ABSTRACT
The physical remains of medieval schooling are, with a few notable exceptions, extremely scanty. Many of the buildings used for school purposes were not designed as schools and in many cases were not adapted for educational use until the Reformation had released on to the property market a large number of surplus ecclesiastical buildings. The earliest schools were relatively undifferentiated as to curriculum and organization, and virtually no record remains of their internal organization. One of the most recent writers on the subject suggests that in schools before the fourteenth century the curriculum was graded neither according to the difficulty of the subject nor according to the age of those being taught (cf. pl. 1). 1 * Before the invention of printing, books were comparatively scarce: it is probable that only the teachers possessed them, and that they read out passages from the books over and over again until the pupils had them by heart. Very few manuscript drawings of the fourteenth century seem to show boys as well as masters holding books, but books are more commonly shown being used by children in the fifteenth century and later (pls. 3 and 4). Even so, it is likely that the teaching methods used were still essentially oral: the child was mainly dependent on the teacher for information, and the days of private study and ‘home-work’ were still in the future. To what extent the pupils wrote their exercises (instead of merely reciting them from memory) is not clear. A recent writer states that the medieval schoolboy ‘had no permanent record of his exercises’. 2 The excavation of a fourteenth-century school at Lubeck in Germany last century provides evidence of wax tablets used by the boys, who seem to have used styluses to write on them, 3 as was common in Roman times: they are probably wax tablets bound together with straps rather than books which the boys are holding in some of the manuscript pictures of schools which have survived from this period (e.g. pl. 2). Certainly by the late fifteenth century (and probably associated with the spread of printing and the greater availability of paper) written exercises seem to have become more usual. Erasmus, who was at school in Deventer in 1475, 2tells us that the grammatical text was dictated slowly by the master, so that the boys could take down every word. 4 We also have visual evidence, such as the brass monument at Little Ilford (Essex), which commemorates Tom Heron, who died in 1512, aged fourteen, and shows him with penner and inkhorn hanging from his girdle. 5
