1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (9 page)

Our heirs in perpetuity
.

Magna Carta, Clause I

L
ike 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.

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,

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.

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
,

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.

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.

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’.