Childhood in Scotland in the Middle Ages

The rich may have taken part in hunting and hawking and there is evidence from the sixteenth century of bear-baiting, cock-fighting and dog fighting.

[1] The diseases that are easiest to spot in the archaeological record are those that caused a "metabolic insult" evident in surviving bones and teeth.

There was also greater exposure to hard and soft tissue trauma, and subsequent infection, as children became more mobile by crawling and toddling.

[5] "Rait's Raving", a poem by a fifteenth-century gentleman, describes young children up to the age of three as only concerned with food, drink and sleep.

[7] "Rait's Raving", attempts to persuade the author's son that tables, cards and dice were only fit for children, suggesting that these were played by the young.

[8] It also describes children gathering flowers, building houses with sticks, using sticks and reeds as swords and spears, "making a white horse of a wand",[9] creating what would later be known as a hobby horse, and imaginative play in which pieces of bread were sailing ships, while girls could make dolls from scraps and flowers.

[10] Sports known to be played in late medieval Scotland included football, golf, archery, and various bowling games, known as "laing bowlis", "pennystanes", and "kyles" or skittles.

"Caich", a form of tennis, was played by two individuals or teams, bouncing a ball against a smooth wall, often a church.

The rich may have taken part in hunting and hawking and there is evidence from the sixteenth century of bear-baiting, cock-fighting and dog fighting.

They often trained in bardic schools, of which a few, like the one run by the MacMhuirich dynasty, who were bards to the Lord of the Isles,[12] existed in Scotland and a larger number in Ireland, until they were suppressed from the seventeenth century.

All this resulted in an increase in literacy, but which was largely concentrated among a male and wealthy elite,[15] with perhaps 60 per cent of the nobility being literate by the end of the period.

Those wanting to study for second degrees still needed to go elsewhere and Scottish scholars continued to visit the continent and English universities, which reopened to Scots in the late fifteenth century.

[20] In Lowland rural society, as in England, many young people, both male and female, probably left home to become domestic and agricultural servants, as they can be seen doing in large numbers from the sixteenth century.