 They first gained popularity through the patronage of the Duke of Albany, the future James VII and II, while he was Royal Commissioner at the Palace of Holyrood.Their exact date of origin had been lost by the mid-19th century but there is reference in the accounts of James IV's personal expenditure to a payment made in 1504 to a jockey, "the boy that ran the King’s horse", at Leith.There is also reference to them in the memoirs of the Earl of Huntly in 1591.