The culture of children in medieval England

Past & Present, August, 1995 by Nicholas Orme

Anyone wishing to study the history of children in the Middle Ages could well begin with the chapters about them in the famous encyclopaedia On the Properties of Things, compiled by Bartholomew the Englishman in the mid-thirteenth century and translated into English by John Trevisa in 1398. Here are accounts of conception and birth, the functions of midwives and nurses, and the characteristics of infants, boys and girls.(1) The discussion of boys includes a remark worth examining. As Trevisa expressed it, "they love talkynges and counsailles of suche children as they bene, and forsaken and voyden companye of olde men".(2) Boys, in other words, prefer each other's fellowship to that of their elders. The observation has a special interest today when the nature of medieval childhood is a matter of debate. One influential writer on the subject, Philippe Aries, has argued that children did not lead separate lives from adults. In his opinion, the mature and the young lived closely together, working and playing in similar ways, with the result that adults did not generally view children as a distinct group or childhood as a special era of life.(3) Shulamith Shahar, the author of the best recent survey of medieval children, takes the opposite view. She grants the fact that people lived in close proximity with one another. But, she asks, were there not differences between the lives of men and women, masters and servants, and therefore also adults and children? For her, there were indeed such distinctions, causing adults to have a well-developed concept of childhood and even of stages within it.(4)

The present article relates to this debate, or rather to one of its aspects. It is not primarily about adults and their relationship with children, but about children and what belonged to them in terms of a culture. What did the young possess by way of goods, activities, speech, folklore and imagination which were distinctively theirs?(5) These topics have received little attention before 1550 compared with the post-Reformation era, when the Opies and Sir Keith Thomas have reconstructed childhood as it was lived by children rather than viewed by adults.(6) There is a good deal of evidence about children's culture in England before 1550, but it is widely diffused among literary, documentary, pictorial and archaeological sources. Such evidence is hard to collect and easily overlooked. Material is much more plentiful in all the sources after 1300 than before, and the present study necessarily centres on the 250 years from then until 1550, though relevant earlier material is included. The aim of the study is to survey the main categories of evidence, to show what each reveals, and to consider what answers can be given to the major questions prompted by the history of children's culture. Did their culture differ from that of adults (one of the strands in the debate provoked by Aries)? Was it simple or sophisticated in its nature and resources? Was it homogeneous or did it vary according to gender, age, rank, wealth or locality? Was it constant or did it change historically? Does it show children to have altered in basic respects between those times and now?

Evidence for children's culture in the Middle Ages is to be found in several kinds of source, each presenting problems in its use. Written sources provide a scattering of casual references in chronicles, miracle collections, coroners' records and literary works. Adult writers, however, were slow to make mention of children and their culture, even casually, and relatively little survives before the fourteenth century.(7) What does is blurred by adults' own assumptions; boys tend to be described in terms of activities, girls in terms of character.(8) Coroners' records of accidental deaths are the most dispassionate accounts, but relate only to a small minority of children.(9) Visual sources centre chiefly on the depiction of scenes of everyday life in illustrated manuscripts. These too are a late genre, mostly dating from after about 1200 and exemplified in such works as MS. Bodley 264 (Flemish, 1338-44) and MSS. Douce 135 and 276 (from early sixteenth-century France), all in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Volumes like these contain valuable pictures of children using toys and playing games, but they may be biased towards the activities of the well-provided and most come from continental Europe rather than England. A third source exists in archaeological finds, which are beginning to yield important evidence about manufactured metal toys from about 1300 onwards.(10) Unfortunately, ground conditions scarcely permit the survival of toys of wood or fabric, and the context of finds is frequently uncertain. A ball, a brooch or a chessman by itself does not establish use by a child or an adult. Fourthly, there are school-books, several dozen of which survive after about 1400, some compiled by masters but others by pupils themselves. These are the earliest examples of children's own writing, but they were written only by boys under supervision in classrooms and it is hard to decide what came from the master and what from the pupil. A further general difficulty in the written sources relates to gender. Medieval writers frequently speak of "children", or pueri in Latin, terms which included girls as well as boys. Often, however, they seem to have only boys in mind, and when they single out a sex it is usually the male one. Girls are as disadvantaged in the history of medieval children as women are in that of adulthood. The present article uses the word "children" to mean both sexes from birth until about the mid-teens. When it appears in references to original sources it reproduces a similar inclusive word - but, to repeat, one which may hide a gender bias.