The Court as a Cultural Centre

In March 1504, the Treasurer to James IV of Scotland recorded a payment from the royal purse as an offering at the first Mass of a royal servant, the poet William Dunbar. The relationship between the verse of Dunbar and life at his master's court is unusually close and remarkably explicit, whether he is petitioning for financial support:

I haif inquyrit in mony a place
For help and confort in this cace,
And all men sayis, my lord, that ye
Can best remeid for this malice
That with sic panis prickillis me,

or offering carefully-worded advice on the occasion of the King's impending marriage to the fourteen-year-old Margaret of England:

And sen thow art a king, thow be discreit;
Herb without vertew thow hald nocht of sic pryce
As herb of vertew and odor sueit;
And lat no nettill vyle and full of vyce
Hir fallow to (associate with) the gudly flour delyce,
Nor latt no wyld weid full of churlichenes
Compair hir till the lilleis nobilnes,

or engaging in boisterous self-caricature as he celebrates 'ane dance in the Quenis chalmer':