About Pages.
Nowadays, when we talk of pages, allusion is made as a rule to the "boy in buttons," but long ago they were rather important folk. It was the practice, hundreds of years since, to employ youths of noble birth to wait upon the sovereign, and the custom flourished in the Middle Ages. The young gentleman "served his time" at courts and castles as a page, previous to taking the further degrees of esquire and knight. The habit of educating the higher nobility as court pages declined after the fifteenth century, and they are now a mere survival, on a very small scale, of a once general practice. Four pages of honour still form part of the state of the British court.