I’d planned to write about medieval education, starting in the year 1000, since as well all know nothing happened before that, but I made the mistake of taking a quick look at what didn’t happen and all that nothing got interesting, so let’s talk about education in Anglo-Saxon England instead. I’ll get to the stuff that happened later. 

Anglo-Saxon England ended with a crash in 1066, when the Normans invaded and we start talking about it as plain ol’ England. For a starting point we’ll take 597. You could argue reasonably enough that Anglo-Saxon England started in 410, when the Romans packed up their sandals and went home, but during that 410 to 597 stretch the Roman system of schooling seems to have collapsed and no one seems to have organized an alternative. Kids learned what their parents and their whoevers thought they needed to know, but it doesn’t seem to have involved the schoolroom.

I’m hiding behind the word seems a lot there. It’s amazing how much isn’t known about this stretch of time, and I won’t claim to know all of what is known. Let’s just move on.

That changed in 597, when a group of monks arrived from Rome, bringing with them both the Latin language and the Latin alphabet. 

Why Latin gets a mention

I’ll admit to a built-in bias toward the Latin alphabet–it’s the first one I learned and the only one I don’t have to sound out letter by letter–but it’s not like the Anglo-Saxons were illiterate before the monks stepped, seasick and salt-encrusted, onto English soil. They used a runic alphabet. It doesn’t mean much to me, and I doubt it does to you, but an alphabet it was. If you can read it, leave me your email address and I’ll send you a batch of homemade brownies compressed into an attachment. 

A runic alphabet. If I’m lucky, it’s the Anglo-Saxon one, but I can’t swear to that.

The thing about that runic alphabet is that most Anglo-Saxons couldn’t read it any better than you and I can. 

And after the monks brought the Latin alphabet? Same story: not many people could read the new alphabet, and things stayed that way for many a century. Reading was a specialized skill that a limited number of people needed, and the country got by just fine with the very small group who’d learned the trick. 

In spite of that, the Latin language and alphabet did make a difference. Latin was the language of the Catholic Church, and the religion had a baked-in need for people who could read it. In other words, the arrival of Christianity expanded the number of people who needed to know the secret handshake.

I’ll come back to that. Really I will. 

Latin was also Europe’s shared language. It allowed scholars, governments, and business people to understand each other, and that had a certain fairness to it, since nobody spoke it anymore so no one got to complain about favoritism. 

Should we backtrack here? 

Oh, go on, let’s: spoken Latin went out of use gradually, between 200 and 500 CE according to Global Language Services, which also says it became a dead language between 600 and 750 CE. Make of that what you can. My math’s terrible but I do recognize a difference between 500 and 600, and the difference between a dead language and one’s that’s no longer spoken is more than I can explain.

Maybe we should go with the Ancient Language Institute’s estimate, which is that (a) it’s complicated, (b) Latin didn’t so much die as morph into multiple separate languages, and (c) 476 CE is as good a date as any other.

We’ve gone off topic, haven’t we? I just love off-topic. But let’s go back to that handful of seasick monks landing in England. Their assignment was to convert the country–or countries, really, since what we call England was a bunch of kingdomlets–to the Roman brand of Christianity. 

Why did I say Roman? Because Cornwall and Wales had already converted to a Celtic form of Christianity, and we’ll leave that alone for now or we’ll never get to the next paragraph. 

In addition to a language and an alphabet, the monks brought the aforementioned churchly imperatives that demanded a literate clergy. And not just literate: literate in Latin. (See? I told you I’d get back to that.) If the church’s sacraments weren’t in Latin, everyone would be sent back five squares and stay there till they rolled a pair of sixes. On top of which absolutely no one would be allowed into heaven.

So one of the monks’ first tasks was to magic up a group of people native to this new country who could read, write, and mumble in Latin. In other words, they needed not just converts but priests to lead the converts, so they set up schools.

In The World of Anglo-Saxon Learning (it’s online but it’s a download, so no link; sorry), Patrizia Lendinara says in the earliest schools they set up “will have [had] the severely functional [aim] of teaching the future clergy how to read and understand the Bible and how to perform the liturgy. . . . Their principal concern was not with classical literature, nor with educating laymen: their sole work was God’s work, the opus Dei, that is, the performance of the Divine Office at regular intervals during each day; and in order to understand the Office, Latin was essential.” 

As the religion spread, more monasteries were founded; churches and cathedrals were built. And most monasteries and cathedrals ran schools, expanding the pool of literate specialists. 

Until late in the Anglo-Saxon period many monastic communities included both men and women, and some of them were led by women. The focus was still on educating boys–the church needed priests and women couldn’t be priests–but at least some of the schools also educated girls. I’d love to know how the numbers compared but I don’t think we’re going to find that. 

Among aristocratic Anglo-Saxon women, the literacy rate was high. For the era, of course.

What did the schools teach?

The evidence is sketchy. They taught reading and writing–and it wasn’t a given that a person who could read could also write. Writing–quill, remember, on parchment or vellum–was a difficult art, not something you mastered just so you could write yourself a quick note saying, “Pick up half a dozen eggs, you idiot.” Students learned to form perfect, beautiful letters. It was a more specialized skill than reading and nobles had scribes to do their writing for them. 

The schools also taught Latin, because that was the whole point of the exercise, along with heavy doses of religion. Bede–one of the few sources on the period–wrote that the school at Canterbury “gave their hearers instruction not only in the books of holy Scripture but also in the art of metre, astronomy and ecclesiastical computation.” Aldhelm, who’d been a student at Canterbury, adds that they also taught Roman law.

Classes would’ve involved a lot of memorization, and how could they not? No one could consult Lord Google, books were the wildest of luxury items. Public libraries were a thousand or more years in the future. If you hoped to use a piece of information at some point, you needed to store it safely in your head.

Latin was taught, in part, using a book called a colloquy, which gave students scenarios to play out in Latin, pushing them to use the language. Two seem to have survived, one dutifully embracing the monastic lifestyle and one, ahem, somewhat less dutifully showing what History Today calls “aspects of daily life in the classroom . . . monks throwing alcohol-fuelled parties, negotiating kisses from women, riding into town to get more beer and going to the privy with younger pupils, unaccompanied. . . . One colloquy . . . sets out a dialogue between master and pupil in which they exchange a vast array of scatological insults, including the memorable ‘May a beshitting follow you ever.’ . . . In one scene, . . . an older student barters and gains a commission to copy a manuscript for a fee of 12 silver coins.” 

Education in English

In a country that spoke English, even if it wasn’t a version of English we’d understand today, the spread of monastic education created a layer of educated people who read and wrote only Latin, which you may be aware is an entirely different language from English. That matched the situation in Europe, but Alfred the Great (Anglo-Saxon king, 871 to 899, known at the time as plain ol’ King Alfred) saw it as a problem and had a number of books translated into English. He pushed the country in the direction of using the spoken language for government documents, leaving a legacy of administrative documents written not in Latin but in–gasp!–-his country’s own language. 

He also founded a school that taught children to read and write English, and if that wasn’t unusual enough, according to that contradiction in terms History Today it taught all kids.

I’d take that with a grain of salt, though. The Britannica says the school was inclusive in that it taught the sons not only of aristocrats but also of freemen “of adequate means.” That leaves out the sons of slaves and of freemen of inadequate means. It also leaves out girls.  

Yeah, I know. It’s all about the context, though, right? For the times, that was inclusive. 

Whatever the school’s limits, Al the G’s drive to use the spoken language in written documents helped create a body of Anglo-Saxon literature.

But back to Latin . . .

Teaching Latin had a built-in problem, which is that the early Romans–gasp–weren’t Christians, and they wrote in (you got it!) Latin. And once you opened that linguistic door, you couldn’t entirely control what readers would drag through it. They were likely to read stuff the pope didn’t approve of. So Pope Gregory (590 – 604) wrote to a bishop (in Gaul, not England), “The same lips cannot sing the praises of Jove and the praises of Christ. Consider yourself how serious and shocking it is that a bishop should pursue an activity unsuitable even for a pious layman.”

I expect that danger hovered over the teaching of Latin for a long, pious and semi-pious time.

Eventually, English church schools were educating enough people to send missionaries out of the country, primarily to what’s now Germany, and to place scholars in impressive spots in Europe, reflecting impressiveness back on their increasingly impressive schools. Be impressed, please.

By the tenth century, things seem to have taken a nosedive. Viking raids and  settlement and all their associated wars would’ve had a lot to do with that. The century before,  Al the Great himself had written about how few scholars were able to read and write in either Latin or English, and he set out to remedy it. By the tenth-century, though, the criticism was tied up with a monastic reform movement led by the Benedictines that drove secular clergy*, many of them married, out of the monasteries, replacing them with celibate monks. As is wise when reading the commentaries left by any political or religious wrestling match, we might want to be a touch skeptical about the claims of scholarly decline, or at least about its cause. They might be accurate but they might also be overstated. Or just plain false. 

Aren’t we lucky stuff like that doesn’t happen anymore?

Whatever the situation was, the Benedictines are given the credit for a revival of Latin learning in the tenth century.

Since I bad-mouthed the Vikings a couple of paragraphs ago, I should give them their due: by the time we get to King Canute (1016 – 1035; you’re welcome; and yes, he was a Viking–or as I think we’re calling them by this point, a Norse king), we find him paying for the education not only of the sons of freemen “but also of the poor.” And by the 10th and 11th centuries, when churches, staffed by a single priest, were being built in small parishes, the priests at least had the potential to act as teachers.

The potential, you’ll notice. So did they act as teachers or didn’t they? I’m not sure. Let’s say “possibly” and sneak out before anyone notices us. We’re almost at the end of the post anyway.    

In 1066 the Normans invaded, busting up the furniture and recreating the bar fight scene from any western you ever watched on TV, before they settled down to run the place. 

And yes, I’ll admit I’m exaggerating the level of destruction–except for in the north, where I’m understating it–but let it stand. It’s shorthand. I’ll talk about education in Norman England next week.

* And you thought history today was a contradiction in terms.