Orphan children

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Ruth

Many medieval children became orphans, either full orphans or with only one parent. Ironically, becoming an orphan was less of a tragedy for children who were not going to inherit property. Children who already lived in poverty became wards of the town and were assigned some household to grow up in, at the station in which they were born: servants or apprentices. Middle class children generally went into relatives’ families. But wealthy children became hostages.

When a baron died, his widow did not have natural custody rights. If she had her own property, she might be able to buy custody of her children from the king, but if not, then at least around school age, if not younger, off the children went to a guardian’s household. The guardian might be the king or another nobleman, or it might be the bishop. Custody of heirs and heiresses was actually bought and sold; children might be moved to a different guardian’s house without even knowing him.

Orphaned wards were money-makers for two reasons. First, until they were old enough to own the property outright, the guardian had the “usufruct,” that is, the use of the fruit: apples from an orchard, timber from forest, wool from flocks, rent from tenants, and so on. The property’s basic value remained for the orphan, but no interest or other income piled up during his childhood. Second, when the orphan was old enough to marry, the guardian made the match. A wealthy heiress was married to his own son or nephew, to keep the orchard, timber, sheep or tenants in the family’s income rolls; part of the property then stayed in the guardian’s family as her dowry. A wealthy heir wasn’t quite as lucrative, but he too could be forced to marry within the guardian’s family. It was a neat way for kings to reward loyal knights: here, take this orphan and her estate. It cost the king nothing and it was perfectly legal.

The Magna Carta even addressed the abuses of orphans’ property by royal guardians.

Even orphans who stood to inherit no more than a city house became valuable wards on a lower scale. Men with pragmatic morals and gambling debts liked to marry orphans. An orphan girl had veto power, technically, but it wasn’t hard to give her a glowing idea of her future married life to get compliance, and the guardians didn’t care if she was happy. They essentially sold these girls (and boys) to debtors.

So when we hear of aristocratic arranged marriages in those times, and we feel shocked that parents made betrothal agreements for their preschool children, we have to see the other side. A betrothed orphan went to the home of her or his future spouse, and nobody could bargain or buy custody for profit. Assuming the natural parent had made a reasonable choice, the child’s welfare was assured if death came early, as it so often did.

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Medieval girls

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Ruth

Meanwhile, what were medieval girls learning? Mostly fabric arts: spinning and sewing. Next to those chief occupations, herbal arts: home medicine and making ale.

All classes and types of girls below the aristocracy could expect to keep a distaff and drop spindle close by at all times. A craftsman’s daughter who was asked to watch the baby was expected to spin most of the time. Farm girls learned to spin in the half-light and even full dark, going by touch. They could spin while walking or talking. Any time they had more than a minute to spare, it was time to pull out the spinning. By the late medieval years, weaving moved from home craft to guild industry, but even professional weavers still bought most of their spun wool or flax from home spinners.

Women at home made most of their family’s clothes and linens, but tailors were taking over a lot of the sewing in towns. Some girls learned fine embroidery skills and could become full-time paid embroiderers working in aristocratic households. Aristocratic girls learned fine embroidery too, but they were not expected to decorate their own clothes. They worked on large decorative fabrics that were given to churches and monasteries. Girls in convents, too, spent hours on these gold-trimmed wall hangings or robes for churches.

Herbal lore had to be passed from women to girls, generation after generation. Herbs were used for medicine, but also for daily use like scenting the laundry, keeping away flea infestations, and freshening breath.

The other major herbal market was for ale. All lower and middle class girls needed to know how to brew. Ale followed local and family recipes, using for flavor anything from pine needles to mint to ivy. Until the use of hops made ale last longer, it had to be brewed in batches that lasted for only a few days. To get fresh ale, your neighborhood needed at least five women who each took a turn brewing and traded jugs of fresh brew. They also supplied taverns and many town women kept up a busy ale-brewing business. Until hops permitted ale to become a large-scale industry, it was never men’s work.

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Kids’ war games

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Ruth

In medieval wars, the leaders and chief actors were knights, whose children were all in formal knighthood training. But there were always large parties of common men who used bows and spears; at times, their actions were more important than the knights’. Their sons were farm and town boys, apprentices and students with feast days free of work. They liked to gather on town commons and play out large war games, perhaps based on their relatives’ stories.

As adults, they wouldn’t be carrying swords, but nothing stopped the apprentices from making toy swords and wooden shields. Large organized war games incorporated several hundred boys, and they fought with such sincerity that some were injured and occasionally died of their injuries. City governments hated these games and stopped them if they became aware. One can imagine apprentices going about their work, quietly passing the word to their friends about which field and what time to meet.

Students and apprentices also liked to play at tournament games. Without ponies, they had to ride on each others’ shoulders. Without official training equipment, they had to make do with what they could design themselves. Of course, a group of apprentices included kids who were learning to work with metal and wood, so their mock-quintains might be pretty good at times. The quintain was a turning post with a target on one side and a sandbag on the other. The point was to ride past and hit the target, while avoiding the sandbag that swung to get you as soon as the target was dislodged.

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Boy knights

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Ruth

Medieval children born into land-owning (that is, aristocratic) families had a specific career future to prepare for. Until the late Middle Ages, they were less likely to go to school than their non-aristocratic age peers. In the early Middle Ages, they didn’t even learn to read. Aristocratic boys had one role: war.

Owning land and leading in wartime were connected at the root, because at least since the time of Charlemagne, royal grants of land included a contract to provide a stipulated number of fully-armed knights in time of war. That’s what the land was for. Its rent payments provided income that allowed the warrior class many hours of practice in fighting skills. If they had to plow their own land or operate mills, they wouldn’t be as good at weapons. Forcing everyone to pay rent to them was a way of funding a national army. And every boy born to that family was an automatic recruit.

From the age when other boys began school, aristocratic boys started a long training program. They alternated hours of household service as pages with hours of rigorous fight training. Most of them could already ride ponies before their formal training began; now they rode ponies with added tasks like simple jousting. They began wearing armor to learn how to move in spite of the weight. They were trained in boxing, archery, spear-throwing and sword skills. As they grew older, their page duties shifted to becoming the squires (assistants) to older knights. They remained squires for an indefinite time, depending on the family’s importance and wealth (richer = younger promotion to knighthood).

Not all boys in this training program were aristocrats. It was a war recruitment program that could take in less important, but physically promising, boys. However, no boy could train in knighthood skills without at least one of his parents having aristocratic connections. Use of a sword, in particular, was a class privilege jealously guarded. Tall and strong yeomen could learn archery and spear use, but swords came with rank alone.

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Children in the church

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Ruth

Medieval society kept noble children and common children strictly apart except in one place: the monastery. There, rich and poor children alike could be dedicated to God from a young age. Until the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, children as young as 8 could be placed in monasteries to grow up and later take orders. This happened with both boys and girls. These children were called “oblates.”

Why would parents do this? In some cases, the child herself felt a vocation and asked to go to the convent or monastery instead of preparing for a secular job or marriage. In other cases, one of the parents had made a vow during sickness or danger that if they lived, they’d dedicate a child to God. Sometimes, poverty made the family glad to have one less mouth to feed. Other times, the family (especially if aristocratic) felt a need to win favor to expiate sins of violence. Finally, it was a way to have a child educated.

Many of the most famous medieval saints had been oblates and knew no other way of life. Of course, though, it didn’t always work out. Some oblates were clearly not suited for adult monastic life and had to be sent away. Others ran away, while others took orders anyway, having no other options, and were troublesome monks or nuns who brought the world’s sins into the cloister.

For most oblates, it would have been a gentle, kindly way of life as long as they didn’t mind waking up at odd hours for prayers. Nobody in the cloister slept through the night. But apart from that, monks and nuns would have been kind foster parents. Meals were regular and life was quiet.

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Learning a trade

Posted on January 16, 2013 by Ruth

Many medieval boys who learned basic reading and simple arithmetic soon left school to begin learning a trade. Entry into a trade was controlled by the local guild, forerunner of labor unions. Parents paid a significant fee to the craftsman who took on their sons; there was a regular written contract signed with guild member witnesses. The master’s chief duty, by this contract, was to make sure that at the end of the term, the boy had been trained with the skills he needed. The apprentice’s duty was simply to obey his master and not run away, which would be breach of contract. There are many court records of disputes over apprenticeships, but few medieval parents complained if their sons were beaten. Rather, parents were most likely to complain if their sons were not being taught skills appropriately. Boys were steeled to put up with just about any harsh treatment as long as they were learning. They were usually between ten and twelve years old when they began, and in everyone’s minds, they were stepping into the first part of adult life.

Trades that began with apprenticeships included nearly everything that wasn’t plain farm work. In the early medieval period, even priests were trained with apprenticeships instead of seminary. By the late medieval years, craft specialties had multiplied beyond anything the early period could have imagined. Ironworking had been a unified trade around, say, 1100, but by 1300, let alone 1400, metal work was carried out by many trained specialists. There were iron refiners, needle and pin makers, locksmiths, clockmakers, wiremakers, farriers, loriners (they made bits for horse bridles) armorers, and toolmakers of many different types. Additionally copper and brass required different skills; and that’s just metal work. All things made of wood (barrels, furniture, ships and buildings), cloth (weaving, dyeing, fulling, tailoring) and many other substances (wax candles, soap, leather, glass) required skilled craftsmen. A boy could also apprentice in grocery or shipping businesses.

Most boys did not have free choice of a trade, because most of life isn’t very free either now or then. If they didn’t go into the same line of work as their fathers (which saved hundreds on apprentice fees), they went into a line of work that their father’s connections could get them into. Guilds controlled how many new workers entered each field, and it was not always easy to find a place.

Once contracted into a trade, the boy could count on a learning period between three and ten years. Bakers studied only about three years, while goldsmiths had among the longest student terms.

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Children as servants

Posted on January 15, 2013 by Ruth

Medieval children who attended school were the lucky ones with stable families and upwardly mobile futures. Even boys who later became apprentices usually went to enough school to learn to read, write and do basic math; sometimes school was a formal requirement of their apprenticeship contracts. The boys who didn’t go to school were the poor of either country or city. If country, they were busy with farm work. If city, they often became servants around the same age that other children went to school. And while only boys went to school or began apprenticeships, both boys and girls became servants.

Child servants were popular with the city households who could not afford better help. All work was labor-intensive, so all but the poorest homes had servants of some kind. Obviously, children are not the best workers, but they are just as obviously the cheapest. They came from the poorest homes, the ones that could not afford any servants at all, and their parents were glad to get them any sort of paying work. There wasn’t much bargaining power for child servants.

One popular strategy was to pay child servants minimally for a few years, with a lump sum at the end. This is recorded most frequently in Italian cities, where girls needed dowries to marry. By promising to provide the girl with a dowry that her family could never afford, the employer could keep her working cheaply for six or seven years. If she ran away or quit before she was old enough to marry, they were off the hook for the dowry. Hard work and harsh treatment made it difficult for many of these poor girls to stick it out.

In England, child servants were usually ten years old. Going into service was not always a bad deal for a child. It depended on what sort of household they went into. Doing well in the right place could mean an invitation to work in a more prestigious place. Boys who had learned to read, and who found work in aristocratic households, could be promoted to positions as clerks or managers. On the dark side, going into service in the wrong place could mean ending up in prostitution or crime. A low-class tavern that needed children to run errands might be a dangerous place to work.

Servants, including children, usually lived at their place of work. They may have had no more than a mat on the floor or a small bunk at the back of the kitchen. In better places, they lived in an upper room with other servants, crowded into communal beds and owning no more than their clothes. They worked long days.

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Grammar School

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Ruth

The next step of medieval school was Grammar School. Its purpose was to teach students to understand the Latin words they had learned to “read” in primary school. Grammar school was much more like a real school; when they were located at cathedrals, they were boarding schools and the students served as choir boys. When they were in towns, they were day schools with simple classrooms: benches for children and a tall desk for the master. Students brought all of their own materials: pens and all the accessories pens required (inkhorns, penknives, sheaths, rags), parchment or paper (later Middle Ages) notebooks, and books. They contributed for firewood, hay to cover the floor, and candles.

By the late medieval years, there was more demand for grammar school education, even for boys who intended to be artisans. Cathedral towns and market towns developed boarding programs for rural students. The rooms were primitive; lesser dormitories might use the local riverbank as their toilet. (Slipping on a riverbank and drowning was a common cause of medieval death, though we don’t know how many of them were schoolboys relieving themselves.) Since urine was a component of many chemical-industrial processes, some schools had tanks to collect it, and one of the lesser schoolmasters was in charge of having it drained periodically, but that was really one of his job benefits, since he could sell it to acid-using industries. (More about dormitory systems in later entries.)

Students in grammar school memorized and copied Latin words, sentences, poems and speeches. But we have evidence that some schoolmasters made the work entertaining when they could. Among the documents that survived into our time, we have student copybooks from the 14th and 15th centuries. Some of the words and phrases they were asked to translate were clearly chosen to amuse adolescent boys. Teachers used riddles, passages about daily life, and even lists of insults and faintly scandalous subjects to keep their students interested. By the end of grammar school years, a good student could read Latin with understanding, and could translate from his native language into Latin; the best students could compose Latin verses and speeches.

Basic arithmetic meant memorizing addition and multiplication tables through 20, and solving word problems of cost, distance and time. Many English grammar schools before 1350 taught basic French, since it was always in use at Court. Italian grammar schools taught the use of the abacus and were the first to teach the new Arabic (Indian) numerals. There was a very strong tradition of commercial accounting in Italy; it was an excellent field for boys to train for. Jewish schools taught Hebrew first, and Latin only as a second academic study.

Boys were whipped for being late, not paying attention, and not memorizing diligently enough. Their school days tended to last about as long as the sun was shining, to maximize learning and minimize the cost of candles.

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Starting school

Posted on January 12, 2013 by Ruth

Age 7 marked the end of infancy in most medieval societies. A girl’s life did not change radically, since she had already been learning some of her mother’s skills. Most girls did not learn to read; it was considered a real mark of class if she did, since it implied that her mother had also learned. But boys began school or apprenticeships.

In the early Middle Ages, schools were only attached to cathedrals, monasteries, and sometimes royal households. But by the 13th century, large towns had schools, as did some smaller towns and private homes. Students typically sat on the floor, on mats or strewn rushes/straw. They were often required to contribute a few candles, the way kids today are asked to bring boxes of kleenex for the classroom. Students were expected to bring their own slates, and little or no other equipment was required.

Primary school, the most universally attended level, taught the sound and meaning of Latin letters and syllables. In this way, boys learned to sound out the words in their prayer books, and they also memorized many prayers. Reading and memorizing were not distinguished. If you could look at a page of text and recite it from memory, nobody tested your phonics skills to see if you could actually read the words. Reading your native language, whether English, French or German, was a secondary matter and it was assumed that anyone who knew the Latin syllables could figure out his native tongue. It seems likely that many teachers explained some local letter combinations like “ch,” but there’s no record of its being a priority, and until the end of the Middle Ages, anyone who could recognize a prayer in Latin and recite it correctly was considered a reader.

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Toys

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Ruth

Medieval babies didn’t have much special equipment beyond a cradle, but some wealthy families had something like a modern “walker” for older babies to toddle around in. There’s also some evidence for baby bonnets with extra padding, intended to cushion the head from falls. (Baby bonnets take their shape from the universal medieval hat, the coif.)

We have evidence for only a few types of toys for older babies and small children: dolls, tops, balls and stick horses. Medieval dolls were called “poppets” (in English) and were made of pottery, wood or cloth. Tops included spinners with a groove for winding a pull string as well as hand-spun tops. Balls could be small clay marbles or larger throwing/kicking balls made of cloth or leather, stuffed with grass. Stick horses varied with wealth, as all toys did. Poor children used a stick, but richer children’s sticks had stuffed horseheads.

Wealthy children always had a wider range of toys, and since aristocratic boys were expected to command armies when they were grown, their specialty was the toy soldier. Not many medieval toy soldiers have made it into the present, since metal was so commonly melted and recast. By the 15th century, princes had moved on to toy cannons, while merchants’ sons in town had pewter soldiers. Their sisters’ dolls were tiny adults with multiple outfits.

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