, and of time I speak,’ said Augustine: and added, ‘What time is I know not.’ In a like spirit of perplexity I may say that in the court I exist and of the court I speak, and what the court is, God knows, I know not. I do know however that the court is not time; but temporal it is, changeable and various, space-bound and wandering, never continuing in one state. When I leave it, I know it perfectly: when I come back to it I find nothing or but little of what I left there: I am become a stranger to it, and it to me. The court is the same, its members are changed. I shall perhaps be within the bounds of truth if I describe it in the terms which Porphyry uses to define a genus and call it a number of objects bearing a certain relation to one principle. We courtiers are assuredly a number, and an infinite one, and all striving to please one individual. But to-day we are one number, to-morrow we shall be a different one: yet the court is not changed; it remains always the same. It is a hundred-handed giant, who if he be all maimed, is yet all the same, and still hundred-handed; a hydra of many heads…

Walter Map, writing some 300 years before the reign of James IV, was a courtier of the English king Henry II. His De Nugis Curalium includes commentary on the court which has become a staple of the literary genre of court satire and criticism. In his words, the court is inscrutable – ‘I may say that in the court I exist and of the court I speak, and what the court is, God knows, I know not’. The court is also mercurial, ‘changeable and various, space-bound and wandering, never continuing in one state’. As difficult as the court may be to describe, he makes clear that any attempt to do so must refer to its members. According to Map, the court's membership is always changing, even as its essence remains.