Post-classical history

CHAPTER 4

School

Our heirs in perpetuity.

Magna Carta, Clause I

Like nearly all babies born into royal and aristocratic families John was given to a wet-nurse. The authors of the time who discussed the care of babies and children preferred mothers to breast-feed their own children, and they advised them to feed on demand, not according to a rigid timetable. Yet nearly everyone who was rich enough to do so ignored them and hired a wet-nurse. She was a symbol of wealth and freed a busy, politically engaged mother, like Eleanor of Aquitaine, from domestic responsibility. John’s wet-nurse was called Matilda.

His older brother Richard’s was Hodierna, and we know a little bit more about her than we do of Matilda. Her own baby grew up to be an abbot of Cirencester and a famous scholar, Alexander Nequam. As a result of Richard’s generosity she became a woman of property, well enough known to have a place named after her, Knoyle Hodierne in Wiltshire.

Henry and Eleanor were not expected to spend much time with their children. They were always on the move and travelling with a baby was not easy. In a poem by Marie de France, whom John may well have met, baby and wet-nurse had to stop seven times a day so that the infant could be fed and bathed. It was easier to leave royal babies and small children in some settled spot while their parents moved on. Other parents saw far more of their children than kings and queens did; the further down the social scale you were the more time you spent with them. ‘Babies’, wrote a thirteenth-century author, ‘are messy and troublesome and older children are often naughty, but by caring for them their parents come to love them so much that they would not exchange them for all the treasures in the world.’ It was with the expectation that their children would be a source of joy that many mothers faced the pains of labour.

During their earliest years all children remained in the care of women. It was from women that children learned how to behave, how to speak in a courtly fashion, and also the first rudiments of their letters. Small children would learn, everyone knew, by imitating adults. Their first steps and words were greeted with delight. This was also their playtime. Toys were already gender-specific. Boys had their soldiers, and girls their dolls’ houses. In later life Gerald de Barri claimed to remember that when his brothers had built sandcastles on the beach at Manorbier, he had built churches; by temperament he was predestined to be a cleric.

In aristocratic households a sharp break came when children reached the age of seven or eight. While girls generally stayed at home, boys would be sent away. The author of Tristan retained a vivid memory of this change in the pattern of a boy’s life.

‘In his seventh year he was sent away into the care of a man of experience. This was his first loss of freedom. He had to face cares and obligations unknown to him before, a stern discipline in the shape of the study of books and languages. He had tasted freedom, only to lose it.’

For this discipline John was sent to the household of Henry II’s senior administrator, the justiciar of England, Ranulf Glanvil. It might have been from him that he acquired his interest in the law. The books which he possessed as king show that he could read Latin and French, and he may well have been able to read English too. The well-educated Englishman of 1215 was either bi- or tri-lingual.

Education in a noble household involved a great deal more than book learning. Above all, young people of both sexes were expected to learn courtesy – modest and polished manners. In order to appreciate the service he would receive during the rest of his life, it was an important part of a young lord’s education that he should himself learn how to serve, both in the hall and elsewhere. For a handsome young man, serving at table on a major feast day when the hall was crowded with visitors and their wives was an opportunity to impress. When the sixteen-year old hero of The Romance of Horn served as cup-bearer,

‘his well-cut tunic was of fine cloth, his hose close-fitting, his legs straight and slender. Lord! how they noticed his beauty throughout the hall! How they praised his complexion and his bearing now. No lady seeing him did not love him and want to hold him softly to her under an ermine coverlet, unknown to her lord, for he was the paragon of the whole court.’

A popular twelfth-century work listed the seven spheres in which a well-taught knight was expected to shine: riding, swimming, archery, combat, falconry, chess and song-writing. Other similar lists include dancing. His sister would learn chess, music and dancing as well as the more specifically feminine accomplishments of embroidery and weaving. She, too, would learn to read, since as a wife or widow she might be expected to manage a household, and in that case it would be useful to be able to read documents and understand accounts. Many romances include scenes in which a daughter is shown reading to her parents and siblings.

In the character of Horn we have a portrait of the model product of late twelfth-century household education – the kind of training John himself received. ‘No one could equal Horn when it came to handling a horse or a sword. He was similarly talented at hunting and hawking. No master craftsman was his equal; no one matched him in modesty. There was no musical instrument known to man in which he did not surpass everyone.’ In this period, the accomplished young aristocrat was expected not just to appreciate music but to perform. In one scene in The Romance of Horn the king’s sister played the harp, and the instrument was then passed to everyone in the room in turn. When the harp came to Horn, he sang a lay said to have been the work of a royal composer, Baltof of Brittany.

Then Horn made the harp strings play exactly the melody he had just sung. Having played the notes, he began to raise the pitch and made the strings give out completely different notes. Everyone was astonished at his skill with the harp, how he touched the strings and made them vibrate, at times causing them to sing, at times making them join in harmonies. Everyone there was reminded of the harmony of heaven!

John’s elder brother, Richard I, was a celebrated song-writer – and at least one of his songs, Ja nus hons prins, ‘No man who is in prison’, the song he is supposed to have composed while a prisoner in Germany, can still be bought in music shops today.

The fashionable indoor game during John’s lifetime was chess. It had been introduced into western Europe from the Arab world, and into England after 1066. As both men and women played chess, a quiet game in the corner of a room or in a window seat created opportunities for flirting. But not all chess games were quiet. Earlier board games such as backgammon or games with dice were essentially gambling games, so it was only natural that the new one, too, was often played for stakes. But chess was, above all else, a game of skill. Victory and defeat were no longer matters of chance, of good or bad luck. Alexander Nequam noted the intensity of the game, the loser’s feeling of humiliation, the winner’s pride. He watched the faces of the players go ‘deadly white or fiery red, betraying the pent-up fury of an angry mind’. In an aristocratic household, budding chess-players were not only learning the moves, they were also learning restraint and how to control their emotions. King John often played backgammon with his courtiers, but there is no contemporary record of him playing chess. According to a later story, the Romance of Fulk FitzWaryn,

‘one day John and Fulk were sitting alone in a chamber playing chess, when John picked up the chessboard and hit Fulk with it. Fulk hit back, kicking John in the chest so hard that his head crashed against the wall, and he passed out. Fulk rubbed John’s ears so that he regained consciousness but was very glad that, apart from the two of them, there had been nobody in the room.’

The introduction of new rules into chess in the sixteenth century made it a much more complicated game than before. At the highest level it gradually turned into a game for professionals, not for the accomplished amateur, but throughout the Middle Ages skill at playing chess, like skill at playing music, was one of the measures of the well-brought-up young aristocrat.

In the village, children were expected to help their parents with the farmwork, weeding, stone-picking, looking after the animals, gathering berries, picking fruit, drawing and fetching water from the well. As they grew older girls and boys went slightly separate ways. Brothers and sisters stopped sharing a bed. Boys joined in their father’s work, ploughing, reaping, building, or staying out in the fields with sheep and cattle. Girls stayed with their mothers, cooking, baking, cleaning, spinning and weaving. By the time they were fourteen both boys and girls had been trained for their future roles in life.

For those whose parents wanted them to be formally educated, but did not live in a noble household, there were schools. By 1215 all English towns would have contained at least one. This might not sound much to boast about, but it is in marked contrast with all earlier English history when nearly all schools had been in monasteries. From the twelfth century onwards town schools were open to all whose parents could afford the fees. By 1215 the demand for further education had led to the development of Oxford and Cambridge, the first two universities in Britain. Contemporaries were acutely conscious of living in an age of educational expansion. ‘Are not teachers’, one complained, ‘nowadays as ubiquitous as tax collectors?’

This doesn’t mean that most children went to school. Very few village children could have done, though occasionally a parish priest would teach the poor free of charge. But then, as now, there were ambitious parents who somehow found the money to pay school fees. According to Ranulf Glanvil, peasants sent their sons to school so that they could rise in the world by becoming clerics. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they aspired to a career in the Church, but they did want to learn Latin and in this way gain access to the world of book-knowledge.

Children first went to school at about the age of seven. At what we might call ‘primary’ school, children learned their abcs – though some of them might already have been given their first lessons in reading by their mother. The earliest surviving manuscripts show the alphabet set down in three rows.

+ A.a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i.k.

1.m.m.o.p.q.r.r.f.s.t.

v.u.x.y.z.&. p.M.est amen.

In other words the modern j and w omitted, v and u are alternatives, there are two forms for r and s, and it ends with the standard abbreviations for et and con, then three dots or tittles and lastly the words est amen. Sometimes known as the ‘crossrow’, because of the way the top row started, the alphabet was usually presented in this way until the eighteenth century. Children then began to learn Latin from a primer, a basic miscellany of prayers, or from a psalter. From an early age they were familiar with the Latin words of church services. They also learned how to write, using a stylus to form letters on wax tablets. In medieval Latin, writing (scriptura) and scripture (scriptura) were synonymous. Many people learned to read without ever learning to write. That they left to clerks – just as in recent times many people left typewriting to typists.

A few girls attended primary schools, but almost none went on to the next stage of education, the grammar schools catering for eleven- to fifteen-year-olds. From now on formal education was for males only. At grammar schools, pupils worked on improving their Latin grammar, read Latin literature, the scriptures, and usually picked up a little science and law on the way. They worked hard. The school day was a long one. It started at six or seven in the morning, and ended eleven hours later, with just two breaks of an hour each. They were kept at it, contemporaries observed, either by love of learning or by fear of the cane – corporal punishment was taken for granted.

For most schoolmasters teaching was a way of earning fees, so they did not always take kindly to competition. The master of the cathedral school of St Paul’s in London acknowledged the permanent presence of schools attached to St Mary-le-Bow and St Martin-le-Grand, but he was entitled to excommunicate anyone else who dared to teach in the city. There were, however, more than three schools in London. According to William FitzStephen, ‘many other schools were allowed as favours to teachers celebrated for their learning’ – although these did not enjoy permanent institutional status. FitzStephen gives a vivid description of the regular London inter-school debating contests.

On feast days the masters assemble their pupils at the churches whose feast-day it is, and there the scholars dispute. Some debate just to show off, which is nothing but a wrestling bout of wit, but for others disputation is a way of establishing the truth of things. Some produce nonsensical arguments but enjoy the sheer profusion of their own words; others employ fallacies in an effort to trick their opponents. Boys from different schools compete in verse, or in debates about the rules of grammar. Others use cross-roads humour to insult or mock their opponents, identifying them not by name but by teasing allusions to their well-known foibles – indeed, to general amusement, sometimes even their elders and betters are subjected to this treatment.

One of FitzStephen’s enthusiasms was for school sports days. He describes at length the annual round of city sports, beginning with cockfights on Carnival (Shrove Tuesday) morning. The schoolboys of London were given the morning off from lessons to watch their favourite cocks do battle. Carnival afternoon was devoted to ball games. Schoolboys and guild apprentices played, while their seniors watched from horseback, recalling the days when they had been young and great ball players themselves. In the summer young Londoners went in for martial exercises such as sword fighting, archery and wrestling, and for athletic pursuits, like jumping, putting the shot, and throwing the javelin. In the winter, bull, boar, and bear-baiting provided amusement. When the great marsh adjoining the northern wall froze over, the ice quickly became crowded. Slides and toboggan runs were set up, ‘while others, more skilled at winter sports, lash animal bones to their feet and striking the ice with iron-tipped poles propel themselves as swiftly as a bird in flight’.

So highly did the Church come to value education that in 1179 Pope Alexander III decreed that each cathedral should maintain a schoolmaster to teach its clerks and other poor scholars for nothing. Pope Innocent III elaborated on this decree in the 1215 Lateran Council, and diocesan statutes, such as those of Salisbury in 1219, show that his instructions were followed. ‘When I was a boy,’ wrote Alexander of Canon’s Ashby around 1200, ‘the ambition of nearly all teachers was to get rich by teaching, but now, by the grace of God, there are many who teach for free.’

Before 1066 virtually no Englishman went abroad to study. But all that changed after the Norman Conquest, partly because for two or three generations England’s élites considered themselves French and it seemed natural to send the sons and nephews for whom they planned a clerical career to France. By the second quarter of the twelfth century Paris had become the acknowledged intellectual powerhouse of the Christian West, pre-eminent among a number of prestigious schools in northern France at Laon, Tours, Poitiers, Orleans and Chartres. Here the over-fifteens studied what was known as the arts course. This meant what were called the ‘seven liberal arts’, consisting of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, astronomy, geometry and music). In practice the greater part of their time was spent on the trivium, and most of all on logic. When the monks of Bury St Edmunds discussed the kind of person they would like to see as their new abbot, ‘I’, wrote Jocelin of Brakelond, ‘said I would not agree to anyone becoming abbot who did not know some logic and how to separate truth from falsehood.’ The full arts course usually took nine years, but many students stayed just a year or two, improved their Latin, learned some law and made some friends. Those who completed the whole demanding course were entitled to call themselves Masters of Arts (MAs). By 1215 half of the canons of Salisbury Cathedral were Masters.

In systematically organised debates, known as ‘disputations’, the students learned to apply the rules of formal logical reasoning and quick-witted verbal virtuosity in answer to questions posed by their masters. At popular debates known as disputations de quodlibet (‘about anything at all’) the questions could be put by the audience and might relate to current political controversies or subjects chosen for their humorous potential. If anyone ever debated ‘how many angels can stand on the head of a pin?’, it would have been during a joky quodlibet. The debating techniques honed in these sessions meant that the products of a school of advanced study had acquired skills which could be transferred to virtually any discipline. Most of them went on to careers as administrators, managers and consultants to kings, aristocrats and senior churchmen. Alexander Nequam remembered how he and a school friend had both vowed to enter a monastery, which he had, but his friend, his studies finished, was now working in the Treasury.

The most famous of the thousands of English students who travelled to the schools of France in search of the most advanced education Europe could offer was John of Salisbury, the author of Policraticus, The Statesman’s Book. He studied at Paris and elsewhere from 1136 to 1147. The most famous of his teachers was the brilliant Breton, Peter Abelard, who taught him logic, but two others were Englishmen, Robert Pullen and Robert of Melun, later bishop of Hereford. The latter, according to John, taught that there was often no one right answer to the most interesting questions and was always willing to argue on either side of a question.

For students who wanted to study law, Bologna offered a prestigious alternative to Paris, especially if they were interested in Roman law – that is, civil law as opposed to the canon law of the Church. But the relevance of Roman law to English law was somewhat indirect, and there is no doubt that the vast majority of English students who went to the continent chose France. A study of the masters of the embryonic University of Paris has revealed that during the period 1179–1215 more than a third of those whose origins are known came from England. Among them was Stephen Langton, one of the key figures of 1215. He taught theology in Paris and it was he who introduced the present arrangement of the Bible into books and chapters. Another was Robert of Curzon, who returned to Paris in 1215 as a papal legate and cardinal and issued the first set of university statutes. Another English student at Paris, at least according to The Mirror of Fools, a satire written by Nigel Whiteacre of Canterbury, was Burnellus, an ass who decided to take the arts course. ‘Then,’ he daydreamed, ‘I’ll be Master Burnell, and the crowds will shout “Here comes the great Master Burnell”.’ According to Nigel Whiteacre, the English students at Paris were already, in the late 1180s, famous for their drinking and womanising. As for Burnellus, after seven years of study at Paris all he could say was ‘hee-haw’.

By 1215, however, it was no longer quite so necessary to go abroad to complete your education. There were schools of advanced study in a few English towns: Exeter, Lincoln, London, Northampton and Oxford. At this date Oxford was pre-eminent – though still much less prestigious than Paris or Bologna. When Gerald de Barri wanted to publicise his first major work, The Topography of Ireland, he gave readings from it on three consecutive days at Oxford ‘because of all places in England that was where clerks were most numerous and most learned’. On the first day he entertained the poor, on the second, all the teachers as well as those scholars who had acquired some reputation, and on the third, the remaining students together with Oxford’s knights and its many burgesses. ‘It was’, Gerald said with characteristic lack of modesty, ‘a magnificent and lavish occasion.’ By the 1190s Oxford was beginning to attract a few students from the continent. But at that time there was as yet no university, just an informal gathering of lots of teachers and students in a single town. The chronicler Roger of Wendover reported the bloodshed in 1209 that led to the creation of the university.

A certain clerk studying the liberal arts at Oxford by mischance killed a woman, and ran away on realising that she was dead. When her body and his absence were discovered the mayor of Oxford arrested three other clerks who had shared a rented house together with the fugitive. Although these three knew nothing whatever about the killing, they were imprisoned and a few days later, on the king’s orders and in contempt of ecclesiastical privilege, were taken outside the town limits and hanged. At this all the clerks of Oxford, both masters and students, about 3000 in all, left so that not one of them remained behind in the town.

Some pursued their studies at Cambridge, others at Reading. The dispute between the town of Oxford and the clerks dragged on for years. Before a formal settlement could be reached, the clerks had to form themselves into a corporation, a body – like a borough – with legal rights and responsibilities: the ‘university’. The English word derives from the Latin universitas meaning a corporation. Finally, in 1214, the town authorities agreed to do penance, to regulate the level of student rents and the price of food, and to make an annual payment to the university as financial assistance to poor students. Clearly, although Roger’s figure of 3000 masters and students was an exaggeration, there had been enough of them for the withdrawal of their purchasing power to have a damaging impact on Oxford’s economy. But the dispute had gone on for so long that one group of teachers and pupils had settled very comfortably in Cambridge. And there they stayed. Students lived in lodgings or rented houses like the unfortunates of 1209, but charitable benefactions from the later thirteenth century onwards meant that a few could be accommodated in colleges, of which the earliest was Oxford’s Merton College.

In the advanced schools of Europe you could study law and theology as well as the liberal arts. As education came to be more formally structured, these subjects were seen as suitable for higher degrees, to be embarked on by the academically inclined after they had completed the arts course. Those who took a doctorate in law expected to be offered well-paid jobs when they finally left university, probably in their thirties. Those who studied theology were more interested in thinking out problems than in making money. Theologians liked to call their subject ‘the queen of the sciences’. Law, by contrast, came to be known as one of the ‘lucrative sciences’; the other was medicine, but anyone wanting to study that was better advised to leave England.

For them there was a choice between two prestigious schools: Montpellier and Salerno. Salerno, in particular, acquired a legendary reputation, as Marie de France’s story, The Two Lovers, reveals. A king who could not bear to part with his daughter decided that only the man who could carry her to the top of a nearby mountain would be allowed to marry her. Many tried, but none got more than half-way up. As it happened, she fell in love with a young man and he with her but, not wanting to cause her father additional distress, she refused to elope. Fortunately she had a cunning plan.

I have an aunt in Salerno, a rich woman who has been there for more than thirty years and who has practised the physician’s art so much that she is well-versed in medicines, and knows all about herbs and roots. Go to her, taking a letter from me, and tell her your story. She will give you such electuaries and potions as will increase your strength.

He took her advice and when he returned from Salerno, he was much strengthened. (The rich aunt was probably based on Trotula, a woman who wrote a book on the medical care of women; Chaucer’s Wife of Bath referred to her as ‘Dame Trot’). He brought back with him a phial of a precious potion that would allow him to complete the Herculean task. She, meanwhile, trying to lose some weight for his sake, had had some success. When the time came for the test, she decided to wear nothing but her shift. He felt so invigorated by happiness that he carried her all the way without stopping once to take the potion, but at the top he collapsed and died. Burnellus the Ass was equally unfortunate. He went to Salerno in the hope of finding a specialist who could make his tail grow until it was as long as his ears. But on the way home, carrying ten jars of Salerno’s finest tail-growing mixture, he was set upon by dogs and lost all the jars as well as half of his tail.

Salerno owed its reputation to a Tunisian Muslim, known in the West, after his conversion to Christianity, as Constantine the African, and his Latin translations of the Arabic medical treatises based on the writings of the great Greek doctor Galen. John of Salisbury was not impressed:

Often failed students of science/philosophy go to Salerno or Montpellier, where they study medicine, and then their careers suddenly take off. They ostentatiously quote Hippocrates and Galen, pronounce mysterious words, and have aphorisms ready to cover all cases. They use arcane words as thunderbolts with which to stun the minds of their clients. They follow two precepts above all. First, don’t waste time by practising medicine where people are poor. Second, make sure you collect your fee while the patient is still in pain.

His jaundiced words did little to impede the success of the new medicine. Kings of England employed the best doctors. At the beginning of the twelfth century Henry I’s came from the Mediterranean – men such as the converted Spanish Jew Peter Alphonsi or Italians such as Grimbald and Faricius – who became abbot of Abingdon. But by the end of the century Richard I had doctors who were Englishmen such as Warin, abbot of St Albans (1183–1195), and his brother Matthew who been trained at Salerno.

By 1200 the medical ideas of the school of Salerno were well known throughout the West. Its adherents saw the human body as having four principal members, each served by the appropriate network – the brain was served by nerves, the heart by arteries, the liver by veins and the genitals by the spermatic ducts. On this theory both men and women produced sperm. Without the first three members, the Salernitans said, the body would no longer function; without the fourth, the human race would cease to exist. They noted that although human beings looked more like monkeys than pigs, their internal organs were closer to those of pigs – an opinion not irrelevant to modern transplant surgery. There were also the four ‘humours’ – or, as we might say, principal components, corresponding to four elements: blood, which was hot and moist like air; phlegm, which was cold and moist like water; red bile or choler, hot and dry like fire; and black bile, cold and dry like earth. Hence, depending on which humour predominated, there were four ‘complexions’ or, as we might say, temperaments: sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric and melancholic. According to this school, good health depended upon a balance of humours. Analysis of a patient’s urine, always bearing in mind their age and sex, was seen as a reliable guide to the balance of their humours and, thence, their health. On this subject a translation by Constantine the African of a treatise by a ninth-century North African-Jewish physician known as Isaac Judaeus was regarded as the authoritative book and remained so until the sixteenth century. When one of Henry I’s doctors, Faricius, abbot of Abingdon, was proposed as a candidate for the see of Canterbury, there were churchmen who opposed him on the grounds that they did not want an archbishop who had been accustomed to examining women’s urine. And, indeed, he was not appointed.

Many prescriptions recommended in the books of the time are simple enough, and not always dressed up in the pretentious Galenic theoretical language that John of Salisbury found so objectionable. Mugwort in wine, for example, was advised for the woman who had problems with menstruation. Steambaths were good for those who suffered from obesity. A swollen penis could be alleviated with a marshmallow compress.

For deafness: take the fatty residue of fresh eels that appears after cooking them, the juice of honeysuckle, and houseleek, and a handful of ants’ eggs. Grind them together and strain them. Mix the result with oil and cook it. After cooking, add vinegar so that the mixture penetrates better, or wine if preferred. Pour this into the healthy ear and stop up the afflicted ear. Have the patient lie upon their good side. In the morning take care to avoid a draught.

The confident tone of medical textbooks is noteworthy, grounded on the assumption that most conditions can be treated without recourse to miracles or magic. And miracle stories themselves suggest that most people shared this confidence in doctors. No theme in them is more common than that the saint healed when doctors had failed – which indicates that people went to the doctors before they went on a pilgrimage.

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