As a new school year gets underway, we’re joined by senior properties historian Michael Carter to discover what education was like in the Middle Ages and how it compared to today’s classrooms.

Discover the different forms of medieval schools, the role of the monasteries as educators and how the educational opportunities differed for boys and girls. We’ll also reveal what the curriculum comprised, what a medieval school day looked like and where you can find out more today. 
 
For details of the school visit opportunities at our historic sites, go to www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/school-visits.

Hello and welcome to your weekly podcast into England's past.

You can listen to brand new episodes every Thursday.

This week at the start of a new school year in England, we'll look at education in the Middle Ages.

And leading our class today is senior properties historian Dr Michael Carter.

It's a real pleasure to be back and it's that time of year again isn't it?

It's been heralded for the last couple of weeks back to school and I'm sure so many listeners will remember this from childhood.

Was it feelings of anticipation, dread or a mixture of both?

I hope in our conversation I'll give some insights into what schooling was like for children and adolescents in the Middle Ages.

I'll bet some listeners are going to recognise some common features from their own school days, but how radically different things were too.

It's those 3 words that sort of conjure up feelings of potential dread for some children, and I suppose others are quite keen to get back to school and learning and back amongst their school friends again.

But let's go back in time and situate ourselves.

So we're talking about the medieval period.

Because 1 tends to think about stone castles, knights on horseback, these sorts of things.

But actually the early medieval period looks rather different, doesn't it?

And in fact we could spend a whole podcast talking about how to define the Middle Ages, culturally and chronologically.

But for the purposes of today I'm going to be talking about quite a broad sweep of history, essentially from the late 6th century and that's the arrival of missionaries to convert the Anglo-Saxon peoples in what's now England to Christianity.

And I'll be going right through to around about

the reign of Henry VIII, the dissolution of the monasteries, the start of the English Reformation, which is a real fissure in English history, a real departure point for a new age and end of another.

What do we mean then by schools in the Middle Ages?

Do they resemble modern schools in any ways?

Well, we're going to be talking an awful lot about Latin in this podcast so I think it's quite appropriate to say that the word school comes from the Latin schola.

I think it ultimately has a Greek origin.

Then as now the word school or schools had various meanings and those include the senses which I'll be using throughout this podcast.

That's a class of children or adolescents, boys and girls, but with much more evidence for the former I have to say, receiving instruction from a teacher and also the building in which this teaching took place.

Now, again, we could have another podcast on schools in the sense of it meaning a place of advanced study, especially the universities.

Did medieval schools resemble the ones we're all familiar with?

Well I think there are some common strands.

Education took place between the ages of around 4 or 5 to mid to late teens and there was an elementary and a secondary phase to it.

There were professional teachers and some of them did indeed have university degrees.

There was definitely an academic year and it started, it seems, in autumn.

And there were 3 or 4 terms and these were punctuated by holiday.

So there are already some common strands there.

But there were also some very, very big differences and I think that will become apparent as I'm talking over the next 45 minutes or hour or so.

When were the first schools established in medieval England?

Well, I'm going to start by asking myself a question that I really don't know the answer to.

Did some sort of schooling survive the end of Roman rule in the western bits of what's now England?

But these areas were predominantly Christian and Christianity is a religion of the book so it requires literacy.

Also Latin was a common language for apes, so you had some instruction in that.

We have evidence from places like Tintagel, of course, an English heritage site, of enduring literacy after the cessation of Roman administration here in the early 20th century, and that there was also enduring contact with the Mediterranean world.

But we're on much firmer ground when it comes to the missions to evangelize or convert the Anglo-Saxons.

Schools at various levels were a feature of the monasteries which were to spearhead these efforts of conversion.

And from sources such as Bede we know of schools at several early Anglo-Saxon monasteries that are now looked after by English Heritage, Lindisfarne, Whitby, and Canterbury.

And within their precincts, boys and young men were instructed to be the next generation of monks, missionaries, and bishops.

There was also some evidence for the instruction of girls, especially, for instance, at the Jewell Monastery of Whitby.

The pupils of these schools were to include some of the great saints of Anglo-Saxon England, and they played a huge role in the shaping of history of these lands in their own time and the influence still resonates to this very day.

Mason Something you just said there, Michael, reminds me of the fact that obviously we have an international audience here on the English Heritage podcast and you've described the children as pupils, p-u-p-i-l-s, A bit like pupils of an eye.

But of course that's a word that I don't think that, I don't think it's used in North America.

But I think that's interesting isn't it, that how even in the lexicon of education there are different words for the children who attend school.

Can you tell us more about this school at Canterbury then?

Was it related to the priesthood or was it a bit more wide-ranging the education there?

Well its origins go back to the arrival of St.

Augustine with his companions from Rome in 597, their settlement in Canterbury, the foundation there of the monastery of St.

They really flourished in the seventh century.

It would achieve international fame and significance under the leadership of Abbot Hadrian and Archbishop Theodore.

Now these men were refugees of Mediterranean origin.

And let's not forget that the Mediterranean was the cradle of Christianity.

And in the seventh century, it was what some historians would call the late antique.

It was in a process of transformation from the ancient world to the medieval world.

Hadrian was from North Africa and Theodore was from Asia Minor.

They were forced to flee their homelands due to invasion and warfare and they made for Italy.

Here they came to the attention of the Pope who sent them to Canterbury.

Bede, the great historian of the Anglo-Saxon Church, speaks in the highest terms of their school at Canterbury, saying that it attracted a large number of students into whose minds they poured wholesome knowledge.

The curriculum at the school included scripture, poetry, astronomy and calendar computistics.

That was a real hot topic in the Anglo-Saxon church, how to calculate the true date of Easter.

The school pioneered the teaching of Greek in Anglo-Saxon England, and that would have been opened up a rich seam of scholarship and knowledge to the nascent English church.

And Hadrian made his own distinct contributions too, where we get gleamings of this from the writings of other Anglo-Saxons.

He was lauded as a respected father and revered teacher for his ineffability and his vanity.

And the school at Canterbury also pioneered the use of music in Christian worship here in England.

So there are a few elements there to the school in Canterbury, which is in Kent in south-east England, which people would recognise today, effectively, in the types of lessons on offer?

Yeah, and I think also as well, this is 1 of the instances where we have to kind of tease out what's meant by school as well.

And I think the praise of the school is a school that was providing both a kind of elementary and secondary education, but also advanced study as well.

That the, for want of a better word, graduates of the school went on to occupy very high positions indeed in the church.

So I think that we're talking about people who are also receiving instruction in adulthood.

JG Yeah, I think as well, we're talking about more advanced study.

So it's like, you know, the use of the word university would be very, very anachronistic at this time.

But I do think we are talking about that next stage.

It's taking your study through to the next level.

And as I said, I think we could have a whole podcast on the history of universities.

As for the monasteries, though, they obviously played a role in education.

What role did monks and monasteries particularly play?

I think that monks are readily associated, and nuns as well it must be said, in the popular imagination with learning and erudition and reading, and rightly so.

And they played a very significant role indeed in education in the Middle Ages.

And I'd say they were probably the leading provider of education until, gosh, you know, well after the Norman Conquest in 1066.

Now, I've already hinted at this in the Anglo-Saxon context, and children within monasteries received education for 2 main reasons.

The first of these was because they were destined for the monastic life.

They'd be brought up as, sometimes, as child oblates.

They were given by their posh parents as gifts to the church.

And they'd be brought up within the cloister.

Benedict, which was to become the dominant form of monastic life in Western Europe, even makes provision for this.

The care was entrusted to the master of children.

Their education would pass through various stages, and they wouldn't be taking the monastic vows until their mid-late teens, when they had a substantial elementary and secondary education.

And these vows had, in theory at least, to be taken freely.

Now, adolescents and young men would enter monasteries as novices.

In theory they should already have been literate, that's to say capable of reading and understanding basic Latin so they could perform the liturgy.

Of course, the liturgy was performed in Latin, but they would often need further instruction too.

Now, there were also monastic schools intended for boys and in some nunneries, girls as well.

But the people who studied there, the young people who studied there, weren't necessarily going to take the cowl and enter the cloister.

Now the song schools, these were the ones that provided an elementary education.

That's how to read and how to sing plain song.

It was how to recognize letters and how to recognize words.

You wouldn't necessarily have been schooled at that point how to understand Latin.

And then as I said, the song school, it was how to sing plain song.

That was what's today popularly known as Gregorian chant.

And the grammar school phase would give you the understanding of Latin.

Now these schools are very much a characteristic of post-conquest Anastasism, especially between the 13th and 16th centuries.

Now, we know of their existence from several sites now cared for by English heritage, Beres of Edmonds, Furness, Gisborough.

And also, I think it's important to mention Denny Abbey, and that was occupied by 3 different orders over the course of the Middle Ages.

Benedictine monks, then Knights Templar, and finally Franciscan nuns, or as they were also known, poor claires.

And there was a school at Denny where the daughters of local elites would be sent to acquire a little bit of polish and a little bit of learning.

And these girls weren't necessarily intended to become nuns afterwards.

And in actual fact, the more you look for evidence at school, medieval monasteries, the more that you're going to find, for instance, several of our monasteries, for instance, Muchelney in Somerset or Cleve, also in Somerset actually, or Byland Abbey up in Yorkshire, we know that there were boy choristers there in the late Middle Ages and they would have had to have received some instruction.

So they were probably a schoolmaster at those schools to be teaching them the very basics in Latin grammar and also how to sing the services.

Roger Pinnes Did monasteries have a monopoly on education then in the Middle Ages or could you get education from other places?

Richard Pinchot They were very important providers of education, but it was far from being a monopoly.

And that's the case even before the Norman Conquest in 1066.

Elite households were also places of education.

But just what that consisted of would have changed over the centuries.

Now, it was common practice for the sons and daughters of the well-off to be sent to the households of other elite families, sometimes at a very, very tender age, as young as 7.

There they'd be instructed or schooled in manners and deportment, you know, what made you a gentleman or a gentlewoman, what was expected of your class.

And there would also have been some instruction in perhaps the basics of literacy.

But for boys, a lot of it was how to fight as well.

That was a very, very important marker of your elite status.

Looking at the church, parish churches, especially after the conquest, often had schools.

These might have been quite informal and it was an acknowledged responsibility of parish priests to provide some kind of education as required and often they would act as kind of like masters for an apprentice who was destined for the church.

There were numerous schools which were purposefully founded.

They were an expression of Christian piety.

And as we'll see later, some of these foundations are still with us today.

Schools were sometimes established by civic authorities and there was also private enterprise school teachers setting up schools of their own And by their very nature, they're not very well documented and some could be very short-lived But just to wrap up I think monasteries it should be said continue to be major providers of education until right up to the time of the dissolution of the monasteries.

I think it's also important to mention that a lot of this monastic education was free, at least it didn't charge any, we'll get to other costs involved in a medieval education.

But the charitable principles of the church meant that a lot of the education provided by medieval schools at various levels and by various providers was intended to be free.

From what you've been describing, Michael, across the range of education on offer in England in the medieval period, which is, well, I guess it's more than a thousand years, isn't it?

Yeah, about a thousand years since the Romans officially leave Britain.

Education can be found in monasteries, in private homes in the wealthy elite, and are there any other areas?

Richard Dawkins Yep, proper school foundations, what we would recognise as schools, and by the late Middle Ages, as we'll be talking, there were school buildings and school rooms.

There were ones that, you know, we were called, some of them were called free schools, a lot were called grammar schools, and some very famous schools indeed that have survived to this day have medieval origins.

And can we put a figure on how many schools there were during the Middle Ages in England?

Obviously, I suppose some come and go, don't they, over that very long period of perhaps more than a millennium?

We know of several hundred, but there were probably many, many more that still await discovery, or that just haven't left any evidence.

And it remains, schooling in the Middle Ages remains a very vibrant area of research.

Learning about school is a strange thing in a way, but it's part of history, isn't it?

And it's actually an important part of education history for anyone who's studying to be a teacher, I suppose.

Did both boys and girls go to the same schools, or was education for them separate?

ROB Well, both boys and girls did go to school.

There were more opportunities for boys to be educated, and I think that reflected the nature of medieval society, indeed society generally in the West until relatively modern times.

Now, nunneries were the main provider of education for girls, and these were the daughters of the well-off, nobles, gentries, merchants.

There are some hints of private schools for the education of girls.

Several women had the surname schoolmistress documented, for instance, in 14th century London, but we don't really know anything about the operation of these schools.

Now, nunneries took in children from a very young age.

I mean, was it childcare or was it education?

But for the most part, boys and girls were strictly segregated.

And indeed, even when I was growing up, the providers of secondary education.

At my local authority for the most part there were boys schools and there were girls schools.

Would every child in England in the Middle Ages have had access to education or was it more something that was for richer families, people connected to the priesthood, that sort of thing?

Only a small minority of children in medieval England received any formal schooling.

Now there were places that provided that was in theory at least a free education.

That's to say an education without fees being charged.

And this was seen as being fulfilling an obligation of Christian charity, and they were purposefully founded so that the teachers, the priests attached to it, the pupils would say prayers in commemoration of the benefactor for the salvation of the soul of their benefactor.

Now these free schools included monastic almonery schools, that's to say schools established by monasteries as part of their obligation to provide alms or relief to the poor.

In theory, admission to a free school was open to anybody that was born free, that's to say not a serf.

But your parents had to be able to spare you, clothe you, feed you.

And to go to that school then as now, where free education would have involved some costs.

Sometimes a registration fee was charged.

And it doesn't sound much like 4 pence, 4 pence, 2 pence, but that's tens if not hundreds of pounds in today's money.

You had to have something decent to wear.

And certainly, towards the end of the period we're looking at, you also had to be supplying various implements necessary for study.

Now, you also had to live close enough to walk to and from school every day Education stops being free when you've got to travel there There were boarding schools in the Middle Ages and we'll be talking about some of those later And as some schools were purposefully established to provide education for the more socially elite.

There was Dean Collett's school in London, for example, seems from the outset to have been targeted better off Londoners.

I think there was 1 free scholarship place, and that boy was responsible for waiting on his fellow pupils or students, and also removing the urine from the communal privy.

I don't think it was, you know, it gave you an idea of how lower the status of that free place was.

And also you think about, you know, Eton and Winchester, late 14th and 15th century foundations respectively, and they were founded for the education of it came to be 70 poor scholars each but you get the medieval equivalent of pushy parents very very quickly finding that these free education places are worth having that you find places going to people who are distant related or descended from the founder, the administrators of the endowment.

And places like Eton and Winchester are very, very rapidly also taking what are called commoners, that's boys who go to the school with a payment of a fee.

But having said that, free education, especially that provided by monastic schools, provided real opportunities for social mobility in the Middle Ages and this was a time of rigid stratification and very very little chance of movement out of the estate into which you were born And some boys with very poor starts in life indeed were able to profit massively from this education.

Several Abbotts and Priors, even an Archbishop of Canterbury started life as almonery boys.

In some instances, little more than street urchins taken off the streets in an act of Christian charity and put in the school to be brought up.

And we also know of less dramatic social mobility, but people, as a virtue of their education, their free education at these schools, being able to attain a post as a steward in somebody's household or an administrator of a monastic estate, and that really did represent a massive change in status and the schools were giving people a really big leg up in life.

In some respects things haven't really changed.

People see the benefit of education and want to get their children into the best school possible.

As for the teaching, who did the teaching?

I suppose in monasteries it was someone connected to the building.

Yeah, I mean monks and nuns definitely had teaching responsibilities in some instances, especially for the child oblates I was talking about and for novices, but there were also professional school teachers and they probably did the majority of the teaching even within monastic context.

And a term which some of the older listeners might be familiar with, schoolmasters, was a term with medieval origins, and the word master gives you an idea of the status and education of these teachers.

They were university graduates and they would have held a degree of Master of Arts.

And it's worth remembering that there were only 2 universities in medieval England, that's Oxford and Cambridge, and only a tiny proportion of the population went to university.

So the fact that university graduates were going into teaching says something about the role.

Indeed the statutes of many medieval schools specify that the school master had to be a graduate.

Now it took 7 years to earn the degree of MA.

So men with that degree, and it really was just men at this time, were often thin on the ground.

The degree of BA was introduced to increase the number of graduates, to fill roles, not just in teaching, but across the church and elsewhere where a degree was necessary.

Well, it's just a church and law, really, and teaching.

And there was also a short-lived degree called Master of Grammar and that's fallen out of use.

Now most schools would have just had a single master.

They were sometimes assisted by what was called an usher.

And I mean I was trying to find the best sort of analogy for this and I settled on teaching assistant, but that's not quite right as these ushers often would also have possessed a university degree and were aspiring masters looking for an appointment somewhere.

So just 2 people leading or taking part in a class fundamentally.

That obviously leads on to a question about the ages of the children in the class but we'll come on to that 1 Michael.

Obviously there's a building in which the children go.

I guess it also varies doesn't it depending on what type of school we're talking about?

Yeah I mean we tend to think of you know a discrete school building set aside for education.

And as I explained, there certainly were those.

But instruction took place in a variety of settings.

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Episode 231 - History lesson: education at medieval schools