Despite the best efforts of historians, the internet is still awash with misconceptions about the Middle Ages. Many of these ideas were the product of Victorian writers and historians reflecting Mediæval life through the lens of their own society, as was done by antiquarians before them and by historians since. However, after more than a century in popular culture, and being taught in schools, these sometimes broad, sweeping assertions remain deeply rooted in everyday consciousness. This is especially so when repeatedly reinforced online, in social media, on television and in the movies. Before addressing one such notion, it is worth remembering that the Mediæval period lasted roughly 1,000 years during which peoples’ lives and experiences varied according to time, place and circumstance. So, with that in mind, were people as uneducated and ignorant as some seem to think?
The Dark Ages Sadly modern conceptions of Mediæval education are still plagued by the notion of the “Dark Ages”, an era defined as “characterised by ignorance, backward in learning, void of intellectual light”. This view originated in the 1330s with Francesco di Petracco (born 20 July 1304; died 19 July 1374), an Italian scholar from Arezzo, a poet of the early Italian Renaissance and one of the earliest humanists. He regarded the centuries after the collapse of the Roman empire as “dark” meaning they were beset with ignorance and error compared to the “light” of classical antiquity's knowledge and understanding. Living in Rome, and being a huge admirer of his ancient forebears, di Petracco’s bias towards believing everything had gotten worse in the post-Roman world is unsurprising. Yet he did not coin the term “Dark Age”. That honour goes to Cesare Baronio, an Italian cardinal and ecclesiastical historian of the Roman Catholic Church. His best-known work of 1602, Annales Ecclesiastici, is a strict chronological history of the Church in which Baronio used the Latin phrase saeculum obscurum (“Dark Age”) in reference to the period between the end of the Carolingian Empire in AD 888 and the first inklings of the Gregorian Reform under Pope Clement II in AD 1046. The concept thus came to characterise the entire Middle Ages as a time of intellectual darkness in Europe between the fall of Rome and the 16th-century Renaissance. The phrase “Dark Ages” became especially popular during the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th-century but, more recently, others have used the term to denote the relative scarcity of written records in the Early Mediæval Period (the late 5th- to the 10th-century AD).
It is fair to say that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire did lead to profound changes in northern Europe. The import and export of certain goods such as ceramics and certain luxury items such as spices was interrupted and, without a unifying empire, an economic decline especially in long distance trade was inevitable. As the layers of imperial military and civil government began to collapse, justice and the administration of the old Roman provinces were consigned to local municipal authorities. The resulting power vacuum meant that anyone with an armed force could quickly become very political. Fledgling states and small kingdoms soon arose. In Britain, for example, former military officers, supported by their loyal soldiers, gradually emerged to become local warlords. While most likely still adhering to Romano-British customs and practices, such groups (warbands?) presumably promised, if suitably recompensed, to protect the populace at a time when aggressors out of nearby Scotland and Ireland or further afield threatened. From the late 5th-century onward, the arriving Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, Danes and Norwegians reshaped post-Roman Britain into what would become the modern countries of England and Wales. But these new settlers relied less on the written word, thus the lack of documentary evidence in this period is understandable. Yet that is not to claim people were illiterate. Greek and Roman learning was preserved by the church to the extent that Christian scholars in the 11th-century expended much effort on rediscovering missing works. Indeed, the spread of Irish monastic schools (scriptoria) across Europe laid the groundwork for the Carolingian Renaissance, an intellectual revival inspired by ancient Greek and Roman culture that began in the 8th-century and continued throughout the 9th-century.
Schools of thought It is true that education in the Mediæval period was not available to all. From their earliest inception most, if not all, of the UK’s oldest schools have been and remain fee-charging private institutions. Pupils were either accepted from families who could afford the tuition fees or were funded through scholarships such as happened at Eton College (see InfoBox opposite).
During this time, the monasteries of the Roman Catholic Church were the centres of education and literacy, preserving the Church's selection from Latin learning and maintaining the art of writing. Prior to their formal establishment, many Mediæval universities [1] were run for hundreds of years as Christian monastic schools (Scholae monasticae) in which monks taught classes, and later as cathedral schools. The King's School in Canterbury, Kent for example was established as one such Mediæval cathedral school about a century after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. From its foundation in AD 597 by Augustine of Canterbury (“Apostle to the English” and a founder of the English Church), the school has been uninterruptedly educating pupils on the Abbey and Cathedral grounds. The King’s School is therefore Britain's oldest fee-paying public school [2], and arguably the world's oldest extant school.
Jump forward nearly 600 years to 1179 and the Catholic Church mandated free education was to be offered to the poor declaring that every cathedral was to assign a master to teach boys too poor to pay the regular fee. Parishes and monasteries likewise established local free schools where priests and monks taught basic literacy skills, their salaries often being subsidised by local towns. Indeed, the Church remained at the heart of education with many of the earliest universities, for example the University of Paris founded in 1160, established on and teaching Christian values. That said, there were also several secular universities such as the world’s oldest continuously operating institute, the University of Bologna in Italy founded in 1088, or the University of Naples Federico II (founded in 1224 also in Italy) apparently the world's oldest state-funded university still active.
The more modern systems of education in Europe derive their origins from the schools of the High Middle Ages (AD 1000-1300). Most schools during this era were founded upon religious principles with the primary purpose of training the clergy. The early curriculum was usually based around the trivium, an introductory course at a Mediæval university involving the study of grammar, rhetoric and logic, and to a lesser extent the quadrivium involving the “mathematical arts” of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. Teaching was conducted in Latin, the lingua franca of educated Western Europeans throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Yet, this was also a time of scientific discovery. As people interacted and cultures collided, clashed or combined, each learned from the other. Perhaps separately or in isolation ideas were improved before being shared once more. European scholars in the newly founded universities had a renewed interest in translating not only ancient Greek but also Arabic texts. With academics encouraged to travel and lectures across Europe, the exchange of ideas and knowledge was reinvigorated. By AD 1200 Latin translations of the works of Ptolemy, Aristotle, Archimedes, Euclid and other ancient Greek authors, and of Arab and Jewish writers such as Avicenna, Averroes and Maimonides, had become available. These were then expanded upon and contributed to by contemporary authors.
As for students attending schools of this period, they were exclusively boys usually aged between seven and fourteen. Teaching ranged from the basics of literacy (alphabet, syllables, simple prayers and proverbs) to more advanced instruction in the Latin language. Occasionally, these schools also may have taught rudimentary arithmetic or letter writing and other skills useful in business. Often instruction at various levels took place in the same schoolroom - a practice that could still be found in smaller village schools in the Victorian era. In northern Europe clerical education was largely superseded by forms of elementary schooling following the Protestant Reformation beginning in the 16th-century. In Scotland, for instance, the national Church of Scotland set out a programme for spiritual reform in January 1561 setting the principle of a schoolteacher for every parish church and free education for the poor. This was provided for by an Act of the Parliament of Scotland, passed in 1633, which introduced a tax to pay for this programme. Although few countries of the period had such extensive systems of education, the period between the 16th- and 18th-centuries saw education become significantly more widespread.
Can you read me? Although education was clearly not available to everyone it would be untrue to claim that only the clergy or the well-to-do were literate. In this context the word “literate” is not simply an ability to read and write but, as the entry on www.etymonline.com states, in the early 15th-century it encompasses being educated:
It is worth noting, however, that the ability to read is not necessarily contingent on knowing how to write; they are two different learned skills albeit closely aligned. In keeping with the current theme, the author admits to being ignorant of any contemporary records documenting literacy levels in Mediæval Europe, so knowing precisely who could or could not read and/or write is difficult to determine. Conversely, identifying how many people were illiterate is similarly problematic. All we can base our understanding on are the corpus of surviving manuscripts, codices and books. These sources were handwritten on expensive vellum, however, so copies were rare and costly to produce, especially illuminated manuscripts [4]. Most of these texts were written in Latin or French, the languages of the educated (literate) elites - royalty, the nobility, clerics, and so forth. Those people untutored in Latin or French were, quite simply, considered illiterate:
Yet, many commonfolk could write, perhaps not in Latin but more likely in their own vernacular expressing their thoughts, ideas and desires in the many and varied regional dialects spoken across Mediæval Europe. Before the printing press obliged standards in spelling, those who had learnt their alphabet often wrote phonetically with little regard for grammar or consistency. Perhaps deemed unworthy of preservation in the libraries of the Church and the universities, much of the material written by commonfolk has been lost. Just occasionally, however, archaeology produces some remarkable finds. Readers may be familiar with the Vindolanda Tablets that famously preserve the 2,000 year old writings of ancient Romans living in northern England adjacent to Hadrian’s Wall. But wax tablets and styluses, or their remains, similar to those used by the ancient Romans have been widely found across Mediæval Europe. Even more remarkable are the over 1,000 birch bark writings found in Russia in the 1950s [5]. The unique soil condition in the Russian city of Novgorod, situated some 200 kilometres south of Saint Petersburg, had preserved letters and drawings dating between the 11th- and 15th-centuries. Over a hundred writing styluses were also found. Sadly, the perishable nature of materials like birch bark meant similar writings rarely survive very long.
Even so, the Novgorod finds included personal letters, documents containing business transaction, legal disputes, shopping lists, school exercises, tax returns, wills, marriage proposals, prayers, spells, curses, private messages, obscene stories and even drawings made by children. Written by ordinary people, these documents reveal a lot about how life was in Mediæval Novgorod and completely changed perceptions about literacy in the region at the time. Among this fascinating find is a charming collection of seventeen drawings made by a young boy named Onfim who, in the 13th-century, was learning to write with a simple stylus on pieces of Birch bark. Stylistic clues and the boy’s penmanship have led experts to estimate he was aged between 6 and 7 years old at the time. Onfim’s surviving work gives us a good idea of how education worked in 13th-century Novgorod and that, surprisingly, little has changed in the last 800 years. Children like Onfim practiced the alphabet, spelled out syllables, reproduced well-known texts, in particular, the Psalms, and practiced writing letters. Significantly the quantity of birch-bark letters from Novgorod attest to the mass literacy of the region’s population. Moreover, Novgorod in Russia, together with Kyiv in Ukraine, were the first cities to have formal schools which for Novgorod meant it became an important centre of Russian culture, disseminating religious knowledge and translations of foreign authors.
In the same decade, hundreds of Mediæval texts inscribed in Runes on pieces of wood or bone were found in Bergen, Norway. Known as the “Bryggen inscriptions” they are similar to the birch bark writings from the Novgorod region as they too appeared to have been written by ordinary people. All these examples reveal that far more people in Europe were reading and writing than just the educated elite. Moreover, they were doing so in their regional languages using whatever materials that were available. That is not to claim literacy levels were consistent across the Europe as they most likely varied by region and at different times.
Conclusion So, the next time you hear someone pejoratively describe something as “Mediæval” to imply brutality or ignorance remember that the collapse of the Roman Empire did not plunge Europe into Cardinal Cesare Baronio’s “Dark Age”. In the thousand years that followed there were several instances characterised by significant cultural renewal. The Middle Ages was an era of noteworthy medical, cultural, scientific, philosophical, and literary advances. Moreover, the latter was not limited to an educated elite or the clergy. It is clear from archaeological finds that many commoners were able to read, write and communicate their thoughts both personal and business related.
Bon appétit!
Reference:
Patowary, K., (2019), “What a 7-Year-Old Russian Boy Doodled in The 13th Century”, amusingplanet.com, Available online (accessed 22nd November 2024).
Endnotes:
1. Evolving from much older Christian cathedral schools and monastic schools, the first institutions generally considered to be universities were established in Italy, France, and England in the late 11th- and the 12th-centuries for the study of arts, law, medicine, and theology. ▲
2. In England and Wales, a public school is a type of fee-charging private school originally for older boys. They are “public” in the sense of being open to pupils irrespective of locality, denomination or paternal trade or profession; nor are they run for the profit of a private owner. ▲
3. The Renaissance is a period in European civilisation immediately following the Middle Ages that was characterised by a surge of interest in Classical scholarship and values. The Renaissance witnessed the discovery and exploration of new continents, the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, the decline of the feudal system and the growth of commerce, and the invention or application of such innovations as paper, printing, the mariner’s compass, and gunpowder. ▲
4. An illuminated manuscript is a formally prepared document where the text is decorated with flourishes such as borders and miniature illustrations. Often used in the Roman Catholic Church for prayers and liturgical books such as psalters and courtly literature, the practice continued into secular texts from the 13th-century onward and typically include proclamations, enrolled bills, laws, charters, inventories, and deeds (Wikipedia). ▲
5. Birch bark was frequently used as a replacement for paper which was, until a few centuries ago, a valuable and expensive commodity. Novgorod is surrounded by birch forests which meant the trees’ bark was widely available, easily cultivated and thus used for centuries by the locals for writing since it was soft and easily scratched. Thin pieces of birch bark were almost as good as wood-pulp paper while requiring little effort to manufacture. ▲
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