Historians of late fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century Scotland have long recognised the significance of its royal court. Jenny Wormald stressed the importance of personal forms of contact in a disparate kingdom with underdeveloped institutions, and A.L. Brown and Trevor Chalmers have likewise emphasised the centrality of informal activity to the business of government. This, wrote Wormald, made the court a political centre of exceptional importance, where the king's ‘natural counsellors’ could gain access to the king and play and work outside the confines of parliament and council. The governmental institutions and financial mechanics of the court have been studied in considerable detail. So has the court's cultural dimension, which provided meaning and entertainment for those who inhabited and visited it. The household has received rather less attention, which this book has sought to address. An establishment of domestic servants as well as a shared sense of domesticity that bound the political, cultural and social worlds of the court together, it gave structure to this centre of personal networks and controlled access to the king, which, as the hangings of ‘ane part of the kingis houshald’ during an aristocratic revolt against James III suggest, could be a matter of life or death.

To understand the role of the household one must first understand what distinguished it from the court, an issue that has vexed historians of courts across Europe. William Dunbar depicted a diverse and bustling court. Gavin Douglas, on the other hand, portrayed the officers of the household as a fortress of virtue against which the likes of Dunbar's unruly outsiders battered. Their poems capture the distinction between court and household, which is reinforced by evidence of the usages of the word and the forms of reward used for different types of royal servants: the court was the space around the king and all those who occupied it; the household was a bureaucratic structure which governed that space and group of people. By this bare definition alone it takes on historical significance in the wider context of James IV's reign.