Medieval Education Sample

Dr.

Z joined me in the studio to discuss medieval education, and we had a wide-ranging conversation that lasted about an hour or so.

I thought you guys would enjoy it.

So, here's a small sample.

One of the big things about

we talked about hegemony,

the hegemonic change when the Normans come in, and the Normans are not just doing that to England, they're also going south.

Remember, they're in Salerno Salerno as well.

Is the Latinification of everything?

So things rapidly go to Latin because they function in Latin as the official language of official acts.

They're speaking French,

but if you're doing anything important, it's being written in Latin.

You're often speaking in Latin.

Latin's very important.

So when they go to England, all that change of putting things in vernacular English doesn't go away entirely.

It's not lost, but it's not pushed.

And so when we talk about school at this point, we are talking about a turn towards a Latin type of education.

So that said, let's go back, talk about, we're mostly talking about this publicly available school to non-religious children and then going up into young adulthood.

In monasteries, it appears that once you committed to a monastery, you were taught

pretty uniformly and formally all the way up.

So you would have started reading, you would have immediately learned Latin, and you would have probably gone all the way up to full literacy in Latin and doing whatever the monks of your monastery did.

And some became full scholars and were writing new moral texts and treaties and became like the people that we reference as our main sources.

Yeah, Malmesbury, Worcester.

And that's been there, and that kind of stays.

It's a bit boring.

So, let's move on to this much more weird thing of, you know, your average person had access to some sort of education.

What was it?

And the best way to sort of start to understand this is understand it as a ladder that you climbed up and people would stop on various rungs.

The first rung of that ladder is just the alphabet.

So

again, with the Latinification, the alphabet is a largely Latin alphabet.

There's a handful of letters

that are different from where they are now.

So is this where we lose like F and Thorn?

In the Anglo-Saxon period, they were still doing this.

You would learn your alphabet first and they did it consistently.

There are only 23 letters at this point and you would have

J and W were missing.

And there's no real distinctions between U and V.

And some of the inclusions were thorn, which is the th sound, and win.

So it was a little different, but it was vaguely similar.

You start moving more to Latin once the Normans come in, because that is their formal education system.

And so this was the part that a lot of people, perhaps even most people, would have learned.

You would have learned your alphabet.

And the places where you would have learned it were Legion.

A lot of people would have just learned in their home from a literate adult, or you would have learned potentially from a very local clerk or priest that was in the area.

Would this be some of the stuff that you learn from your mother?

Very possibly, or your father.

For girls, they're definitely learning from their mother.

And this is part that's hidden to us because

there's very little records even for the boys, and there's certainly no real records for the girls with the exception of nunneries.

And nunneries, if you're going to a nunnery and to become a nun,

they were also fully literate.

We have female scholars that were just as important as male scholars, with the exception of, you know, everyone pretending it wasn't happening.

So none of these that was fully happening.

Girls, though, were not, as far as we can tell, being sent to school with a fee.

That said, if you had a literate mother or a literate woman in the area, we do have signs that women were absolutely learning to read for nothing else than they're fully literate and reading and writing by the end of the 12th century.

So they're getting educated somewhere.

It's probably in the home.

Another indication of women's education is it becomes a very frequent motif in art.

So in marginal art and sometimes like stained glass and wall paintings that have survived, of either the mother of the Virgin Mary teaching the Virgin Mary when she's young,

or the Virgin Mary teaching sort of in,

not Jesus.

This is sort of like women teaching women type of motif, right?

But the Virgin Mary like teaching the metaphorical other girls or sometimes like a child saint is being taught by by the Virgin Mary in a motif, you know, where it becomes more metaphorical.

Gotcha.

But it does sort of suggest that there's this understanding and acceptance of women being teachers, particularly to other girls.

Right.

We do have that story from Alfred, which suggests that at least in the Anglo-Saxon period, though that's getting a while back now, women were teaching boys and that that was fine and normal.

And it's possible that at the young stage that that's still going on, but we just, they're not writing about it.

We don't know.

Right.

Urich Vitalis actually talks about his very early education and says he was,

he was born in 1075, so just a little before where we are in the story right now.

And he says he began to learn his letters from a priest in Shrewsbury at five years old.

So he became a scholar.

So that might be why he went all the way up is he learned a little on the early side, learned from an official priest, was probably already moving towards that.

I mean, Rowan's five, he knows his letters.

We've got a future like Vitalis on our hands.

Well, this is what we see.

So

there are essentially teachers, particularly priests and clerks, that would do that early work, but it's also very possible you're learning it from more of a family adult, or maybe

in some cases, great houses seem to be bringing people in and hiring them for the house.

So you had multiple children and you had a large income.

Yes.

Early, early version of the tutors.

Again, most of these would have been some sort of secular clerk priest type figure.

And it's interesting, the way you learn this looks very much the same for almost 800 years.

The way that they're learning their ABCs and including the materials they're learning them with

almost doesn't change even into the 1800s because it's so standard.

So what you would get would be

the alphabet written out.

In one case, we have a piece of slate literally from Hastings, from the time of Hastings, that looks like

exactly this.

And then right under that, you usually had like the starting lines of the paternoster.

So the my father, who art in heaven, our father.

Whatever.

It's in Latin in this case.

And that was how you started to translate the letters into your first syllables.

Okay.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so there'd be a piece of slate.

If you had a room where multiple people were learning, there's

we have these later, so we kind of assume that this was happening earlier as well.

Paintings on walls of small churches or buildings where it looks like they were using it as a schoolroom.

You write out the ABCs there.

Awesome.

And again, the patternoster underneath often, if that part of it survived.

You also have things that later became called horn books.

So they were basically a tablet that kind of looked like like a paddle that you would hold.

They would write it right on that piece of wood or carve it in, and you'd hold it.

And there was, it used to be a culturally resonant image to have the image of a child sort of placed

forward facing in between the knees of their teacher when they're young, going through that ABCs over and over again.

Wow.

And it's called a horn book because they, after a while, they placed a piece of transparent like bull's horn horn or cow's horn over to sort of

preserve that lettering.

Okay, I don't think they're doing this at the end until at least we don't have it, but later it's a common item that we like find repeatedly.

So, it would have been one of these things, kind of in the similar way that we think of like pencils and notebooks as these sort of resonant items of childhood.

That would have been theirs.

Cool.

And so, this went on, like it stayed relatively unchanged until like the 1800s?

That part seems to be the same.

We see the same types of items,

And

again, no one just writes, no one writes with us as the intended audience, right?

Right.

They're not trying to explain as if to aliens from a thousand years from now how education worked.

So we're placing, we're putting these things together.

But when you see repeated images or sometimes people would write stories and in the stories, their characters are learning their alphabet.

Then we have like those from weirdly some of the best descriptions of how someone would learn was when someone writes that in a fictional story.

Right.

But even then they're still writing it from a slightly like not as instructive as you would hope if you're trying to repaste it together.

But it's the same sort of thing where it's so common and so everyday that it gets lost because

everyone has the same reference.

Right.

And so when it changes, it just goes.

But that alphabet stage is the basic stage.

And many, many people were actually reaching it.

And some would have gotten it in schools, but most part, it seems like what was ideal was that you learn that outside the school, either by a tutor or some really low-level teacher or the in the home.

And then

if someone thought you had some promise or you had some time, or potentially one of the things driving this was sort of a, you know, merchants in trade, there is an obvious benefit to learning how to read and do your sums if you're doing business.

So if you're in that kind of family or that kind of trade, there would be an incentive for your family to at least get you up to speed a little bit more than just learning your alphabet.

Right.

And that's when the schools come into it.

So, there are schools that are mentioned in at least 14 cities between the conquest and the end of the 12th century.

And by mentioned, I mean we can find them in a record.

No one was doing a survey of schools.

Are you talking about schools in general or schools in Britain?

Schools in Britain.

Okay.

Or are we just talking about England?

England, I'm sorry.

Okay.

We are talking about England.

Okay.

I'm so sorry.

Well, I think there's one mentioned in Wales at this point, but the point is, is that what we have is not a formal survey of schools, but what's interesting there is that they seem to be everywhere.

So of these 12 that are mentioned offhandedly, not trying to capture every school.

We have schools mentioned all the way from Exeter to Norham, which is basically to to say all the way the fuck the north.

Yeah, all the way up into Northumberland.

Yeah, and it was a school mentioned in a small parish church run by a secular priest.

And that little record is from

the 1130s.

Okay.

So early on, we already have a school mentioned all the way up there.

And there's another record from 1160 that mentions a school out in Wales.

Okay.

So York has a record of eight schools within it.

Wow.

Yeah.

So

what historians are saying about all these records is like that is probably a sign that almost everywhere probably had a school.

I mean, maybe.

Also, I mean, York is a different culture.

York has a lot of different Scandinavian.

But again, we have mentions all the way.

There were probably places that had more

than others, but

there's no sign that it's clustered.

No one mentions about traveling out to get education unless it's very specialized education at a high level.

Okay.

So this isn't like, because York for quite a while was the center of intellectual thought in Britain.

Which would make sense why they have eight.

There's also a bunch of schools mentioned in London.

These were bigger cities.

Okay.

And people are traveling to them.

But there are also in very small areas also schools mentioned there.

Cool.

Which is just to say that this is way more accessible than you would initially think.

Now, what a lot of these schools probably were were what were called song schools.

And this is where it gets, it's this

strange place that is mostly driven by probably a, uh, a desire for piety.

And so what you would do is in these song schools is ideally you'd have your, your, uh, ABCs learned, or this might be a place where you go learn your ABCs.

And then Jack Black comes in, and it's like a school of rock kind of situation.

It's so not the school of rock.

Um, sounds way less cool.

But you're learning

your syllables, and you're learning your syllables to learn very accurately religious song.

And so you would be chanting and singing your plain song, and that's how you'd practice.

And what would happen then is that you would become very literate in the alphabet and how to use it to make syllables, but you're never actually learning Latin.

Okay.

So you wouldn't, you would know, like, I don't know if you've ever learned a song in another language.

Like, people know

Lady Marmelode and they can all say voulet vucouche avec moi, having no idea what the hell they they just said.

And that's kind of where they were.

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Thanks for listening.