Studying Late Medieval History by Wood Cindy;

Author:Wood, Cindy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4530679
Publisher: Routledge

Education

From the early days of Christianity in Western Europe, monasteries and churches provided some type of elementary schooling, mostly for boys. It is not clear whether these schools were only for those intended for the church, but by the later period these schools did include all local boys irrespective of their calling in life. Convents often offered a similar opportunity for girls to learn, again widening over time to include those not intending to become nuns. Those children not intending to join the church paid a fee to attend these schools to learn Latin grammar, and from 1387 Grammar Schools were recognised in England.

For those living away from monasteries and cathedrals, education was often undertaken by parish priests or those attached to chantries. By the late medieval period this type of schooling was widespread and available to many in the lower level of society. Literacy levels cannot be accurately ascertained, but it is likely they were higher than we once thought, due to the practice of local teaching even at a basic level in the parishes.

Additionally a distinction must be made between the ability to read and that of writing. Writing involved many more skills, including mixing ink and making vellum (paper only arrived in large quantities in the fifteenth century) and quills. Thus documents that have ‘marks’ for a witness instead of a name might not necessarily mean the person was illiterate. For many people a ‘scrivener’ was used when documents were needed, these were specialists in making documents, and were trained specifically in this field. Scriveners were a recognised trade in our period. The rates of literacy often do not take into account this difference between reading and writing and is something to be aware of when looking at original documents, as a mark does not always denote someone who could not read the document, but only their inability to write their name.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.