One of the most striking features of educational and cultural endeavour all through the middle ages was its itinerancy, but itinerancy continued to be important in Scotland longer than in some other parts of Europe, because its universities were not established until the fifteenth century. D. E. R. Watt argues that the excitement of education abroad may actually have fed the desire of Scots for a ‘university of their own at home’.63 Once that desire was fed, the founding of colleges and universities became a vigorous aspect of late medieval Scottish culture, laying the groundwork for Scotland’s future eminence in the fields of law and medicine.
Itinerancy, tutelage and institutionalization supported each other closely in late medieval Scotland.64 Tutelage was certainly the chief means of educating the secular nobility, and probably played a significant role in any house of means. Its importance during the minorities of this period was inestimable; indeed these lengthy minorities concentrated attention on educational matters all through the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Royal tutors often were, or became, powerful politicians, whether at court or in church. While still a captive, James I and his tutor bishop Henry Wardlaw sponsored the petition to Pope Benedict XIII to found and confirm the privileges of the new University of St Andrews.65 Lyndsay was not James V’s official tutor, but he was companion to the king in his youth, and appealed to that relationship when exhorting the king in later life.
Before and after the founding of the Scottish universities, formal Scottish educations were often continental. Many studied at the universities of Paris (260 names are recorded from 1340 onwards) and Orleans (in sufficient numbers to constitute a separate ‘nation’). At the University of Paris, the Scots were sorted with the ‘English nation’, ‘a composite group which after the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War in 1337 contained hardly any Englishmen and was largely controlled by clerks from the Empire and Scandinavia’.66 (Then, as now, an education in Paris meant getting acquainted with the rest of Europe.) Many of these graduates were pioneers in the development or use of book-production technologies. James Liddell, who received his MA from the University of Paris c.1483, was the first Scot to have his works printed during his lifetime. David Lauxius or ‘Loys’ [Lowis], a near contemporary, took his bachelor of arts degree at Paris in 1494; he was a close associate of the French humanist and editor Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples.67
World History
