Tag Archives: medieval education

Education in medieval England

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England’s medieval era dragged on long enough for a lot of things to change, and I’m not going to give you dates because they vary depending on who you ask. I’m not even going to give you centuries. We’ll start with the Norman invasion, not because that marks the beginning of the medieval period but because I wrote about schooling in Anglo-Saxon England last week. If you want to read about that, follow the link.

So that’s our fairly arbitrary starting point. When does the medieval period end? 

Oh, you know, eventually. Like I said, it depends on who you ask. What matters for our purposes is this: life changed a lot and schooling changed with it. Every so often I’ll narrow down the time period, but to some extent, inevitably, I’ll be rolling all those years in together. Sorry. You want anything less generalized, go find a real historian. They’re wonderful, and unlike me, they actually know stuff. Some of them write beautifully, although that’s not a requirement, unfortunately.

Irrelevant photo (yes, we’re back to them): daffodils for sale outside the shop. I don’t know what the weather’s doing where you are, but here it’s spring.

Latin, French, and English

Medieval schooling was mostly in the hands of the church, and for a long time it concentrated on producing people who knew enough reading and Latin to oil the wheels of Christianity, because those wheels could only be oiled in the church’s very own, special language, Latin. To make Latin even more special, it wasn’t anyone’s native language anymore, so everyone involved had to learn it, word by rule by painful declension.

Do I sound like I have a little trouble taking this seriously? Sorry. You need a certain mindset to talk about it with a straight face. I don’t have it.

The Normans took over a country with a network of churches, cathedrals, and monasteries–and probably some convents. Nuns had originally been part of dual monasteries, where nuns and monks lived side by side. When those were closed down, I believe convents were founded but that’s a different topic and we’re not going down that rabbit hole today. Many of the cathedrals and monasteries ran schools, and so did some of the churches, and as the Normans took control of the church structure and positions, they also took control of, reorganized, and eventually expanded the network of schools.

That expansion wasn’t because the Normans valued education more than the Anglo-Saxons. It was because time passed and society changed, as society will when time passes. 

The Normans left the schools in the hands of the church–I doubt anyone could imagine anything else–and since they were still far more French than English, they imported books and teachers from France, and students stopped translating Latin into English and translated it into French, the language of the conquerors, which quickly became a language the people who did business with or served the conquerors learned. An article I’m leaning on heavily here defines that group as “the middle classes in towns, and the whole cultured and clerkly class.” 

Move outside those circles, though, and people spoke English. 

In the early years after the conquest, not many aristocrats wasted their time learning to read. They had people to do that for them. Their children learned the important stuff: how to fight, hunt, ride, fight, behave well at mealtimes, and look down on the classes below them. And a few other things as well, but we’ll leave all that offstage. We’re talking about schooling, not other forms of education. If we broaden the topic too much, I’ll drown.

The dominance of the French language held until–well, these things are gradual, but the Edwardship of Edward III (1327 -1377; you’re welcome) marked a turning point: the aristocracy had somehow noticed that its country spoke an entirely different language than it did and thought, Gee, maybe we outta try that out ourselves. 

Bit by bit, English replaced French in the classroom and in respectable circles and gained acceptance as a language for business, for literature, and for anything I’ve left out. By 1420, English had pretty well shoved the French language (although not the Norman aristocracy who’d imposed it) off the island.  

Latin was losing its grip, although it remained the language of the church. In 1731–long after the medieval period had packed its bags and gone home–it was finally dropped by the law courts. You could now be summarily convicted of a crime in a language you understood. 

Isn’t progress wonderful?

Not unconnected with Latin’s weakened grip, literacy grew and an increasing number of lay people got an education.

 

The schools themselves

These days, learning Latin sounds like a trick best left to academics, but in post-conquest England it was vocational, and so were the schools that taught it. 

  • Song schools trained church choristers, and for that they needed at least some Latin. 
  • Grammar schools provided the education you’d need to become a lawyer, clerk, statesman, civil servant, priest, or cleric, so more Latin. Grammar at the time didn’t mean just the structure of a language. It meant reading–especially aloud–along with comprehension and commentary. l

Different sources mention a few other kinds of school, but not necessarily the same ones, which makes me nervous, but Oxford Bibliographies sounds impressive, so let’s rely on that. It mentions:

  • Reading schools, which–no prize for guessing this one–taught basic reading, although in literate families kids were likely to learn this at home. That’s as far as most girls got. If you go any higher, you’ll find only boys. 
  • Specialized schools, often connected to cathedrals and monasteries, teaching logic, philosophy, canon law, and philosophy. Another group of specialized schools taught what a business person would need to know, including French.

So we’re still talking basically about vocational training, but for fairly elevated vocations.

 

The students

Before the 14th century, if you wanted to go to school you’d be well advised to have parents with enough money to pay your fees and keep you fed and housed and wearing the right clothes. Beyond the elementary level, you’d be well advised to be born male. So most students would’ve been the sons of freeholders, tradesmen, officials, or gentlemen. They were probably the sons of women as well–that’s the usual way of things but hey, who cared about that?

By the time we get to 1179, the church’s Third Lateran Council decreed that every cathedral should have a schoolmaster to teach ”the clerks of that church and poor scholars freely”–in other words, without charge. By the 14th century, we find some wealthy individuals and the occasional guild endowing schools, sometimes with the aim of teaching the poor, which made it possible for the sons of peasants to attend. But becoming a priest was one of the few legal ways for a person to escape serfdom, and until 1460 it was the only way a bondsman was allowed to send his son to school, so a peasant’s child didn’t have a wide spread of vocational choices. 

It wasn’t just school fees and serfdom that kept the poor outside the school doors. Their families had to manage without the wages the boy would otherwise have earned or the work he would have done. Kids had to pay their way through life from an early age.

Overall, literacy spread throughout the medieval period–not (I’d argue) because the country’s rulers became more enlightened or the rich more benevolent but because towns and commerce were growing, and with them the number of artisans and craftsmen, creating a class of people who needed to read, probably write, and certainly work with numbers. Their kids needed an education. There was benevolence involved in funding free schools, but it didn’t so much magic up a literate group of people as respond to a need society had recently developed. 

 

Two more points about students

1, Most boys started school at seven and those who went on to college might’ve started at fourteen, but it wasn’t unusual for adult students to be sprinkled in among the kids. As David Gillard says in Education in the UK (although the part I’m leaning on covers the period long before the UK existed), in an era before clocks or when clocks were still rare, “Age seems to have mattered little. This was characteristic of medieval society.” Time was still a liquid and age only semi-solid. 

2, It seems to have been a given that being a student involved being beaten. It was all part of the joy of learning. 

 

The schools

As education expanded, the chancellor of a cathedral could license someone to teach its school and grant him a monopoly on the teaching of grammar in that city. Or if the bishop waved the correct magic feather over the correct piece of parchment, the chancellor could also license other schoolmasters in the city. 

Did the chancellor or the cathedral make money from the arrangement? Believing it didn’t is beyond me. 

Schools also opened in an increasing number of towns, and assorted patrons claimed jurisdiction over them–some to organize and regulate them and (until the Third Lateran Council spoiled their fun) some to charge the schoolmaster for the right to teach. 

Do you see where things are headed here? Not only are more students, and more categories of students, being educated, but schools are inching away from the church. The articles I’ve read call them secular schools, although they’re secular only in churchly terms: they were out in the world, not enclosed in cathedrals or cloisters, but they were still religious to the core. The masters might now be priests instead of monks or friars, and they were open to any student the master accepted–assuming the family could pay or an endowment provided for them. In the 12th century, there were 30 secular schools in England.

With time, endowed schools became more common, and wealthy benefactors or guilds began to establish chantries, which had their own priests to celebrate masses for the repose of the benefactors’ souls–and, in an early version of two-for-the-price-of-one, often to conduct a school. 

And with all that out of the way, Gillard (remember  him? the last link I threw in?) quotes Never Mind Who to say that most teaching probably took place outside of organized institutions, making it casual, sporadic, and (I’d add) hard to count. Parish priests–if they were literate enough themselves; and not all were–were likely to do some local teaching. Parents who could afford to hire a tutor, or who had someone literate enough in the household, might educate their children at home.

From 14th or 15th century onwards, some endowed schools took both fee-paying students and “poor and needy scholars, of good character and well-conditioned, of gentlemanly habits, able for school, completely learned in reading, plain-song and old Donatus.” (Gillard quotes that. I’m stealing from him.) They drew students from across the country, not just the locality, and increasingly fee-paying kids edged out those annoying poor or relatively poor people students. Those schools developed into England’s network of public schools, which were no more public than I’m the prime minister. They’re private schools, perpetuating the country’s class structure.

Two of the earliest independent schools were Winchester and Eton. These days Eton costs £63,000 a year. The median annual income last year was £37,430. The annual income for a 40-hour-week on minimum wage was £23,795.20. But yeah, don’t let that slow you down.

 

The schoolmasters

Initially, teachers were mostly monks or priests, and teaching wasn’t a high-status job, so it was usually off-loaded onto junior clerks. In the 15th century, laymen began moving into the job, but priests still had a built-in advantage: endowed schools were often linked to churches. 

When schools looked for a teacher to hire, they generally advertised for a man–and it would’ve been a man–who knew grammar and had an honest reputation. Beyond that, nobody seemed to care. 

 

Higher education

Oxford University dates back to the 12th century and Cambridge to the 13th. They taught the seven liberal arts: the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric led to the degree of bachelor; the quadrivium of arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy led to the degree of master.

They were also vocational. You came out prepared to teach, preach, administer, or–damn, I can’t make verbs out of these next two: be an official or a lawyer. The pursuit of knowledge for its own silly sake was a luxury the society couldn’t afford–or else it didn’t want to or couldn’t imagine such a thing. Why should it? If you wanted to know the truth, all you had to do was look to the scriptures, the churchly fathers, and Aristotle. You read, you memorized, and you analyzed. You did not get too creative. 

Starting in the 13th century, the educated reaches of medieval society began assimilating Greek and Arabic science, medicine, and philosophy (that’s how Aristotle got on the list), and struggling to make them fit inside the framework of medieval Christianity. Cue lots of controversy. It wasn’t always an easy fit, but that’s a tale for another post.

Education in Anglo-Saxon England

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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.