1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook by Danny Danziger Page A

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    School
    Our heirs in perpetuity .
    Magna Carta, Clause I
    L ike nearly all babies born into royal and aristocratic families John was given to a wet-nurse. The authors of the time who discussed the care of babies and children preferred mothers to breast-feed their own children, and they advised them to feed on demand, not according to a rigid timetable. Yet nearly everyone who was rich enough to do so ignored them and hired a wet-nurse. She was a symbol of wealth and freed a busy, politically engaged mother, like Eleanor of Aquitaine, from domestic responsibility. John’s wet-nurse was called Matilda.
    His older brother Richard’s was Hodierna, and we know a little bit more about her than we do of Matilda. Her own baby grew up to be an abbot of Cirencester and a famous scholar, Alexander Nequam. As a result of Richard’s generosity she became a woman of property, well enough known to have a place named after her, Knoyle Hodierne in Wiltshire.
    Henry and Eleanor were not expected to spend much time with their children. They were always on the move and travelling with a baby was not easy. In a poem by Marie de France, whom John may well have met, baby and wet-nurse had to stop seven times a day so that the infant could be fed and bathed. It was easier to leave royal babies and small children in some settled spot while their parents moved on. Other parents saw far more of their children than kings and queens did; the further down the social scale you were the more time you spent with them. ‘Babies’, wrote a thirteenth-century author, ‘are messy and troublesome and older children are often naughty, but by caring for them their parents come to love them so much that they would not exchange them for all the treasures in the world.’ It was with the expectation that their children would be a source of joy that many mothers faced the pains of labour.
    During their earliest years all children remained in the care of women. It was from women that children learned how to behave, how to speak in a courtly fashion, and also the first rudiments of their letters. Small children would learn, everyone knew, by imitating adults. Their first steps and words were greeted with delight. This was also their playtime. Toys were already gender-specific. Boys had their soldiers, and girls their dolls’ houses. In later life Gerald de Barri claimed to remember that when his brothers had built sandcastles on the beach at Manorbier, he had built churches; by temperament he was predestined to be a cleric.
    In aristocratic households a sharp break came when children reached the age of seven or eight. While girls generally stayed at home, boys would be sent away. The author of Tristan retained a vivid memory of this change in the pattern of a boy’s life.
    ‘In his seventh year he was sent away into the care of a man of experience. This was his first loss of freedom. He had to face cares and obligations unknown to him before, a stern discipline in the shape of the study of books and languages. He had tasted freedom, only to lose it.’
    For this discipline John was sent to the household of Henry II’s senior administrator, the justiciar of England, Ranulf Glanvil. It might have been from him that he acquired his interest in the law. The books which he possessed as king show that he could read Latin and French, and he may well have been able to read English too. The well-educated Englishman of 1215 was either bi- or tri-lingual.
    Education in a noble household involved a great deal more than book learning. Above all, young people of both sexes were expected to learn courtesy – modest and polished manners. In order to appreciate the service he would receive during the rest of his life, it was an important part of a young lord’s education that he should himself learn how to serve, both in the hall and elsewhere. For a handsome young man, serving at table on a major feast day when the hall was crowded with visitors and their wives was an