Nicholas Orme

Education and Learning at a Medieval English Cathedral: Exeter 1380–1548

During the last hundred years our knowledge of the educational institutions of medieval England has steadily increased, both of schools and universities. We know a good deal about what they taught, how they were organised and where they were sited. The next stage is to identify their relationship with the society which they existed to serve. Whom did they train, to what standards and for what ends? These questions pose problems. They cannot be answered from the constitutional and curricular records which tell us about the structure of educational institutions. Instead, they require a knowledge of the people—the pupils and scholars—who went to the medieval schools and universities. We need to recover their names, to compile their biographies and thereby to establish their origins, careers and attainments. If this can be done on a large enough scale, the impact of education on society will become clearer. In the case of the universities, the materials for this task are available and well known. Thanks to the late Dr A. B. Emden, most of the surviving names of the alumni of Oxford and Cambridge have been collected and published, together with a great many biographical records about them. For the schools, on the other hand, where most boys had their literary education if they had one at all, such data are not available. Except for Winchester and Eton, we do not possess lists of the pupils of schools until the middle of the sixteenth century, and there is no way to remedy the deficiency.

Children and the Church in Medieval England

At the beginning of Langlands poem Piers Plowman , the narrator, having glimpsed the field of folk and the two castles, meets a lady with a beautiful face, clothed in linen. When he fails to recognise her, she gently chides him. ‘I am Holy Church; you ought to know me. I received you at the first and taught you faith. You brought me pledges to fulfil my bidding and to love me loyally while your life lasts.’ In these few words, Langland affirms the importance of childhood as inaugurating the relationship between human beings and the Church. Every child becomes a member of the Church by baptism soon after birth. The Church teaches its faith to the child, and the child is committed by its godparents to carry out the Churchs requirements in a loving way. This view of childhood is a limited one. It centres on the outset of life—birth and baptism – not on the following fifteen years or so, and it does not perceive the status of children in the Church to differ in principle from that of adults, who also received teaching and owed commitments. Nowhere in his work has Langland much to say about children and in this respect he is typical of most medieval writers. Little was written about the work of the Church with children or the involvement of children in Church, despite the extent to which children – actually or potentially – made up the membership of Christendom.