Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (59 page)

The universities had no public buildings, and the lectures were delivered in churches or in rooms hired for the purpose. The students lived in lodgings and inns. A Master of Arts could hire a large tenement, and advertise for scholars; he had created a ‘hall’ in which his pupils would live and learn. Tackley Inn, Ing Hall, Lyon Hall, White Hall and Cuthbert Hall were premises in which grammar was taught. Each of the halls specialized in a particular discipline or set of disciplines, but they were essentially unregulated. They could be riotous.

The colleges of Oxford were first erected for the poorer students. Balliol College, for example, was endowed as a home for poor scholars by 1266. The founders of the colleges were the most prominent ecclesiastics and nobles, particularly of royal blood; it was considered to be a religious duty, and the members of the college were pledged to sing innumerable Masses for the souls of their patrons. The fundamental intent of the college was to create learned clergy, and it was thus an adjunct of the Church in every sense. The fellows of Queen’s College in Oxford wore purple robes as a memorial to the spilled blood of Christ. Teachers very gradually moved to the more regularized life of these institutions, which by the fifteenth century had become individual houses of learning.

The students themselves were classified as ‘northern’ or ‘southern’,
with the river Nene (it rises in Northamptonshire, and runs for 3 miles (4.8 kilometres) between Cambridgeshire and Norfolk) being nominated as the boundary; the northern and southern contingents were often fiercely tribal, and the most trivial incident in a tavern or lodging house could provoke mass attacks one upon the other. Even the masters participated. A serious confrontation between southern and northern masters at Cambridge, in 1290, led to a general migration to the school of Northampton. The country was still in a sense divided into ancient kingdoms.

In 1389 some Oxford scholars from northern England fell upon their Welsh counterparts, shooting at them in the lanes and streets of the town; they called out ‘War, war, slay, slay, slay the Welsh dogs and their whelps.’ They killed some, and wounded others; then they dragged the rest to the gates. Before they ejected them they pissed on them and forced them ‘to kiss the place on which they had pissed’. The chronicler adds that ‘while the said Welshmen stooped to kiss it, they would knock their heads against the gates in an inhuman manner’.

Violent struggles also took place between the students and the townspeople. A skirmish at Swyndlestock Tavern, in the centre of Oxford, led to a bloody affray in 1354. The landlord’s friends rang the bell of the church of St Martin, the signal to alert the people of the town. A crowd gathered and assaulted the scholars with various weapons, whereupon the chancellor of the university rang the rival bell of the university church of St Mary. The scholars, alerted, seized their bows and arrows; a pitched battle between the two factions lasted until night fell. On the following day the townspeople sent eighty armed men into the parish of St Giles, where many of the scholars lodged; they shot and killed some of them, when once again the university bell was rung and a large assembly of Oxford pupils set upon the townspeople with their bows and arrows. But they were outnumbered. 2,000 people of the town advanced behind a black flag, crying out ‘Slay! Slay!’ or ‘Havoc! Havoc!’ or ‘Smite hard, give good knocks!’ These were the war cries of the medieval period. A general carnage ensued, with many deaths. All the scholars of Oxford seem to have fled, leaving the university empty for a while.

Less violent diversions can also be cited. An inspection of the pupils of Magdalen College, Oxford, in the very early years of the sixteenth century, revealed that ‘Stokes was unchaste with the wife of a tailor . . . Stokysley baptised a cat and practised witchcraft . . . Gregory climbed the great gate by the tower and brought a Stranger into College . . . Pots and cups are very seldom washed but are kept in such a dirty state that one shudders to drink out of them . . . Kyftyll played cards with the butler at Christmas time for money.’ Other students were accused of keeping as pets a ferret, a sparrow-hawk and a weasel.

It is perhaps not surprising that, in a society of very young men, casual and sporadic violence was common. The students entered the university at an age between fourteen and seventeen, where they embarked upon a course of study that lasted for seven years. Grammar, rhetoric and dialectic were taught in the first three years; these disciplines were followed by arithmetic, astronomy, music and geometry. The students attended lectures and tutorials, but they also disputed among themselves in formal debates. Disputation was an important aspect of medieval life in every sphere. The examinations themselves were entirely oral and were prolonged for four days. The successful candidate would then be given the title of Master of Arts. The more learned moved on to the study of theology; that pursuit took another sixteen or seventeen years, more or less consigning its devotees to an academic life.

The learning promulgated in Oxford and Cambridge was not all of a scholastic kind. More informal schools, established in the two towns to take advantage of their general reputation, taught lessons in conveyancing, accountancy and commercial law; these were frequented by the sons of the greater farmers and landowners, and by the administrators of such estates, to keep abreast of the ever more complex world of property ownership and property speculation. A great enthusiasm for knowledge of a practical nature can be observed in this period.

The appetite for education was in any case instinctive, the natural child of emulation and ambition in an expanding world. By the beginning of the thirteenth century every town had its own school.

So wrote the author of a fifteenth-century poem, ‘The Birched Schoolboy’. The schoolmaster sat on a large chair, often with a book in his lap, while the boys were grouped on simple benches around him. He would dictate the rules of Latin grammar, for example, while the boys would scribble them on wax tablets or chant them in unison. Schooling began at six in the morning and, with appropriate breaks, concluded at six in the evening. Another verse describes the life of the boy out of the schoolroom. When he was young, John Lydgate

In a world of much casual and spontaneous violence the beating of children was customary and familiar. Agnes Paston beat her daughter, Elizabeth, ‘once in a week or twice, and sometimes twice in one day, and her head broken in two or three places’. Elizabeth herself was twenty years old at the time. Agnes Paston also ordered her son’s schoolmaster to ‘truly belash him’ if he was disobedient. The sentiment would be expected from a loving mother. It was advised that a child should be beaten until he or she admitted guilt and cried for mercy. But childhood was not simply a world of whips and blows. Many educational manuals espoused the cause of gentleness mixed with firmness; excessive punishment was generally denounced.

Thomas More, who was born in 1478, believed that three out of every five of the English people could read; that might be an overestimate, and he might only have been considering the men and women of London, but it is testimony to the growing literacy
of the country. The development of the unfamiliar medium of printing, in the latter decades of the fifteenth century, created a new audience with new skills. This was the age in which the poster and the handbill came into use and in which some of the larger towns had libraries. The Guildhall Library, established in 1423, exists still. Four new grammar schools were established in London in the space of one year. In the last decades of the fifteenth century free schools were endowed at Hull, Rotherham, Stockport, Macclesfield and Manchester.

Schoolboys were not allowed to dice or to use bows and arrows on the premises; they were, however, given time and opportunity to engage in the more suitable sport of cock-fighting. ‘Wehee!’ was the cry of liberation from the schoolroom. It was an age of ‘leaping about’, of running and of wrestling. Birds were snared or brought down with sling and stone. Bede recalls that in his youth he had engaged in a primitive form of horse-racing.

The medieval schoolboy played croquet, football, skittles, marbles. Tennis was played against a wall rather than across a net, with the palm of the hand rather than a racket; rackets were not introduced until the end of the fifteenth century. ‘Cambuc’ was a form of golf, with a curved stick known as a ‘bandy’. Skating, with skates made out of bone, was popular. A game known as ‘tables’ resembled backgammon. Chess was common and there were circular chessboards; stray chess pieces have been excavated from medieval dwellings. Card games were not introduced until the middle of the fifteenth century. Bowmanship was important; in ‘penny-prick’ an arrow was fired at a hanging penny coin. Dice were very frequent. ‘You shall have a throw,’ one schoolboy tells another in a schoolbook of the 1420s, ‘for a button of your wristlet.’ Play is as old, and as ever renewed, as the world.

35

The lion and the lamb

The new king, Edward IV, was according to Thomas More ‘a goodly personage, and very princely to behold . . . of visage lovely, of body mighty, strong and cleanly made’. A contemporary chronicler, Dominic Mancini, writing just after Edward’s death, gave a more ambiguous account. ‘Edward was of a gentle nature and cheerful aspect; nevertheless should he assume an angry countenance he could appear very terrible to beholders.’ Of course it was one of the duties of a king to appear very terrible, especially one who had succeeded Henry VI; the previous king had been more lamb than lion. Mancini went on to report that ‘he was easy of access to his friends and to others, even the least notable. Frequently he called to his side complete strangers, when he thought that they had come with the intent of addressing or beholding him more closely.’ Come, he might have said. Look at me. Yes. I am your king. ‘He was wont to show himself to those who wished to watch him, and he seized any opportunity . . . of revealing his fine stature more protractedly and more evidently to onlookers.’ He had a voracious appetite and, like many gourmands, he often vomited in order that he might eat again. In time this affected his girth; More commented that in his later years he became ‘somewhat corpulent and boorly, and nevertheless not uncomely’.

In his youth his pride was touched with vanity, and like many
previous monarchs he indulged in the theatrical and spectacular aspects of kingship. In the first year of his reign the keeper of the great wardrobe spent a little over £4,784 on clothes and furs for the king’s person, an extraordinary sum when the average annual wage of a labourer was approximately £6. He draped himself in cloth of gold and crimson velvet, in tawny silk and in green satin. He owned hundreds of pairs of shoes and slippers, hats and bonnets; he wore amethysts and sapphires and rubies in abundance. They were talismans as well as jewels. The amethyst gave hardiness and manhood; the sapphire kept the limbs of the body whole; if poison or venom were brought into the presence of the ruby it became moist and began to sweat. Edward possessed a toothpick made of gold, garnished with a diamond, a ruby and a pearl.

It was not just a matter of personal aggrandizement, although of course that played a large part in the acquisition of wealth. One of the purposes of becoming king was to become the richest person in the land. But it was also a way of asserting the wealth and status of the kingdom; it was a display of national power. So self-love, and self-aggrandizement, can be construed as devotion to duty.

Of course that kingdom was still divided or, at the least, unstable. The survival of Henry and his son was a serious embarrassment to the new monarchy, especially since the Lancastrian dynasty had many loyal followers in the west as well as the midlands of the country. Edward had no power at all in the far north, where the old king was just over the border in Scotland. The largest part of Wales supported Henry, who also commanded more supporters among the magnates of the country. Thirty-seven noble families had fought for him and with him; only three of those went over to Edward’s side.