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t 4/9/1-15

4/9/4 (Item 2 from file: 47)

DIALOG(R)File 47: Gale Group Magazine DB(TM)
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04428818 Supplier Number: 17911581 (THIS IS THE FULL TEXT )

A pilgrim's search for relics of the once and future king.(King Arthur)

Alexander, Caroline
Smithsonian , v26 , n11 , p32(10)
Feb , 1996
ISSN: 0037-7333
Language: English Record Type: Fulltext; Abstract
Word Count: 4813 Line Count: 00373

Abstract: A trip to the UK and a search for the historical basis of the Arthurian legend is described. The search was a
difficult one because from the first mention of Arthur as a warrior leader who defeated the Saxons around the year 500, the
tale has become intermingled with both fact and fiction.

Text:
Ancient stones and much-loved stories yield both hints and guesses about
Arthur and his Camelot.

Hidden in a thicket, I drew my coat around me and peered into the darkness.
It was Christmas Eve. The night was clear and still and without moonlight.
I had positioned myself beside a muddy bridle path that winds down a hill
between the trees and was quietly awaiting the thunder of hoofbeats. The
hill behind me is known as Cadbury Castle, for centuries regarded as the
most likely site of King Arthur's Camelot. According to legend, on
Christmas Eve the ghosts of Arthur and his knights gallop out of the
castle's fallen gates on silver-footed horses.
Cadbury Castle is in Somerset just outside the village of South
Cadbury, in southwest England. In daylight, the open grassy summit is
brilliant green, rising above an encircling band of forest. From the top,
you can look down on flocks grazing the clipped pasturage at the base of
the hill. Northward lies the whole width of Glastonbury plain. The first
recorded identification of Cadbury Castle as Camelot was made by the
antiquarian John Leland in 1542. But it wasn't until the 1960s that parts
of the hill's many layers of former settlements were finally excavated,
revealing that it had been occupied off and on since at least early
Neolithic times. More important, ruins from the Arthurian period were well
represented, with evidence of former ramparts, a fortified gate-tower and a
sizable timber structure thought to have been a great hall.
I had expected to share my vigil on Christmas Eve with any number of
other faithful (or gullible) pilgrims. But when I trudged across the frosty
fields to my thicket, I was very much alone. The whirring wings of a
disturbed wood pigeon made the only sound I heard all night. At last I
reluctantly gave up my post and trudged back down through the fields. The
once and future king had failed to appear.
How to account for the spell that Camelot has cast over the world's
imagination? In scores of languages and shaped to all sorts of storytelling
genres, from medieval epic to modern musical, tales of Arthur and his
knights have been enthralling people for more than a thousand years. On
plot alone, the legend is hard to resist: the undistinguished boy, Arthur,
pulling the sword from the stone to become king of England; his marriage to
beautiful Guinevere; the brotherhood of the chivalrous Round Table knights;
the quest for that elusive object, the Holy Grail; the disastrous passion
between Lancelot and the queen; evil Mordred's treachery; the ultimate
destruction of Arthur's realm; the banishment of loyalty, piety and
righteousness from the land.
But the emotional pull of Camelot is greater than its captivating
storybook romance. Arthur's loss of his Round Table, though set in the
worldly realm of kings and counselors, jousting tourneys, swashbuckling
knights and bewitching ladies, is a replay of mankind's fall from grace in
the Garden of Eden. It ends in treason and civil war, with brother against
brother, father against son. It has become part of the geography of our
collective imagination. Today, that 'fleeting wisp of glory called Camelot'
stirs an overwhelming sense of loss-a nostalgic yearning for a
better-ordered and more-spiritual age that we long to believe once existed.
A magic world of profound melancholy
I have spent years more or less in thrall to the Camelot story. Walt
Disney's film The Sword in the Stone set me on the path, imparting beyond
the comedy and magic a sense of something grave and wondrously tragic.
Based on T. H. White's The Once and Future King, it opened up Arthur's
whole life and world, a medieval land full of hawking and archery and
imagined fighting described in whimsical detail yet marked by overwhelming
melancholy. Later, Thomas Malory's unwieldy but masterful epic poem Le
Morte d'Arthur worked for me at a more profound level of regret and
grown-up loss, its archaic language evoking images of armored footsteps
receding down deserted flinty halls. But it was through Tennyson's epic
Idylls of the King that all the 'Arthurian' emotions-loyalty and loss and
the impotent regret of wisdom learned too late-became entirely personal.
Like many pilgrims, then, I had come to England hoping to find
something that might allow me to believe that Camelot was 'real.' And
indeed, the West Country of England is shaped by Arthurian associations. At
Tintagel, where Arthur supposedly was conceived, a ruined castle still
clings to the dark, sea-beaten cliffs guarding the Cornish coast. A few
miles inland, on the willow-fringed banks of the unprepossessing river
Camel, is Slaughter Bridge, a village so nondescript that I drove right
through it before realizing it is supposed to be the site of the Battle of
Camlann, where Arthur and Mordred meet in mortal combat.
From here, so the story goes, the grievously wounded king was carried
inland by faithful Sir Bedivere to the heart of brooding Bodmin Moor. One
evening I walked the moor toward a pond called Dozmary Pool, near whose
waters Arthur's wounded body was laid and into which he thrice commanded
the reluctant Bedivere to hurl his sword, Excalibur. Reflecting an evening
of vivid sunset, the pool's shallow waters turned blood red. Perhaps it was
after seeing such an apocalyptic sight that Tennyson described an
astonishing arm: 'Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,' rising from
the water to catch, to thrice brandish and finally sink forever beneath its
surface with the world's most famous sword.
A hundred miles or so west from Dozmary Pool in the town of Amesbury,
I visited a pretty cruciform church where the repentant Guinevere is said
to have retreated to the spacious grounds of an early abbey, now a ruin. A
pub and some shops have claimed a good deal of the old abbey land, but
behind the church is a gently flowing river where a black swan stretched
its neck among a crowd of ducks.
Arthur, an old soldier after all, never really dies but fades away-to
the enchanted Isle of Avalon, which, since the late 12th century, has been
associated with Glastonbury. The extraordinary hill, known as Glastonbury
Tor, that juts abruptly from the plain just outside the modern town was
formerly surrounded by marsh and may once have had the appearance of a
misty, enchanted island. In 1191, the grave of Arthur and his queen was
'discovered' in Glastonbury Abbey-a find that launched a lucrative
pilgrimage industry and enabled the canny monks to rebuild their abbey,
which had burned to the ground in 1184.
In each of these places I caught a glimpse of the kind of romantic
'truth' I was seeking. Amesbury was the most evocative, perhaps because it
was so easy to imagine the grieving queen pacing the riverbank on a
winter's morning, or perhaps because for me the end of Camelot, especially
in Idylls of the King, has always been most irrevocably signaled by the
final parting between Arthur and Guinevere. In the end, however, all these
towns and castles failed me. In part this was due to modern realities, such
as the King Arthur tourist shops dominating Tintagel, that kept crowding my
vision. In larger part, though, it was because I knew before I arrived that
the few historical facts known about Arthur cannot be squared with any of
these places.
The shadowy figure who became the Arthur of legend first appeared, if
he appeared at all, not in medieval England but in the afterglow of the
Roman occupation of Britain. The native Britons were 'Celts' (Smithsonian,
May 1993)-a term used to define a linguistic and cultural group rather than
a race. But from Emperor Claudius' invasion in a.d. 43 until the departure
of the last legions in 410, Roman culture shaped the island. From the late
fourth century on, Roman garrisons in Britain were reduced in order to
strengthen the waning empire on the continent then being overrun by
Germanic tribes. It is unclear how rapidly the social fabric created by the
long Roman occupation unraveled in Britain after the Romans' departure.
With the central government gone, local authority was fought over by
powerful local rivals. From the 430s onward, fierce Angles and Saxons,
intent on making settlements of their own, streamed across the North Sea
into the east and south of Britain. In the north of Britain, skirmishes
with Picts and Scots, old enemies, were renewed. In response to this last
threat, the Britons made a fatal mistake: they hired Angles and Saxons as
mercenaries. Sometime around 450, these paid allies turned against their
British hosts, and the south and east of Britain fell entirely under
Anglo-Saxon rule.
The only surviving near-contemporary account of this period, by a West
Country monk named Gildas, reports that these invaders pursued a
'scorched-earth' policy: fire 'burned almost the whole surface of the
island and was licking the western ocean with its fierce red tongue.' In
the still-unconquered west, Anglo-Saxon and British forces fought a series
of battles, culminating, sometime around 500, in a decisive victory for the
British at a place called Mons Badonicus, or Badon Hill. The Briton
responsible for this landmark victory, as we are told by the very few
extant documents pertaining to the period, was a warrior called Arthur.
Badon Hill has been cautiously identified as a long, barrow-shaped
hill-fort called Liddington Castle in the Thames Valley, north of Salisbury
Plain in a region full of ancient earthworks, stone circles and other
prehistoric enigmas. Now in pursuit of history rather than legend, I
clambered up its rain-slick slopes on a blustering winter's day, crossed
the moatlike ditch that once defended the summit and stumbled upon a herd
of grazing cows. A valuable tactical lesson: clearly a squadron of cavalry
could have occupied Badon Hill and gone undetected from below.
The victory at Badon Hill temporarily halted the Saxon progress in the
Thames Valley and bought the British in this region some 40 years of
respite. Nothing much is known about the battle, but general knowledge of
military practices of the period suggests that Arthur's men fought from
horseback, making repeated passes at the enemy, rather than in a unified
cavalry charge. Spears, javelins and long-bladed Roman cavalry swords were
the weapons of choice. Most warriors carried oval or round whitewashed
shields. A warrior chief of Ar-thur's standing probably wore battle dress
modeled on that of a high-ranking Roman general: a knee-length leather
tunic, perhaps with leather breeches and rudimentary armor.
In general, though, the sum of our knowledge about Arthur (or
Artorius, his probable Roman name) is that he fought 13 battles, 12
victorious and one mortal, the great majority of which are associated with
now unidentifiable places. The earliest account, Gildas' The Ruin and
Conquest of Britain, dating between a.d. 530 and 540, describes the battle
of Badon Hill, but it does not make a single mention of Arthur. His name
first makes its appearance about three centuries later in History of the
Britons, a sometimes specious historical miscellany attributed to a man
named Nennius who states, matter-of-factly, that 'Arthur fought against
(the Saxons) in those days with the kings of the Britons, but he himself
was leader of battles.' A dozen successful campaigns are then listed,
concluding with Badon Hill.
The most exciting source is The Annales Cambriae, a manuscript kept in
the British Museum. Beginning in an unspecified year, apparently about a.d.
450, it contains sequentially numbered years next to which significant
events are recorded. Gently turning its thick parchment pages, I read the
following Latin entries: 'Year 72. Battle of Badon in which Arthur carried
the cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders (on his shield) for
three days and nights and the Britons were victorious.' 'Year 93. The
battle at Camlann in which Arthur and Medraut were killed.' These brief
lines preserve something of the later legend: the Christian warrior-king in
a final showdown with the treacherous knight Mordred. Although the
chronological format inspires confidence, the annals were in fact compiled
about 500 years later from material preserved in monastic records. Even so,
nothing in the intrinsic nature of the annals warrants their being
dismissed out of hand. The surest facts about Arthur, then, seem to be the
sites of his greatest victory and his death.
Despite fierce British resistance in the west, the Anglo-Saxon
conquest and appropriation of Britain rolled on. Many Celts fled overseas
to kinsmen in what is now Brittany (then called Amorica) or to Wales or
Cornwall, which held out against the Anglo-Saxon invaders until 848. The
Domesday Book (Smithsonian, July 1986), commissioned by William the
Conqueror in 1086, suggests that the population of the island at the time
was less than half what it had been under the Romans, an eloquent
indication that British displacement had been drastic. Some Britons, of
course, had to remain, but the fact that the Old English word
characterizing them-Wealh (Welshman, Briton)-came to mean 'slave' says a
good deal about their condition.
So much for historic Arthur. What of archaeological Camelot, the court
and headquarters of the legendary king? The 1966-70 excavators of Cadbury
Castle discovered remains of earthworks and defenses dating to the critical
Arthurian period. Combining features typical of both Roman and British
fortifications at the time, they greatly strengthened the site's
centuries-old identification with Camelot. Excavations at other sites,
however, showed that repossession of Iron Age hill-forts in the fifth
century a.d. was common all over southwest England-so there is nothing
conclusive about Cadbury's archaeological record. In all likelihood the
identification with Camelot arose from the evocative names of the nearby
villages: Queen Camel and West Camel.
Nonetheless, the whereabouts and, perhaps more important, the
character of the warrior-hero's headquarters were issues that early Welsh
bards who embroidered on the Arthur story had to address. And the only
truly imposing structures they had by way of models were those built and
left by the Romans. The luxurious villas with atrium gardens, central
heating, running water and mosaic floors; the great towns at Colchester,
Silchester, Wroxeter, with public baths, basilicas, temples, theaters,
marketplaces and forums; the ubiquitous self-contained fortresses: to later
generations these must have seemed the stuff of dreams. That even the
conquering Anglo-Saxons were not insensible to these monuments of past
glory is evident from an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon poem, 'The Ruin':
'Bright were its palaces, its many bathing-halls, Its wealth of tall
pinnacles, its tumult of warriors, Many a mead-hall filled with festive
life, Until mighty fate overturned all.'
And if resonant for the Anglo-Saxons, how much more so for the
Britons, for whom such relics had once been part of a life now all but
destroyed. To many Romano-Britons, the fragmentation of Roman order must
have indeed signaled the arrival of a dark age, the banishment of loyalty,
piety and righteousness from the land; perhaps it is their centuries-old
nostalgic despair that finds its voice in the legend of Camelot.
One raw day I took a look at the remains of Viroconium, once the
fourth-largest city in Roman Britain, now lying outside the village of
Wroxeter in Shropshire. The fog was so thick that even the great brick wall
of the town's old baths, the most intact relic, vanished from sight at a
distance of 20 feet. Spiderwebs spanning the plum-colored masonry had
frozen into rigid lacework. The fallen walls looked like so many piles of
rubble but, as I realized when I touched them, were stoutly rooted in their
position for all eternity-truly Roman handiwork. Remarkably, after several
centuries of decline, this town underwent reconstruction until as late as
the end of the fifth century and was apparently used in some capacity until
the mid-seventh, thus overlapping Arthur's lifetime. Anglo-Saxon and Briton
alike would not see anything to match it for centuries to come. It is
reasonable to think that the memory of such unimaginable splendor sparked
the earliest description of Arthur's court; if so, Camelot was, in fact, a
Roman town.
Ultimately, though, it is not from any pieced-together history or
Arthurian tourist sites but from literature, from the magic of
storytelling, that what we mean by 'Camelot' seems most real. Some glamour
now lost to us, some ineffable charisma must have clung to the historical
war hero Arthur, slipping through the cracks of the bare surviving facts,
because Welsh legends about him began appearing in the ninth century and
were doubtless sung as early as the late sixth century.
From the great mass of romancing about the king of Camelot, the works
of two authors stand out, one British and one French. The first, Geoffrey
of Monmouth's The History of the Kings of Britain, written in Latin and
completed in 1136, became an international best-seller. Geoffrey combined
all the loose-ended and free-floating Arthurian lore up to his time,
producing a coherent if improbable narrative suffused with Celtic glamour
and unfolded against an otherworldly backdrop of dragons, wizards, visions
and prophecies. The familiar outline is laid forth: Merlin's prophecy and
Uther Pendragon's deceitful seduction of another man's wife, resulting in
the conception of Arthur; the adultery of Guinevere; the final battle
between Arthur and Mordred on the river 'Camblam'; the wounded king's
departure to the mysterious Isle of Avalon.
The authoritative, straightforward tone of Geoffrey's pseudohistory
put Arthur on the map, so to speak. But the legend of Arthur was
permanently embellished by the unashamedly romantic work of Chretien de
Troyes. A late 12th-century French poet, Chretien often wrote under the
patronage of Marie, Countess of Champagne, so that his series of Arthurian
romances reflects the refined and feminized tastes of her court in Troyes.
Five romances survive. In often titillating detail they tell of the
adventures, both amorous and martial, of various Round Table knights.
Feasts, tourneys and assemblages of court are featured-and inordinate
attention is paid to the dress of both knights and damsels.
Chretian was not, as is sometimes claimed, the father of Arthurian
romance. Behind him, as behind Geoffrey, lies a rich and virtually lost
tradition of singing and storytelling. In Wales, for instance, the
increasingly elaborate memory of the British war hero's deeds was kept
alive in popular folklore and by professional bards, fragments of whose
work survive. On the continent Arthur's fame was spread by Breton bards and
minstrels who took the stories and songs of their ancestral hero to
aristocratic French courts. For a professional storyteller, the
entertainment value afforded by an entire company of colorful, chivalrous
knights, many amorously linked with some fair lady, was considerable. The
relatively advanced status of women in the French courts meant that
feminine tastes and the tradition of courtly love already exercised
influence. To this increasingly significant audience the story of King
Arthur and his court doubtless afforded welcome relief from the other great
poetic themes of the day, the unremitting battles of Charlemagne and
Alexander the Great. More than a few of the characteristics of today's
paperback romances were insinuated into the Christian warrior-king's saga.
The evolution of the 'Matter of Britain,' as the Arthurian romances
were called, spans centuries and cultures, absorbing the characteristics of
each passing age. Consider the successive renderings of the name of
Arthur's sword: in Irish, it is called Caladbolg; in Welsh, Caledvwlch;
Latinized in Geoffrey's History it comes out Caliburnus; in French it is
Calibourc; and finally, in English, Excalibur.
Similar is the development of one quintessential Arthurian theme, the
fellowship of the Round Table. The Round Table is first mentioned in a
paraphrase of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History, written in French verse by
the Norman poet Maistre Wace in 1155. According to Wace, Arthur 'made the
Round Table, of which the Bretons tell so many a tale,' as a way of
settling a dispute among his knights about the order of precedence of their
seating. Subsequent romances have the table variously seating 13 or 250 or
1,600 warriors.
The bond of loyalty between the Germanic lord and his retainers,
famous even in Tacitus' day and heroically dramatized in the Anglo-Saxon
epic Beowulf, also left its mark on the knights of Camelot. From it came
the ideal of a brotherhood of aristocratic warriors equal in their service
to their lord. In the poems of Chretien de Troyes, chivalry tended to be
measured by a knight's prowess in the coy game of courtly love, but later
narratives introduced a religious dimension. In the Quest for the Holy
Grail, apparently written by a 13th-century Cistercian monk, a new
asceticism crept in: for Chretien, the ideal knight was an ardent but
faithful lover of his lady, but the Grail saga offers total chastity as an
ideal in itself. It is the virgin Galahad, not the adulterous Lancelot, who
is the one to actually see the Grail.
No worldly quest for Arthur is complete without a visit to the
medieval Great Hall of Winchester Castle, which, with its cobbled yard and
lofty tie-beamed roof and solemn doors, is of all places in England most
like my vision of Camelot. A 2,400-pound circular oak table measuring some
18 feet in diameter hangs on one of the flint-and-rubble walls. On it, a
portrait shows Arthur as a white-bearded patriarch surrounded by the names
of 24 of his knights. To his left, Galahad holds pride of place in the
Siege Perilous, the name of the seat reserved for the most pure and
blameless knight; 'Sir Mordrede,' the traitor, is seated to Arthur's right.
 For centuries, the Winchester table was venerated as the Round Table.
Alas, when it was restored in 1976, carbon dating revealed that far from
being a sixth-century artifact, the table had been made between 1250 and
1280, during the reigns of Henry III and Edward I. The painting, it
appears, was added in the 16th century, probably at the behest of Henry
VIII, to whom the portrait of Arthur bears a more than passing resemblance.
The table's prosaic origin illustrates how deeply entrenched in history, as
opposed to legend, Arthur had become: Henry VIII clearly saw a political
advantage in publicizing his royal 'descent' from so famous a king.
Despite its many French refinements, the Camelot story's most
memorable versions came from England. Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur was
published by William Caxton in 1485. Malory was a Warwickshire
soldier-rebel who, as a political prisoner of Edward IV's, whiled away the
last of several stints in prison producing his mournful version of King
Arthur and his knights. Perhaps it was his sobering experience of
contemporary politics that gave Malory his melancholy vision of even the
most high-minded government. Shedding the charming, country fairy tales of
Chretien, he concentrated on the fateful triangle of Arthur, Guinevere and
Lancelot, and wrote an epic. Malory represents the downfall of each as the
result of weakness and conflicting loyalties. Though still picturesque, the
quasi-medieval world of Malory's creation is harsh and wintry, fraught with
darkness and danger. The stakes Malory's characters play for are fatally
high. Lancelot returns from his failed quest for the Grail not glamorously
disheveled but mortally harrowed. Guinevere, Lancelot and the strangely
passive Arthur are destroyed not by potions and magic spells but by
more-insidious and more-deadly foes, the passions of their own humanity.
Malory's work inspired Tennyson, whose Idylls of the King (published
intermittently between 1859 and 1885) brought Arthur to the affectionate
awareness of a broad English public. Having inherited the essentially
medieval content of the Arthurian tales, Tennyson gave them their final
autumnal coloring. He was a master of the elegiac tone, and it is his own
sorrow for Arthur's loss that is the poet's most haunting contribution.
Toward the end of Idylls of the King, Arthur pays one last visit to
his fallen queen, now doing penance with the nuns at Almesbury. As
Guinevere lies repentant at his feet, Arthur bluntly tells her: 'Thou hast
not made my life so sweet to me, That I the King should greatly care to
live; For thou hast spoilt the purpose of my life.' Yet he cannot keep from
wondering aloud, 'But how to take last leave of all I loved?'
Powerfully taken by the spell of such a scene, it is hard for a reader
to remember that every detail-the misty, vaporous night; the 'sad nuns'
standing with flaming torches outside the cold walls of the abbey; the
golden-haired Guinevere, groveling on the floor; the stern and
brokenhearted king in armor; the emotional finality-is utter fiction. None
of this ever happened; none of this ever existed. It is a marvel that some
mix of collective need and artistic imagination, which over the long and
fickle centuries fabricated the legend of Arthur down to the last bright
rivet of armor and thread of gold embroidery, had, at the end of the day,
integrity enough to preserve the essential truth of irrevocable loss that
lies at its deeply buried core.
It is here in the works of these two very different men that I like to
feel the real Arthur-the Romano-British Artorius fighting for his life
against barbaric forces- at last received a fitting characterization and
tribute. Although the victory of Badon Hill bought borrowed time, the
overall cause of this obscure warrior was doomed, and whoever he was, he
lost a world.
The curt, unadorned style of the references to the Battle of Camlann
in The Annales Cambriae has convinced many experts that this entry, at
 least, is genuine. Some scholars believe that Camlann itself may be a late
form of Camboglanna, the name of the largest Roman fort built near the
western end of Hadrian's Wall (Smithsonian, April 1985), which runs from
Newcastle upon Tyne to the Irish Sea. This would place Arthur's last battle
not in the Celtic West Country, where legend and logic, as well as Tennyson
and others, have placed it, but in the north of Britain, on the
Northumbrian border far from where I had originally sought it.
Intriguingly, the very few tentatively identifiable battle sites named in
Nennius' list of 12 are also in the north. But if it is true, as many
believe, that Camboglanna represents the most hard and certain fact in the
whole tissue of Arthurian lore, then Arthur did not die fighting his
Anglo-Saxon enemies but in an internecine border war with another British
faction.
Eventually I walked an outline of fallen stones, all that now remains
of Camboglanna. To the east and to the west, the Roman wall-already
centuries old by Arthur's time-stretches to the horizon across rolling
pasturage, green even in midwinter. Arthur may have died fighting for this
fort, or he may have fallen somewhere beyond, in the perpetually green
fields. A dramatic loop of the Irthing River flows through a glen below the
fort, and it may be that he was finally lost in its swift, dark waters. It
says much about the power of the Camelot myth-and my own romantic
susceptibility-that even at the end of this quest I continued to believe
some tangible proof of its reality had eluded me only because I looked in
the wrong places. Now, at what may be the site of that 'last, dim, weird
battle,' I couldn't help but think that if it was ghosts I was after, it
was here and not at Cadbury Castle that I should have kept my midnight
vigil for the once and future king.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Smithsonian Institution

Special Features: illustration; photograph

Descriptors: United Kingdom--History
Named Persons: Arthur, King of the Britons--Research
File Segment: MI File 47

4/9/7 (Item 3 from file: 88)

DIALOG(R)File 88: Gale Group Business A.R.T.S.
(c) 2007 The Gale Group. All rights reserved.

05639288 Supplier Number: 69200038

Time please.
WAINWRIGHT, GEOFFREY
Antiquity , 74 , 286 , 909
Dec , 2000
ISSN: 0003-598X
Language: English Record Type: Fulltext
Word Count: 24607 Line Count: 01979

Text:
Introduction
I had been working in archaeology for about 10 years before my father
thought to tell me that he had worked as a labourer for Cyril Fox in 1925
on a prehistoric tomb at Kilpaison Burrows near the village in
Pembrokeshire where I was raised. Something may have been passed on to me
from that unique experience for that young collier which was nourished and
nurtured by the beauty and variety of the historic landscapes of west
Wales. My purpose in writing this piece is to provide a personal
perspective of the growth of my subject through my own eyes -- not to
produce objective history. I cannot be objective about a subject which has
consumed my working life and for which I care so passionately. I have not
checked my recollections against those of my contemporaries, so as to
retain the purity of that personal view, but my salutations and thanks are
to them and to the countless friends with whom I have worked to push
forward the boundaries of our subject. We are intensely tribal in our love
of gatherings, feasting and vendettas and I have a fierce loyalty to them
as well as gratitude for their companionship along the way.
In the beginning
In March 1952 the then Chief Inspector of Ancient Monuments -- Bryan
O'Neil -- sent a memorandum to the Director of his department which
contained an account of developments in the heritage field since 1945. One
can but envy his brief which was to take a strategic view of the United
Kingdom, and his confidence that standards were being maintained. Any
opposition to his ideas was dismissed with a lofty disdain: `we hear no
criticism of our proceedings except occasionally from dilettante, who
worship ruins as such without valuing them for their historical value.
These people are sometimes vocal, but they cannot be many in number'. He
retained his most cutting remarks for Hadrian's Wall where `some even of
the local dilettante are being converted to our ways'. He had already
pioneered the preservation of industrial monuments with two windmills in
East Anglia and with remarkable foresight estimated the number of monuments
which could be scheduled as 50,000 compared to 7554 in the UK in 1951. He
had also overseen the expansion of rescue excavations between 1939 and 1945
when 55 such projects had been financed -- mainly in advance of airfields
-- 450 of which had been built involving 300,000 acres of land. This
programme of work continued after the war using `non-official'
archaeologists instead of his own staff `because the system of subsistence
for people like us is absolutely iniquitous after a stay of 28 days'. The
period between 1945 and 1951 saw 40 excavations in historic cities such as
London, Canterbury, Dover, Southampton and Exeter as well as Roman towns at
Great Chesterford (Essex) and Caister (Norfolk) and classic post Roman
sites at Thetford (Norfolk) and Mawgan Porth (Cornwall). His department was
also funding a research excavation at Stanwick in Yorkshire under the
direction of Mortimer Wheeler and employed 16 Inspectors of Ancient
Monuments.
That 1952 memorandum had been written some years after a conference
held in London in 1943 to discuss the contribution of archaeology to the
post-war world (University of London 1943). Archaeologists are fond of such
occasions which provide an opportunity for tribal bonding as well as
forward planning, and this conference was both timely and addressed by
front-rank speakers. It is rather disconcerting to realise that the subject
matter would be familiar to the archaeologist nearly 60 years on --
research agendas, training, records, museums, education, amateurs and state
archaeology. What was lacking in both O'Neil's memorandum and the 1943
conference proceedings was any sense of the legitimate and latent interest
of the public in archaeological discoveries. For Britain this was to change
in 1954 with the discovery of the Temple of Mithras in London. The queues
of people wishing to see the remains, and the political and media interest,
demonstrated conclusively that archaeology had a role to play in the
cultural life of the country and would no longer be the preserve of the
professional.
This was not reflected in the content of the archaeology course I
began studying at University College Cardiff in 1955 under Leslie Alcock.
That course was hard-working, pragmatic, adversarial and insular -- all the
criteria required to make a career in British Archaeology. Cardiff
graduates are much sought after by potential employers for their practical
knowledge and application; nevertheless, when I nervously approached
Kathleen Kenyon after a lecture in Cardiff to enquire -- rather brashly
perhaps -- about employment prospects, I was told to inherit or obtain a
private income. It was no surprise to me that a decade later Dame Kathleen
published an undistinguished book on beginning in archaeology with a
depressing chapter of advice on careers which concluded with the injunction
to go abroad.
I did the next best thing and moved from Cardiff to London and the
Institute of Archaeology in Gordon Square. When I arrived in 1958 the
Director was a Pembrokeshire man -- Peter Grimes, the discoverer of the
Temple of Mithras -- and the Institute was at the cutting edge of new
thinking and practices in archaeology and archaeological science in
particular. I was to go to India for two years at Frederick Zeuner's
request in 1961, but of more relevance for the purpose of the present
narrative was the publication in 1960 of A matter of time by the Royal
Commission on Historical Monuments for England (RCHME 1960).
An age of innocence
The Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME)
had been set up in 1907/08. Along with its sister Commissions in Wales and
Scotland, its brief was to compile an inventory of the ancient and
historical monuments and constructions from the earliest times to 1700.
Normally listed by parish and then by county, the volumes were treasured
possessions and provided the raw material for many academic studies. The
work was conducted at a leisurely pace by staff skilled in the
interpretative survey of monuments and buildings, and the 1960 survey
represented a change of direction from fulfilling long-term objectives to
issuing the first warning that our archaeological resource was a
diminishing asset. The report was a survey of the archaeology of the river
gravels in England and drew attention to the great number of sites that
were being rapidly destroyed by modern methods of gravel digging. This was
followed in 1963 by a list of 850 monuments -- earthworks and buildings --
selected from a far larger number, which were considered to be at risk or
destroyed (RCHME 1963). These two reports are important for the influence
which they had over professional attitudes during the following decades.
The response by Government to the problems they revealed was to appoint
three directors of rescue excavations within a structure headed by John
Hamilton, whose department was focused on the rescue of archaeological
sites before they were destroyed. The programme had three initiatives --
grants to organizations; the employment of consultant archaeologists on a
fee and subsistence basis; and the internal group of the three excavation
directors. I returned from India in 1963 to be recruited by Arnold Taylor
-- the then Chief Inspector of Ancient Monuments -- and to join Brian
Davison and Ian Stead as the Government digging team.
Those who complain about the present structure of heritage provision
in the United Kingdom would have had plenty of material in 1963. Only three
months' noticE; was required to destroy a scheduled site which had to be
recorded -- or not -- during that period. Few counties had sites and
monuments records, and there was no integration between the planning
process and archaeology. Funding was poor and little was made available for
post-excavation work. Strategic surveys were extremely rare and the
importance of the 1960 and 1963 studies by the RCHME cannot be
overestimated. It cannot be said, however, that our work programmes on
behalf of the Government bore any relevance to the state of affairs
revealed by the two reports which had resulted in our appointments. We were
left in the main to devise and pursue our own research strategies. This was
done in an amicable fashion by lan Stead removing himself to north of the
Thames and the Celto-Roman World, Brian Davison occupied himself with
post-Roman matters and I was left with prehistoric sites in south England
and Wales. My two big research ideas were straight forward enough. I wished
to undertake complete excavations and publish as many Iron Age Settlements
as possible, in order to clarify the numerous partial excavations
previously undertaken. Secondly, I intended to investigate a hitherto
unexplored class of henge monument in southern England whose large size and
massive earthworks hinted at their former importance. John Hamilton was
absolutely superb in his unlimited support for these simple ambitions,
which were to occupy me happily for the next decade.
When I joined the Ministry of Works -- and for a number of years
thereafter -- our method of working was with a gang of contract labourers,
supplemented by supervisors who were paid fees and subsistence, and
volunteers -- who were on a subsistence basis. In my case, the supervisors
and volunteers formed an exuberant group who depended on my projects for
their livelihood and who therefore toured the country on a semi-permanent
basis, bringing prosperity to pubs and local economies wherever they
settled. For 10 years from 1963 to 1973 that team was permanently in the
field, occasionally undertaking rapid response work but more often pursuing
the two strategic themes which John Hamilton had so enthusiastically
embraced. The first opportunity to pursue the settlement theme occurred at
Tollard Royal on the Pitt Rivers Estate in Wiltshire in 1965. This was a
small one-acre settlement, badly eroded by ploughing and visible only from
aerial photographs and the skilled eyes of Collin Bowen (another
Pembrokeshire man) and Peter Fowler of the RCHME, who had become my mentors
in all matters to do with chalk downland. Their eyes popped a little when I
took a JCB digger to remove the ploughsoil -- thus exposing the entire
settlement. This was the first time this technique had been used on chalk
downland and deeply unimpressed the archaeologists of the Wessex
establishment. John Hamilton quite properly resisted their outraged letters
and the programme went from Tollard Royal to Walesland Rath in
Pembrokeshire (1967, 1968), Gussage All Saints (1972) and Balksbury Camp
(1973) (Wainwright 1971; 1979; Wainwright & Davies 1995).
Henges
The henge monument programme arose by chance in 1966 when Wiltshire
County Council decided to straighten the A345 where it crosses the interior
of the large earthwork enclosure at Durrington Walls. John Hamilton agreed
to the expenditure of a large sum to recruit an army of 40 workmen, an
equivalent number of volunteers and a fleet of JCB diggers and dumper
trucks. As always, the strategy was simple -- to strip off all ploughsoil
along the length of the road scheme -- about 1000M -- and reveal what was
underneath. It was a hot summer in 1967 and the machines kicked up a thick
pall of sweet-smelling chalk dust which permeated everything. The contract
labourers were quite the worst I had ever encountered, but treated me with
sullen caution after I sacked one of their number as he lay in the bottom
of the enclosure ditch with a broken hip, having driven his dumper over the
edge on the way back from the customary lunchtime session at the pub.
Barely more tolerable -- in many ways less so -- were the Wiltshire
archaeological establishment led by Richard Atkinson -- who asked Arnold
Taylor to take me off the job -- and got the rebuff he richly deserved. On
the credit side were the team of site staff and volunteers, the specialist
colleagues -- Ian Longworth, John Evans, Tony Clark, Richard Burleigh and
Ralph Harcourt -- who joined me at Durrington Walls and stayed for the
remainder of the Henge Programme. The cause of all the excitement -- apart
from the dust, noise and aggravation -- were the foundations of large
timber circular structures revealed in the bottom of the cutting. In 1968
we moved on to Marden in the Valley of Pewsey where similar structures were
found and in 1970 and 1971 to Mount Pleasant in the outskirts of Dorchester
for more of the same (Wainwright 1989c). No more contract labourers were
seen on my sites after Durrington Walls -- nor, indeed, was Richard
Atkinson -- and the enclosures at Avebury and Knowlton remain safe from my
attentions, but will reveal similar foundations one day.
Fieldwork and archaeology in the 1960s
These experiences in the 1960s formed part of a rich tapestry of
investigations during that decade -- many of which were recorded in Current
Archaeology, which Andrew and Wendy Selkirk first produced in March 1967
and which for the past 30 years has reflected the ebb and flow of
archaeological endeavour against the familiar background of Andrew's
increasingly eccentric editorials. Barry Cunliffe was consolidating his
reputation as the foremost excavation director of the century with his work
at Fishbourne, Bath, Porchester and Danebury. At South Cadbury, Leslie
Alcock was wrestling with media attentions rather than succumbing to the
warm embrace which would have welcomed his project at the end of this
century; Martin Biddle was showing urban archaeologists how to do it at
Winchester; Phil Barker was agonizing over the minutiae of Hen Domen and
John Hurst and Maurice Beresford were engaged in the long march at Wharram
Percy. Great projects were being undertaken at Knowth, Llandegai,
Verulamium, Jarrow, North Elmham, Overton Down, Usk and Wroxeter. Richard
Atkinson's futile and ill-advised tunnel into the heart of Silbury Hill was
exposed on television and John Coles in the Somerset Levels was laying the
foundations for what was to be one of the great field projects of the 20th
century. The Royal Archaeological Institute launched its research project
on the origin of Castles in England, under the tutelage of Brian Davison,
and the Council for British Archaeology (CBA) produced a pilot copy of
British Archaeological Abstracts. The discipline seemed in good heart and
in retrospect that decade was truly the age of innocence.
The theme of the erosion of Britain's archaeological resource, begun
in England by the Royal Commission in 1960 and 1963, was continued by the
Council for British Archaeology in 1965 in a report which called for a new
approach to the preservation of historic town centres (CBA 1965). The
report listed over 300 towns whose special quality merited comprehensive
survey. In England, excavations subsequently took place in some 60 towns
between 1965 and 1970. The policy adopted by Government was to grant aid
equivalent to that provided by local authorities. It was painfully obvious
by the end of the decade that this response was quite inadequate.
Expenditure by Government on resourcing archaeology had risen from 18,000
(pounds sterling) in 1953/54 to 150,000 (pounds sterling) in 1967 -- but
this included the costs of maintaining Stead, Davison and myself in the
field. There was therefore a general discontent with the way things were
and a polarization of interests between the countryside and the town.
The Walsh Report
For urban archaeologists, this was not helped by the excellent report
produced in 1969 by the Committee of Enquiry into the arrangements for the
protection of field monuments chaired by Sir David Walsh (Walsh 1969). The
Walsh report looked deeply into the problems facing monuments in the
countryside -- it met on 47 occasions -- but did not take a holistic view
to include historic towns. Nevertheless, its recommendations were
wide-ranging and to a large extent forecast what was to happen in the
future. It recommended that a consolidated record of all known field
monuments should be held by County Planning Authorities and compiled by
archaeologists employed by them. It recommended improvements in the
legislative machinery, acknowledgement payments to farmers to refrain from
ploughing, an increase in the number of scheduled monuments, the
appointment of field monument wardens and an increase in the rescue
archaeology budget. All these came to pass during the next decade. Two
issues considered by the Walsh Committee were that the developer should pay
for the archaeological record necessitated by his actions and that a mobile
team of archaeologists be set up to undertake rescue excavations. Both were
to happen over the next two decades but were rejected by the Walsh
Committee. On the developer funding issue the Committee considered `That
the British practice of providing for the conduct of excavations from
public funds, or by the use of voluntary effort, is fairer in that the
evidence they yield is to the public benefit'. The `polluter pays'
principle was seen as an incentive to concealment (Walsh Report: para 144).
The proposal for a mobile team was also rejected because of the need for a
reserve of standby work, the difficulty of finding lodgings and `workmen do
not like being away from their homes for a lengthy period' (Walsh Report:
para 143). This was well out of touch with the true situation, but a mobile
team was to be formed by Government in the mid 1970s. The Walsh Report
therefore brought the decade to a close on a very positive note. The Royal
Commission produced its third strategic report when it was invited by the
Nene Valley Research Committee to undertake a survey of the archaeological
sites and historic buildings in the area around Peterborough in advance of
the New Town Development (RCHME 1969). Government prepared to implement the
principal recommendations of the Walsh Report, when a meeting held at
Barford in Warwickshire introduced the word crisis into the archaeological
lexicon.
The Rescue crusade
By March 1969, almost 1000 miles of motorway had been built in
Britain with little archaeological record and, not for the last time,
motorway archaeology provided a catalyst for more general concerns. Peter
Fowler formed the M5 Research Committee in March 1969, and thanks to his
energy and vision an organization was set up which ensured that along the
whole length of 75 miles all fields were walked, documentary work done,
aerial photographs were scanned and an archaeologist was appointed (Fowler
1972). At the same time the extent of destruction in historic cities was
becoming recognized and it was with a sense of crisis in mind that Philip
Barker called a meeting at Barford in Warwickshire in February 1970. The
atmosphere at the meeting was evangelical and the 35 people present were
gratified -- if slightly alarmed -- at having their comments and
contributions recorded for posterity. The proposals which emerged were sane
enough (Fowler 1970) -- a National Antiquities Service, a comprehensive
national register of antiquities and the formation of a British
Archaeological Trust. The beginnings of private practice archaeology were
apparent when Chris Musson described his newly formed Rescue Archaeology
Group which envisaged six to eight archaeologists, working on contract or
commission, able to dig almost any kind of site, anywhere in the country
and at any time of the year. Such confidence made nonsense of Sir David
Walsh's cautious words about the difficulties of finding lodgings. The
crusade -- for that is what it was in the minds of the main sponsors --
moved to Newcastle in November 1970, and at a conference sponsored by the
CBA at the University of Southampton in September 1971, papers by Charles
Thomas and Peter Fowler intentionally laid stress on a situation in which
the primary evidence for our past was disappearing for ever (E. Fowler
1972). The first annual general meeting of Rescue, a Trust for British
Archaeology was held in January 1972 at the Senate House, London
University, with more than 700 people present. The Trust achieved 2400
members in its first year with Phil Barker as its first secretary and
launched Rescue News in 1972. Its intention -- which was never realized --
was to recruit 50,000 members, sponsor field work and purchase or lease
areas for archaeological conservation.
The cause was carried forward with evangelical fervour by a small
group of professional archaeologists who also held key positions in the
CBA. The language of the time was heavy with military metaphor in an
atmosphere of crisis. Charles Thomas could write `a despatch from the front
line' about an actual moral duty and categorical imperative to do something
(Thomas 1971). Brian Philp's new model army saved Kent's heritage from the
ravages of development and there was heady talk of `officer training units
for future archaeologists'. The theme was continued in articles and a book
(e.g. Jones 1973; Rahtz 1974), conferences and press releases and there is
no doubt that the movement influenced government thinking on heritage
provision in a positive way. By December 1971 Government had already agreed
to increase spending on rescue archaeology by nearly 50% to 310,000 (pounds
sterling) annually -- in line with the recommendations of the Walsh
Committee. It was the pressure by Rescue which increased the annual figure
in 1973/4 to 813,000 (pounds sterling) and then by substantial annual
increases to 2.1 million (pounds sterling) in 1976/7.
A good example of the type of pressure being generated is in the
musing preface to the classic CBA study published in 1972 on archaeology
and planning in towns. `Crisis in urban archaeology ... most important
towns lost to archaeology in 20 years ... little time for action ...
unprecedented expenditure of money and archaeological manpower required ...
sheer general ignorance ... failure to act' (Heighway 1972: v-vii). No
wonder Government ministers found extra money for rescue archaeology in the
face of such an onslaught.
By the mid 1970s the missionary fervour and impetus had waned as the
founding fathers :ran out of steam, no doubt grew tired of seeing the same
faces on an almost daily basis on nominally different committees, and moved
on to other things. Two meetings in January 1975 indicated that some
thought was being given to the objectives of the crusade and the results to
date. A seminar organized by the Department of Extra Mural Studies at
Oxford University concluded -- rather desperately -- that there still was a
crisis (particularly in Scotland) -- that the national situation was now
more complex requiring more academic input and that the preservation of
sites should be given greater emphasis over rescue before destruction (CBA
1975). The Rescue Trust organised a conference at Burwalls in Bristol in
the same month which acknowledged that the original vision had gone, to be
replaced with a strident policy of extracting money from the State.
Questions were also asked about the value derived from the money. In 1975
Peter Fowler attended the 40th annual meeting of the Society for American
Archaeology in Dallas. He returned to announce that `a reassessment of the
concept of rescue archaeology is needed in Britain' (Fowler 1976). He
suggested the need to develop a philosophy which uses the archaeological
heritage as a non-renewable resource -- something to be conserved rather
than to be exploited. Such a statement today is commonplace and
uncontroversial. In 1975 it showed the first glimmerings of what we now
call sustainability and his short paper is a milestone on that account. The
theme was taken up by Charles Thomas in 1976 (Thomas 1977) who concluded
that the rescue crusade had outrun its original purpose and that the
philosophies developed in 1970 were no longer appropriate.
Rescue had successfully pressed Government for additional funds, the
public service heritage provision had been restructured, archaeological
bodies for undertaking field work had been formed and new categories of
archaeological employment proliferated. It was a good time for Rescue to
acknowledge that its primary task had been successfully completed, but like
an ageing pugilist it has continued to struggle on beyond its time,
unsuccessful in attracting mass membership and irrelevant to the needs of
modern archaeology.
The 1970s restructuring in field archaeology
In 1972 Arnold Taylor retired. He had presided over the State's
heritage service with skill and scholarship and was held in universal
respect. Inspectors of Ancient Monuments had been brought together with
Historic Building Investigators and the numbers of professional staff
greatly increased. He was succeeded by Andrew Saunders who lost little time
in coming to terms with the conditions for the new world which Rescue had
helped to create. In 1973 I was completing my 10th year as an excavation
director at a 40-acre hillfort called Balksbury Camp near Andover.
Typically I was attempting to strip most of the interior with a fleet of
machines and was looking forward to a break from the field in order to
write up some excavations. The old firm were as exuberant as ever, but
times were changing, and views of appropriate behaviour were no longer what
they were 10 years ago. My personal plans were abruptly changed by Andrew
Saunders and John Hurst who he had appointed head of excavation policy --
separating it from post-excavation which was left under John Hamilton! I
had hardly seen an administrative file for the past 10 years -- except
those made out for my excavation projects which were necessary for John
Hamilton's approval -- but a meeting held on 22 February 1973 at our HQ at
Fortress House in central London was to change all that. A restructuring of
responsibilities saw me with an administrative post in charge of
archaeological investigations in southern England with the newly arrived
Chris Young as my assistant. My colleagues Ian Stead, Sarnia Butcher and
Brian Davison were in charge of the North, Midlands and London
respectively. The meeting was packed with psyched-up archaeologists,
clamorous after their budgetary successes and now looking for a new
national structure. What they got was an announcement by Government of its
intention to see the whole of England covered by a series of regional
archaeological units fully organized for all excavation and post-excavation
work with common support facilities (DoE 1973). The rest of the day was
taken up by a group of speakers who represented all the great and good in
field archaeology at that time. Most of it was familiar stuff about
motorways, Oxfordshire, Winchester, York, Norwich, Norfolk, Kent and the
Rescue Archaeology Group -- even down to the total exclusion of museums
from the occasion. One contribution was different. David Baker was the
County Archaeologist for Bedfordshire -- one of the few in post at that
time. He put a cogent case for the advantages of archaeology in a planning
department as part of a far-sighted plea for archaeology to be seen for its
value within a wider planning and social context. Already the battle lines
were being drawn up which would lead to the collapse of the regional
initiative on a national scale. John Hurst concluded the day by exhorting
us all to go away and think about what we had heard -- I wish we had!
Dennis Haselgrove was appointed to a new post as Under-Secretary
Archaeology under the Chief Planner to the Department of the Environment
(DOE) and substantial increases in the funds allocated for conservation
areas, historic buildings and archaeological excavations were announced. It
looked as if the hard work of the previous three years would pay offbut,
advised by David Baker, opposition to the plans increased from the local
authority associations. A leak to the Times Higher Educational Supplement
published by them on 15 June 1973, revealed that Government plans for the
regional structure involved staff costs being met from local Government. At
that time the local government associations were not formally aware of the
proposal and reacted strongly against the regional structure. They were
naturally dismayed to learn from their newspapers that they were to fund
regional archaeological teams on a large scale.
Government persisted with their plans despite this setback and in
1974 Anthony Crossland and John Morris -- Secretaries of State for the
Environment and for Wales -- announced new regional arrangements for rescue
excavations and archaeological surveys. In England 13 Archaeological
Advisory Committees were appointed to advise the DoE on policies and
priorities, on applications for grants and on regional back-up facilities.
At a national level in England the Department would be advised by a
Committee of the Ancient Monuments Board. Both Departments undertook to
continue discussions with local authorities regarding a regional structure.
We were therefore left in England with a series of regional advisory and
executive bodies. These usually covered the same region, held Chairmen in
common and, by and large, possessed the same membership. The best way of
dealing with the whole ridiculous situation was to hold meetings of the
advisory and executive body on the same day -- to save everyone's time.
That leak to the THES proved costly and ruined the only real chance England
has had of a structured, resourced and well-managed state archaeological
service which would have been sufficiently robust to accommodate the
changed circumstances of the next decade. It must be seen as an opportunity
lost through lack of vision, mismanagement and corporate rivalries.
Remarkably, the archaeology units showed great resilience under
adversity although in order to keep them afloat it was increasingly
necessary to direct the available state funds to their establishment costs.
The regional unit for Avon, Somerset and Gloucestershire enjoyed
considerable initial success under Peter Fowler's energetic chairmanship.
The regional units for Wessex and North West England are still in existence
with the former, in particular, enjoying great success under Andrew Lawson.
In London, the Department of Urban Archaeology under Brian Hobley --
possibly the first unit director to wear a suit -- was very successful, as
were those in Oxfordshire, Peterborough, Northampton and Warwick. There
was, however a heavy reliance on Government funding which inhibited growth
and the pursuit of research agendas. Scotland was less than enamoured of
the unit concept but in Wales a complete set of four archaeological units
was established by 1975, covering the whole country and remains in place to
this day.
Towards national policy and planning
In July 1974 -- the same year that the regional arrangements were
announced -- the CBA and Rescue proposed a new structure for archaeology in
Britain (Rescue/CBA 1974). The document was intended as all attempt to pick
up the pieces of the debacle resulting from the leaking of Government plans
to create a regional organization funded from central and local government
in about equal proportions. The core of the proposed new Rescue/CBA
structure was the establishment of a National Archaeological Service,
operating through regional offices. This executive structure would be
supported by a parallel structure of advisory committees at national,
regional and county level. This archaeology service would be `complementary
to but distinct from' the then Inspectorate in the DoE. In other words, the
new proposals would set up a regional structure to carry out excavations,
leaving research and heritage management in the hands of the DoE. These
proposals have to be seen as the last illogical surge of the rescue
crusade. Quite properly, the proposal to divide an integrated structure was
rejected by the Council of the CBA in January 1975 and did the reputation
of the profession a great deal of harm. The regional advisory arrangements
remained in place until 1979 when Michael Heseltine, Secretary of State for
the Environment, axed a number of Quangos, including the Rescue Archaeology
Panel, 13 Area Advisory Committees and the Hadrian's Wall Advisory
Committee -- all of whose functions were absorbed by the Ancient Monuments
Board. The Panel had done good work in focusing attention on rescue funding
at a national level and producing the Frere and Dimbleby reports on
publication and archaeological science respectively, and the Area Advisory
Committees provided a much needed view on priorities. However, without the
regional executive structure they were intended to inform, their
irrelevance increased as the decade advanced and their demise brought an
unfortunate episode to an end.
If the archaeological politics of the 1970s were pretty awful, some
important foundations were laid for the future. Surveys of the implications
of development in urban and rural areas became the norm, local authority
provision for archaeology attracted substantial funding and organizations
were established which indicated a growing professional maturity.
The first urban survey had been published by Don Benson and Jean Cook
for Oxford in 1966 (Benson & Cook 1966) followed by York (Addyman &
Rumsby 1971) and Tewkesbury (Miles & Fowler 1972). The much-needed
national statement was published by the CBA in 1972 (Heighway 1972). The
polemic at the beginning of the study and in Martin Biddle's introduction
was entirely appropriate to that febrile period when rhetoric on behalf of
the rescue crusade was crucial to its success. `Of those historic towns
which remain for study, the archaeological value of one-fifth will most
probably have been entirely destroyed in the next 20 years' (Heighway 1972:
2). The report set the scene for the many urban implications surveys and
excavations that were to come and two of its recommendations were
far-sighted, if largely ignored. Recommendation 7.3 suggested that the
archaeological potential of any proposed development should be considered
when planning permission was granted -- nearly 20 years later this was to
be a corner-stone of PPG-16 on Archaeology and Planning and recommendation
7.11 took the view that archaeology should to some extent be a charge on
the developer. This report was rapidly followed by others on the City of
London (Biddle & Hudson 1973), Andover (Champion 1973), Shrewsbury
(Carver & Wills 1974), Lincoln (Colyer 1975) and Hereford (Shoesmith
1974). Wales was early on the scene with a study of the archaeological
implications of development in the historic towns of the Principality
(University College Cardiff 1976) and Perth appeared in 1976 with a classic
crusading title (Stewart & Thomas 1976).
Inspectorate policies on the ground from 1973 onwards were
straightforward. The national and regional advisory frameworks were
established in 1974. Within that framework we encouraged the formation of
regional groups to undertake field projects in what was often an
adversarial atmosphere. When regional groupings were clearly not possible
-- usually because of personal vendettas -- or desirable, the status quo
was maintained on a county, district or city basis. Thus was created the
kaleidoscope of organizations which by and large exists today. The
mid-1970s was a period when a large number of organizations were
established and archaeologists were in short supply for the numbers of
posts that were created. The available funds were directed to these posts
and to the strategic surveys which the executive bodies were asked to
undertake. The surveys of major historic cities soon became county-based
and Wiltshire (Haslam 1976), Avon (Leech 1975), Sussex (Aldsworth &
Freke 1976), Berkshire (Astill 1978), Somerset (Aston & Leech 1977),
Hampshire (Hughes 1975) and Oxfordshire (Rodwell 1975) are classic examples
of the genre. The Committee for Rescue Archaeology in Avon, Gloucestershire
and Somerset (CRAAGS) in particular took the process into the countryside
for a villages survey (Ellison 1976), Exmoor (Ellison 1977a) and forestry
(Ellison 1977c). Rural surveys took in the countryside (Gingell 1976),
gravel extraction (Leech 1977), ploughing (Drewett 1976) and rural
development (Balkwill 1976). One survey of north England was remarkable for
covering both urban and rural matters, as well as the size of the area
covered and the range of topics (Clack & Gosling 1976).
Occasionally, the committees were set up to cope with specific issues
such as the M3 extension under the chairmanship of Martin Biddle (Biddle
& Emery 1973), which achieved great things during its life and when
compared to the integration of archaeology with trunk road schemes at the
end of the century illustrates how far the profession has advanced since
those pioneering days. These surveys -- and many others like them, set a
firm foundation for the following decades and were coupled with a policy
directed towards the integration of archaeology with the planning process.
This integration had been a recommendation in the Walsh Report in
1969 and it was clear at the beginning of the 1970s that the future
well-being of the archaeological resource as a whole -- rather than just
that proportion which was scheduled -- lay in the hands of Planning
Authorities. The establishment of archaeologists at that level would also
be important in awakening local historical consciousness -- vital for the
future well-being of the nation's heritage. The implementation of that
policy was made more difficult by the collapse of the 1973 DoE initiative,
when the County Council Association confused the need for advice on the
conservation of the heritage, which we all agreed should be at local
authority level, with the formation of archaeological units to undertake
fieldwork, which was also regarded by the ACC as a county -- not a regional
-- matter (see Baker (1976) for a classic exposition of this view). Our
concern was with the conservation of the historic environment as well as
with its recording through fieldwork. For the former I decided to lobby for
archaeological posts in local authorities and to encourage the latter to
establish and maintain sites and monuments records for their areas. The
formula was quite simple and successful and did not vary from its inception
to the present day. We offered local authorities 50% of the cost of
establishing an archaeological post over a three-year period with an
undertaking from them that the post would become permanent. This was
normally coupled with an offer of grant aid to establish or enhance the
sites and monuments record. In 1971 there were only a handful of
archaeologists working in local authorities (Baker 1975). By 1975 there
were 20. The last county to get an archaeologist was Kent in 1989, and in
1996 a survey showed that 232 staff were engaged in conservation duties.
Most of those posts had been pump-primed by EH or its predecessors and the
investment was without doubt the most important and significant that we
have ever made.
The Sites & Monuments Records (SMRs) made more rapid progress. By
1979 an SMR had been funded in almost every county. Job Creation Programmes
provided basic manpower in many places but at the expense of quality. A
survey in 1978 by the Royal Commission showed that SMRs were firmly
established (RCHME 1978). Their quality was to remain variable but they
proved to be the basis on which policies in the next two decades were
founded.
In May 1973, nine county archaeologists voted to form an Association
of County Archaeologists. In 1975 a Standing Committee of Archaeological
Unit Managers (SCUM) was formed and in the same year, archaeologists
working in museums formed the Society of Museum Archaeologists. The
profession was mobilizing into its constituent groups and was all The
stronger for that. The foundation of a much-needed professional body for
archaeologists was more controversial and took longer to establish. The
early initiatives from 1972 onwards were shouldered by the CBA who endured
a good deal of criticism for their pains. An inaugural meeting of the
Association for the Promotion of an Institute of Field Archaeologists was
finally held in 1979, articles were signed in 1982 and it opened for
business in May 1983 with Peter Addyman as Chairman.
Rescue archaeology: the next phase
In 1977 the DoE issued a statement called Rescue Archaeology: the
next phase (DoE 1977). The statement acknowledged that all hopes for the
1973 initiative had been dashed and that given the levelling-off of state
funds after a period of steady growth a radical review was necessary. At
that time there were 83 grant-receiving bodies and nearly 300 core posts --
virtually all of them dependent on DoE grants. The objectives set out in
the revised policy were a statement of what was actually happening on the
ground:
i To establish a sites and monuments record in each county.
ii To establish an archaeological presence in each county either in
or closely associated with the planning department.
iii To conduct thematic surveys.
iv To carry out excavations of threatened sites according to an
overall programme of research priorities established at national and area
level.
v To develop the closest and most economical scientific support.
vi To prepare for publication the reports of such excavations and to
ensure that the excavation archive and the objects from an excavation are
safely deposited.
Reaction to this statement covered the whole spectrum of opinion from
the openly welcoming to the overtly hostile. A second edition of the paper
was produced some three months later to `allay some of the anxieties'
without doing so to any noticeable degree and frustrations arose on both
sides to an extent which drove me to Dartmoor for my final field project on
Shaugh Moor. This was a happy interlude for me amongst my old team of
supervisors -- under the wing of the Central Excavation Unit founded in
1976 and based near Portsmouth. I was amongst good friends, I met Judith,
the archaeology was breaking new ground and I had some respite from the
increasingly difficult archaeology scene, collapsing as it was under its
twin burdens of declining budgets and overstaffing.
One summer's day in 1977 I was happily standing at the centre of a
completely stripped Bronze Age enclosure, when four young men arrived from
Southampton to invite me to speak at a conference they were organizing
later that year. Tim Darvill, Mike Parker Pearson, Bob Smith and Roger
Thomas were the stars of an outstanding year at the University of
Southampton and were to feature prominently in the events of the next two
decades although Bob's premature death robbed us of a good friend and
colleague. For the purposes of this narrative they gave me the opportunity
to set out a policy which gave the only chance that I could see of breaking
the connection between a declining state budget which was entirely taken up
with supporting numerous infrastructures. This was to implement a policy of
funding only project-orientated fieldwork within a research framework. In
future research designs should accompany any proposal for funding from the
DoE who would direct its limited resources on the basis of what we needed
to know (Wainwright 1978). We had arrived at the point where there was no
flexibility in the DoE budget and priorities could not be established and
funded. Most of the funds were shared out more or less equally between
regions and spent on staff costs. What was proposed was a change, to a
system whereby the money was allocated site by site and problem by problem
rather than to the employment of staff. I recall vividly that having put
these proposals to the Southampton conference, the subsequent discussion
revolved largely around the ability of the sheep at Butser Iron Age Farm to
jump over fences, and my friends and I left early.
The policy was implemented and as a result it was possible to count
the projects we were funding for the first time in 1980/81 -- there were
350! It was also possible to tell what they were. The focus at that time
was on two landscape types -- uplands as on Exmoor, Bodmin and West Penwith
and Wetlands as in the Somerset Levels and the Fenlands. The flagship
prehistoric excavations were the Hazleton chambered tomb and Hambledon Hill
and urban interests were being well served at London, Carlisle, Chester,
Colchester, Lincoln, Norwich, Stafford and York. It was as if a veil had
been pulled aside and we could see clearly what was being funded, with the
future flexibility to define agendas and pursue them. I returned from
Dartmoor in 1980, having completed my final field project, but with the
confidence that on the foundations laid during the past decade, we could
cast off the political failures and proceed to implement clear polices free
of restrictions imposed by funding establishment costs and infrastructures.
Building for the future
The new decade not only saw new policies for archaeology in place but
also new legislation. The Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act
1979 first saw the light of day in 1976 in a DoE consultative document and
to general surprise became law on 4 April 1979 -- the last piece of
legislation to be discussed on the last day of James Callaghan's
government. The most important provision was the replacement of the system
of three months' notice before altering a scheduled site with one of
scheduled monument consent by the Secretary of State advised by the
Directorate of Ancient Monuments. The most irrelevant was Part II of the
Act, which created Areas of Archaeological Importance in Berwick-on-Tweed,
Canterbury, Chester, Colchester, Exeter, Gloucester, Hereford, Lincoln,
Oxford and York. These provided access for nominated archaeological bodies
to development sites for recording purposes. The world had moved on since
Part II of the Act had been conceived. The legislation did not have a
bearing on any planning decision, did not allow for any consideration of
preservation issues and made no provision for funding. This went against
the grain of the embryonic arrangements for the management of
archaeological sites and Part II of the Act has effectively been in
abeyance ever since -- although not yet removed from the statute book.
In March 1981 we issued an Advisory Note to the profession and local
authorities which was primarily designed to explain the provisions of the
1979 Act (DoE 1981b). So far as rescue archaeology was concerned, the
policies already stated were reiterated with the undertaking that in future
DoE would fund a project from start to finish -- previously commitments had
been given on an annual basis only. Within a year it was possible to issue
the first of a series of annual statements analysing the grant allocations
and policies behind them (Wainwright 1982). At that stage, organizations
were still bidding for funds. The total bid for 1982/83 was from 103
organizations for 6.7 (pounds sterling) million in respect of 765 projects.
The rescue budget was 4.8 million (pounds sterling) of which 1.5 million
(pounds sterling) was spent on strategic projects. These were the excellent
in-service training scheme devised by Trevor Rowley at the Department of
External Studies, University of Oxford; the storage of archives in museums
in collaboration with the Museums and Galleries Commission; and contracts
for the provision of archaeological science at various universities managed
by the Ancient Monuments Laboratory. Funding of posts in local authorities
and their sites and monuments records was -- and still is -- a fixture in
the programme; a project to eradicate the backlog of excavations undertaken
before 1972 was in full swing; the plotting of aerial photographs for SMR
purposes was an annual allocation and substantial grants were made to
surveys of uplands and wetlands. Of the remainder, the project funding
policy had exposed the problem of unpublished excavations and resources
were directed to resolve the issue. With differences of emphases resulting
from the ebb and flow of priorities these broad divisions in the rescue
budget were retained for the remainder of the decade and beyond. For those
who measured success by the numbers of excavations funded from state
budgets this was an unwelcome development. Yet it was clear to those of us
involved that local authorities were beginning to provide consistent
support for our efforts as the numbers of their archaeologists grew under
our urging and support. As a result, contributions from industry to
archaeological projects were on the increase. There can be little doubt
that the switch from funding core establishments' costs to projects in 1980
came as a rude shock to the unit system. Some organizations coped
admirably, others could not and were unable to take advantage of the
expanding opportunities which the decade presented. Some organizations
masked their difficulties by ingenious use of Government money made
available for the relief of unemployment in the Jobs Creation Programme. I
recall one project sacking all its staff, thus making them unemployed, and
then taking them on again under a Job Creation Programme at higher rates. A
great deal of digging was done and one estimate is that in the 1980s,
one-third of all archaeological field work was paid for by these means.
Towards the end of the decade funds from this source were removed leaving
large numbers of unpublished and poorly recorded excavations. Some good
work was done under imaginative and sympathetic managers, but in general
the experience was not a happy one and the penalty was paid in the next
decade when some large urban units opened up their archives for inspection.
The new Ancient Monuments Act
The 1979 Act greatly improved the protection of scheduled sites by
substituting the three months' notice system for one in which consent had
to be given for any proposal to change their condition. The process was
cumbersome. In the early years, professional officers advised their
administrative colleagues just down the corridor who may -- or may not --
accept that advice when responding to the applicant. When English Heritage
was established in 1984 the professional advice had to travel a greater
distance but the process remained the same and remains in need of
simplification. At an early stage, I drafted a set of eight criteria which
governed the selection of monuments of national importance for scheduling.
These criteria were closely based on those used to define sites of
scientific importance and were confirmed and published by the Secretary of
State in 1983. Although reissued on several occasions the criteria remain
essentially the same as when originally published. We also needed to
establish whether and to what extent the schedule of ancient monuments was
a representative sample of England's archaeological resource. This was done
by a rapid quantification of the nation's archaeological sites and
comparing this with the schedule of ancient monuments. David Fraser
undertook the survey using county-based sites and monuments records (Fraser
1984). This was an uneven and inadequate representation of the surviving
remains, but it was the best available and it demonstrated for the first
time that there were an estimated 635,000 sites and monuments in England,
of which 2% were scheduled. Structural imbalances were shown in the
schedule by distribution, period and monument type and the report concluded
that a five-year programme using the recently defined scheduling criteria
would create a representative sample of England's archaeology through a
four-fold increase in the schedule (Wainwright 1984). The report was
completed in time for the launch of EH who adopted the proposed programme
as a policy initiative. Eventually, after a long internal wrangle, the
Monuments Protection Programme emerged in 1986.
 The National Heritage Bill
A major organizational change in the way in which the nation's
historic environment was managed was signalled in November 1981 (DoE 1981a)
when Michael Heseltine proposed the setting-up of a new agency for England
to carry out the majority of the heritage functions of the DoE. Following a
large number of representations, a policy statement was issued the
following year (DoE 1982). The National Heritage Bill which established
English Heritage (EH) was given its first reading in the House of Lords in
November 1982 and was enacted in 1983. EH began work in April 1984 with
Lord Montagu as Chairman and Peter Rumble as Chief Executive. The provision
of a single committed and central focus for our heritage has proved to be a
powerful and creative stimulus to providing a better future for our past
and for communicating enjoyment and understanding to the public. With the
benefit of hindsight there were three issues considered at the time where
different decisions may have been beneficial. The Royal Commission on
Historical Monuments had not played a central role in the events of the
past 15 years -- despite its major contribution in the 1960s. Rather than
merge it with EH to create a single voice it was kept as a separate body,
thus creating discord and confusion until the nettle was finally grasped in
1999. Government misguidedly created a separate body for the Royal Palaces
which would have been better placed within the support framework of a
national heritage structure. Finally, it was thought best to keep EH as a
single, centralized, London-based organization, rather than involving local
communities through a regionalized structure. This misjudgement has also
been rectified.
EH was launched with a number of flagship projects. Those with most
direct archaeological relevance were the proposal to increase the schedule
of monuments, to improve the condition of Maiden Castle hillfort in the
outskirts of Dorchester and to improve the management of the nation's
heritage icon at Stonehenge. The Stonehenge story is still unfolding. A
definitive account of the struggle up to April 2000 has recently been
published in this journal and will play no further part in this narrative
(Wainwright 2000).
The great hillfort of Maiden Castle is famous on account of its size,
majestic appearance and the excavations by Sir Mortimer Wheeler between
1934 and 1937. Despite its fame, the condition of the monument had been
deteriorating through inappropriate management and there were no
interpretation facilities on site. In 1984, EH undertook to improve the
condition of the monument, to repair erosion scars on the ramparts, to
provide interpretative and educational material and to undertake
excavations designed to increase our understanding of the monument in the
light of advances in scientific techniques since 1940. In addition, EH
proposed a centre to enhance the enjoyment and appreciation of the visitor
to one of the most important monuments in Britain. The project proved to be
an excellent foretaste of the very similar issues we were to encounter a
decade later at Stonehenge. With the enthusiastic prompting of Dai Morgan
Evans, a Management Plan was prepared for the hillfort (Evans 1986); a
project design established for the excavation (Wainwright & Cunliffe
1985) which was subsequently published (Sharpies 1991); consultation was
undertaken on the visitor centre (EH 1985) and educational material was
issued (EH 1988). The project provided valuable experience in the
importance of partnerships -- the Duchy of Cornwall who owned the site and
the Princes Trust who repaired the erosion scars on the ramparts were
particularly central to the operation; the importance of understanding the
monument before undertaking management work; and the volatility and
sensitivity of community opinion. The proposed site for the visitor centre
was set away from the monument with good vehicular access and an excellent
approach to Maiden Castle along an established bridleway. Yet the proposal
was ultimately withdrawn in the face of resistance to change by local
communities and interests. The monument is now in excellent condition and
it has a fine volume recording the recent excavations and putting Wheeler's
work in a new light, but there is little to inform the visitor unless they
drive into Dorchester to visit the excellent county museum. I would be
reminded of these issues when grappling with the complexities of Stonehenge
10 years later.
Archaeological Science had been established as part of Government as
long ago as 1931 when a small laboratory was set up which was staffed on a
part-time basis. In 1950 Leo Biek was appointed as the first qualified
member of staff and considerable progress had been made in establishing the
subject both within and outside central government. So much so that in 1986
a review of science-based archaeology was undertaken by a panel of the
Science and Engineering Research Council under the chairmanship of
Professor Hart. His previous exposure to the archaeological profession had
clearly been limited and the experience made a vivid impression. `The
structure of archaeology in the UK is complicated and largely
uncoordinated. ... Most of its constituent bodies seem jealous of their own
autonomy, and oppose any attempt, real or imagined, to impose policies from
the centre' (Hart 1985: Appendix IV). This complex and fragmented nature of
UK archaeology -- as perceived with some justification by Professor Hart --
made it difficult for the full potential of Science Based Archaeology
Committee-sponsored work to be realized and an initiative was taken to
address it. A Forum for the Co-ordination of Funding in Archaeology was
established under the Chairmanship of Colin Renfrew with the British
Academy and EH as sponsors. For many years the Forum strove with varying
degrees of success to co-ordinate policy until it was finally dissolved
some 10 years later.
Undeterred by Professor Hart's strictures we issued a policy
statement on rescue archaeology in 1986. (EH 1986). This set out the
background to EH policies, the principles and criteria on which funding
decisions would be based, consultation arrangements and the categories and
mechanisms of funding. It included the following statement (EH 1986: para
4.4):
It is important to emphasise that English Heritage allocates the
funds at its disposal for recording those archaeological sites which cannot
be preserved and whose destruction is taking place beyond the control of
agencies with the powers and resources to deal with the problem. The
Commission (i.e. English Heritage) welcomes participation by developers and
other bodies in the funding of rescue programmes for its resources are
inadequate to carry that burden alone. In particular, local planning
authorities have a clear role to play in ensuring that the archaeological
implications are properly addressed; and that where destruction of
important archaeological sites is unavoidable, due provision for essential
archaeological recording is agreed and made before permission for a
particular development scheme is given
This was an important statement. The numbers of archaeologists
employed by local authorities was on the increase, sites and monuments
records were improving and developers were funding more and more
archaeological work. In the same year appeared an excellent Code of
Practice (1986) which brought archaeologists and developers closer
together. The brainchild of Brian Hobley, the document was influential in
helping to create a climate which made the integration between archaeology,
planning and development much easier. January 1987 saw a report from the
Environment Committee of the House of Commons (House of Commons 1987). With
42 recommendations, it was the most comprehensive survey of policy,
practice and opinion in the historic environment field for many years. It
gave support for the principle that both private and public developers
should contribute to the cost of rescue archaeology. A circular letter from
myself to the Association of Country Archaeology officers dated 22 July
1988 set out our view of archaeology and planning and this was reiterated
in a letter from Lord Montagu to The Times the following year (21 March
1989). The progress of the policy was inexorable but there were to be some
problems on the way before it became official government policy.
While the policy was maturing, the vision and energies of Dai Morgan
Evans were expressing themselves through two innovative projects. In the
first instance he commissioned Ancient Monuments in the Countryside from
Tim Darvill which, for the first time, provided England with a coherent
framework for the enjoyment, preservation and conservation of the historic
environment in the countryside (Darvill 1987). The report took account of
major shifts in perception and attitudes towards archaeology in rural
areas, and made it clear that the English countryside has reached its
present form as a result of human activity in the past. It also took a
holistic view of the historic environment to include hedgerows, woodland
and old trackways. The report was influential and accompanied by a highly
successful grant scheme for farmers to enable them to manage their historic
assets in a way that would be of benefit both to them and their heritage.
The second project was commissioned from the Centre for Environmental
Interpretation on how to present and interpret archaeological excavations
to the public. (Centre for Environmental Interpretation 1988). This was
also coupled with a grant scheme in an attempt to meet a public fascination
for archaeological excavations, which at that time remained largely
unsatisfied. The increase in developer-funded excavations soon brought
archaeology to the attention of the media, it was good publicity for the
funding body, and this has in turn led to the mass popularity of the
subject which we see today.
These two strategic projects broke new ground for EH and showed the
potential for such studies during the next decade should integration
between archaeology, planning and development receive official backing,
thus freeing up the EH archaeology budget for such framework documents. In
the spring of 1989, excavations in the Southwark Bridge Road by the Museum
of London provided an opportunity to make the point at Ministerial level.
Capital gains
Our operational policy since 1986 was based on the document published
that year and we stuck to it, despite determined attempts to deflect us.
Excavations in many historic cities ran short of funds and turned to EH as
their traditional supporter and punch-bag to make a grant. Their strategies
were predictable and lacking in subtlety -- involving an initial approach
to the press to soften us up, followed by a letter to Lord Montagu. Both
Lord Montagu and Peter Rumble remained admirably firm in the face of these
tactics. 1989 was a particularly turbulent year. The Queen's Hotel Site in
York was found to contain an immense and palatial Roman building whilst in
the City of London, Roman remains under the Huggin Hill site proved to be
much grander than anticipated. We gritted our teeth, explained our position
to ministers and continued to press for their endorsement of a policy which
would prevent such problems in the future. Excavations in Southwark Bridge
Road by the Department of Greater London Archaeology (Museum of London)
brought matters to a head in the spring of 1989 when they revealed the site
of the `Rose', one of the four famous Tudor/Jacobean playhouses on London's
south bank, and also that visible -- though fragile -- remains of the
theatre had survived. Although the Rose Theatre was a site whose previous
existence was known, planning permission had already been granted by the
London Borough of Southwark for the erection of an office block. The Museum
of London played the by now dog-eared negotiating cards of a press release
followed by a request for funds. When this was predictably refused in line
with our 1986 policy the scene was set for a high-profile confrontation.
Jennie Page had recently taken over as Chief Executive of EH and was
initiated into the development of archaeological policy with some
bemusement at first but with increasing relish and unswerving support as
the drama unfolded. EH took the lead in negotiations with Imry Merchant
Developers to persuade them to re-design their foundations in a
non-damaging fashion and in a way which would allow the remains to be
uncovered again and displayed to the public. The Museum of London were
deeply unhappy about the negotiated settlement and refused to undertake the
work proposed. EH therefore took over responsibility for the site and our
Central Excavation Unit did the necessary works under very difficult
circumstances. The Rose was ultimately saved (see Orrell & Gurr 1989;
Wainwright 1989) but an enormous amount of political and public interest
was generated on a scale which had not been equalled since the discovery of
the Temple of Mithras in 1954. The then Secretary of State for the
Department of the Environment, Nicholas Ridley, took a personal interest in
the engineering solutions, a judicial review was hem into his refusal to
schedule the site -- which upheld his decision -- and the local MP -- Simon
Hughes -- properly maintained a constant pressure on us to do the right
thing. Above all, an enormous amount of public interest was generated which
received much media coverage, promoted of course by the theatrical world.
Lord Olivier died in July and issued a plea for the Rose Theatre before he
did so. Dame Peggy Ashcroft was seen in deep distress on the arms of
various leading men and Sir Ian McKellan spoke strongly against the
compromise solution which was negotiated. Amongst many incidents I recall
rashly accepting a suggestion from Simon Jenkins -- then Deputy Chairman of
English Heritage -- that I should put the case for compromise to a public
meeting in the Olivier Theatre on the South Bank. In a packed auditorium
stacked with devotees of direct action, baying for the hides of myself and
the Imry Merchant representatives I sought a friendly face in vain amongst
the crowd cheering Simon Hughes and Ian McKellan to the rafters. This was
all froth. The Rose was saved, has been shown to the public and has long
awaited the attentions of the Rose Theatre Trust. More importantly perhaps,
there was general recognition of the need for archaeological sites to be
properly integrated into the planning process. The episode led ultimately
to a review of London's pre-Restoration theatres which identified their
locations and condition (Blatherwick 1998). The experience also led to a
review of archaeological provision in London.
So anxious were politicians to issue policy guidance on the matter,
that in May 1989, Virginia Bottomley -- then Heritage Minister -- announced
Government's intention to issue new guidance on archaeology and planning.
The ground had been well-prepared and the timing could not have been
better. A draft policy document had been prepared and its main provisions
publicised by EH before it was discussed with the Department of the
Environment (Wainwright 1989). The announcement was made at a time when
archaeological discoveries in York and London -- culminating in the Rose
Theatre -- had highlighted awareness and interest in archaeology, and the
need to ensure that archaeological remains were being considered early on
in the planning process.
PPG-16
A consultation document was issued in February 1990 based on the
draft provided by EH. It set out a general statement of policy on the
importance of archaeological remains and advice on the handling of
archaeology in the planning process, the weight to be given archaeological
matters in planning decisions, the use of planning conditions and the
principle that the developer should pay for the recording and publication
of archaeological remains which were to be destroyed by his actions. The
Department received more than 200 responses and the advice note was
launched as Government policy on 21 November 1990 (DoE 1990), by Baroness
Blatch -- then Heritage Minister -- on the day of Margaret Thatcher's
resignation. The occasion was the annual conference of the English Historic
Towns Forum in Lincoln (EHTF 1990) and the keynote address by Barry
Cunliffe endorsed the policy and drew attention to issues that were to
become dominant over the next decade -- professional demarcation,
publication and the problems of archaeology functioning in a free-market
economy. A Planning Policy Guidance Note (PPG) is issued by Government as
advice on best practice and that advice is not necessarily enshrined in
legislation. This caused some to doubt its future effectiveness but these
early fears have been unrealized and PPG-16 has provided a firm platform
from which archaeology has expanded hugely -- and given birth to a similar
phenomenon in the rest of Europe.
The operation of the PPG was reviewed one and four years after its
launch. On the first occasion (Lane & Vaughan 1992) the review by
Pagoda Associates indicated that by the end of 1991, the archaeological
significance of virtually all planning applications in England were being
properly considered. The second review by Roger Tym and Partners &
Pagoda Associates (1995) confirmed that early impression and in a
perceptive review identified a number of issues that were to occupy
archaeologists and planners later in the decade. For the moment we and our
partners in local authorities were well content with the advice from
Government on archaeology and set about getting it recognized and
implemented in the country.
Whilst doing so, there was some unfinished business to clear up in
London. Following the Rose Theatre episode and the publication of PPG-16, a
difficult period of discussion began between EH and the Museum of London
over the future organization and funding of archaeology in the capital.
Eventually a solution emerged (Thomas 1992) which saw EH establish its
London Archaeology Advisory Service in a strategic and advisory role (EH
1998a; 1998b) and a new body -- the Museum of London Archaeology Service
(MOLAS) emerge as a recognized provider of archaeological services to the
nation's capital city.
Consolidation and expansion
Whilst some were surfing these turbulent times, the Monuments
Protection Programme (MPP) was making steady -- if undramatic -- progress.
So much so that in 1990 the Department of the Environment issued a press
notice, announcing a 10-year programme to revise and update the schedule.
The team assembled by Bill Startin had spent the years since 1986
developing principles, procedures and systems to enable a national
assessment. (Darvill et a). 1987). The process of evaluating records held
by each SMR around a standard suite of 225 specially commissioned monument
class descriptions was completed for the whole country in 1993 in
partnership with archaeologists in local government. Documentation was
improved, 18 regionally based archaeologists appointed, a series of
strategic projects at national level set in train and by 1997 the number of
scheduled monuments had risen to nearly 17,000 -- between 25,000 and 35,000
sites. Current estimates are that a schedule of 35,000 monuments should
cover the 45,000-50,000 sites which fit the criteria for national
importance set out in 1983 -- not far Short of Bryan O'Neil's estimate in
1954 (EH 1996; Nieke 1997). The importance of the MPP rests not simply on
the numbers of monuments added to the schedule, but in the way it has taken
forward our understanding of great swathes of our past -- industrial
archaeology, medieval and later settlements, 20th-century defence sites,
historic landscapes and flint scatters and the success of the programme is
testimony to the professional skill of those who have undertaken the work.
Implementing PPG-16 on the ground was a matter of arranging regional
workshops for local government planners with officials from the DoE and the
Association of County Archaeology Officers (ACAO). One of the earliest was
held at Taunton and it wets clear that we had a success on our hands. Not
only were the doors to the room closed on a maximum audience of 200 but the
level of representation was from chief executives and chief planners as
well as more junior staff. As the road-show toured the country it was
apparent that the advice contained in PPG-16 was timely, welcome and
relevant and that only a few dinosaurs wished to turn the clock back.
The forces of reaction found clearest expression not amongst the
local planning authorities but amongst government departments who suddenly
saw themselves as being held responsible -- both in conservation terms and
financially -- for the archaeological implications of their developments.
Nowhere was the resistance to change more apparent than in the Department
of Transport. The opportunity to take them to task arose in May 1989 --
such a busy year! -- when the government published a White Paper called
Roads for Prosperity which announced a greatly expanded motorway and trunk
road programme at a cost of over 6 billion (pounds sterling). Additional
schemes were announced in a further report in February 1990 Trunk roads,
England: into the 1990s which brought the total trunk road development
programme to over 2500 miles at a cost of 12.4 billion (pounds sterling).
At that time the Department of Transport were providing 500,000 (pounds
sterling) annually to EH to assist in the financing or archaeological work
-- a figure which had recently been increased from its previous 100,000
(pounds sterling). Clearly this was no time for polite exchanges with the
Department of Transport through our own Ministry and Gerry Friell took
charge of commissioning a report on the archaeological impact of the
proposals from Environmental Resources Ltd. The review (Friell 1991) showed
that:
* over 800 sites could be affected
* recording costs could be of the order of 70 (pounds sterling)
million
* greater weight must be given to archaeological and environmental
considerations in the process of trunk road planning and assessment.
The study was not a secret but neither did Gerry Friell and I tell
many people about it so it was with some secret surprise and apprehension
that it formed a major component of EH's Annual Report press conference in
October 1990 -- when the Conservative Party were meeting in Bournemouth.
The responses from Cecil Parkinson and his staff were intemperate -- even
taking our ambush into account -- and a heated controversy ensued in the
pages of The Times. But Lord Montagu was as steadfast as ever and the
tactic resulted in the Department of Transport agreeing to fund its own
archaeological work and reviewing their Manual of Environmental Appraisal.
This proved to be the key to solving the general problem. In April 1993 new
arrangements for funding archaeology in advance of development carried out
by Government Departments came into force, and the principles set out in
PPG-16 were finally extended to Government Departments.
The publication of PPG-16 made it necessary for EH to put its own
policies in order. In 1991 we issued three documents:
i A definitive policy statement regarding archaeology funding
embodying the principles and procedures contained in PPG-16 (EH, 1991A).
This remained substantially unaltered for the next decade.
ii Guidance on the management of archaeology projects -- called MAP2
to distinguish it from its precursor in 1989 (EH 1989; 1991c). This
document was largely the brainchild of Gillian Andrews and Roger Thomas. It
defined a management cycle and a project management framework for
archaeology projects. Initially, it was intended for EH-funded projects but
it was rapidly adopted by developers, local authorities and subsequently
the Heritage Lottery Fund as standard guidance. It established the
principle that all projects pass through a number of discrete phases
(planning-recording -- analysis -- report preparation -- dissemination) and
that an explicit decision is required to proceed with each. This document
remains standard guidance in England (Thomas & Andrews 1995).
iii Following extensive consultation within the profession we issued
a forward strategy document Exploring our past (EH 1991b) which identified
areas of archaeological activity considered to need particular attention.
These contained a mix of strategies, including chronological or thematic
studies, landscapes and broad goals directed to managing the resource. The
document was important because it stated firmly that although rescue
funding had been taken over by developers, EH had a future role in funding
rescue projects where no developer could be found -- such as wetlands and
coastal erosion -- and as the lead public sector body dealing with
archaeology in England. Exploring our past was therefore used to guide our
archaeology funding until the end of the decade and was also used to direct
programmes of work for the Central Archaeology Service and the Ancient
Monuments Laboratory.
In addition to taking steps to ensure the acceptance of PPG-16 and
aligning EH policies, it was necessary to build on the foundation which had
been created. Soon after the publication of PPG-16, Graham Fairclough took
the lead in drafting development plan policies for archaeology (EH 1992a)
and in the same year a policy statement was issued on the management of the
urban archaeological resource (Wainwright 1992). The paper clarified and
re-aligned policies in respect of the management of the urban
archaeological resource in the wake of PPG-16. It set out our intention to
commission urban archaeological databases and to initiate a programme of
Intensive Urban Assessments for 30 English towns with great chronological
depth, complex stratigraphy, good survival and intensive development
pressure. York was the pilot study and the strategy developed there, backed
up by an archaeologist in the City Council, has ensured that the earlier
crises are now well in the past (Ove Arup 1991). The policy document also
considered that for most towns a less detailed approach is adequate and
these were dealt with through extensive urban surveys. These proved to be
very popular and, managed by Roger Thomas, Somerset, Hereford and
Worcester, Shropshire, Gloucestershire, Essex, Kent, Hampshire and the Isle
of Wight were soon on stream. Each project proved to be more time-consuming
and expensive than originally thought, for each possess three phases --
database, assessment and strategy formulation -- and the scope was
broadened to include other heritage interests; but they proved to be a
reliable vehicle for securing appropriate policies for the management of
the urban heritage.
Countryside and churches
In the countryside there was full recognition that the historic
environment shares space with the natural environment of wildlife and
land-form systems, and that both national and cultural assets constitute
the fabric of our country's scenic beauty and landscape. The separate
aspects of the environment are covered by three government agencies and
Graham Fairclough steered us towards the first formal evidence of
collaboration in a statement on conservation issues in Strategic Plans
(Countryside Commission et al. 1993) and its companion volume on
Conservation Issues in Local Plans (EH et al. 1996). Taken together, the
volumes gave practical advice to planning authorities on how to incorporate
an integrated approach to the plan-making process at local level. A number
of areas were either not covered by PPG-16 -- either by accident or design
-- or felt themselves to be excluded. Historic Buildings were subsequently
covered by their own PPG-15 (DoE 1994), together with World Heritage Sites,
Historic Parks and Gardens, Historic Battlefields and Historic Landscapes.
The full benefits of this PPG in respect of historic buildings has yet to
be felt as it was not pursued with the same vigour as PPG-16. Nevertheless,
it gave rise to good practice papers (ALGAO 1996) and EH (1994) on the
recording of historic buildings -- which is now the norm rather than the
exception (Stocker 1994).
The question of the funding and disposal of excavation archives had
inadvertently not been addressed in PPG-16. Grants for the storage of boxes
of specified sizes had been paid since the early 1980s (Museums and
Galleries Commission 1986). Eventually, a jointly funded survey by the
Museums and Galleries Commission and EH (Swain 1998) provided some facts on
which to base a policy. It showed that the quantity of archaeological
archives held by museums is about 40,000 cubic metres, of which 35% is held
by five museums with the Museum of London holding about 18% of the whole.
The storage problem was therefore focused on a relatively small number of
large museum services. Rather more worrying was the disclosure that 48
archaeological contractors hold 8543 individual archives and that four
contractors hold 66% of this total. The recommendations of the report
include a network of regional archaeological resource centres, the
dissemination of the value and interest of these archives to the public and
the archaeological profession and guidelines for disposal or dispersal.
These recommendations must be taken forward if we are to avoid a major
problem further down the line.
Churches were, of course, a problem on account of their peculiar
status outside the planning system, their poverty and the large numbers
falling into decay. As the first full-time secretary of the CBA Churches
Committee, Richard Morris took up the challenge with enthusiasm and was
responsible for a scheme to appoint archaeological consultants to each of
the Diocesan Advisory Committees with such success that experienced people
were hard to find -- a problem which exists to this day. An example of how
conservation documents should be prepared and presented for churches is
that by Tony Fleming & Glenn Foard (1997) for the Peterborough Diocese
and such documents show the way forward in this difficult area.
Growing pains -- the new professionals
Nowhere did the publication of PPG-16 and its consequences have such
a great effect as on the archaeology profession itself. There was nothing
less than a fundamental re-shaping of the structure of the profession, not
just in Britain but in the rest of Europe. (Kristiansen 1996). Because of
archaeology's success in integrating with the development and planning
world and its huge popularity in the media, the profession had to change
rapidly. Some prospered in the new world, others found change painful and
hankered after an illusory golden age, seeking eagerly for problems which
would reinforce their reaction (Wainwright 1993). By 1996 it was estimated
that 30-40 million (pounds sterling) annually was coming in to support
archaeological work as a result of PPG-16 and developer funding. Consulting
engineers and other development agencies found it necessary to set up their
own archaeology divisions -- Gifford and Partners showed the way in 1989
when they appointed Tim Strickland to head up their archaeology section.
Archaeological work in England has been catalogued in annual gazetteers
(Darvill & Hunt 1999). These record that PPG-16 has resulted in the
number of investigations per annum being increased nearly threefold in six
years, from 1228 in 1990 to 3210 in 1996. The discipline has moved from
being a leisure and purely research activity protesting in vain at the
erosion of our heritage and the lack of resources to record it properly, to
occupying a central role in environmental planning and regional and
national policies for regeneration, tourism and land management (Wainwright
1999).
An early issue which the archaeology profession faced in 1991 was the
appearance of contract archaeology and competitive tendering for projects.
This came to the fore at an early stage as a result of the acceptance of
PPG-16 by developers who recognized the need to shoulder the costs of
archaeological recording arising from their proposals. The debate on the
issue was led by the Institute of Field Archaeologists (IFA) which
sponsored a conference on the subject, agreed a Code of Practice and
convened a committee to monitor developments, formulate guidelines, to
provide members with information and advice and to act as an arbitrator.
The IFA played a decisive and pivotal role in this issue which at the time
was closely linked with that of territoriality. Vigorous organizations such
as Wessex Archaeology and the Oxford Archaeological Unit tendered for work
outside their traditional areas and therefore operated in territories
previously considered to be the private preserves of a single body. This
issue disappeared into farce in Kent, where the Oxford Unit working in
Dover under the nose of the redoubtable Brian Philp were reported to IFA
with a view to removing the Oxford Unit's Director David Miles from its
professional register as `entering a new era of unethical activity'. Brian
Philp was in turn reported to IFA by Dover District Council, and it was
silly episodes such as this which opened the eyes of the majority of the
profession to the futility of attempting to maintain traditional tribal
boundaries.
As Roger Thomas (1993; 1995) has so convincingly demonstrated, the
roles and responsibilities within the professional framework of archaeology
in Britain have been fundamentally re-structured:
Curators employed by local government and national heritage bodies
advise on archaeological requirements for preservation or excavation.
Contractors compete for and undertake archaeological work for
developers on a commercial basis.
Consultants provide advice to developers and curators.
Crucial to the process is the separation of the roles of curator and
contractor. It is not ethically possible to have the same organization
specifying to the developer what should be done and then tendering for that
work. Local authorities which maintained their own field teams felt this
issue particularly keenly and some felt it necessary to externalize the
latter. This was unpopular and created a swell of resentment against PPG-16
in some quarters, but Essex County Council have shown how it is possible to
combine both roles entirely satisfactorily.
In 1998 EH -- in collaboration with Cadw, Historic Scotland and DoE
Northern Ireland -- commissioned a survey of archaeological jobs in the UK
(Aitchison 1999). The survey showed that there are approximately 4425
poorly paid professional archaeologists in the UK. Of these, 680 are
employed by national heritage organizations, 644 in universities and
colleges, 605 are local government employees and 1341 -- by far the largest
number -- work for contractors. National museums employ 156 archaeologists
and local museums 190. Independent consultancy is a growth industry and
number 153 individuals, 170 are in commercial employment and 461 in other
organizations. The profession has shown spectacular growth over the past
five years and further growth is expected. This survey provides the basis
on which a much-needed infrastructure can be built.
One group who perceive themselves as having lost out through PPG-16
are the local societies, at least as seen through the eyes of their main
spokesman, Andrew Selkirk, who with his wife Wendy has owned and edited
Current Archaeology for over 30 years and has chronicled with attractive
clarity and integrity the main achievements in British archaeology over
that period. Assertions that there is no longer a place for the volunteer
in archaeology and that massive government intervention has cut the
profession off from its grass roots (Selkirk 1997) are without foundation.
It may be the case that some contractors ignore local societies and
relationships have not always been easy. Mutual respect and recognition of
their interlocking roles are necessary and may sometimes be lacking
(Council for Independent Archaeology 1993). My own local society at
Richmond in Surrey is an example of a group undertaking excellent work in
productive co-existence with MOLAS and with hard work and a renouncing of
personal vendettas similar opportunities exist throughout the country.
Local societies are the backbone of our subject in the UK and have a strong
stake in its future development.
Two organizations share much of the credit for the controlled
expansion of the subject over the past decade. Local government
archaeologists are in a pivotal position as advisors to local planning
authorities and their advice is critical to the whole process. The
promotion of professional standards and ethics has been the role of the
Institute of Field Archaeologists founded in 1982 and has been central to
the advances which have been made since then.
The national body for local government archaeologists is the
Association of Local Government Archaeology officers (ALGAO) -- formed in
1996 through the amalgamation of the Association of County and District
archaeology officers with the aid of a grant from EH to cover its
infrastructure costs (ALGAO 1997). The constructive relationship between
ALGAO and its predecessors with national heritage bodies has been crucial
to the success of national policies and the statements produced by the ACAO
in relation to sites and monuments records (ACAO 1978) and the procedural
arrangements for the operation of PPG-16 (ACAO 1993) have become
professional standards.
The first proposals for a professional body for archaeologists were
made in 1972 by the CBA. They ran into difficulties for the usual reasons
and it was not until 1982 that the IFA came into being and, as our
professional body, has been invaluable in promoting professional standards
through its validation process, which now includes a register of
organizations, and its promotion of training and career development
schemes. It is well known for its very successful annual conferences, but
its role as a standards setting body and active professional organization
promoting influential guidelines and standards has been secured through its
succession of eminent chairmen and latterly by its Director. EH offered to
fund the permanent staff posts with some reluctance -- not wishing to
compromise the essential independence of the organization -- but experience
has shown these initial fears to be without foundation. The IFA has also
produced its share of professional standards papers which have helped to
guide us through early problems. Contractual regulations (Darvill &
Atkins 1991); environmental assessment (Ralston & Thomas 1993);
guidelines for finds work (IFA 1992) and standards and guidance for
archaeological field work (IFA 1994) are but a few of their documents. Both
ALGAO and the IFA have played important roles in the developments which we
see today and have much to offer for the future management of the
archaeological resource and the regulation of the archaeological profession
respectively.
Some parts of the archaeology profession were understandably a little
queasy about the rapid strides towards its incorporation in the fields of
planning, development and environmental control. Claims of
`anti-intellectualism' can be dismissed as ill-informed ranting but genuine
concerns were expressed about the need for a research agenda and quality
control (Morris 1993) and it is time to see if archaeology did become a
casualty of the market -- as feared initially by a few faint hearts.
Casualties of the market?
When Exploring our past was published in 1991 it contained a review
of rescue funding in the 1980s and a strategy for the next decade. The
document had been prepared not just to illuminate the way forward but to
head off any predators who might regard the archaeology budget as
vulnerable as a result of PPG-16. The strategy resulted from inviting the
national period societies and special interest groups to give their views
on priorities. These were then condensed into a single document -- without
omitting any proposal! The document was therefore not so much a list of
priorities but a wish list. Nevertheless it served its purpose for the rest
of the decade. From 1991, EH took a more proactive role in shaping the
archaeology programme and actively commissioned projects which implemented
the strategy contained in Exploring our past. In the same year, the
Taoiseach of Ireland, Charles Haughey, launched the Discovery Programme.
This was a bold research initiative, chaired by Professor George Eogan,
with its own budget and four major interdisciplinary projects (Discovery
Programme, 1992). It was based -- as was Exploring our past -- on the
principle of setting the questions and developing field programmes to find
the answers.
Exploring our past was implemented against the backdrop of the EH
agenda published in October 1992 (EH 1992b). This was the brain-child of
Jocelyn Stevens who became Chairman in that year. Passionate about the
heritage, committed to quality and irascible when it suited him, Jocelyn
brought a breadth of vision and experience to EH to which most of us
responded -- though some were burned off by his passionate insistence that
only the best would do. His agenda began with dismantling an earlier
proposal that EH should move to Nottingham, and contained the key messages
of partnership, local management agreements for our monuments in
guardianship where appropriate, more focus in our grant aid and
externalizing the direct labour force. He delivered these messages in the
face of knee-jerk criticism which only spurred him on and increased his
determination. He rapidly became a firm friend to archaeology and his
support was crucial during the remainder of the decade.
A notable achievement of the 1980s had been the virtual elimination
of the unpublished backlog of 1100 state-funded excavations carried out
before 1973 (Butcher & Garwood 1994). Two studies were particularly
influential during that decade. The Frere Report (1975) was commissioned by
the Committee for Rescue Archaeology of the Ancient Monuments Board for
England. This report was particularly concerned to address the problem of
how to publish an ever-increasing quantity of archaeological data. The
Cunliffe Report (1982) stressed the need for the critical selection of that
data and particular emphasis was placed on the research design as a means
of exercising the selectivity. In 1991, The Management of Archaeological
Projects (MAP2) identified the need to develop the concept of regular
critical review as the key to successful project management and set out how
this may be achieved. During the 1990s MAP2 was -- and still is -- a
standard reference for the public and private sectors and was the framework
within which programmes of analysis and publication took place. These
dominated the programme, as the excavation units in the historic cities of
London, York, Lincoln and Carlisle -- to name a few -- opened up their
archives to the rigours of MAP2 scrutiny. They required (and received) a
huge investment of funds and by the end of the decade the benefits of the
policy in terms of volumes on shelves is apparent.
Survey and synthesis
Great projects were brought to a successful conclusion. The Danebury
Hillfort and Landscape study (Cunliffe 2000) encompassed 28 years of work
and at Boxgrove in West Sussex human remains 500,000 years old were found
along with stone cutting tools and the bones of animals now extinct
(Roberts & Parfitt 1999). Landscape studies on Salisbury Plain (Bradley
et al. 1994) and Bodmin Moor (Johnson & Rose 1994) epitomized the
richness of the uplands and emphasized the paradox of Salisbury Plain both
as a military training area and an unravelled archaeological resource.
Field archives were gently appropriated from elderly excavators who were
given assistance to write up their great sites (e.g. Alcock 1995) and other
projects were given the wherewithal to reach a successful conclusion (Bell
et al. 1996). The rapid field response was retained as part of the
repertoire and was exercised in respect of the Bronze Age Dover Boat and to
capture a record of the country's deep-mined coal industry at a time of its
radical re-structuring (Gould & Ayris 1995). The last was commissioned
from the RCHME -- one of a series of major surveys undertaken with them
over the decade.
Topographical considerations frequently played a major role in the
programme. The importance of the uplands had been recognized in the 1980s
and surveys undertaken of the Lake District, the Cheviots, Peak District,
Exmoor, Dartmoor and West Penwith as well as Bodmin and Salisbury Plain.
From 1973, EH supported surveys and excavations in the wetlands of England
in close and productive association with John and Bryony Coles. Gradually
the surveys progressed across the country from Somerset (1973-1987), the
East Anglia Fens (1976-1988), the northwest wetlands (1990-1998) and the
Humber Wetlands which was initiated in 1992 and where surveys will continue
to 2003. All the work has been published as a series of wetland monographs
and has not only created a pool of expertise in wetland matters but will
lead to the preservation of selected areas in co-operation with other
partners (Coles 1995). As Barry Cunliffe has shown at Danebury, the
long-term view is essential for success. The coast and inter-tidal zone was
another topographical zone in need of greater understanding. EH and the
RCHME commissioned the Universities of Reading and Southampton to prepare a
report which addressed the characterization of the archaeological resource
in the intertidal zone, and the development of appropriate management
strategies for it in the context of sea-level change (Fulford et al. 1997).
The management issues were addressed in a separate publication (EH/RCHME
1996) and are now being followed up in selected areas (Williams & Brown
1999).
Surveys of subject areas were extensively commissioned -- often as
part of the MPP. EH and Cadw commissioned a seven-year survey of Lower
Palaeolithic remains in Britain. The, programme was undertaken by John
Wymer within a framework provided by Wessex Archaeology. The successful
completion of the surveys is a landmark in Palaeolithic studies and
provides a national overview difficult to parallel elsewhere in the world.
Copies of the regional surveys are held by county sites and monument
records, an archaeological guidance leaflet for planning authorities and
developers was produced (EH 1998c) and an academic synthesis published
(Wymer 1999). Other subject areas investigated were lithic scatters
(Schofield 1994); medieval settlements; industrial archaeology (EH 1995;
Stocker 1995a) and 20th-century military sites (EH 1998d).
As a result of the growth in the number of excavations funded by
commercial developers, we embarked upon a series of broadly-based syntheses
to ensure that work was carried out within a framework of good professional
practice and not in isolation. Romano-British pottery is ubiquitous and
abundant and was therefore chosen as the first in a series of reviews
(Fulford & Huddleston 1991), followed by medieval pottery (Mellor
1994). Later came a report on stone (Peacock 1998). Each report was
supplemented by training courses concerned with basic recording standards
and guidelines for processing. The implementation of PPG-16 required
support through an annual gazetteer of developer-funded projects (Darvill
& Hunt 1999) and at a technical level to reach a better understanding
of the interaction between archaeological deposits and the buried
environment (Corfield et al. 1996). This project was concerned with the
successful application of mitigation strategies developed since 1991. An
issue which badly needed some factual content was that of metal detecting,
which was the cause of deep divisions. There can be no doubt that the hobby
has caused serious damage to archaeological sites through the undisciplined
removal of artefacts from their context. Others regard metal detecting as
an invaluable aid to the investigation of the past.
EH commissioned a comprehensive study from the CBA of the effect of
metal detecting on archaeology in England (Dobinson & Denison 1995).
The study concluded that the hobby has been for good as well as ill and
that its potential benefits have not been harnessed to the full.
Subsequently, the Treasure Act 1996 came into force in September 1997 and
was accompanied by a Code of Practice. The Act has resulted in more finds
being recorded and created an important role for finds liaison officers
(Bland 2000).
The great changes which took place during the decade were almost
entirely due to PPG-16. The build-up to the Advisory Note had been gradual
and considerable emphasis placed on its implementation, leading to its
ultimate success. The number of excavations in the country tripled in its
first five years and EH was able to adopt a strategic and supportive role
instead of being the main provider. These changes occurred not just in
England but in the rest of Europe.
Wider horizons
In June 1990, a Committee of Experts, appointed by the Council of
Europe, chaired by Gustav Trotzig and guided by Daniel Therond, began the
work of revising the 1969 European Convention on the Protection of the
Archaeological Heritage. Remarkably, the Committee completed its work in
April 1991, and the text was signed by Ministers -- including the UK -- at
the third European Conference of Ministers responsible for the Cultural
Heritage held in Malta in January 1992 (Valletta 1992). The revised
Convention was not a radical step in the protection of the archaeological
heritage of Europe. Rather, it represents the embodiment of a gradual
development of principles and archaeological practice which we have seen in
the UK during the 1980s and its provisions can be regarded as a standard to
be met throughout Europe (O'Keefe 1993; Trotzig, 1993). The Convention
begins with a definition of' archaeological heritage which was -- and is --
a very contentious issue. It covers matters familiar to us from the UK
experience including the integration of archaeology with planning,
developer funding, the reporting of portable antiquities and their trade,
and the conservation of monuments. Above all, the Valletta Convention
defines not only a minimum legal system for the protection of cultural
property, but also provides a framework for professional co-operation in
Europe. The UK Government should ratify this Convention which is proving to
be influential in promoting international collaboration.
To promote the implementation of the revised Convention, the
Ministers at the same time recommended a number of actions which together
might form a `European Plan for Archaeology'. One of these was concerned
specifically with urban archaeology (Council of Europe 1999a). A second was
a multilingual glossary of archaeological terminology (Council of Europe
1999b). A third was the preparation of a core data standard for records of
archaeological sites and monuments (Council of Europe 1999c). A fourth was
a European campaign on the theme `The Bronze Age, the first golden age of
Europe' (Council of Europe 1994). This is an impressive record of
achievement and the Council of Europe deserve all our thanks for their
efforts to unite us. With their assistance the archaeology profession is
organised at a European level through the European Association of
Archaeologists, chaired initially by Kristian Kristiansen and latterly by
Willem Willems. We have our own journal, newsletters and annual conferences
-- 700 attendees from 25 countries met at Bournemouth in 1999. National
cultural resource managers have organized themselves at a European level
through the Archeolgiae Consilium -- initially under the chairmanship of
Willem Willems and latterly Adrian Olivier. Such professional linkages are
important for those of us who work on these small islands and Willem
Willems has set out the sound foundation which exists for the future
(Willems 1999; 2000).
Regional developments in archaeological policy
In the United Kingdom, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have
developed their own versions of the events in England and I am indebted to
Ann Hamlin, Richard Avent and David Breeze for their perspective on these
developments. The political context of heritage management in Northern
Ireland requires a full measure of scholarship and diplomacy which found
its expression in Ann Hamlin. Direct Rule from 1972 means that all
government is run from the `centre' and local authorities have minimal
powers. This has profoundly affected the provision of the archaeological
service which is a centralized integrated archaeological service combining
the function of many regional and county bodies in England. This is now
changing with the Northern Ireland Assembly, but the centralized system has
brought many benefits. New legislation has retained strengths such as
licensing excavations and reporting all finds; the Northern Ireland
Monuments and Buildings Record opened in 1992 and the belated impact of
developer funding has led to much evidence of prehistoric activity on
greenfield sites where there were previously few clues. It is important for
us to recall that heritage management in Northern Ireland and its
communication to the public has taken place against a background of
inter-communal strife which is partly rooted in conflicting perceptions of
the past. The six-month Navan Fort Public Inquiry in 1985 and the 1986
decision to halt destructive quarrying did a huge amount to increase public
awareness (Mallory 1987) and this has increased through active media
exposure, educational outreach and publications. The availability of
European Community funds has led to investment in the presentation and
marketing of major state care monuments, with the main aims of improving
provision for schools and increasing cultural awareness -- so important in
Northern Ireland. It is one matter to debate the philosophy of conserving
Wigmore Castle in the rural west midlands of England and quite another to
communicate perceptions of the past at Navan. Our colleagues in Northern
Ireland have a responsible and complex role which they have discharged with
scholarship and integrity.
An important difference between EH on the one hand, and Cadw and
Historic Scotland on the other, is that both Cadw and Historic Scotland
remain embedded within their respective Government departments. Both are
Executive Agencies and remain part of Government and are thus perhaps
unable to speak and act as freely as EH.
Wales is an orderly and well-run place. Advice on the handling of
archaeological matters in the planning process was issued in 1996,
replacing PPG-16 (Wales) (Welsh Office 1996), and both national bodies
dealing with the historic environment -- Cadw and the Royal Commission on
the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales -- have jointly set out their
agenda for the next few years (Cadw/ RCAHMW 1999). A major milestone was
the creation and development of the four Welsh Archaeological Trusts over
the past 25 years. At the time of their establishment, the Trusts were seen
purely as a way of dealing with major rescue threats, either through
excavations or watching briefs. In the absence of archaeological services
at the local authority level -- these were not fought for and financed as
they were in England -- the Trusts rapidly developed their educational and
curatorial roles and, by the time PPG-16 was implemented in Wales in the
early 1990s, the Trusts were offering a wide range of planning advice.
During the 1990s, as developers increasingly took on the role of funding
rescue archaeology, Cadw have funded the Trusts to undertake this
curatorial role and a range of strategic surveys including the entire
length of the Welsh coastline, medieval churches and deserted rural
settlements. The system relies on Cadw support. Local authorities have not
taken ownership of their heritage and careful divisions have to be drawn
within the Trusts between their curatorial and contractual roles. The fact
that archaeological advice to local authorities is based on charitable
trusts means that it does not have the statutory clout of a system based in
the authorities themselves.
There have also been considerable achievements in extending the
boundaries of our knowledge and understanding. The Welsh Severn Estuary has
perhaps the greatest concentration of prehistoric intertidal archaeology
yet found in Britain and the results of the investigations have been
published. Stephen Green's excavations at Pontnewydd Cave have recorded the
remains of early Neanderthals from 250,000 years ago. The discovery of
evidence to suggest that copper ore was exploited on Great Orme's Head in
Gwynedd on a considerable scale in prehistory in conjunction with recent
work at Cwmystwyth (Ceredigion) and Parys Mountain (Anglesey) has been of
great significance in our understanding of the development of metal-working
technology in the British Isles. The discovery of the unexpected legionary
fortress at Usk and a major programme of research and excavations on the
castles and courts of the Welsh princes conclude what is, by any reckoning,
a remarkable record of achievement which fully meets the challenges,
potential and richness of Welsh heritage under the new Assembly.
In Scotland there is a similar emphasis on the pivotal role of the
lead Heritage Agency -- Historic Scotland -- working closely and
effectively with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical
Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS). The Scottish Office issued its advice on
archaeology and planning in 1994 (Scottish Office 1994a; 1994b). By 1977 it
had already been decided to establish the Field Survey Unit (which came to
be placed within RCAHMS), and the Central Excavation Unit -- later to
become independent as AOC (Scotland). Within a short period the Scottish
Urban Archaeology Unit (now the SUA Trust) was founded in Perth, and a
similar urban unit in Aberdeen. The Industrial Survey was formed -- at
first at Strathclyde University and later in the RCAHMS. Historic Scotland
has increased its funding for archaeology from a few thousand pounds in
1970 to 600,000 (pounds sterling) by 1980 and great headway has been made
with eradicating the backlog of unpublished reports (Barclay 1997). As in
Wales and Northern Ireland, Scotland is well placed to realize the
potential of the new Assembly with the assistance of archaeologists in some
local authorities. As in Wales, there remains a deep concern about the
long-term future of the archaeology service in local authorities which
needs to be tackled in the near future.
Last orders
In April 1999, a new lead body for the identification, documentation
and conservation of the historic environment was created by the merger of
the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments for England (RCHME) and
English Heritage (EH). The decision resulted from the Government's
Comprehensive Spending Review -- the latest in a long series of government
perusals of the issue -- all of which had come to opposite conclusions. A
policy review of the RCHME conducted in 1988 formalized the relationship
between the Commission and local record systems and the RCHME were
recognized as the lead body for oversight of the system of local SMRs in
England, but in a delicious compromise -- both EH and RCHME were given the
discretion to fund them. The Secretary of State did not order a funds,
transfer to enable the RCHME to implement their new function and the scene
was set for problems during the next decade.
The review had recognized that regular liaison between the two bodies
was essential and this was pursued with goodwill on both sides. Following
its influential role in the 1960s the RCHME had not been a consistent part
of the great series of assessment documents and surveys of the 1970s and
1980s -- save as on Bodmin Moor where local interests coincided. These two
bodies came together in the 1990s jointly to undertake major strategic
projects -- urban databases, intertidal zone and Monuments at Risk for
example -- and, with the exception of natural tensions which arise between
two organizations one of which is much larger than the other, the process
of coming together worked well despite the move of the RCHME to Swindon.
The problem lay in the crucial area of records.
Before 1988, there had been considerable investment by English
Heritage in the development of local records which created the basis for
much of the progress that we see today. After 1988, funds for local records
were coming from two national bodies. English Heritage was committing an
average 250,000 (pounds sterling) per annum to the creation of
archaeological posts for curatorial purposes in local government and
surveys to expand the content of local records. The RCHME, naturally
enough, were able to commit a smaller sum to the structure of the records.
The RCHME, EH and the ACAO were successful in producing strategic documents
(RCHME 1993; 1998), but on the ground, where the SMRs were crucial to the
protection of archaeological remains through the local planning process,
which was EH's concern, the SMRs became victims of their own success and by
the end of the decade were seriously or significantly under-developed. With
the benefit of hindsight the tragedy of the 1988 decision regarding SMRs
was not that it was necessarily wrong (Scotland and Wales demonstrated that
such lead role responsibilities can work well) but that the sometimes
divergent aims of the RCHME and EH were not reconciled into a set of common
objectives and that this crucial area was under-resourced. The ACAO were in
the middle of this and for most of the decade felt it necessary to hold
separate meetings with the two organizations. Opportunities were missed as
a result and in some respects the decision at the end of the decade to
merge the two bodies came as a relief. A review by David Baker (1999) for
ALGAO has drawn attention to the potential of SMRs both as functional
planning tools and as an educational resource for the wider community.
There is much to do before the local records can achieve either goal with
any confidence and this area must surely be the target for substantial
future investment within a structured framework.
The comprehensive spending review by government in 1988 also set out
proposals for a regional structure for English Heritage and during 1998 and
1999 regional offices were set up into which were moved the advisory
grant-giving and property aspect of the work. There are excellent reasons
for such a structure which creates a stronger regional presence and greater
accessibility. No-one would have wished that the integration of EH and the
RCHME took place at the same time, but at least the process gave an
opportunity of reviewing the new archaeological provision which the merger
had produced. There were strong arguments -- which were accepted -- for the
retention of the new Archaeology Division as a central (not a regional)
resource, and the three principal centres agreed were London, Swindon (the
offices of the previous Royal Commission) and Fort Cumberland near
Portsmouth. At this latter the Central Archaeology Service (CAS) was based,
to which it was proposed to move the Ancient Monuments Laboratory to create
a single, integrated archaeology service with purpose-built accommodation
-- including laboratories -- at a cost of over 2 million (pounds sterling)
(Malone et a). 2000: 255-6).
The Central Excavation Unit was founded at Fort Cumberland in 1975 to
provide a flexible response in emergencies and excavations on monuments in
care. In 1989 it was reviewed and re-named the Central Archaeology Service,
with the revised brief of providing an intelligent customer capability to
English Heritage in procurement of archaeological commissions and to
provide informed and knowledgeable advice. Its recording systems and
procedures formed the mainstay of advisory notes as good practice
(Jefferies 1977; HBMC 1986). It fulfilled its role with great
professionalism, distinguishing itself at the Rose Theatre and in the
aftermath of the fires at Uppark, Windsor Castle and Hampton Court, whilst
breaking new ground in respect of landscape assessment at Stonehenge and
Avebury and publishing many reports.
The Ancient Monuments Laboratory (AML) was founded in 1950 and for
the next 20 years or so was virtually the only authoritative focus of
technical competence and knowledge in the field of archaeological science.
Its London laboratories were designed in 1972 and a quarter of a century
later were wildly inappropriate in terms of their central London location
and accommodation. By the late 1970s sponsored posts had been set up in
Universities which had flourished as a regional and national resource. The
creation of EH in 1984 had made no change to the even tenor of the
Laboratory's ways and by 1997 it was time for a change. The nature of that
change was indicated by a review which drew attention to the exciting
opportunities of integrating with the CAS. Other options were considered,
but the choice of Fort Cumberland as a base rested on cost, space, the
beneficial re-use of historic buildings, the opportunities to promote the
Fort and the work carried out in it to the public and the huge potential
for collaboration with the University of Southampton. The CAS had operated
successfully from the Fort since 1976 and the new Archaeology Centre was
opened in 1999. There is considerable potential for what must be one of the
largest multi-disciplinary groupings of archaeologists in western Europe.
Substantial investment has been made in the infrastructure, and visionary
leadership is now needed to realize its full potential. The collection of
papers presented at a conference held in London in 1997 (Bayley 1998) shows
the potential for the future if the available opportunities are seized.
Exploring our past was overdue for review and the stage was set for
this by Adrian Olivier (1996). In a review of research frameworks Adrian
drew attention to the problems resulting from the rapid expansion of the
profession which had produced a sense of isolation and fragmentation, as
the means of dissemination and assessing the new information had not kept
pace with events elsewhere. The review proposed a series of regional
research frameworks as a basis for curatorial decisions and the funds to
make them possible. The frameworks were soon in preparation (e.g.
Glazebrook 1997) and it was time to look to our new agenda.
Tim Williams had joined the Archaeology Division early in the decade
and soon took a grip on the rapidly changing situation. He moved us to a
position where the archaeology budget was used to commission projects,
rather than respond to requests, and presided over the archaeology
programmes the Division developed during the 1990s. In 1996 he prepared and
circulated for discussion an ambitious document (Williams 1996) which would
be used to direct our own efforts, through the CAS, the AML, the MPP and
the programme commissioned from external sources through the archaeology
budget. The document was eventually called Exploring our past 1998 and an
implementation plan for it was published in 1999 (Williams 1999). The Plan
will need to be expanded following the merger with RCHME, but it represents
a strategic framework for the future which can be modified in the light of
experience, through a series of goals within which programmes can develop.
It is a much more sophisticated document than Exploring our past 1991 but
carries the same need to look into the future, assess what may be required
and establish appropriate programmes.
One project which appeared in both editions of Exploring our past was
a proposal to determine how many archaeological sites had survived, what
was their distribution and type and what influences were bearing down on
their condition. For years I had been asked these questions by politicians
and managers and needed to provide serious answers if archaeology was to
take its rightful place alongside other heritage assets. With Tim Darvill
and Dai Morgan-Evans a proposal was worked up which took three years or so
to get past the guardians of what was prudent in EH. A Monuments at Risk
(MARS) programme would be expensive about 1 million (pounds sterling) --
and had the potential to unleash pressures on EH to re-direct resources
from the traditional areas of expenditure on the built heritage to less
obvious but equally deserving heritage assets. Finally, MARS was launched
with 1995 as its census date and the University of Bournemouth as our
contractors, Tim Darvill and Andy Fulton as project managers and the RCHME
as our partners. The methodology was difficult to work through -- it was
clearly impossible to look at all archaeological sites in the country --
and a sampling scheme was devised to look at a cross-section of all
recorded monuments. A 5% sample was selected in 1927 1-kmx5-km randomly
distributed sample transects, backed up by an aerial survey programme in
which Bob Bewley of RCHME was a tower of strength. It was published in 1998
(Darvill & Fulton 1998), accompanied by a summary report and an EH
implementation plan.
MARS is the first stage in what should be an on-going process for
measuring and monitoring change. Much of its work was concerned with
setting bench-marks against which change will be measured in future. The
results exceeded expectations and provided enough statistics to keep my
successors and EH busy for the next two decades, when MARS should be
repeated:
* nearly a million entries in local sites and monuments records
* about 300,000 monuments in the country, of which one quarter are of
unknown date
* on average, one recorded monument has been completely destroyed
every day since 1945
* 80% of the wholesale destruction of our archaeological heritage is
caused by five hazards: development and urbanization; demolition and
building operations; mineral extraction and industry; agriculture; and
road-building
* 63% of earthwork monuments are now flat
* 2% of monuments are at high risk.
MARS is the pinnacle of strategic planning for the future of our
archaeological heritage. Its recommendations contain enough work for the
next generation of EH Inspectors -- and other conservation agencies -- and
it must be repeated at regular intervals.
EH of course is no longer alone in the field of archaeological
resource management -- it has numerous partners. Local authorities and the
mosaic of archaeological groupings which make up the discipline have
clearly played a major role in the story of the past four decades. The
National Trust -- which celebrated its centenary in 1995 -- is a
long-standing ally which owns large chunks of the best archaeology in the
country, is pioneering in the archaeology of gardens, has a particular role
in industrial archaeology and historic landscapes and has been the first to
explore the complexities of conserving our Cold War heritage at Orford
Ness. The National Trust has recognized archaeology as a core subject area,
backed it up with skilled and experienced staff and, with EH, is a major
player in what happens to our heritage (Evans et al. 1996). A more recent
partner on the heritage scene is the Heritage Lottery Fund, which will
focus increasingly on funding archaeological work that includes a high
level of involvement of, access by, or presentation to the general public,
as well as setting an example by funding archaeological works which are an
essential component of a lottery-funded project (Heritage Lottery Fund
1998).
Public interest in what archaeologists do has never been higher and
this is reflected on television and radio and in newspapers. The Time Team
reaches over 2 million viewers for each programme. Yet archaeologists have
traditionally felt self-conscious about involving the media and the public
and have patrolled the boundaries of their profession in an attempt to
exclude rather than engage. A classic example is our national heritage icon
at Stonehenge, where in 1995 groups of young people making for Stonehenge
at the summer solstice were stopped by police road-blocks. The
confrontations which followed led to the battle of the beanfield and over
500 arrests. The environs of Stonehenge had been saved from the perceived
ravages of a festival, but at the cost of an appalling public-relations
mess for which EH and the National Trust took the blame. In the summer of
2000 EH took the brave decision to open Stonehenge to the public for the
summer solstice. The occasion was an outstanding success and restored
Stonehenge in the public mind as a monument which belongs to us all, not
just to its guardians (see Wainwright 2000 for the current position).
There is a need for people to be able to connect with an
understanding to their past and now is an opportune time carefully to
assess the future -- how our heritage may be defined and valued and how it
may be administered and funded. Government ministers have seized the moment
and invited EH to co-ordinate a review of government policies with
particular reference to a holistic definition of the historic environment
in our multi-cultural society and to establish heritage policy as a
critical component of sustainable development thinking (EH 2000). If Bryan
O'Neil were writing his memorandum in 2000 and not 1954 he would see many
changes -- and similarities. He would not have recognized (and perhaps not
have welcomed) the wholesale integration of archaeology into the planning
process and the transfer of responsibilities from the centre to the local
scene. He would have welcomed the huge increase in archaeological activity
as a result of developer funding and done something about recording and
disseminating the information. Organizations such as Wessex Archaeology
with its range of over 100 clients; undertaking any form of archaeological
work whether on land, or below water; a high standard of academic output
with an extraordinary range of discoveries and a community officer, would
have met with his full approval (Wessex Archaeology 2000). The work
recently described in Kent (Current Archaeology 2000) he would have
recognized immediately as an excellent example of a county archaeologist
using PPG-16 and the planning process as a research tool to investigate the
archaeology of the county. He would have recognized the calls for a
professional infrastructure from a discipline which has expanded so rapidly
and fully backed the grant of 850,000 (pounds sterling) recently made to
ensure the future of a Roman site near Swindon. Maritime archaeology he
could easily have taken on board -- as he had fought for industrial sites
-- and he would have recognized the current research excavations at Whitby
Abbey as a worthy successor to the government supported project at
Stanwick. The London Mithraeum demonstrated the power of public interest in
conserving our past and he would have had no problem in recognizing that
legitimate interest when it has surfaced subsequently over the Rose
Theatre, Stonehenge, the earliest European (Boxgrove), Arthur (Tintagel),
King Alfred (Winchester) and Seahenge.
Above all he would have recognized the power of archaeology to change
our perceptions of the past and thus influence the ways in which we live
together in the future. If the last 40 years has brought us further along
the road to that self-understanding then ! am content.
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GEOFFREY WAINWRIGHT, wainwright@bstone.demon.co.uk

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"To free them from binding": women in the late medieval English parish.
French, Katherine L.
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History , v27 , n3 , p387(26)
Winter , 1997
ISSN: 0022-1953
Language: English Record Type: Fulltext; Abstract
Word Count: 9803 Line Count: 00789

Abstract: Late Medieval parishes celebrated the springtime holiday known as Hocktide for two days after Easter as a means
of raising fund for church activities. The holiday, which usually occurred in town or borough parishes and was celebrated by
married couples and women, called for women to capture men and release them upon payment of a forfeit on the first day.
The situation was reversed on the second day. It enabled women to play a greater role in their local churches.

Text:
Historians generally study the late medieval English parish in order to
understand the Reformation. Consequently, they view the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries only as a period on the verge of major change from the
perspective of later religious reform. Another hazard of letting the
specter of the Reformation shadow their studies is that class and gender
concerns are often subsumed under the "more important" goal of describing
religious reform. In order to begin altering the static image of late
medieval parishes and the undifferentiated composition of their members,
scholars need to borrow concerns and methodologies from fields other than
history.(1)

Although literary scholars of medieval drama are influenced by the later

presence of William Shakespeare, they have been successful in studying
medieval drama on its own terms. In seeking to uncover the early traditions
of English theater, they have discovered, in parochial records and other
ecclesiastical documents, many heretofore unknown examples of local
dramatic performances. Their growing list of local theatrical
presentations, however, does not go far enough in asserting the dynamism of
the late medieval parish; the role of drama in the parish is important in
its own right, not just as a precursor to later developments. It
entertained, educated, and raised money, and the sources that usually
record these performances are financial ones, which permit a look at the
economics of individual communities and the financial consequences of
staging plays and revels.(2)
Economic inquiry shows the rich and diverse character of parochial
religious behavior prior to the Reformation. But demonstrating the economic
viability of medieval theater is still not sufficient to challenge the
current historical view of the medieval parish. The long-standing insight
of anthropologists that religion is more than liturgy and theological
discussion justifies examination of economic behavior in terms of religious
practice in the late medieval parish. The expanding list of dramatic
performances are part of a community's economic structure and an expression
of religion as practice. Viewed from this position, English parishes become
much more than staging grounds for the Reformation; they have a dynamic
culture that can be analyzed for other issues, such as gender.
Influenced by such interdisciplinary concerns, recent scholarship on
the late medieval English parish has increasingly focused on the corporate
nature of lay parish life and worship. Not only was attendance at mass a
community activity, but so was the physical care and maintenance of the
church and its contents. Throughout the fourteenth, fifteenth, and
sixteenth centuries, the laity increased their level of organization and
involvement in their parishes.(3)
Unfortunately, most discussions of the resulting corporate activities
are gendered male, or predominantly male, because of the difficulty of
identifying women or their interests when they are excluded from public
displays, or subsumed under family. Since salvation was available to both
men and women, and the parish was the point of contact with the message and
sources of salvation, this neglect of women's participation should not go
unchallenged. Although scholars are beginning to identify corporate action
by women, they have done little theorizing about gender in the parish, or
what role it played in the parish's corporate activities. The issue goes
beyond simply asserting that parochial activities duplicated larger
societal gender roles; it concerns how these gender roles were incorporated
into parish involvement. What do identifiable examples of collective
association by men and women reveal about their interaction? Did
sex-related roles remain constant as lay involvement in the parish grew? If
not, how did parishioners react when gender roles changed?(4)
In the fifteenth century, English parishes began observing a new
springtime holiday called Hocktide, which lasted for two days - the second
Monday and Tuesday after Easter. On Monday, the women chased the men, tied
them up, and released them upon payment of a forfeit; on Tuesday, the
situation was reversed. The parish received the forfeit money. The addition
of feminist concerns to gender roles and women's agency found in the revels
can alter the static and undifferentiated image of the pre-Reformation
parish that historians typically present. Focusing on the impending
Reformation obscures changes in the pre-Reformation parish that economic,
anthropological, and feminist examinations reveal.(5)
Hocktide's origins are obscure; few contemporary descriptions of the
festivities remain. It was thought to commemorate a victory by Anglo-Saxon
women over the Vikings. According to Rossius, a fifteenth-century
chronicler, people remembered the death of Harthacunute "on the day called
in the vulgar 'Hox Tuisday', when they play in the villages at capturing
one party with cords and with other jokes...." Between 1406 and 1419, the
mayor of London repeatedly forbade an activity called "hokking" carried out
on the Monday and Tuesday after Easter. In 1446, when Queen Margaret was
coming to London, "hokking" again was banned in an effort to clean up the
city and improve public behavior for the royal visit. These proclamations
linked hokking with immoral behavior, gambling, and other activities that
the authorities felt were too violent or inappropriate.(6)
Not until 1450 is Hocktide associated with parishes. In a letter to
the almoner of his cathedral, John Carpenter, Bishop of Worcester, soundly
condemned the holiday, considering it to be a "noxious corruption" and a
sign of "spiritual illness." In the process of trying to stop it, Carpenter
provided its fullest description:
(For you must have known) how on one set day usually, alas, when the
solemn feast of Easter has ended women feign to bind men, and on another
(or the next) day men feign to bind women, and to do other things - would
that they were not dishonorable or worse! - in full view of passers-by,
even pretending to increase church profit but earning loss (literally
damnation) for the soul under false pretenses. Many scandals arise from the
occasion of these activities, and adulteries and other outrageous crimes
are committed as a clear offence to God, a very serious danger to the souls
of those committing them, and a pernicious example to others.(7)
The bishop demanded that all parishioners "cease and desist from these
bindings and unsuitable pastimes on the hitherto usual days, commonly
called "hock days...." Anyone caught still participating in the holiday was
to be brought before the bishop's consistory court, the legal venue for
sexual infractions.(8)
These early descriptions suggest that women were involved in the
holiday, but none of them state categorically that women were its primary
celebrants. Not until the holiday began appearing in parish financial
records were the separate roles for men and women visible and consequently
open to analysis.
Antiquarians, struck by the sexual nature of Hocktide's activities,
have used such words as "quaint," "merry," "amusing," and "sportive" to
describe the holiday. Chambers, in his classic study of medieval drama,
ends his discussion of the holiday with the dismissive statement, "The
central incident of 'hocking' appears therefore to be nothing but a form of
that symbolic capture of a human victim of which various other examples are
afforded by village festivals." Current scholarship is more interested in
the financial aspects of the holiday. Hutton recently described the holiday
as a "great moneyspinner," and Brown referred to it as a "ubiquitous" way
of raising money.(9)
Upon closer examination, none of these descriptions are adequate. They
either respond to the titillating descriptions of the festival's
activities, or else they ignore the issue of gender by discussing the
holiday in terms of parish finances. They do not look at how it gave women
an economic role in the parish that exposes assumptions about the
interaction of the sexes. Both approaches, however, still allow for
comments on women's unexpected successes at the holiday's end. "The ladies
always appear to have been more successful than the men on these
occasions."(10)
Recent treatments of Hocktide are usually subsumed under more general
descriptions of courtship rituals, youth culture, and May Day celebrations;
in many respects, these were similar kinds of holidays. Neither Hocktide
nor May Day commemorated ecclesiastical occasions; both fell in the spring;
and both dealt with sexual concerns. A more systematic survey of Hocktide
reveals, however, that it usually took place in town or borough parishes,
and that the principal actors were usually married couples or women, not
the youth typically involved in May Day celebrations.(11)
The holiday's function as a source of income drew upon assumed
practices of parochial organization and administration. Yet, looking
specifically at how this holiday was celebrated shows that often invisible,
or assumed, gender roles were playfully dissolved and then rebuilt in the
course of the festivities. As Davis has argued, games involving sexual role
reversal and separate male and female activities expressed a number of
communal concerns: They "gave a more positive license to the unruly women";
they affirmed a traditional ordering of sexual relations during times of
change in the "distribution of power in family and political life"; and
they negotiated the world outside of the parish and reinterpreted it
through a prism of local concerns.(12)
Hocktide served as a controlled way of examining and reaffirming
traditional gender roles in the face of the changing social dynamics that
accompanied the growing visibility and influence of the parish in late
medieval England. It was a carnivalesque holiday that upset male-female
relationships; women captured men, tied them up, and forced them to pay for
their freedom. As others have argued, games and rituals of inversion played
during periods of misrule were ways of calling attention to, defining, and
preserving the status quo.(13)
Nonetheless, women also derived status from participating in Hocktide.
Under its auspices they organized themselves, raised money, and then
purchased items that the community needed. The holiday reasserted women's
secondary status, but it also expanded their opportunities for
participation and influence within the parish. The abolition of Hocktide in
the Reformation marks the loss of an opportunity for critiquing social
order. In another example of what Burke has termed the "triumph of Lent,"
the reformers stressed social conformity and deference to authority,
replacing what they saw as disorderly and exuberant displays.(14)
The division of Hocktide into male and female halves need not be
understood simply as conflict between the sexes. Parishes sponsored
gender-related activities for married couples because conviviality, gender
identification, and life stage - which all figure in the Hocktide
celebrations - were also important concerns for parish communities. The
holiday had no single meaning within parish culture; instead, it offered a
way to locate the intersection of a number of issues relating to local
religious participation. Hocktide forces us not only to read gender back
into parochial life, but also to assess how concerns surrounding it were
inherent in parochial interaction.
The rise of Hocktide came at a point when the parish was increasing
its influence in late medieval English society. In the wake of the Fourth
Lateran Council, bishops focused more and more on the quality and form of
religious practice at the local level, which involved episcopal demands for
greater lay responsibility in supporting and maintaining parish churches.
As the laity began organizing in an effort to meet these obligations, a
variety of institutions external to the parish were also confronted with
the parish's new position. Towns, monasteries, and cathedrals had to enter
into competition with parishes for financial resources and political
influence. Common law could not recognize a parish as a corporation even
when it acted like one, and canon law was ill-equipped to cope with the
economic contingencies that increasingly occupied parishioners as they
worked to keep up their churches.(15)
The growth of the parish's presence in the legal, social, and
religious landscapes of England was accompanied by a parallel growth in its
self-awareness as a unit of association. The increased mandates for parish
support required internal administration. Parishes repeatedly negotiated
the volatile issues of class and gender by regulating seating arrangements,
recording pious gifts in bede rolls, and arbitrating petty disputes.(16)
Women usually supported their parishes by performing duties in keeping
with their status and roles within the family and society. Individual women
were generally responsible for mending altar clothes, washing and mending
vestments, sometimes cleaning the church, and providing flowers and rushes
for decorations. Women also fed parish workers, even providing lodging for
artisans hired by the community to work on the church.
The parish was unusual in that it offered women opportunities for
collective association, on either a temporary or permanent basis. After the
birth of a child, churching brought women together for their own liturgical
celebration. By the late fifteenth century, women in some communities, were
forming their own parish guilds, which supported side altars or chapels
dedicated to St. Mary or St. Margaret. The introduction of permanent seats,
during the same period, placed women together on one side of the church and
men on the other when they attended mass or other services.(17)
Large-scale renovations and other major building projects sometimes
induced women to organize themselves to help raise money. During the
three-year rebuilding of St. Petrock's Church in Bodmin, Cornwall, the
maidens banded together and raised money for the church. In Walberswick,
Suffolk, c. 1495, the wives of the town contributed 9s. for new glass
windows, and in 1497, the maidens collected 2s. 10d. for a new painting of
the popularly venerated King Henry VI. Hocktide was not the only parish
activity that afforded women the opportunity for collective action on
behalf of the parish community and their own salvation. It was unusual,
however, to the extent that the specifics of its celebration explicitly
called upon women.(18)
Although women's involvement in local religion was secondary, it was
apparently on the rise. As the parish assumed a greater role in local
society, women's functions within the parish grew commensurately. Outside
the parish's confines, women had few opportunities for leadership or
institutionalized influence. The examples of women serving as churchwardens
and guild wardens, however, shows that the limits of sex-related behavior
were expanded with respect to parochial involvement.(19)
As a new holiday, Hocktide not only reflected issues of social change;
it embodied them. By overturning and restoring expected relations between
men and women, Hocktide provided a means of responding to concerns about
women's growing influence within the parish and the changes in gender roles
that it brought. Locating the origins of Hocktide in the distant past
helped to tame the volatile issues of the sexes acting out of form. The
increased influence of women was perceived as an old and familiar concern,
not a new threat or sudden change.
Parishes used the holiday to raise money and reflect on the nature and
form of women's parochial support and involvement. Women's commitment and
success had implications for their relations with men. Collective action
created moments of solidarity, and raising and spending money for the
church created a physical analog of their sentiments.
The women of Walberswick or Bodmin could see in their churches the
results of their combined efforts. As the moral arbiter of sexual and
marital behavior, the Church was now offering parish women two messages:
The first urged them, as always, to be good wives and support the parish.
The second message, however, potentially undermined the first. By letting
women run Hocktide, earn money, and make purchases, the Church was
encouraging them to exercise their own financial and cultural prerogatives.
These concerns ultimately helped to reconcile, or served to exacerbate, the
sometimes contradictory ideas of required parochial involvement and gender
roles.
With the exception of the descriptions cited earlier, information on
Hocktide comes from churchwardens' accounts, which record in detail how the
laity raised and spent money to support their parishes and show how
Hocktide fits into local parish culture. Many of these sources trace
Hocktide's earliest celebrations and subsequent growth and financial
success. Only in those accounts that date from the sixteenth century does
Hocktide appear as an already established holiday, predating the earliest
surviving records. The churchwardens' accounts show not only the
introduction of the holiday into the parish calendar, and its place among
other parish activities, but also reveal its geographical distribution.
Although Hocktide was a recognized feature of the parish calendar, it
was not celebrated in every community. From its earliest appearances in the
fifteenth century to its abolition during the Reformation, Hocktide appears
most often in or near towns rather than in rural communities; two parishes
in London celebrated it, as did those in Reading, Salisbury, Westminster,
and Canterbury. At least thirty-one of the parishes with surviving
pre-Reformation churchwardens' accounts celebrated Hocktide at least once.
Geographically, these communities are concentrated in central and southern
England.(20)
 Anecdotal evidence suggests that Hocktide had a wider popularity than
what the churchwardens' accounts alone reveal. In 1549, Shrewsbury's
Hocktide activities led to tragedy when two men seeking refuge from the
women hid in a cave that collapsed upon them. Coventry also had an
unusually elaborate Hocktide festival. The city first held what probably
became the annual Hock Tuesday play in 1416. As the city's Annals noted,
"The pageants and Hox Tuesday (were) invented, wherein the King and Nobles
took great delight."(21)
Bishop Carpenter's letter notwithstanding, the earliest identifiable
parishes to celebrate Hocktide were St. Margaret's in the London suburb of
Southwark, and All Hallows in London Wall. Both communities started
celebrating Hocktide sporadically by the 1450s. The addition of Hocktide to
an increasing number of parish calendars appears as part of a general
expansion of parochial celebrations initiated in the fifteenth century. The
churchwardens' accounts from St. Margaret's in Westminster show that other
celebrations had increased in scope before the first Hocktide collection in
1497. In the 1480s, the parish began purchasing more church decorations for
the feast of St. Margaret, and the St. George's procession was already
sporting a dragon. By 1512, the parish maidens also had their own
collections for the chapel of St. Margaret. The growth of women's parochial
involvement kept pace with the general growth of lay parochial
activism.(22)
The holiday created a certain amount of unease. In addition to the
controversy concerning the sexual nature of the festivities, the financial
resources generated by women's collective actions at Hocktide brought
confusion to the parish community as well. Changes in the form of the
celebration throughout the years suggest a careful negotiation between
maintaining standards of behavior and recognizing the community's varied
interests in the holiday.
At first, some communities included a Hocktide supper for the women.
It did not become a permanent feature; nor was there a dinner for the men.
When St. Mary at Hill in London first celebrated Hocktide in 1498, the
parish contributed 16d. "for iij ribbes of bieff to the wyven on hokmonday
& for ale & bred for them that gaderyd." The next year, there were
only two ribs of beef, and in 1500 only bread and ale. The women continued
to celebrate Hocktide thereafter, but the parish no longer provided a
dinner.(23)
Two years after Kingston-upon-Thames started its celebrations, the
parish paid 12d. for "mete and drynke at Hocktyde." In 1510, St. Edmund's
in Salisbury paid 3s. 10d. for a meal for the women "on the day of 'le
Hockes.'" Since the women had brought in only 4s., the celebrations did not
raise much money that year. Twice after the women of St. Giles', Reading,
took over the Hocktide festivities, the parish hosted a supper for them.
Although, the cost of the supper was much less than what the women had
earned, it, too, disappeared from descriptions of the celebrations.(24)
The early inclusion of a feast suggests that parishes initially
reacted to the women's activities as they did to the collective actions of
a parish guild. Guilds earned money to support the parish or one of its
endowments and sponsored an annual dinner for the membership. As Rosser
recently wrote, "(f)easting and drinking were in the Middle Ages regarded
as defining activities of the guilds." The annual dinners, which could
range from simple to extravagant, fostered new social relationships. The
meals integrated members of otherwise disparate social backgrounds into the
community of the guild and allowed for the development and expansion of
common ideas and attitudes.(25)
That the suppers did not remain a part of Hocktide suggests that the
holiday and its attendant activities did not sit comfortably with
assumptions about community activities. The capturing and binding united
the women in comic reenactment of their shared experiences with men. A
subsequent feast might have rallied them further, expanding the atmosphere
of conviviality and solidarity to one of defiance. If such a situation
persisted, it might have permanently undermined the relations between men
and women that the Church was bound to uphold. The feast loomed as such a
potent forum that the parish could not afford to let it become a fixture of
the holiday revelries, lest it lose control of them. Solidarity among women
had to be channeled into more acceptable directions that would reestablish
women's interests within traditional limits of behavior.(26)
Hocktide needs to be viewed within the cycle of revels and
celebrations already under the aegis of parish fund-raising. As it became a
regular feature of the calendar, it earned more money, and women's
financial contributions became a greater portion of parish revenue. In the
pre-Reformation church, parishes employed a variety of strategies to raise
money. All communities depended, to some degree, on individual pious
contributions. Town parishes often took advantage of burgage tenure - the
purchase of houses for renting out to tenants. Parish entertainments were
yet another category of fund-raising, from modest affairs - small church
ales held in the church-house that earned only a few shillings - to more
elaborate ones with hired actors and minstrels that attracted large
profits. Parishes did not restrict themselves to one kind of entertainment;
they were willing to sponsor a number of such activities.(27)
Parish gatherings, which involved drinking and feasting, took place on
ecclesiastical holidays. Such occasions, which constituted a vibrant part
of local religious culture, encouraged donations to support the parish and
its endowment. The 1499 churchwardens' account for St. Edmund's, Salisbury,
recorded that parish coffers "receyved of diverse wiffes and maydens to
save tham from byndynge in hok Tuysday in alle this yere - 5s." For the
wardens of St. Edmund's, this kind of communal interaction was a
manifestation of pious devotion. As a later account stated, money came from
the "devocyon' off the pepull apon hoke tewsday."(28)
The level of women's participation in parish fund-raising is directly
related to their economic resources and their position within medieval
society. Women generally had fewer economic options and lower status than
men. More occupations were open to men than women, and women commanded
lower salaries than men for the same work. Men were also the heads of the
household and in control of whatever property and resources that their
wives brought to the marriage. Consequently, both as individuals and as
family members, men were able to contribute more money and labor to the
parish than women.
Hocktide momentarily reversed these trends. When women organized into
a coherent group with the playful goal of capturing the men and raising
money for their parishes, they breached their usual sex roles. Although the
end of the day restored normal relations between men and women, the parish
permanently benefited from this temporary mock upheaval. But the money that
the women were able to raise for the parish did not disappear with the end
of the period of misrule. In this respect, the holiday permitted both a
temporary and a permanent expansion of women's power and influence within
the community.
Hocktide was often paired with one of a number of male-oriented
celebrations within the parochial fund-raising calendar - the most popular
being May Day, which communities celebrated in different ways, such as with
a King play, May Day dance, or Robin Hood revel. It was also the feast of
SS. Philip and James, and some parishes held an ale in their honor. The two
winter celebrations for men were a Christmas or New Year's collection
called Hogling and Plow Monday, the first Monday after Epiphany, which
inaugurated the growing season. Linking Hocktide to male festivals tended
to associate it more explicitly with women, often making a men's Hocktide
collection unnecessary. However, parish sponsorship of male-centered
entertainments was no guarantee that the community would also hold
Hocktide.(29)
General trends emerge when the financial successes of Hocktide are
compared with those of other festivals. Income levels are consistent,
suggesting that parishes enjoyed Hocktide, and women were committed to
running it. It brought in less money than May Day, but was more successful
than the winter holidays. Similarly, when both a men's and a women's
Hocktide collection took place, the women's half consistently earned more
money than the men's. In the London parish of St. Mary at Hill, the women
consistently raised two to three times as much money as the men
(ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED). The same situation prevails in other
parishes, such as St. Mary's in Lambeth, Kent.(30)
In St. Michael's, Oxford, and St. Giles', Reading, Hocktide evolved as
a women's holiday paired with a male-focused Whitsun celebration. Both
communities used these festivals to supplement parish rents, the primary
source of income. The first surviving churchwardens' account for St. Giles'
(1518) shows both a profitable Whitsuntide King play and a Hocktide
collection, sponsored by the men. Hocktide disappeared from the accounts
after 1520, only to reappear again in 1526 with the parish wives in charge.
The men's Hocktide collection never returned. It was at this point that the
parish experimented with holding a wives' supper. In Oxford, St. Michael's
started a male-run Whitsun ale in 1457 and added the women's Hocktide
celebration in 1464. Not until the 1470s did either festivity become an
annual or significant source of income. Together, both festivals in both
parishes contributed between 15 to 20 percent of the parishes' annual
income, but Whitsun regularly earned twice as much as Hocktide
(ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 2 AND 3 OMITTED).(31)
Kingston-upon-Thames in Surrey celebrated Hocktide along with the
popular, but sporadically held, Robin Hood revels and Mummers' dances.
Comparison of the erratic, though higher, income from Robin Hood
celebrations with Hocktide's consistent but lower income levels suggests
that the latter was a more local event, drawing on the skills and resources
immediately available to the parish women. The Robin Hood revels required
more planning and greater organization. The effort to produce them demanded
a level of commitment that may have been necessary only when the parish
needed extra income to finance a large project, such as a new bell tower
(ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED).(32)
In Boxford, Suffolk, the parish celebrated both Plough Monday and
Hocktide. The Hockpot, as the Hocktide ale was called, generated more
enthusiasm and greater profits, regularly earning more than (pounds)2, or
25 to 45 percent of the annual total income. Although the point is not made
explicitly in the churchwardens' accounts, Hocktide's economic stability
and importance would have given women a prominent role in this parish
(ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED).(33)
These trends are all duplicated in one unusual parish. Croscombe, in
central Somerset, was distinctive for a variety of reasons. The parish
sponsored numerous entertainments throughout the year, three of which were
specifically for the parish men. Also unique to this community was the fact
that the parish youth, not married couples, ran the Hocktide celebrations.
As in other parishes, however, the Croscombe maidens earned more money than
the young men at Hocktide; they also collected more than the married men's
Christmas Hogling collection. But the maidens could not compete with the
mens' occasional Robin Hood revel (ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 6A AND 6B
OMITTED); nor was there any occasion for the wives of the parish to
organize and raise funds for the parish. In 1483, the wives held a dance,
but it did not lead to other parish activities for married women. The
preponderance of parish activities explicitly for men emphasizes the
secondary nature of women's economic involvement in this parish. Hocktide
came only once a year, and its successes were reserved for the unmarried
women of the parish.(34)
The financial heights of the women's collections has elicited surprise
from many scholars. One possible explanation for it lies in the economic
resources available to late medieval men and women. Men had more money. The
forfeits that the women exacted from the men that they caught at Hocktide
were higher than the ones that the men could expect when the tables were
turned. Both collections relied on some form of involvement by women. When
the women were not paying for their own release, they were attracting
donations from the men. Although the women may have had to depend on the
greater resources of the men for their donations, they still had to use
their own wiles and charms to get them. This was not a scattershot attempt
to make money but an effective method of fund-raising. Separating the sexes
linked fund-raising with sexuality and ways of influencing members of the
opposite sex.(35)
The repetition of these trends in different communities helps to
separate the local economic concerns from the general themes that the
holiday addressed. In strict economic terms, Hocktide served as a means to
augment income, but it did not compete successfully with the other
springtime holidays that also increased parish resources. Only in Boxford
was Hocktide a major source of revenue.
Too many financial demands at the same time meant that parishioners
had to choose which activities to support. The added splendor of drama,
costumes, and music that accompanied Robin Hood revels and King plays gave
them a financial advantage over Hocktide. The relative weakness of
Hocktide, compared with the male celebrations, underscores women's more
limited economic options. Nonetheless, Hocktide could still earn upward of
15 to 20 percent of a parish's annual income. Steady returns also show
sustained support for the holiday among the parishioners, particularly the
women.
Hocktide provided women with leadership opportunities and gave status
to those who participated. Usually the women in charge of Hocktide were
members of prominent families in the parish and the wives of either current
or past churchwardens. In 1523, the wives of the current churchwardens for
the London parish of St. Mary at Hill turned over (pound)1 3s. 6d. in
Hocktide money to their husbands, in the manner of parish guild wardens.
Implied in this transaction is responsibility for the prior organization
needed to manage money. In one case, the woman in charge of Lambeth's
celebrations even refused to turn over the Hocktide proceeds to the
wardens. The women did not erase their debt to the community until the
following year.(36)
In All Hallows', London, Hocktide never earned much money - only 3 to
5s. - but the organizational skills that the women gained were applied to
other circumstances. From 1482 to 1483, when the church was undergoing
major renovations, the wives of the current churchwardens organized a
collection to help pay for work. They also contributed (pounds)2 for the
building of the church in 1527/1528 and another (pounds)2 to the glazing of
the windows the next year. The women's most obvious contributions first
came under the guise of Hocktide and later continued with greater success
at other occasions, as the community saw fit.(37)
At St. Margaret's in Westminster, which enjoyed both male and female
Hocktide collections, prominent couples ran the Hocktide festivities. In
1498, the parish "received of Maistres Bough, Maistres Burgeys, and
Maistres Morland for Hokkyng money - 3s. 4d (and) received of Maister
Bough, Maister Morland, and Maister Rabbi for Hokkyng money - 16s. 7 1/2d."
Both Morland and Bough were described as gentlemen and former
churchwardens, who would continue to serve the parish. Information from the
next year's account suggests that the revels, or collections for Hocktide,
were also based upon competition between wards or streets within the
parish. Mistress Morland "& hir company" contributed 5s. 1d. "for
hokking money"; Mistress Hachet "& hir company" gave only 3s. 10d. Both
of these groups were outdone by Walter Gardener's wife and the women of her
neighborhood who earned 13s. As were the Boughs and Morlands, the Gardeners
and Hachets were well-to-do families.(38)
Although Hocktide gave the parish a chance to focus on women's
expanded opportunities, the community's use of the money raised by them
reinforced expected gender concerns. The money earned from Hocktide was
usually absorbed into the parish's general income. The churchwardens'
accounts of how the community spent the Hocktide money, however, allows a
possible identification of the concerns and interests particular to women.
In St. Mary the Great in Cambridge, a portion of the Hocktide revenue
eventually went to support a light in the church dedicated to the Virgin
Mary. In 1518, the women also raised money outside the confines of Hocktide
for the same light, as well as for a new tabernacle for the St. Mary
statue. In 1535, when there was no Hocktide collection, the women still
collected 37s. 6d. for St. Mary's light. Other parishes used Hocktide
income to support women's devotions. The Hocktide collection for St. Mary
Steps in Exeter went to the "damelight." In both St. Edmund's and St.
Thomas' of Salisbury, some of the revenue went to the "wiefes light." The
maidens' guild in Croscombe contributed part of its earnings to a maidens'
light.(39)
Hocktide money not only went to support lights, but also to provide
needed furnishings for the church. In 1497, the women of St. Edmund's in
Salisbury spent their Hocktide income on new windows for the church. In
1509, at St. Margaret's in Westminster, the Hocktide proceeds purchased a
new banner for St. Margaret. In 1532, the women of St. Martin in the Fields
in Westminster spent the money they raised on a satin altar cloth and two
curtains.(40)
Women's pious concerns reflected their domestic spheres of influence.
Within their families, women spun wool, washed and mended the clothes, and
dressed the children. The purchase of altar clothes and banners for side
altars dedicated to women saints reflected the same interests. Furthermore,
altars to SS. Mary, Margaret, or Elizabeth served as comfort to women
facing the uncertainty of childbirth or the fear of infertility. Hocktide,
with its clear-cut gender roles and its emphasis on male and female sexual
contact, incorporated women's concerns about marriage and their dealings
with men into local religious life.
The disposition of Hocktide money also raises several questions about
the relationship between the women's Hocktide association and more
permanent ones, such as guilds. As the disappearance of the Hocktide
suppers suggests, women's collective action during the festival did not
achieve the kind of formal status as that of the parish guilds. It was an
opportunity for women to support a preexisting endowment, or add a wives'
light to a chapel or altar. Neither the women nor the parish seem to have
been setting up a new or separate foundation to be maintained by a
continuing order or corporation. Any money that the women raised for their
lights was funneled through the parish and its administrative apparatus.
Nor did the wives' support of a light dedicated to the Virgin Mary preclude
other (male) parishioners from contributing to the endowment. Hocktide
remained under the control of the parish, which dispensed some of the
proceeds into endowments catering to women. This arrangement helped reorder
the "topsy-turvy" world created by Hocktide.(41)
Until the Reformation forced a rearrangement of the parochial
calendar, Hocktide remained a regular and popular part of yearly
celebrations. St. Michael's, Oxford, and St. Mary's, Lambeth, dropped it
when Edward VI acceded to the throne, revived it during Queen Mary's reign,
and stopped it again with the accession of Elizabeth. Those that brought it
back in Mary's reign did so with little sign of dampened enthusiasm;
revenues immediately returned to their pre-Reformation levels.(42)
The city of Coventry kept its Hock play until reformers prevailed in
1561. The city renewed it in 1566 and in 1573 for Queen Elizabeth. The
prominent role of women at a time of budding nationalist sentiments
generated much enthusiasm for the play. In a letter describing the event,
Lanehame, a member of the court, wrote, "And for becauz the matter
mencioneth how valiantly our English women for loove of their cuntree
behaved themselves: expressed in actionz & rymez after their maner,
they thought it moought moove sum myrth to her Maiestie...."(43)
The demise of such festivals as Hocktide ended a forum for women's
local leadership, organization, and collective action, and one of the most
visible ways that women could financially support their parishes.
Protestants sought to strengthen respect for authority, while emphasizing
humility and penance. They distrusted the familiar and chaotic displays of
Hocktide or May Day to which they ascribed pagan roots and popish themes.
Family dues replaced ales, revels, and plays as sources of parish
fund-raising. The abolition of saints' cults and other elements of
pre-Reformation religious life also affected both male and female
interaction with the parish. The opportunities for women's solidarity that
originated in the late medieval parish were erased, and women's actions
within the church more closely mirrored their position outside it.(44)
By the late Middle Ages, participation in religious life included a
whole range of other parochial activities beyond receiving the sacraments.
Parish participation involved pious work for the benefit of one's soul,
which pertained to both men and women. Consequently, when the laity tried
to import the gender roles of society into the parish, they did not exactly
fit. The development of parish responsibilities had inadvertently broadened
women's horizons and made relations between men and women less clear.
Women's growing influence challenged their inferiority to men and placed
individual women in positions of authority. Parishioners had to find a way
to reconcile expected gender roles with actual parochial experience.
The most popular image of Hocktide exploits its reputation for
titillation, voyeurism, and lawlessness. In 1622, a woman testified in
court that a Wiltshire man tried to induce her to commit adultery with him
as part of his own personal Hocktide revival. He told her that "he must
bind her (and then) they would do as their forefathers had done." Moving
beyond this legacy and learning what this holiday meant to those who
celebrated it entails the question of how issues of sexual relations
combined with concerns for parochial support in the context of the late
medieval parish.(45)
Because the celebration of Hocktide was an occasion to flirt with, and
perhaps even engage in, surreptitious physical contact with someone else's
spouse, it implicitly and explicitly provoked parishioners' anxieties about
fidelity, dominance, and sexual relations within the context of marriage.
The Church, as the arbiter of moral behavior, was committed to upholding
proper behavior between the sexes and between spouses. The parish tried to
assure an appropriate outcome for each sexual interaction by providing a
moral context for the issues expressed in Hocktide.
Adapting an economic analysis of the pre-Reformation parish in light
of more recent literary and anthropological approaches shows Hocktide as a
new holiday that mixed concerns for the status quo with the changing role
of the parish and the opportunities that it offered men and women. In its
fund-raising capacity, Hocktide drew upon accepted parish activities, but
as a platform for women, and an occasion of unusual visibility and
financial import, it allowed communities to explore temporarily the outer
bounds of expanding gender roles, before quickly retreating to familiar
mores. Sexual relations, the foundation of medieval gender roles, were
inextricably linked to issues of communal participation and local religious
involvement.(46)
1 Robert Whiting, Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and
the English Reformation (Cambridge, 1989); Eamon Duffy, Stripping of the
Altars (New Haven, 1992).
2 The University of Toronto's project - Reginald W. Ingram (ed.),
Records of Early English Drama: Coventry (Toronto, 1981) (hereinafter REED)
- seeks to locate and publish all surviving references to drama prior to
the seventeenth century.
3 Gervase Rosser, "Communities of Parish and Guild," in Susan J.
Wright (ed.), Parish, Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion,
1350-1750 (London, 1988), 29-55; Andrew Brown, Popular Piety in Late
Medieval English: The Diocese of Salisbury, 1250-1550 (Oxford, 1995),
67-158; Beat Kumin, The Shaping of a Community: The Rise and Reformation of
the English Parish, c. 1400-1560 (Aldershot, 1996); Whiting, Blind
Devotion; Duffy, Stripping.
4 Both Duffy and Brown tend to treat gender as incidental to corporate
action: Duffy, Stripping, 150-154; Brown, Popular Piety, 256-258. However,
Ralph A. Houlbrooke, "Women's Social Life and Common Action in Medieval
England From the Fifteenth Century to the Eve of the Civil War," Continuity
and Change, I (1986), 171-189, and Barbara Hanawalt and Ben McRee, "The
Guilds of Homo Prudens in Late Medieval England," Continuity and Change,
VII (1992), 163-169, challenge the presumption of a male orientation to
collective action.
5 A few communities appear to switch the days around, with the women
capturing on Tuesday; other communities drop the men's portion of the
events altogether. See, for example, John Payne Collier (ed.),
"Churchwardens' Accounts of St. Margaret's Southwark," The British
Magazine, 32 (1847), 493; John Ebenezer Foster (ed.), Churchwardens'
Accounts of St. Mary the Great Cambridge, 1504-1635 (Cambridge, 1905), XXV,
34, 35, and passim.
6 It is not clear which Vikings the women fought or when the battle
occurred. Despite Rossius' belief that Hocktide marked the death of
Harthacunute and the accession of Edward the Confessor, Coventry celebrated
it during Queen Elizabeth's reign as a commemoration of an English massacre
of the Danes on St. Brice's day in 1012. The latter option appears to be
the generally accepted explanation, although Ingram, introduction to REED:
Coventry, notes inconsistencies in these explanations: Hocktide is a spring
holiday and Harthacunute died in early June; St. Brice's day is 13
November. John Rossius (d. 1491) (ed. Thomas Hearne), Historia Regum
Angliae (Oxford, 1716), as quoted in Edmund K. Chambers, The Mediaeval
Stage (Oxford, 1903), I, 155 n. 1. Reginald R. Sharpe (ed.), Calendar of
Letter-Books of the City of London at the Guildhall: Letter-Book I (c.
1400-1422) (London, 1909), 48, 72, 85, 124, 161, 194, 211; Henry Thomas
Riley, Memorials of London and London Life in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth
and Fifteenth Centuries (London, 1868), 561, 571; Journal of the Court of
Common Council, IV, fol. 73v., Corporation of London Record Office. Shannon
McSheffrey is responsible for this reference.
7 David N. Klausner (ed.), REED: Herefordshire and Worcestershire
(Toronto, 1990), 349-350, 553-554.
8 Ibid., 553-554.
9 J. Charles Cox, Churchwardens' Accounts from the Fourteenth Century
to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1913), 65; Francis A.
Gasquet, Parish Life in Mediaeval London (London, 1906), 242; Charles
Kerry, A History of the Municipal Church of St. Lawrence Reading (Reading,
1883), 239; Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, I, 158; Ronald Hutton, The Rise
and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1994),
59-60; Brown, Popular Piety, 84.
10 Kerry, A History, 239.
11 Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England
(New York, 1986), 188-267; George C. Homans, English Villagers of the
Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), 353-401; Cox, Churchwardens'
Accounts, 261; Gasquet, Parish Life, 241-244; Christopher R. Cheney, "Rules
for the Observance of Feast Days in Medieval England," Bulletin for the
Institute of Historical Research, XXXIV (90) (1961), 117-147.
12 Natalie Zemon Davis, "Women on Top," in idem, Society in Culture in
Early Modern France (Stanford, 1965), 143-147; 150; Davis, "The Reasons of
Misrule," in ibid., 103, 109.
13 I agree with Clive Burgess that work toward salvation was often a
collective or corporate effort. In "'A Fond Thing Vainly Invented': An
Essay on Purgatory and Pious Motive in Late Medieval England," in Parish
Church and People, 56-84, he argues that voluntary support for the parish
and its endowments manifested an interest in salvation, not yet another
financial burden on an already resentful and over-taxed laity. The
collective needs of the parishioners combined with their responsibilities
to the parish to create a forum for salvation "self-help." Houlbrooke,
"Women's Social Life," states, "Yet certain economic and social functions
were largely reserved to them (women), and some of these brought them
together in sizeable groups, arguably facilitating the development of
independent common opinions" (171). These two approaches open the way for a
discussion of women's specific religious concerns and their active
participation in the parish.
14 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York,
1978), 192-194, 200, 207; Sally-Beth MacLean, "Hocktide: A Reassessment of
a Popular Pre-Reformation Festival," in Meg Twycross (ed.), Festive Drama
(Cambridge, 1996), 233-241, generously provided to me in an early version.
15 Charles Drew, Early Parochial Organization in England: The Origin
of the Office of Church-warden (York, 1954); Emma Mason, "The Role of the
English Parishioner: 1100-1500, "Journal of Ecclesiastical History, XXVII
(1976), 17-29; Burgess, "'Fond Thing Vainly Invented'"; Rosser,
"Communities of Parish and Guild"; Kumin, Shaping of a Community, 1-53.
The laity's duties were expanded in the fourteenth century to include
provision of such liturgical items as mass books and vestments. Mason, "The
Role of the English Parishioner," 7-9; Drew, Early Parochial Organization,
6-11; Brown, Popular Piety, 49-66; David Gary Shaw, The Creation of a
Community: The City of Wells in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1993), 255-260;
Rosser, "The Cure of Souls in English Towns Before 1000," in John Blair and
Richard Sharpe (eds.), Pastoral Care Before the Parish (Leicester, 1992),
267-284; Fredrick Pollock and Frederic Maitland, The History of English Law
Before the Time of Edward I (Cambridge, 1968; 2d ed.), I, 490-504, 560;
Robert Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 1989),
142-149; John H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History (London,
1990; 3d ed.), 136-138; Richard M. Wunderli, London Church Courts on the
Eve of the Reformation (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 20-23; Brian Woodcock,
Medieval Ecclesiastical Courts (London, 1952), 30-36. Parishes began
turning to the new equity courts for legal redress.
 16 Drew, Early Parochial Organization, 6-14; Margaret Aston,
"Segregation in the Churches," in William J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds.),
Women and Religion (Oxford, 1990), 237-294; Hanawalt, "Keepers of the
Lights: Late Medieval English Parish Gilds," Journal of Medieval and
Renaissance Studies, XIV (1984), 21-37; Duffy, Stripping, 153-154, 334-337.
17 Houlbrooke, "Women's Social Life," 174.
18 John J. Wilkinson (ed.), "Accounts for the Building of Bodmin
Church: 1469-1472," in Camden Miscellany VII (London, 1874), 5, 10; FC
185/E1/1, fos. 241, 249, Suffolk Record Office (Walberswick CWA).
19 Judith Bennett, "Public Power and Authority in the Medieval English
Countryside," in Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (eds.), Women and Power
in the Middle Ages (Athens, 1988), 19-21. The known examples of female
churchwardens are to be found in the west country dioceses of Bath, Wells,
and Exeter. Gasquet, Parish Life, 105-106; Cox, Churchwardens' Accounts,
6-7; French, "Local Identity and the Late Medieval Parish: The Communities
of Bath and Wells," unpublished Ph. D. diss. (Univ. of Minnesota, 1993),
220-223.
20 The initial appearance of Hocktide in town parishes intimates
features particular to borough rather than rural communities. Cities,
especially London, were trendsetters. Urban gender roles were in a greater
state of flux because of economic opportunities and a more mobile
population.
Because the survival rate for churchwardens' accounts is sporadic and
fragmentary, any assessment based on them is tentative. Only about 250 sets
of churchwardens' accounts predate the Reformation, the majority of which
come from parishes in southern and western England and around London. The
activities of northern parishes will not be well represented in any survey
based on these records. For a nearly complete list from the fourteenth
century to 1670, see Hutton, Rise and Fall, 263-293, and for his list of
pre-Reformation parishes that celebrate Hocktide, 60, n. 55-57 and 87, n.
94.
21 Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, I, 154-156; Ingram (ed.), REED:
Coventry, xx, 7. Many of the original documents for Coventry are now lost,
but they were partially copied in the early nineteenth century by Thomas
Sharp in Illustrative Papers on the History and Antiquities of the City of
Coventry (Birmingham, 1871). This play is quite celebrated among scholars
of medieval and early modern drama. See Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, I,
154-156; Ingram (ed.), REED: Coventry, xx. Charles Phythian-Adams -
"Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Year at Coventry 1450-1550," in
Peter Clark and Paul Slack (eds.), Crisis and Order in English Towns:
1550-1700 (Toronto, 1972), 57-85 - argues that the prominent role given to
women at Hocktide was an attempt to include them temporarily in events from
which they were ordinarily excluded. Hocktide provided an outlet for
tensions built up in a restrictive social and communal structure.
22 Collier (ed.), "St. Margaret's, Southwark," 493, 495; Charles Welch
(ed.), The Churchwarden's Accounts of the Parish of All Hallows, London
Wall, in the City of London (London, 1912), 4, 7, 20, 23, and passim.
Hutton erroneously attributes the first parish Hocktide celebration to
1468/1470 in the parish of St. Mary the Great in Cambridge (Merry England,
60). Drew, Early Parochial Organization, 14-16; Richard W. Pfaff, New
Liturgical Feasts in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 1970); Hutton, Merry
England, 49-68; E1, fos. 260, 286, 290, 370; vol. 2, no folio numbers,
Victoria Library Archives (St. Margaret's, Westminster CWA).
23 Ms. 1239/1, pt. 1, fos. 159, 164, 179, London Guildhall Library
(St. Mary at Hill CWA).
24 KG2/2/1, fo. 24, Kingston Borough Archives (Kingston-upon-Thames
CWA); Henry James Fowle Swayne (ed.), Churchwardens' Accounts of St. Edmund
and St. Thomas, Sarum: 1443-1702 (Salisbury, 1896), 57; Walter L. Nash
(ed.), The Churchwardens' Account Book for the Parish of St. Giles, Reading
(1518-1546), I (Reading, 1881), 40, 46.
25 Rosser, "Going to the Fraternity Feast: Commensality and Social
Relations in Late Medieval England," Journal of British Studies, XXXIII
(1994), 432-433 (quotation on 431).
26 Houlbrooke, "Women's Social Life," 171-175. The lack of a male
dinner and the accepted male dominance of parish administrations imply a
certain wariness on the part of the male establishment. Nonetheless, even
though men and women were separated sometimes both physically (church
seating) and emotionally (churching), they also shared common goals for the
community.
27 Evidence for parish fund-raising activities can be found in most
churchwardens' accounts. For more discussion, see Whiting, Blind Devotion,
83-112; Brown, Popular Piety, 83-91; Burgess and Kumin, "Penitential
Bequests and Parochial Regimes in Late Medieval England," Journal of
Ecclesiastical History, XLIV (1993), 610-630; French, "Parochial
Fund-Raising in Late Medieval Somerset," in idem, Gary Gibbs, and Kumin
(eds.), The Parish in English Life: 1400-1600 (Manchester, forthcoming).
28 Swayne (ed.), St. Edmund, 50, 66, 70, 71.
29 Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, I, 172-175. Many antiquarians
falsely assume that Hocktide and Hogling, or Hognels, are the same
festivity because of their similar sounding names. See James Stokes, "The
Hoglers: Evidence of the Entertainment Tradition in Eleven Somerset
Parishes," Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset, XXXII (1990),
807-816; Hutton, Merry England, 12-13, 16-17, 50, 75, 87-89. The
seventeenth-century depositions cited by Stokes suggest that, when these
communities revived Hocktide, they conflated the two holidays as well.
30 Drew (ed.), Lambeth Churchwardens' Accounts, 1504-1645, and Vestry
Book, 1610 (Lambeth, 1940), 14, 18.
31 Nash (ed.), St. Giles, Reading, 3, 4, 12, 32, 39, and passim;
Herbert E. Salter (ed.), Churchwardens' Accounts of St. Michael's Church,
Oxford (Shipstone-on-Stour, 1933), 50, 61-102. In Henley, the King play was
an older celebration, and it lasted longer than Hocktide (Phyllis M. Briers
(ed.), Henley Borough Records: Assembly Books 1-4: 1395-1543 (Oxford,
1960), 58, 125, 147, 189, 198, 204).
32 KG2/2/1, fo. 64, Kingston Borough Archives.
33 Peter Northeast (ed.), Boxford Churchwardens' Accounts: 1530-1561
(Woodbridge, 1982), xiii.
34 Edmund Hobhouse (ed.), Churchwardens' Accounts for Croscombe
(London, 1890), 1-43; the originals are missing.
35 Kerry, History, 239; Cox, Churchwardens' Accounts, 261; Gasquet,
Parish Life, 242-243; Herbert F. Westlake, The Parish Gilds of Mediaeval
England (London, 1919), 61.
36 In 1518, Mistress Sabyn, Mistress Halhed, and the other wives of
St. Mary the Great in Cambridge collected 20s. on Hock Monday (Foster
(ed.), St. Mary the Great, 34). Mistress Sabyn was the widow of an alderman
(44); Mistress Halhed's husband was one of the parish auditors, and a
collector for the Easter wax and other gatherings (16, 17, 20, 31). In the
1537-1539 account for St. Andrew's, Lewes, the parish received 20s. in hock
money from Thomas Pokell's wife. Pokell had been churchwarden in 1536
(Michael Whitley (ed.), "Churchwardens' Accounts of St. Andrew's and St.
Michael's, Lewes, from 1522-1601," Sussex Archaeological Collections, XLV
(1902), 47). Of the fifteen named maidens' guild wardens for Croscombe, six
of them are related to the churchwardens (Hobhouse (ed.), Croscombe, 1-43).
Ms. 1239/1, pt. 2, fo. 488, London Guildhall Library; Drew (ed.), Lambeth
Churchwardens' Accounts, 21, 25, 29, 30.
 37 Welch (ed.), All Hallow's, London, 24, 56, 59.
38 E1, fo. 361, Victoria Library Archives. Bough and Morland, both
gentlemen, lent the parish money on at least one occasion. Bough was a
churchwarden from 1474 to 1476 and again from 1484 to 1487 (E1, fos. 361,
380, 421, Victoria Library Archives). Mistress Hatchet's husband or father
was a warden from 1480 to 1482, and Walter Gardener was warden from 1498 to
1500 (E1, fos. 171, 351, 380, Victoria Library Archives).
39 Ingram (ed.), REED: Cambridge, I, 91; Foster (ed.), St. Mary the
Great, 34, 82; DD70914 and DD70915, Devon Record Office (St. Mary, Steps
CWA); Swayne (ed.), St. Edmund, 79, St. Thomas, 274-275; Hobhouse (ed.),
Croscombe, 21.
40 Swayne (ed.), St. Edmund, 47, 365; E1, fo. 574, Victoria Library
Archives; John V. Kitton (ed. and trans.), St. Martin-in-the-Fields: The
Accounts of the Churchwardens, 1525-1603 (London, 1901), 31 (originals
destroyed in World War II).
41 Duffy, Stripping, 149. At St. Mary the Great, Cambridge, Robert
Smith gave (pound)1 "for our ladys wax" in 1539 (Foster (ed.), St. Mary the
Great, Cambridge, 92).
42 One exception, St. Mary at Hill, stopped celebrating Hocktide in
1527 (Ms. 1239/1, pt. 2, fos. 524, 545b, 559, London Guildhall Library).
Drew (ed.), Lambeth Churchwardens' Accounts, 69-70; Salter (ed.), St.
Michael's, 214-231. In the 1660s, some parishes attempted to revive
Hocktide. See David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the
Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley, 1989),
19-20; Hutton, Merry England, 87.
43 Ingram (ed.), REED: Coventry, xx, 273.
44 John J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People
(Oxford, 1984), 61-84; Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England:
1500-1720 (New York, 1993), 1-97; Duffy, Stripping, 478-503; Whiting, Blind
Devotion, 83-112.
45 Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England,
1570-1640 (Cambridge, 1987), 251.
46 I am not arguing for either equality or a golden age for medieval
women, only for a change in their opportunities and an increase in their
visibility. See Bennett, "Medieval Women, Modern Women: Across the Great
Divide," in David Aers (ed.), Culture and History, 1350-1600: Essays on
English Communities, Identities and Writing (Detroit, 1992), 147-175.
Katherine L. French is Assistant Professor of Medieval History, State
University of New York, New Paltz. She is the author of "The Legend of Lady
Godiva and the Image of the Female Body," The Journal of Medieval History,
XVIII (1992), 3-19.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Descriptors: Church group work--Demographic aspects; United Kingdom--History ; Middle Ages--Fairs, festivals, etc.
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03689953 Supplier Number: 17474749
The culture of children in medieval England.
Orme, Nicholas
Past & Present , n148 , p48(41)
August , 1995
ISSN: 0031-2746
Language: English Record Type: Fulltext; Abstract
Word Count: 15950 Line Count: 01200

Abstract: The culture of children in medieval England is similar to modern times except in terms of their 'social system and
standard of living.' Then, as now, children played with toys, constructed things with which to play with, and engaged in
physical and team games according to a calendar of activities centered around April Fool's Day, Mischief Night, Halloween
and Guy Fawkes Day. This conclusions were made from evidence compiled from illustrated manuscripts, archaeological
material and school books dating from the period 1300 to 1550.

Text:
Anyone wishing to study the history of children in the Middle Ages could
well begin with the chapters about them in the famous encyclopaedia On the
Properties of Things, compiled by Bartholomew the Englishman in the
mid-thirteenth century and translated into English by John Trevisa in 1398.
Here are accounts of conception and birth, the functions of midwives and
nurses, and the characteristics of infants, boys and girls.(1) The
discussion of boys includes a remark worth examining. As Trevisa expressed
it, "they love talkynges and counsailles of suche children as they bene,
and forsaken and voyden companye of olde men".(2) Boys, in other words,
prefer each other's fellowship to that of their elders. The observation has
a special interest today when the nature of medieval childhood is a matter
of debate. One influential writer on the subject, Philippe Aries, has
argued that children did not lead separate lives from adults. In his
opinion, the mature and the young lived closely together, working and
playing in similar ways, with the result that adults did not generally view
children as a distinct group or childhood as a special era of life.(3)
Shulamith Shahar, the author of the best recent survey of medieval
children, takes the opposite view. She grants the fact that people lived in
close proximity with one another. But, she asks, were there not differences
between the lives of men and women, masters and servants, and therefore
also adults and children? For her, there were indeed such distinctions,
causing adults to have a well-developed concept of childhood and even of
stages within it.(4)

The present article relates to this debate, or rather to one of its

aspects. It is not primarily about adults and their relationship with
children, but about children and what belonged to them in terms of a
culture. What did the young possess by way of goods, activities, speech,
folklore and imagination which were distinctively theirs?(5) These topics
have received little attention before 1550 compared with the
post-Reformation era, when the Opies and Sir Keith Thomas have
reconstructed childhood as it was lived by children rather than viewed by
adults.(6) There is a good deal of evidence about children's culture in
England before 1550, but it is widely diffused among literary, documentary,
pictorial and archaeological sources. Such evidence is hard to collect and
easily overlooked. Material is much more plentiful in all the sources after
1300 than before, and the present study necessarily centres on the 250
years from then until 1550, though relevant earlier material is included.
The aim of the study is to survey the main categories of evidence, to show
what each reveals, and to consider what answers can be given to the major
questions prompted by the history of children's culture. Did their culture
differ from that of adults (one of the strands in the debate provoked by
Aries)? Was it simple or sophisticated in its nature and resources? Was it
homogeneous or did it vary according to gender, age, rank, wealth or
locality? Was it constant or did it change historically? Does it show
children to have altered in basic respects between those times and now?
Evidence for children's culture in the Middle Ages is to be found in
several kinds of source, each presenting problems in its use. Written
sources provide a scattering of casual references in chronicles, miracle
collections, coroners' records and literary works. Adult writers, however,
were slow to make mention of children and their culture, even casually, and
relatively little survives before the fourteenth century.(7) What does is
blurred by adults' own assumptions; boys tend to be described in terms of
activities, girls in terms of character.(8) Coroners' records of accidental
deaths are the most dispassionate accounts, but relate only to a small
minority of children.(9) Visual sources centre chiefly on the depiction of
scenes of everyday life in illustrated manuscripts. These too are a late
genre, mostly dating from after about 1200 and exemplified in such works as
MS. Bodley 264 (Flemish, 1338-44) and MSS. Douce 135 and 276 (from early
sixteenth-century France), all in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Volumes
like these contain valuable pictures of children using toys and playing
games, but they may be biased towards the activities of the well-provided
and most come from continental Europe rather than England. A third source
exists in archaeological finds, which are beginning to yield important
evidence about manufactured metal toys from about 1300 onwards.(10)
Unfortunately, ground conditions scarcely permit the survival of toys of
wood or fabric, and the context of finds is frequently uncertain. A ball, a
brooch or a chessman by itself does not establish use by a child or an
adult. Fourthly, there are school-books, several dozen of which survive
after about 1400, some compiled by masters but others by pupils themselves.
These are the earliest examples of children's own writing, but they were
written only by boys under supervision in classrooms and it is hard to
decide what came from the master and what from the pupil. A further general
difficulty in the written sources relates to gender. Medieval writers
frequently speak of "children", or pueri in Latin, terms which included
girls as well as boys. Often, however, they seem to have only boys in mind,
and when they single out a sex it is usually the male one. Girls are as
disadvantaged in the history of medieval children as women are in that of
adulthood. The present article uses the word "children" to mean both sexes
from birth until about the mid-teens. When it appears in references to
original sources it reproduces a similar inclusive word - but, to repeat,
one which may hide a gender bias.
I TOYS
Let us begin with toys, which are good examples of the ambivalence of
children's culture. They may be given by adults and embody an adult
purpose, like education, but they may also be used by children in original
ways. Girls and boys may adapt their elders' possessions for play, or make
toys of their own without the involvement of older people. The earliest toy
of childhood, the rattle, obviously belongs to the category supplied by
adults. It occurs as punung, meaning something that creaks, in a late Old
English glossary,(11) and survives archaeologically by the sixteenth
century. Rattles recovered from that period are made of lead-tin alloy and
consist of a handle, about 90 mm. long, ending in an open-work ball
containing a bead to make the noise.(12) The first literary mention of the
word "rattle" occurs in 1519 when the Tudor schoolmaster William Horman
includes it in his book of Vulgaria (English and Latin translation
sentences for schools). "I wyll bye a rattell to styll my baby for cryenge"
- evidently a reference to manufactured rattles available for purchase.(13)
Dolls, or poppets or puppets as they were called before 1700, are mentioned
in literature by the early fifteenth century, the oldest references being
to rag dolls made by children themselves.(14) A text of 1413 compares idle
knights and squires to "legges of clowtes, as childeren maken popetis for
to Pleyen with whyle they ben yonge",(15) and not long afterwards a
Scottish writer noticed children making "a cumly lady of a clout".(16) In
1583, the Puritan Philip Stubbes derided women's fashions as "mawmets"
(another word for doll) "of rags and cloutes compact together".(17) But
dolls were also made by adults on a commercial basis. William Tyndale wrote
in 1537 that "a chylde . . . yf he crye . . . men styll with a poppet",(18)
and William Turner's Herbal (1562) likens certain roots to "little
puppettes and mammettes which come to be sold in England in boxes".(19) In
1582, the crown set a duty of 6s. 8d. per gross of imported "puppets or
babies for children".(20) Many of these imported puppets were probably made
of wood to withstand transport, like the simple painted truncheon-shaped
dolls in the Museum of Childhood at Bethnal Green, London. Others may have
been of wax. Small human images of wax were manufactured to be offered at
shrines, and the makers could have supplied wax dolls without much
difficulty.(21)
There were also toys requiring strength and skill. The top occurs in
the Old English version of Apollonius of Tyre, dating from the early
eleventh century, and an example in maple-wood from the same century has
been found at Winchester.(22) As a toy it is mentioned in several later
medieval sources: sometimes large and driven by a whip as at Winchester,
sometimes small and meant to be spun by the fingers. Tops of the second
kind were known as scopperils, from a root meaning "to jump about", and a
source of about 1425 mentions both the scopperil and the top "that children
play with".(23) When Thomas More wished to have Childhood shown on a
painted cloth in the early sixteenth century, he had it portrayed as a boy,
also with physical toys: top, quoit, cockstele and ball.(24) The cockstele
was a stick to throw at a cockerel in the cruel sport of burying the bird
in the ground and aiming sticks or arrows at its head.(25) At least one
child played with a toy cart. This was Henry, the five-year-old son of
Edward I, in 1273; it was bought for 7d. and cost 2d. to be mended when it
was broken.(26) A simple kind of hobby-horse was in use by the fifteenth
century, when a Scottish text talks of children who "mak a wicht [white]
hors of a wand".(27) Another mention occurs later in the same century in a
miracle story involving the five-year-old son of a man named Robert North
who lived near the Thames. The boy, who suffered from a growth on his lip,
saw a vision of the dead King Henry VI who told him, he said, to make a
pilgrimage with his mother, "riding with you, and not on my wooden horse".
That meant, remarked the miracle collector, not on the stick which small
children use in their games.(28) Manufactured hobby-horses are shown in
continental manuscript pictures.(29)
By 1300, craftsmen were producing model toys which imitated objects
from adult life.(30) In France, ceramic specimens are known,(31) but those
so far recovered in England are metal ones made of lead-tin alloy using
moulds, and therefore capable of being mass-produced. They are similar in
form to brooches and pilgrim badges - which suggests that they were
produced by the same craftsmen and sold in shops, at fairs or by pedlars.
One complete figure [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE 1 OMITTED] and one similar
fragment have been found in London, portraying knights in armour on
horseback, 55 mm. high - typical toy soldiers. To judge from the armour,
they date from about the reign of Edward I. Mechanical toys are represented
by a hollow bird of about the same date, 27 mm. high, originally mounted on
a stand; when the bird was pivoted, a separately mounted tongue moved in
and out of its beak. [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE 2 OMITTED] Most common are
small jugs and ewers, 35-45 mm. high, furnished with handles and sometimes
with lids and spouts. They are complemented by standing cups and plates,
all 24-27 mm. in size, suitable for make-believe meals and playing at
housekeeping. [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE 3 OMITTED! Miniature tripod cauldrons
and skillets of copper alloy appear in about the sixteenth century, and
were robust enough to have been placed by a hearth to heat the water. Other
small objects from the same century include bowls, cutlery, fire-irons and
candlesticks; there even survives part of an ornate cupboard, stamped from
a flat sheet of alloy and ready to be assembled in the manner of a modern
Airfix kit. [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE 4 OMITTED! The Tudor period also
furnishes examples of flat human figures, 50-75 mm. high, dressed like
gentlemen and gentlewomen in datable costume. These have arms like handles,
allowing a string or ribbon to be threaded through, so that the doll could
be danced like a puppet. Together, such objects suggest that wealthier
children in towns, where most of the alloy models have been found, were
well provided with small toys to play with, and there is no difference
between such toys and modern ones. The lead-tin models especially went on
being made in fairly similar forms down to the Industrial Revolution.
What of poor children? They may not have been altogether unprovided
with quality toys, if we can posit skilful fathers making such things for
their offspring. But even the poorest children could make toys by
themselves from valueless materials at hand. Indeed, even the children of
the rich might do so. Gerald of Wales, recalling his childhood at
Manorbier, Pembrokeshire, in the 1150s, tells how he and his brothers
played with sand and dust (perhaps on the nearby beach), they building
towns and palaces, he churches and monasteries.(32) At about the same time,
in 1152, the five-year-old William Marshal, later earl of Pembroke, is said
to have fought the game of chevalers or knights with King Stephen at
Newbury, Berks. The game involved picking plantains or similar stalks with
a knob at the top and hitting one against the other to knock off the head,
in the manner of conkers.(33) The best account of children's private
toy-making comes from the fifteenth-century Scottish didactic poem Ratis
Raving. Rait, the apparent author, was a gentleman who wrote to advise his
son about the seven ages of life. He was unusually observant about
childhood, which he considered to cover the first three ages. In the
earliest, till they were three, children were concerned only with food,
drink and sleep. In the second, from three to seven, they began to make
things: gathering flowers, building houses with sticks, and using bread,
stalks, sedges and rags to make a horse, ship, spear, sword or doll:
Sa lang havis child wyl alwaye With flouris for to jap and playe; With
stikes and with spalys small To byge vp chalmer, spens and hall; To mak a
wicht hors of a wand, Of brokin breid a schip saland; A bunwed [ragwort
stem] tyll a burly spere, And of a sega swerd of were; A cumly lady of a
clout, And be rycht besy that about To dicht it fetesly with flouris And
luf the pepane [puppet] paramouris.(34)
This must have gone on universally, but it took the originality (or
eccentricity) of a Rait to record it in writing.
Playing with toys may seem to be the activity most specific to
children, and the most distinct from the culture of adults. Even today,
however, the child's toy resembles (or does duty in) adult model-making and
-collecting, and in medieval times dolls too were adult objects, as Aries
reminds us.(35) The English mystic Margery Kempe, travelling through Italy
in 1414, met a woman who journeyed about with an image of the infant
Christ, which other women dressed with clothes as an act of reverence.
Margery, seeing this happen, fell into tears for love of the holy
child.(36) Similar dolls of Christ and Mary are said to have been carried
round by women in the north of England during Advent.(37) Votive offerings
at shrines might take the form of doll-like human figures,(38) or dolls
might be used for purposes of witchcraft. The word "poppet" occurs as early
as the fourteenth century for a figure made for magic purposes.(39) In the
1530s, it was possible for images from dissolved religious houses to be
given to children as toys, or so we are told by the cleric Roger Edgeworth.
Preaching at Bristol in 1539-40, he complained that:
nowe, at the dissolucion of monasteries and of freers houses, many
images have bene caryed abrod and gyven to children to playe wyth all. And
when the chyldren have theym in theyr handes, dauncynge theim after their
childyshe maner, commeth the father or the mother and saythe: What Nasse
[i.e., Agnes!, what haste thou there? The childe aunsweareth (as she is
taught) I have here myne idoll; the father laugheth and maketh a gaye game
at it. So saithe the mother to an other, Jugge [i.e., Joan], or Thommye,
where haddest thou that pretye idoll? John our parishe clarke gave it me,
saythe the childe, and for that the clarke must have thankes and shall
lacke no good chere.(40)
Edgeworth was a conservative who would have shared Margery's reverence
for doll-like images. He witnesses, however, to a change of attitudes in
which some adults regarded religious images as idols or dolls in a
pejorative sense, and after the Reformation this became the official view.
The Elizabethan Second Book of Homilies (1563) compared adults worshipping
images to small girls who "play with little puppets".(41)
II GAMES AND EXPLORATIONS
A wide variety of evidence can be gathered about children's games,
from the play of toddlers to that of adolescents. "Handy-dandy", guessing
in which hand a small object is hidden, is referred to by the poet Langland
in the 1360s, and may have been played by adult and child or between
children; the name, with its suggestion of baby-talk, implies that infants
played it.(42) Another poet, the blind John Audelay, musing on childhood in
the 1420s, wrote that children are not covetous; they are quite content
with cherry-stones.(43) This is the earliest of several references to a
game or games with these objects, one of the games being known as
"cherry-pit" from the hole into which the stones were thrown.(44) The bad
child Wanton in the morality play Mundus et Infans (printed 1522) liked
cherry-pit, and Horman gave it a kind glance in his Vulgaria: "Playenge at
cheriston is good for children".(45) Board-games were well developed, and a
boy and girl competing at nine men's morris are pictured in a
fourteenth-century manuscript of the French Romance of Alexander.(46) Rait
associated such games with the third stage of life, from seven to fifteen,
when he believed that humans reached the age of reason:
Now at the tablis [backgammon], now at the ches, Weill oft and seldin
at the mes [mass], And mekle with playing at the dyce - That werk yhit hald
I maist wnwys.(47)
Rait himself disliked them - chess and backgammon lead to absence from
mass and dice are unwise - but not all adults shared this view. Chess was
sometimes regarded as educational. It was used to symbolize the ranks of
society and their duties, and there were. books on the subject.(48) As for
dicing, when Edward the Black Prince was ten in 1340, money was paid for
him not only to play "ad bill'" - a physical game with a stick - but also
"ad talos" (dice or knuckle-bones) with his mother the queen, Sir John
Chandos and the boys of his chamber.(49)
"You shall have a throw", says one boy to another in a Bristol
school-book of about the 1420s, "for a button of your wristlet".(50) The
liking of children to collect such things as buttons and beads is
illustrated by the chief archaeological excavation of a school that has yet
been carried out. The Carmelite friary at Coventry, closed in 1538, was
occupied from about 1545 to 1555 by the free grammar school of the town.
The friary church became the classroom and the choir-stalls (which survive
at a different site) served as desks for the pupils. During this period,
numerous small objects fell into the foundations beneath the stalls and
were recovered during the excavation in the 1970s. Many were of iron or
copper, including arrowheads, buckles, buttons, pins, fragments of knives,
and small trinkets such as a cross, bells and a Jew's harp. A large number
of small copper tags from the ends of laces - about four hundred of them -
suggests that they were used as currency or as weapons for teasing other
pupils. There were beads of glass, paste and bone, two children's teeth,
discs and counters made from tile and shale, and marbles of green and red
sandstone, brick and clay. These marbles antedate the earliest records of
words for them - "alley", "marble" and "taw" - providing a salutary
reminder of the limitations of literary sources.(51)
Next, there were physical and team games. These, for girls and younger
boys, may well have centred on singing and dancing, as they did in later
times. Trevisa noted that young children are "witty to lerne caroles [songs
sung while dancing!", and Wanton in Mundus et Infans could dance and
whistle on a willow pipe.(52) But onlookers, male themselves, tended to
notice only the more energetic games of older boys. Flemish and French
illuminated manuscripts of the later Middle Ages liked to include such
games in scenes of daily life, including snowballing, blind man's buff,
bowls, and a guessing game in which one child holds its face in the lap of
a second - perhaps "hot cockles", first recorded in literature in 1549.(53)
William FitzStephen mentions ball games in London at the end of the twelfth
century,(54) and Rait lists them together with running as typical of the
third age of childhood, from seven to fifteen:
Now at the prop [target?] and vthir quhill Ryne at baris [run at bars,
a game] and at the ball, And at the caich play with all.(55)
Hand- and football games were popular throughout the later Middle
Ages.(56) One of them, tennis, emerges as a name in the fifteenth century,
and was first played against a wall. The shepherds in the Wakefield cycle
of plays gave baby Jesus a ball to "go to the tenys",(57) and the dean and
chapter of Exeter complained about 1448 of "yong persons" who entered their
cloister to play at "the toppe, queke, penny prykke and most atte tenys, by
the which the walles of the saide cloistre have be defowled and the glas
wyndowes all to-brost".(58) Queke should have been a quiet game - it was
played with a chess-board - but the alarm about penny-prick is
understandable, since it apparently involved the shooting of arrows at a
penny target.
Many of these games took a paramilitary form, especially among boys.
We have seen that those as young as five might fashion weapons out of
grasses and sedges, and this propensity was encouraged by fathers,
guardians and masters, apparently among all social ranks. Edward I's son
Henry had two arrows bought for his use in 1274 at the age of five.(59)
Henry V had a sword in 1397 when he was nine, and his son Henry VI was
provided with eight in the 1420s, "some greater and some smaller, for to
learn the king to play in his tender age", as well as a little "harness" or
suit of armour for his visit to France in 1430 when he was eight.(60)
Children's bows were a distinct commodity by 1475, when the wood for them
was imported from Spain.(61) One was bought for Henry VII's son Arthur in
1492 when he was five, and his sister Margaret shot a buck with a bow at
Alnwick in 1503 when she was fourteen.(62) Among the rest of the
population, Maud Boylun of Tillbrook, Beds., aged five, was hit by the
ten-year-old John Phuch as he aimed at a target in 1271,(63) and children
playing with arrows caused a similar accident to the four-year-old Thomas
Fowle of Marden, Kent, in the fifteenth century.(64) Eventually, in 1512, a
royal statute ordered that boys should join the system by which adult men
were supposed to practise archery. Every man with boys in his house, aged
from seven to seventeen, was to provide them with a bow and two arrows and
bring them up to shoot. Play became formally merged with military
training.(65)
The liking of children to imitate adults in their play is very
ancient, if not natural to humanity. A famous story of the young Cyrus of
Persia playing as king of the boys was told by Herodotus and was known in
late medieval England.(66) A school-book from Magdalen College, Oxford,
about 1500 refers both to Cyrus and to one of the school's own pupils
acting the lord with his companions: choosing a carver, a butler and a
porter, and causing a boy to be beaten.(67) Playing at kings could turn
into mimicry of their wars and battles. At Lent 1400, six months after
Richard II had been overthrown by Henry IV, Adam of Usk reported that the
children (pueri) of London gathered together in thousands and chose kings.
"They made war upon each other and fought to their utmost strength, whereby
many died, stricken with blows or trampled underfoot or crouched in narrow
ways - much to the wonder of the people what this might foreshow." We would
interpret this as the boys' excitement at recent political changes; Adam
regarded it as a portent of the plague of 1401, when many of the combatants
died.(68) The Cornish topographer Richard Carew remembered how in 1549,
again at a time of rebellion, the boys of Bodmin School divided into two
factions, one of the old religion, one of the new, each with a captain and
displaying much "eagerness and roughness": "At last, one of the boys,
converted the spill of an old candlestick to a gun, charged it with powder
and a stone and (through mischance or ungraciousness) therewith killed a
calf, whereupon the owner complained, the master whipped, and the division
ended".(69) Five years later, after the failure of Wyatt's rebellion in
January 1554, boys again gathered near London in Finsbury Fields "to play a
new game: some toke Wyates parte and some the quenes and made a combacte in
the feldes". Renard the Spanish ambassador reckoned the number at three
hundred and heard that several were wounded; "most of them", he wrote,
"have been arrested and shut up in the Guildhall".(70)
Less formal than games but no less formative were explorations, forays
and experiments. These come into our view mainly in coroners' records and
miracle stories which tell of accidents to children - usually at home or at
work, but occasionally during times of play.(71) A little girl aged four
was drowned as she played with a duck and tried to put it into the
river.(72) Robert son of John of St Botulph of London, aged seven, was
injured climbing with other boys on pieces of timber in Kiron Lane in 1322,
as was the three-year-old Beatrice Shirley of Wiston, Sussex, while playing
with other small children under a stack of faggots in the fifteenth
century.(73) Boys especially wandered afield, hunting for birds and their
nests. In the same century, Thomas Scott of Burnham climbed a tree one
Sunday morning for a prank or to take young birds from a nest; he fell
thirty feet but survived through being nursed in the nearby nunnery and
saved by prayers to King Henry VI.(74) An early sixteenth-century French
manuscript in the Bodleian Library shows boys going fowling with bows and
seeking a nest in a tree,(75) and the boy in John Heywood's Play of the
Weather (1533) confesses:
All my pleasure is in catchynge of byrdes . . . And to here the byrdes
how they flycker theyr wynges In the pytfale, I say, yt passeth all
thynges.(76)
Wanton in Mundus et Infans watches for sparrows' nests and also
torments animals:
Yea, sirs, I can well geld a snail And catch a cow by the tail- This
is a fair cunning!(77)
In an age when life was cheap, food hard to come by and mutilation a
legal punishment, the teasing and chasing of birds and animals must have
been common practice.
The games of children and adults were not greatly different in form.
Most of the activities we have mentioned were shared by both groups:
whether dice, chess, tennis, football, shooting, birds'-nesting or
tormenting animals. Age was distinguished chiefly by fellowship; children
were more likely to play with other children because of similar strength,
skill and availability. Adults were sometimes present at children's games
as spectators (as we shall see at the Shrove Tuesday football in
twelfth-century London) or as supervisors (as laid down in the archery
legislation). But the war games in Bodmin and London show that boys, at any
rate, were capable of planning and executing activities on their own and
against the laws of their elders. And for each event so great as to find
record, there must have been thousands of smaller everyday ones.
III
THE CALENDAR OF CHILDHOOD
The Opies, the pioneers of modern children's folklore, have shown us
that boys and girls observe a calendar in which April Fool's Day, Mischief
Night, Hallowe'en and Guy Fawkes Day are among the chief festivities. Other
games and activities come in and out of fashion, not always at the same
time of the year.(78) In medieval England, culture as a whole was strongly
influenced by the calendar, both of the natural year and of the church, and
it is reasonable to suppose that the young were affected by these cycles,
as were their elders.(79) We know that children in great households
sometimes took part in dramatic interludes on major festivals, such as the
Macro play Mankind.(80) We may guess that they joined in the egg customs of
Easter and the games and processions of May Day, although it is not usually
clear what roles they played and how far their Christmas, New Year, Easter
or May Day differed from those of adults. There are also signs that
children had a calendar of their own: not wholly independent of the adult
one but certainly semi-detached from it.
The first English witness to a children's calendar seems to be the
poet Alexander Barclay in his translation, published c.1518, of the sixth
Eclogue of the Italian humanist Mantuan (Battista Mantovano Spagnuoli).
Mantuan had noted that every time of life has its joys: children, for
example, like playing at ball with a bladder. Barclay altered this to
observe how games vary not with one's age but with the seasons. He
lengthened the account of ball-playing and added two other activities, one
in summer and one in early spring:
Loke in the stretes beholde the little boyes Howe in fruite season for
ioy they sing and hop; In Lent is eche one full busy with his top, And nowe
in winter for all the greevous colde, All rent and ragged a man may them
beholde. They have great pleasour, supposing well to dine, When men be
busied in killing of fat swine. They get the bladder and blowe it great and
thin With many beanes or peasen put within; It ratleth, soundeth and
shineth clere and fayre When it is throwen and caste vp in the ayre. Eche
one contendeth and hath a great delite With foote and with hande the
bladder for to smite . . .(81)
Accidentally or instinctively, Barclay seems to have identified three
of the main peaks of children's activity. The periods he mentions - Lent,
the fruit season and the time when pigs were killed (usually in November) -
all figure in that respect in other sources.
The first of these seasons, Lent, was preceded by Shrove Tuesday in
February or early March, depending on the date of Easter, to which it was
tied. Shrove Tuesday was a date of special importance in the children's
calendar. The last day before the six-week Lenten fast, it was a public
holiday and one when they had a customary activity: cock-fighting.
Surviving references to the custom relate entirely to schoolboys, but it is
not clear whether this reflects reality or simply the better survival of
records relating to schools. According to the earliest major witness,
William FitzStephen, describing what happened in London at the end of the
twelfth century, "Every year, on the day called Carnilevaria, boys from the
schools bring fighting cocks to their master, and the whole forenoon is
given up to boyish sport; for they have a holiday in the schools that they
may watch their cocks do battle".(82) The practice continued throughout the
later Middle Ages. It seems to have taken place in the morning, as
FitzStephen asserts, and the birds (dead or alive) seem to have been
appropriated by the boys' schoolmasters. At Gloucester School in 1400, it
was agreed that fifteen cocks should be sent to the priory of St Oswald
which had a claim over the school - showing that the bodies were a
recognized perquisite.(83) At Ely School in the fifteenth century, the
fighting was set as a topic for Latin verse composition and a poem survives
about it.(84) Even a boy in a noble household might have 7d. spent on his
behalf "for a hen at Shrovetide, for Francis to sport him with the
children".(85) Only with the approach of the Reformation did the custom
begin to fall out of favour with some adults. John Colet forbade
cock-fighting in his statutes of 1518 for St Paul's School, London, and
this was copied at Hugh Oldham's foundation, Manchester Grammar School, in
1525.(86)
Cock-fighting is not the only physical activity recorded during the
Lenten season. According to FitzStephen, Shrove Tuesday was also a day for
ball games involving not only the scholars but youths in general, including
those at work:
After dinner all the youth of the city goes out into the fields to a
much-frequented game of ball. The scholars of each school have their own
ball, and almost all the workers of each trade have theirs also in their
hands. EIder men and fathers and rich citizens come on horseback to watch
the contests of their juniors, and after their fashion are young again with
the young.(87)
The London battles of 1400 happened in Lent and those of 1554 were in
March, nearly all of which fell within Lent that year. Barclay, as we have
seen, associated tops (another outdoor activity) with the season, and one
wonders if this was a conscious reflection of the scourging of Jesus or of
penitent sinners, and encouraged as such by adults. In 1520, the city
council of York ordered men to prevent their children disturbing the peace
by sounding clappers on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. On these days, it
was customary to summon people to church with portable clappers, not bells
- a practice which the junior population in York apparently took to
extremes!(88) Clearly, Lent was an appropriate time for physical play
because it came with drier ground and longer days, but it is possible that
the fasting and solemnity of the period was itself a factor, causing a
restlessness which found an outlet in games, battles and naughtiness. In
what they did in Lent, children partly accorded with, and partly
disorganized, the calendar of their elders.
A second peak of activity accompanied the fruit and harvest season,
from about June to September. Here, food was an important object. Many
references testify to the liking of medieval children for fruit, especially
apples and pears - no doubt reflecting a diet restricted in sugar - and the
enjoyment of them (licitly or illicitly) may have been popular in summer
and early autumn. The English "Luttrell Psalter" of 1335-40 has a marginal
illustration of a boy up a tree, apparently picking cherries, with an angry
man beneath.(89) In the same vein, the poet Lydgate confessed to stealing
apples in his youth, sparing neither hedge nor wall,(90) and Wanton in
Mundus et Infans vows that when going to school:
Some good-man's garden I will assay Pears and plums to pluck.(91)
Nutting too was popular. One of the miracles of Henry VI, relating to
the late fifteenth century, tells how Joan Barton of Leicestershire, aged
nine, was accidentally injured while looking for filberts in a garden with
other boys and girls.(92) At Henry's college of Eton, boys went nutting on
a fixed day in September by 1560-1; it was a recognized holiday, and they
presented some of their spoils to the headmaster and fellows.(93) By about
1600, Holy Cross Day (14 September) is mentioned as a day of general
nutring in England.(94) A further food-based custom, roasting beans, is
also mentioned in the collection of Henry's miracles. A house at
Berkhamsted, Herts., was nearly burnt by a nearby bonfire on the Sunday
before St Matthew's Day (21 September), but was saved by the dead king's
intervention. The fire, says the miracle collector, was the result of a
children's game (puerorum ludo), "for children are accustomed in the autumn
to burn beans or peas in their stalks, so that they may eat them half
burnt".(95)
The third period of excitement unfolded as winter approached. The
opening day of November, All Saints' Day, was an important stage in this
respect, apparently being seen as the start of winter. The killing of
animals traditionally began on this day, providing bladders for ball games,
and may thereby have opened the football season.(96) In church, the liturgy
of the day began to sound the theme of Advent. At Salisbury Cathedral, the
liturgical model for churches in southern England, the text known as the
respond which followed the eighth lesson at matins referred to the wise
virgins awaiting the coming of the bridegroom, and was sung by choristers
with their hoods up "in the manner of virgin women".(97) By accident or
design, this liturgical impersonation introduced the season when boys, both
in and out of church, dressed up as other people, sang songs and asked for
money or food. The practice was followed (perhaps to varying extents in
different places) on All Saints' Day itself, on 2 November (All Souls'), 23
November (St Clement), 25 November (St Katherine), and most of all on 6
December (St Nicholas) and 28 December (Holy Innocents' Day or Childermas).
From at least the early thirteenth century, boys (especially scholars)
often attended church on 6 December in honour of the saint, their
patron.(98) The festival, much more than All Saints' Day, was marked by
licensed "role reversal". A boy was chosen as bishop and other boys as his
clerks. They put on clerical garments, travelled round the neighbourhood,
administered blessings and solicited gifts. Most of this took place in
streets and houses, but on 28 December, the boy-bishop reappeared in church
and took a leading part in the liturgy. At Salisbury, he was formally
installed in the choir at vespers on the afternoon of the 27th. He led the
services and gave the blessing.(99) In some places he preached a sermon,
two of which survive from the Tudor era.(100)
Holy Innocents' Day had further extraneous customs. Special breakfasts
and dinners were held for the bishop, his entourage and other people.
Parties went round the streets as on St Nicholas's Day, presenting gloves
to worthies, repeating the blessings and gathering money. Indeed, the fact
that the term "St Nicholas's clerks" eventually came to mean robbers
suggests that the boys did not lack persistence! There was adult
involvement in all this, in that men stage-managed the liturgy, helped
provide the feasts, and sometimes took part in the extra-mural processions.
At Exeter Cathedral, for example, the canons' servants went round with the
boys.(101) In the parishes, however, where there were few clergy or church
servants, the boys may have been less supervised, like Guy Fawkes
collectors or carol singers today. When the Reformation came, the season of
impersonation fell foul of new definitions of superstitious practices. A
royal proclamation of 1541 sought to abolish the observances on 6 and 28
December and on the feasts of St Clement and St Catherine (23 and 25
November). On these days, complained the proclamation, "children be
strangelye decked and apparelid to counterfaite priestes, bysshopps and
women, and so ledde with songes and daunces from house to house, bleasing
the people and gatherynge of monye" - a practice it forbade.(102) The
abolition seems to have been most successful in respect of 6 and 28
December, which were church-based and therefore susceptible to control. On
23 and 25 November, when the festivities largely took place outside, boys
continued to wander about singing and asking for money or food until the
nineteenth century.(103)
The schools had a calendar of their own, affecting a smaller number of
children, chiefly boys. Schools, then as now, seem to have operated a
system of three terms - Michaelmas, Christmas and Easter - and there are
references in school-books to the starting and ending of these. This rhythm
may have produced its own calendar customs. Sir Keith Thomas has drawn
attention to the practice, after the Reformation, of schoolboys marking
special holidays like Shrove Tuesday by a real or mock exclusion of the
master from school.(104) I have found only one pre-Reformation allusion to
this custom of "barring-out", which occurs in a Latin and English poem or
song from a late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century school-book of
unknown provenance. It starts with a bold, even threatening, stanza in
Latin:
Ante finem termini baculum portamus: Capud hostiarii frangere debemus;
Si preceptor nos petit quo debemus ire, Breviter respondemus, "non est tibi
scire".
(Before the end of term we carry a stick. We are going to beat the
usher's [deputy master's] head] If the master asks us where we are going,
we reply to him briefly, "That's not for you to know".)
This is followed, however, by a series of petitions in Latin and
English, in which the master is flattered by being called a noble teacher
and requested to terminate school:
O pro nobilis doctor, now we youe pray Ut velitis concedere to gyffe
hus leve to play . . .; Ergo nos rogamus, hartly and holle, Ut isto die
possimus to brek upe the scole.(105)
It would be unwise to assert that barring-out did not exist in the
Middle Ages, since we know so little of the details of school life. But if
the lack of references to it reflects the real situation, it may be that
barring-out was less called for before the Reformation because schools were
more varied in their timetables. The year was punctuated by festivals
involving holidays; masters were usually self-employed and may have been
indulgent about suspending lessons. After the Reformation, festivals
decreased. More schools were endowed and regulated by statutes, and the
school year became more fixed and rigid. Barring-out may have been a
response to this change.
The relationship of children to adults within the calendar seems to
resemble the relationship within games. Much was common to the two groups,
in this case the adaptation of activity to the seasons of nature and the
celebration of the major festivals. Young and old might join together at
meals (it seems to have been the practice, at least in upper society, for
children to say grace at the table),(106) or in some theatrical
performances. Equally, the age-groups separated. Adults had self-contained
activities relating to the drama and to fund-raising; children had their
own distinctive roles in November and December and at Shrovetide. Less
officially, but more widely, children gathered food and (perhaps) lit their
own bonfires. As in their games, they retained the ability to act
independently of parents and masters.
IV VISIONS
In the history of toys, games and children's organizations we depend
very much on what we are told by adults. What have children told us about
themselves? One apparent source is to be found in visions, usually in
relation to the cults of saints. It begins early on. Bede in his
Ecclesiastical History tells of a young boy (puerulus) dying of the plague
in the monastery of Selsey, Sussex, who saw and reported a vision of Sts
Peter and Paul dressed in rich clothes, who foretold his death that day but
the survival of everyone else in the community.(107) A number of similar
instances could be collected from miracle literature up to the late
fifteenth century. They originate from boys and girls alike, but they have
been written up by adults and they relate to a rather narrow range of
subjects. Usually, the child (like Bede's) sees beautiful dignified
figures, very much as he or she would have encountered them in art. Less
often, the vision was sinister, like that claimed by a boy of about eleven
at Cambridge in 1462. Walking at dusk in the lane between King's College
and Clare Hall, he saw an old man with a long beard and poor clothing from
whom he wished to flee but could not. He was told to return the next night
to receive news; on the second night he was warned to come back on the
third. Finally, the old man condescended to reveal his message: the onset
of more pestilence, famine and death than anyone living had known.
Questioned by a doctor of theology and others, the boy said that he did not
see the figure walking on the ground, and the conclusion was that he had
met a spirit.(108)
A few of these visions are more bizarre, suggesting mental
disturbance. One such case occurs among the miracles of St Thomas of
Hereford, collected in the early fourteenth century. Christian Nevenon of
Inglethorpe, Norfolk, a puella (girl) perhaps in her teens, was vexed for
five years by a devil who promised her gifts to sleep with him, but was
kept at bay when she made the sign of the cross. One day, he took her to a
lovely place and showed her wonders, including a table with delectable
food, but she escaped again by crossing herself, though she later fell ill
and became paralysed - a condition from which she was freed by the
saint.(109) The chronicle of Thomas Walsingham of St Albans relates the
case of a youth or young man (iuvenis) of the household of William, Lord
Greystoke, who was riding through a field of wheat in 1343. The wheat
rippled like the sea and out of it peered the head of a small red man
(homunculus). The more the rider watched him, the more he grew in stature.
He seized the youth's bridle and led him through the wheat to a beautiful
lady attended by many damsels. She ordered him to be put down from his
horse, lacerated in his skin and flesh, and flayed. Then, cutting open his
skull, she took out his brain, and closed up the head again. She had the
youth put back upon his horse and sent him away. As a result, he grew
insane and had to be chained up, but his girlfriend stayed faithful to him
and led him to many shrines to cure him. At last, after six years of
misery, he had a dream at Beverley in which he saw the beautiful lady
again. Once more, she opened his head but this time she put back the brain.
Restored to sanity, he married the girl and they had fifteen sons; after
she died, he took holy orders and became the rector of a parish. There was
a sequel to the story. While the rector was celebrating mass and elevating
the host, the red man came once more and surrendered his power. "Your
keeper now", he said, "is he whom you hold in your hands".(110)
Another fantasy attaches to the story of the green children.(111) They
were found in the 1180s, a boy and a girl, by reapers on the edge of a pit
at Woolpit near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, human in form, wearing clothes
and with a green tinge to their skins. Crying inconsolably, they were taken
to the house of a nearby knight where they refused food until beanstalks
were brought; these they wanted to eat, but had to be shown how to find the
beans inside. The boy, apparently the younger of the two, languished and
soon died, but the girl survived. She grew accustomed to a normal diet and
lost her original colour. Duly baptised, she entered the service of the
knight and eventually got married at King's Lynn. They may have been
orphans from the backwoods who lived wild and became anaemic through lack
of a balanced diet, but the girl told a different story. When she was asked
about the land she came from, she said that its people were green and that
there was no sun but a glow in the sky like that which comes after sunset.
One account of her story adds that the land was that of St Martin and the
people were Christians; it was not far from our country, but was parted
from it by a considerable river. When asked how she got into Suffolk, she
said that while she was following a flock of animals with the boy, they
entered a cavern where they heard the sound of bells. They went through the
cavern and discovered a path into our world, but could not find the way to
return. Unfortunately, it is impossible to trace back the story with
certainty to the girl or to adult invention. It is attached to a child and
it claims to be a child's own story but, as so often, adults have written
it up and we hear it at second hand.
V SCHOOL-BOOKS
The largest body of evidence about the culture of children is to be
found in school-books: anthologies of Latin and English texts and exercises
studied in grammar schools.(112) Several dozen such books survive from the
fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, some of which appear to have been
compiled by or for schoolmasters or by young adults such as monks, but many
by schoolboys in their teens and perhaps even younger. The school-book grew
out of individual quires of paper on to which the writer copied the
standard grammatical texts and poems of the school curriculum, together
with his working notes and exercises. It was therefore a personal anthology
and could be used to jot down names of ownership, pen-trials, private
memoranda, scraps of songs or poems, and scribbles like "I am a good boy,
and so and so is a bad one". This unofficial material is interesting, but
it requires careful handling. We need to be sure that it was written when
the writer was a schoolboy, not later in life like the similar material
which survives in adult commonplace-books. We have to be able to judge the
origin of the material. A phrase such as "Ego sum bonus puer quem deus
amat" ("I am a good boy whom God loves") may look like a schoolboy's own
attempt at expressing himself in Latin, but it occurs in several
manuscripts and was evidently a well-known phrase. The boy may have
identified himself with it, but he did not invent it.
The main interest of school-books for our purposes lies in the
exercises: short Latin passages of a sentence or two, sometimes with
English translations. Such passages were known as latins (latinitates) or,
when accompanied by English, as vulgars (vulgaria). Between the 1480s and
the 1530s, four English schoolmasters - John Anwykyll, William Horman, John
Stanbridge and Robert Whittinton - published collections of vulgaria for
schools, similar in form to those of the school-books.(113) As usual, there
are problems with this kind of evidence. Some school exercises were
certainly set by the master, like the four printed collections. Others may
have been the pupils' own invention, but this cannot be demonstrated for
certain. Their relevance lies not in their origin, therefore, but in their
substance. Masters composed the exercises (or allowed pupils to compose
them) with reference to the kinds of things that would interest their
pupils and keep them attached to their work. Topics were chosen which
related to the schoolroom, the pupils and the everyday world outside the
school doors. These ranged from family life to trades, occupations and
political matters like the king or war. Food is frequently referred to, no
doubt because it introduced further Latin vocabulary, but also implying the
penchant of pupils for eatables, especially of festive and seasonal kinds.
There are references to animals, to hunting and to games like Horman's
cherry-stones. Most precious are the bits of oral culture: sayings, riddles
and poems or songs current among the young. Whether this material got in
because the master collected it (as a kind of early folklorist) or because
the material was suggested by the pupil(s) is not clear, but it is there
and it feels authentic, not artificial.
The content of school-books comes rernarkably close to the material
collected by Iona and Peter Opie in The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
(1951) and The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959). In these books,
the Opies examined the oral culture of children in recent times and
identified a number of elements. There is humour, comprehending satire, wit
and repartee, parody, riddles, rhymes, nicknames, nonsense and, as they
call it, "tangletalk". There is abuse and foul language. There are
incantations and ceremonies. There are allusions to public events, to sex
and to the supernatural - especially ghosts. Nearly all these categories
are represented in the fifteenth-century school-books, and they provide an
earlier body of evidence than has been hitherto available on these topics -
perhaps the earliest body that exists in England. Even texts which we know
to have emanated from masters, like the printed vulgaria, are often
remarkably schoolboyish, which is one of the reasons why it is hard to
distinguish between the influence of master and pupil. Somehow much that
was current among schoolboys seems to have found its way into the
school-books, though there is also much that comes from adults such as
proverbs, moral admonitions and religious references. This adult material
is excluded from the present study, for fear that it represents an alien
ingredient.
Let us look at some of these categories in more detail. Children like
tricks of language - puns, puzzles, tongue-twisters and riddles - and this
was encouraged in schools as a way of commanding their sympathy. A Lincoln
manuscript contains a tongue-twister in English, with a Latin translation:
Thre gray gredy geys [geese] Fliyng over three greyn gresy furs
[furrows]; The geys was gray and gredy; The furs was greyn and gresy.(114)
Similar words occur in tongue-twisters collected orally during the the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Riddles were popular with children, as
they were with adults, and some school-books have small collections of
them. This ancient example comes from a group of seven in Latin, in a
school-book from Chirk, north Wales:
Quis fuit natus et non mortuus? Elias. (Who was born and never died?
Elijah.)(115)
Another example, from Bristol, may be a very simple riddle, a
counting-out rhyme or a taboo avoiding the word "four", which is the
answer:
On feler then [one more than] thre and fewer than fyvy [five] Y hadde
vpon my cule [arse] strokes ful ryve [abundantly].
On feler then thre and fewer than fyve Y plokkyd appullys [apples] ful
ryve.(116)
Similar to riddles are puzzles, found in Latin. They were set, one
presumes, by the master but they must also have been expected to appeal to
the pupils:
Al pi pen ca bas tot [nas?] habet quot habet grus
runs a jumble of Latin syllables, found at Barlinch, Somerset. It has
to be unscrambled, and the answer is supplied in the text:
Pica habet tot albas pennas quot habet grus. (The magpie has as many
white feathers as the grouse.)(117)
 A Devon school-book contains the following:
??
This can be solved by dodging between the lines and repeating the
syllables. Two lines are then produced:
Pastorum rumpas pasture reprime metas Iudice celorum rumpetur turma
malorum,
with the rough meaning "Put back the broken boundaries of the
herdsmen's pasture" and "The troops of the wicked are broken apart by the
iudge of the heavens".(118) Finally, there is nonsense and the Opies'
category of "tangletalk". This example also comes from Devon:
Iij heddelyse men playd at ball, I heddelyse man servit them all.(119)
It is a variant of something found in longer form in an adult
collection of songs from the fifteenth century:
I saw iij hedles playen at a ball, An hanlas [handless] man served hem
[them] all; Whyll iij mouthles men lay and low [laughed], Iij legles a-way
hem drow [drew them].(120)
Versions of the same rhyme, and similar rhymes, occur in children's
folklore down to the present day.(121) They are not ad hoc inventions but
were handed down and became widely current. As the texts of the "headless
men" demonstrate, they circulated among adults as well as children.
Learning language, as Caliban found, enables the learner to curse.
Moralists, especially in the sixteenth century, criticized the verbal
rudeness of children (especially boys) and its toleration by their parents.
If they call their mother "whore" or their father "cuckold", wrote a
schoolmaster about 1500, the parents laugh and treat it as a joke.(122) The
school-books confirm that abuse was popular, and show us some of the terms
and forms employed. It could take the form of scribbling on someone else's
pages. The school-book of Walter Pollard, a Devon schoolboy, contains (not
in his own handwriting):
Walterus Polard non est but a dullard,
which the writer subsequently retracted with:
Y saye that Polard yis none wery dullard.(123)
More often, the verbal abuse appears as a topic in the exercises. The
words employed suggest that the schoolboys adopted many of the abusive
terms of adults. We find opprobrious names such as "hairbrain",
"jackenapys", "popeholynes", "blabbe", the more downright "whoreson" and"
false knave", and phrases like "I beshrowe the[e]", "tourde in thy tethe"
and "thou stinkest". More elaborately, a simile could be used, as at
Oxford, "His nose is like a shoynge horne",(124) or in this example from
Barlinch:
Tu es instar suis que duodecim porcellos vberelactat. (You are like a
sow suckling twelve piglets.)(125)
Once or twice, we come across short rhymes of the kind that pupils may
have chanted at each other, with the formula "I have something nice, and
you have something nasty". This one occurs in the morality play Mankind,
but is presented there as if it were said in a school:
I have etun a dyschfull of curdys, And I have schetun [shitten] yowr
mowth full of turdys.(126)
Another, from Barlinch, is in Latin, but it is followed by one English
phrase which suggests that the starting-point was a verse in English:
Ego habebo scuticam, tu habebis petuitam. Ego habebo rosam et tu
habebis catarrum.
Y woll have the wypp [and you will have the pip (disease). I will have
the rose and you will have a snotty nose.!(127)
In all this there is one thing missing: swear-words involving God. As
these were common in society, the school seems to have filtered them out.
In practice, boys must have known and often have used them.
 Adults directed abuse at groups of people whom they disliked, and
schoolboys picked up similiar prejudices. A Winchester school-book lambasts
friars, animal-wardens, publicans and shoemakers:
A fox and a fullymert [polecat], a frere and a haywarde, Stondynge on
a rowe, A tapyster stondyng ther by, The best of the company ys an olde
schrewe.(128)
Sowters [shoemakers] have a nyse pryde For they wolle ever on paneers
[paniers] ryde As pultres on pokys; Where in Ionde we may them fynde We
shall turn ther arse agayne the wynde For [they] stynke lyke dogges.(129)
Another, from Lincoln, has a fragment of a song against the Scots
which can be reconstructed with the help of the Latin. It seems to have
been inspired or revived by the defeat of the Scottish force in France at
the battle of Verneuil in 1424:
[Rough-footed Scot with a raveling (large boot), Wast] thu at
[Verneuil?] at the wrastlyng? In the cruk on the mowne went thu thederward,
And on the wyyld wenyng com thu hamward; Ther was thu castyn in medis on
the plays, That thi nek brak the[e] tyl evyll grays.(130)
The song tells how the Scots set forth in the new moon and came home
in the waning (both unlucky times). They were thrown as in a
wrestling-match, metaphorically breaking their necks.
A contrary mood altogether, verging on sentimentality, is noticeable
in the treatment of birds and animals. Most school exercises have a good
deal to say on this subject - presumably reflecting the ubiquity of pets
and livestock and the liking of boys for fowling. One from Winchester has
noises for speaking to animals, "Hye dog hy", "schowe henne schowe".(131)
Another from Lincoln mentions "Copyl our heyn" (i.e., Copple, or little
top, the hen's name), and a dog with white feet or one named
Whitefeet.(132) A third has several lines about the jay. It looks at first
sight like a popular rhyme, but may have been specially written to
incorporate Latin terms for animal noises:
At my house I have a jay He can make mony diverse leye He can barking
as a fox He can lowe as a noxe He can crecu as a gos He can remy as a nasse
in his cracche He can croden as a froge He can barken as a dogg He can
cheteron as a wrenne He can chateryn as a henne He canne neye as a stede;
Such a byrde yt were wode to fede.(133)
A Bristol manuscript contains a verse reminiscent of "Who Killed Cock
Robin?":
Y say [saw] a sparw Schotte an arow By an harow Into a barow,(134)
while one from Exeter suggests the outline of a story on the lines of
a fable:
Harys and voxys, myys and rattys, Prayed reremys [bats], fiyys and
gnattis That they schold arme ham with olde mattis To vese [drive] out of
towne hondys and cattis.(135)
A fourth, from north-east Wales, goes further. It has three similar
four-line verses, beginning with how:
The krycket and the greshope wentyn here to fyghght...
The first verse tells how the two insects went to do combat with
helmet and armour, the second describes the hare putting on her shoes and
awaiting the hounds, while the third portrays the miller followed by hens
(presumably looking for grain) and shooing them away, again with "schew,
henne, schew!"(136)
The supernatural (other than the Christian) makes fewer appearances,
but it too was evidently close to schoolboys' interests: they lived in a
society interested in magic and ghosts. Officially, a school might distance
itself from such things, as at Exeter:
A general rumour is spreading among the people that the spirits of the
air, invoked by necromantic art to find mines of gold, silver and azure,
and other treasures in hidden places, have appeared in bodily form,
stirring up great tempests in the air which are not yet over, it is
believed, nor yet allayed.(137)
A Winchester pupil, on the other hand, could allude to (and perhaps
even quote a charm against) being ridden by the witch's daughter (or
nightmare):
Iff hit so be tyde The wyche dowghter over the ryde, Both schal have
goddys curse: The wyche dowghter and hurse,(138)
while a Bristol school-book has a sentence which looks like the sort
of thing that boys might say to frighten each other in dormitories:
Blodles and boneles stondyth by-hynd the dore.(139)
The Winchester verse reminds us that the young, like their elders, are
likely to have known charms and rituals against evil as well as those which
aimed to give you positive knowledge. One of the latter occurs in a Norfolk
school-book:
Yf thu wyl know ho [who] haw stole thi godis, wryth this letterys in
virgyn wax and put under thin hed, and he xal [shall] aperyn in thi slepe
that hat[h] thi godis.
The letters to be written are "de. so. an & s b s fallacio".(140)
The world of adulthood cast shadows, too, in the matters of love and
sex. Love is represented in three short verses in a Winchester manuscript.
The first two look like scraps of popular songs, though the last, with its
quadruple rhyme, may be an ad hoc piece by the master or pupil:
Wedde me Robyn and brynge me home; Haue I owght, have I nowght, than I
am a dame.(141)
Flowres in myn herber, Thay growe grene; But yff my ladye luff me
wele, My dogge wylle dye for tene [grief].(142)
Undyrnethe a lover [louvre] Pluckyde I a plover; Goo to Johane Glover
And sey that I love her By the lyghte of the mone; See that hit be soo
doon.(143)
These, it might be argued, are stray bits of adult culture and tell us
nothing of pupils' views of love, but sex undoubtedly found its way into
schoolboys' lives even in school, where the master admitted it either to
teach morality or simply because of its popularity. A scholar at Barlinch
wrote: "Si sis vir fortis non des tua robora scortis" ("If you are a strong
man, do not give your powers to whores"),(144) and Stanbridge made boys
translate "He lay with a harlot al nyght".(145) The most adventurous in
this respect was William Horman, headmaster first of Eton, then of
Winchester. His Vulgaria include a whole section on vices and improper
manners, in which a pupil might learn that "a comen woman lyveth by her
body" and elegantly render into Latin "an excedynge stronge hore". He would
learn of men who "defloured many women", "kepeth other mennys wyves",
"gropeth uncleanly children and maydens" and even keep a "suster openly as
she had be his true wedded wyfe".(146) There is a similar openness about
the lavatory. Stanbridge's Vulgaria, published in 1509, includes such
sentences as "I go to syege" (i.e., to sit on the latrine) and "I am almost
beshytten".(147) True, this is the material of lessons, not pupils' private
talk. Its interest is that it suggests fewer brakes upon such talk, less
need for furtiveness, than was the case in later centuries.
A modern observer might also wish to ask what attitudes schoolboys had
to authority and to social ranks. Obviously, they understood such things;
playing at lords or armies implies a sympathy with the world in which they
existed. In the school setting, boys were under the control of a master who
levied corporal punishment. Beating is a frequent subject in school
exercises, though it is often treated humorously - a point worth noting,
though one which also ignores the fear and pain involved. At the same time,
school exercises imagine the animosity of pupils against their masters, the
wish for revenge and the evasion of control through playing truant. There
is a small genre of schoolboys' songs like the end-of-term example, whose
authorship (adult or child)is impossible to establish, in which the
schoolmaster and usher are threatened with violence for their tyranny.(148)
Attitudes to social ranks are less clear. School-books sometimes mention
the wealth and rank of imaginary pupils and their parents, who can range
from a squire and landholder to poorer struggling people, but the books do
not pursue the matter. This may reflect the fact that grammar schools took
their pupils from a relatively narrow range of ranks (gentry, citizens,
yeomanry and poorer boys with more important patrons), or that
schoolmasters wished to avoid disputes over social ranking. Perhaps for the
same reason, bullying is not much mentioned, though an Exeter school-book
mentions having one's clothes torn by bad boys and an Oxford one describes
how a scholar was mugged in the city at dusk.(149) The material of the
books probably does insufficient justice to the snobberies and brutalities
that existed.
Many of the verses in the school-books bring to mind nursery rhymes -
a phrase coined in the early nineteenth century to describe a variegated
mass of short verses, some invented for use with children, others taken
from adult songs or writings of the day. The Opies, who have collected and
studied this material in The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes and The
Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, have analysed the various kinds of rhymes:
infant amusements, counting-out formulae, practical verse, tongue-twisters,
riddles, popular songs, political squibs and so on.(150) Although most of
the nursery rhymes current in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries cannot
be traced before 1600, the Opies made the reasonable conjecture that
similar rhymes existed in the Middle Ages too. The riddles "Two legs sat on
three legs" and "White bird featherless" are found in Latin during the
eighth and tenth centuries, while "I have a young sister", "Thirty days
hath September", and an analogue of the mock-Latin "Infir taris" occur in
English texts of the fifteenth.(151) The school-books support this view.
Coming from the world of older boys, they are not direct evidence of the
rhymes told to or spoken by those who were younger. The only rhymes which
we can postulate being used with very young children are lullabies, and
most of these do not survive in their original form but merely as a motif
in adult poetry.(152) Nevertheless, the school-books show that the kind of
material found in nursery rhymes after 1600 was current among older boys,
with elements of amusement, mystery and romance which would have been
assimilable by younger children. What has not yet been found, curiously, is
much in the way of the miniature stories with human characters which make
up so many nursery rhymes, like "Humpty Dumpty", "Jack and Jill", "Little
Bo-peep" and "Jack Horner". There seems no reason why such stories should
not have existed, but so far nothing closer to them has been found than
"Flowres in myn Herber", "Joan Glover" and the miller in "The Cricket and
the Grasshopper".
VI CONCLUSION
How distinctive, then, was children's culture in medieval England?
There were few striking differences of content from the culture of adult
life. Language, once it was mastered, seems to have been common to children
and adults, though there may of course have been slang or private usages
particular to the young. An interest in jokes and puzzles was shared by
both groups and the same was true of games, the majority of which were
played by people of many ages. Then as now, toys were the most distinctive
possessions of children, but even these had adult analogues. Both cultures
were complex rather than simple. Just as adult life encompassed piety and
anticlericalism, romantic love and fabliau satire, so children could move
swiftly from religious to non-religious activities on St Nicholas's Day or
practise cruelty to animals while holding sentimental views about them.
Adults and children were often present together when they followed cultural
pursuits. Sometimes, the young joined in their elders' activities in a
subordinate way, and sometimes they had leading roles alongside those of
their elders. Adults might watch and instruct what children did and even
exact a share of the proceeds, as in the fund-raising. Thus far, we have to
agree with Aries. But he has not given sufficient weight to the times when
adults and children did things separately. Records like those of coroners
and miracles confirm the view of Trevisa that medieval children liked to
wander away from their elders and have adventures with one another. They
were capable of planning some major exploits and many petty ones
independently of, or against, their elders. The culture of children also
differed in its resources. Children were weaker physically, less
experienced, more poorly provided with money or tools, and less able to
communicate over long distances. An army of boys was limited in effect
compared with a force of men.
It is less easy to chart the variations in children's culture
according to region, gender and social rank. The Opies have been able to
demonstrate what is common and regional in the children's culture of the
twentieth century, but the information available before 1550 is
insufficient to show what varied locally. In the case of gender and rank,
the material is heavily biased in favour of boys, and wealthier boys at
that. Not enough can yet be collected about girls or poor boys. Wealthy
boys had the advantages of specially made toys and schooling, marking them
off from the poor. The latter had a less materialist and literate culture,
but not necessarily a narrower one. They had access to the resources of
streets and workshops and, perhaps, a greater freedom to roam and have
adventures. Girls figure chiefly in terms of dolls and games of the less
strenuous kinds, but coroners' records hint at more active play which
medieval observers - to our disappointment - failed or refused to
notice.(153) The chronology of cultural change is also indistinct within
the later Middle Ages. We do not know enough to say how children's culture
developed from one century to another. Change is clearer in the longer
perspective, when we compare the culture then with culture today. The
culture of medieval English children differed in its context: the social
system and the standard of living. Equally, it shared important elements
with our culture. Childhood has certain constants - play, imitation and
physical weakness. Medieval children, like ours, were inventive in making
things for themselves. Then as now they formed groups and had adventures,
and although their formal games often differed from ours in terms of rules
and equipment, there was a similar framework of skills and objectives.
Manufactured toys were already available. Children's rhymes and folklore,
as the Opies have shown, have endured in similar forms (as opposed to
precise details) over many centuries. The calendar customs of the later
Middle Ages are most distinctively different. These underwent some
modification in the sixteenth century when the boy-bishop disappeared and
cock-fighting came under disapproval, but most of them (including
cock-fighting) continued in the same or similar forms down to the
nineteenth century. On the whole, the children's culture of the later
Middle Ages seems to differ from ours in details rather than in principles.
It is also linked to ours by evolution, not dissociated. What we have
studied does not suggest that a concise date or even a period will ever be
defined at which a medieval culture of children turned into a modern one.
Nicholas Orme University of Exeter
1 On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa's Translation of
Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De Proprietatibus Rerum, ed. M. C. Seymour et al.,
3 vols. (Oxford, 1975-88), i, pp. 294-305.
 2 Ibid., p. 301.
3 Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood, trans. Robert Baldick
(London, 1962), esp. pp. 33-49, 128-33.
4 Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London, 1990), pp.
1-2. For parallel views, see Barbara Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound: Peasant
Families in Medieval England (Oxford, 1986), p. 335, entries indexed under
"Aries"; B. Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London (New York, 1993), pp.
7-8, 89.
5 Another important aspect, religion, is treated in a separate
article: Nicholas Orme, "Children and the Church in Medieval England", Jl
Eccles. Hist., xlv (1994), pp. 563-87.
6 The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, ed. Iona and Peter Opie
(Oxford, 1951); I. and P. Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren
(Oxford, 1959); I. and P. Opie, Children's Games in Street and Playground
(Oxford, 1969); I. and P. Opie, The Singing Game (Oxford, 1985); Keith
Thomas, Rule and Misrule in the Schools of Early Modern England (Stenton
Lectures, ix, Reading, 1976); Keith Thomas, "Children in Early Modern
England", in Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs (eds.) Children and their Books
(Oxford, 1989), pp. 45-77.
7 Notable early exceptions include AElfric, Colloquy, ed. G. N.
Garmonsway, 3rd edn (Exeter, 1978); Bartholomew the Englishman, On the
Properties of Things, ed. Seymour et al., i, pp 300-2; and William
FitzStephen in the passages cited at nn. 54, 82 and 87 below.
8 On this subject, see Nicholas Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry: The
Education of the English King: and Aristocracy, 1066-1530 (London, 1984),
pp. 85, 106-9, 112-13, 234-5.
9 On this topic, see especially Hanawalt, Ties that Bound, pp. 171-87.
10 The pioneer work on toys and games in England, still worth
consulting, is Joseph Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of
England, ed. William Hone (London, 1876), esp. pp. 485-513. W. Endrei and
L. Zolnay, Fun and Games in Old Europe (Budapest, 1986), is also useful. On
the archaeology of toys, see Geoff Egan, Base-Metal Toys (Finds Research
Group, 700-1700, datasheet x, Oxford, [1985]); Geoff Egan, The Medieval
Household (Museum of London, Finds from Medieval Excavations in London
ser., London, forthcoming); Martin Biddle, Object and Economy in Medieval
Winchester, 2 vols (Winchester Studies, vii, Oxford, 1990), ii, pp.
692-709. For European analogies, see Jan Baart et al., Opgravingen in
Amsterdam (Haarlem, 1977), pp. 452-71; Pierre Riche and Daniele
Alexandre-Bidon, L'enfance au Moyen Age (Paris, 1994), pp. 12-13, 71.
11 An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, ed. J. Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller
(Oxford, 1898), p. 1076.
12 I am grateful to Mr Geoff Egan for this information; see also n. 10
above.
13 William Horman, Vulgaria (London, 1519, S.T.C. 13811; repr.
Amsterdam, 1975), fo. 147a.
14 O.E.D., s.vv. "doll", "poppet", "puppet".
15 Guillaume de Deguileville, The Pylgremage of the Sowle
(Westminster, 1483, S.T.C. 6473), fo. 84a.
16 Ratis Raving, ed J. R. Lumby (Early Eng. Text Soc., original ser.,
xliii, London, 1870), p. 58.
17 Philip Stubbes, Anatomy of the Abuses in England, ed. F. J.
Furnivall, 2 vols. (London, 1877-82), i, p. 75.
18 William Tyndale, The Exposition of the Fyrste, Seconde, and Thyrde
Epistles of S. Jhon (Southwark, 1537?, S.T.C. 24443.5), fo. [81.sup.b].
19 William Turner, Herball (London, 1562, S.T.C. 24366), pt 2, fo.
[46.sup.a].
20 The Rates of the Custome House (London, 1582, S.T.C. 7689), sig. D
[viij.sup.a].
21 Ursula M. Radford, "The Wax Images Found in Exeter Cathedral",
Antiquaries' Jl, xxix (1949), pp. 164-8.
22 The Old English "Apollonius of Tyre", ed. Peter Goolden (London,
1958), p. 20; Biddle, Object and Economy in Medieval Winchester, ii, p.
706.
23 O.E.D., s. vv. "top", "scopperil"; for a picture of a top, see
Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Bodley 264, fo. [64.sup.r].
24 The English Works of Sir Thomas More, ed. W. E. Campbell, 2 vols.
(London, 1931), i, pp. 332-3.
25 The game is noticed without comment in some school exercises from
Oxford in about 1500: Nicholas Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and
Renaissance England (London, 1989), p. 136.
26 Hilda Johnstone, "The Wardrobe and Household of Henry Son of Edward
I", Bull. John Rylands Lib., vii (1922-3), pp. 400, 403.
27 Ratis Raving, ed. Lumby, p. 57. The word "hobby-horse" is not found
in literature, however, until the mid-sixteenth century: O.E.D., s.v.
28 Henrici VI Angliae regis miracula postuma, ed. P. Grosjean
(Subsidia hagiographica, xxii, Brussels, 1935), pp. 284-6.
29 Bodleian Lib., MS. Douce 12, fo. [16.sup.r] (Flemish, 1450-1500);
MS. Douce 276, fo. [124.sup.v] (French, 1450-1500).
30 On what follows, see Egan, "Base-Metal Toys".
31 Ceramic examples of an animal, whistle, knight and crockery,
similar to the metal examples discussed below, are illustrated in Riche and
Alexandre-Bidon, Enfance au Moyen Age, pp. 13-14.
32 The Autobiography of Giraldus Cambrensis, ed. H. E. Butler (London,
1937), p. 35.
33 L'histoire de Guillaume le Marechal, ed. P. Meyer, 3 vols. (Societe
de l'histoire de France, Paris, 1891-1901), i, p. 23, 11. 602-19. On the
game, see Opie and Opie, Children's Games in Street and Playground, pp.
226-7.
34 Ratis Raving, ed. Lumby, pp. 57-8.
35 Aries, Centuries of Childhood, p. 69.
36 The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily
Allen (Early Eng. Text Soc., original ser., ccxii, London, 1940), pp. 77,
297.
37 A. R. Wright, British Calendar Customs: England, ed. T. E. Lones, 3
vols. (Folk-Lore Soc., xcvii, cii, cvi, London, 1936-40), iii, p. 192.
38 See n. 21 above.
39 O.E.D., s.v. "poppet", 2b.
40 Roger Edgeworth, Sermons Very Fruitfull, Godly and Learned:
Preaching in the Reformation, c.1535-c.1553, ed. Janet Wilson (Cambridge,
1993), pp. 143, 388.
41 Certain Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches, new
edn (London, 1843), p. 275.
42 The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman, ed. W. W.
Skeat, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1886), i, p. 106 (A.iv.61).
43 The Poems of John Audelay, ed. Ella K. Whiting (Early Eng. Text.
Soc., original ser., clxxxiv, London, 1931), p. 197.
44 O.E.D., s.vv. "cherry-pit", "cherry-stone".
45 Three Late Medieval Morality Plays, ed. G. A. Lester (London,
1981), p. 116, 1.104; Horman, Vulgaria, fo. [281.sup.b].
46 Bodleian Lib., MS. Bodley 264, fo. [112.sup.r].
47 Ratis Raving, ed. Lumby, p. 61.
48 Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry, pp. 178-80.
49 Public Record Office, London (hereafter P.R.O.), E 101/386/6.
50 Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England, p.
101.
51 Charmian Woodfield, "Finds from the Free Grammar School at the
Whitefriars, Coventry, c.1545 - c.1557/8", Post-Medieval Archaeology, xv
(1981), pp. 81-159.
52 Bartholomew the Englishman, On the Properties of Things, ed.
Seymour et al., i, p. 300; Three Late Medieval Morality Plays, ed. Lester,
p. 116, 11. 105-6.
53 For example, Bodleian Lib., MS. Bodley 264,. fos. [52.sup.r]
(guessing-game), [63.sup.r] (bowls), [130.sup.v] (blind man's buff); MS.
Douce 135, fos. [5.sup.v]-[6.sup.r] (blind man's buff), [7.sup.v]
(snowballing); MS. Douce 276, fos. [12.sup.r] (bowls), [49.sup.v] (blind
man's buff). On hot cockles, see O.E.D., s.v.
54 Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, ed. J. C. Robertson and
J. Brigstocke Sheppard, 7 vols. (Rolls Ser., London, 1875-85), iii, p. 9.
55 Ratis Raving, ed. Lumby, p. 61.
56 See, for example, p. 66-7 below. Thomas S. Henricks, Disputed
Pleasures: Sport and Society in Preindustrial England (New York, 1991), has
several references to these games, though early records often fail to
distinguish between child and adult participation.
57 The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle, ed. A. C. Cawley
(Manchester, 1958), p. 62.
58 Letters and Papers of John Shillingford, Mayor of Exeter 1447-50,
ed. Stuart A. Moore (Camden Soc., new ser., ii, London, 1871), p. 101.
59 Johnstone, "Wardrobe and Household of Henry Son of Edward I", p.
408.
60 Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry, pp. 183-4.
61 Rotuli Parliamentorum, ed. J. Strachey, 6 vols. (London, 1767-77),
vi, p. 156; The Statutes of the Realm, ed. A. Luders et al., 11 vols. in 12
(London, 1810-28), ii, p. 432.
62 Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry, pp. 201, 204.
63 R. F. Hunnisett, Bedfordshire Coroners' Rolls (Beds. Hist. Rec.
Soc., xli, Streatley, 1961), pp. 33-4.
64 Henrici VI Angliae regis miracula posturea, ed. Grosjean, pp. 37-8.
65 Statutes of the Realm, ed. Luders et al., iii, pp. 837-41.
66 Herodotus, Histories, i. 14, as told in Ranulph Higden,
Polychronicon, ed. Churchill Babington and J. R. Lumby, 9 vols. (Rolls
Ser., London, 1865-86), iii, pp. 140-3.
67 Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England,
pp. 142-3, 150.
68 Chronicon Adae de Usk, A.D. 1377-1421, ed. E. M. Thompson, 2nd edn
(London, 1904), pp. 45, 206.
69 R. Carew, The Survey of Cornwall (London, 1602, S.T.C. 4615), fo.
[124.sup.b].
70 The Chronicle of Queen Jane, ed. J. Gough Nichols (Camden Soc., old
ser., xlviii, London, 1850), p. 67; Cal. State Papers Spanish, 1554, p.
146.
71 On children in coroners' records, see Hanawalt, Ties that Bound,
esp. pp. 171-87.
72 Ibid., p. 183, quoting P.R.O., JUST 2/107, m. 7.
73 Calendar of Coroners' Rolls of the City of London, A.D. 1300-1378,
ed. R. R. Sharpe (London, 1913), pp. 63-4; Henrici VI Angliae regis
miracula postuma, ed. Grosjean, pp. 35-7.
74 Henrici VI Angliae regis miracula postuma, ed. Grosjean, pp. 101-3.
75 Bodleian Lib., MS. Douce 135, fos. [91.sup.r], [92.sup.v],
[96.sup.v].
76 John Heywood, The Play of the Weather (Malone Soc., Oxford, 1977),
sig. D [iii.sup.a], ll. 1032, 1041-2.
 77 Three Late Medieval Morality Plays, ed. Lester, p. 116.
78 Opie and Opie, Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, pp. 232-305.
79 On calendar customs, see Wright, British Calendar Customs: England,
ed. Lones; Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual
Year, 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 5-48; and (most recently) R. Hutton,
"The English Reformation and the Evidence of Folklore", Past and Present,
no. 148 (Aug. 1995), pp. 89-116.
80 The Macro Plays, ed. Mark Eccles (Early Eng. Text Soc., original
ser., cclxii, London, 1969), pp. 158, ll. 129-34 (children), 164, 1. 332
(Christmas).
81 The Eclogues of Alexander Barclay, ed. Beatrice White (Early Eng.
Text Soc., original set., clxxv, London, 1928), p. 184.
82 Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, ed. Robertson, iii, p.
9, trans. H. E. Butler, in F. M. Stenton, Norman London (London, 1934), p.
30.
83 Nicholas Orme, Education in the West of England, 1066-1548 (Exeter,
1976), p. 62.
84 David Thomson, A Descriptive Catalogue of Middle English
Grammatical Texts (New York, 1979), p. 150.
85 Nicholas Orme, English Schools in the Middle Ages (London, 1973),
p. 137.
86 J. H. Lupton, A Life of John Colet, 2nd edn (London, 1909), p. 278;
W. Farrer and J. Brownbill (eds.), The Victoria History of the County of
Lancaster, 8 vols. (London, 1906-14), ii, p. 584.
87 Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, ed. Robertson, iii, p.
9; Stenton, Norman London, p. 30.
88 York Civic Records, iii, ed. Angelo Raine (Yorks. Archaeol. Soc.,
Rec. Ser., Wakefield, cvi, 1942), p. 70.
89 British Library, London (hereafter Brit. Lib.), Add. MS. 42130: The
Luttrell Psalter, ed. E. R. G. Miller (London, 1932), fo. [196.sup.v].
90 The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. H. N. MacCracken, 2 vols.
(Early English Text Soc., extra ser., cvii, original ser., cxcii, London,
1911-34), i, p. 353, ll. 638-9.
91 Three Late Medieval Morality Plays, ed. Lester, p. 116.
92 Henrici VI Angliae regis miracula postuma, ed. Grosjean, pp. 61-2.
93 H. C. Maxwell-Lyte, History of Eton College, 1440-1910, 4th edn
(London, 1911), p. 152.
94 Grim the Collier of Croyden, II.i: Robert Dodsley, A Select
Collection of Old English Plays, 4th edn, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt, 15 vols.
(London, 1874-6), viii, p. 418.
95 Henrici VI Angliae regis miracula postuma, ed. Grosjean, p. 54.
96 Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (Oxford,
1984), p. 49.
97 Breviarium ad usum insignis ecclesiae Sarum, ed. F. Procter and C.
Wordsworth, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1879-86), iii, p. 975.
98 On what follows, see E. K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage, 2 vols.
(London, 1903), i, pp. 336-71; Orme, "Children and the Church in Medieval
England", pp. 18-20; Hutton, Rise and Fall of Merry England, pp. 53-4;
Shulamith Shahar, "The Boy Bishop's Feast: A Case Study in Church Attitudes
towards Children in the High and Late Middle Ages", in The Church and
Childhood, ed. Diana Wood (Studies in Church Hist., xxxi, Oxford, 1994),
pp. 243-60.
99 Breviarium ad usum insignis ecclesiae Sarum, ed. Procter and
Wordsworth, i, cols. ccxxix-ccxlv.
100 J. G. Nichols, "Two Sermons Preached by the Boy Bishop", The
Camden Miscellany, VII (Camden Soc., new ser., xiv, London, 1875), item 1.
101 G. Oliver, Lives of the Bishops of Exeter and a History of the
Cathedral (Exeter, 1861), pp. 228-9.
102 David Wilkins, Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, 4 vols.
(London, 1737), iii, p. 860; Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes
and James F. Larkin, 3 vols. (New Haven, 1964-9), i, p. 302. There is also
a contemporary mention of St Edmund's Day (probably 20 November) as one of
these disguising festivals: Chambers, Mediceval Stage, i, p. 367.
103 Wright, British Calendar Customs: England, ed. Lones, iii, pp.
167-76, 177-85.
104 Thomas, Rule and Misrule in the Schools of Early Modern England.
105 Brit. Lib., MS. Sloane 1584, fo. [33.sup.r], printed in Reliquiae
antiquae, ed. T. Wright and J. O. Halliwell, 2 vols. in 1 (London, 1841),
i, pp. 116-17.
106 Orme, "Children and the Church in Medieval England", pp. 567-8.
107 Bede, Ecclesiastical History, iv. 14: Bede's Ecclesiastical
History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors
(Oxford, 1969), pp. 376-80.
108 Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, ed, J. Gairdner (Camden Soc.,
new ser., xxviii, London, 1880), p. 165.
109 Miracula S. Thomae Cantilupe Episc., iii. 6 (ed. C. Suysken, Acta
Sanctorum, Octobris, i, Antwerp, 1765, pp. 677-8).
110 Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, ed. H. T. Riley, 2 vols.
(Rolls Ser., London, 1863), i, pp. 261-2.
111 The story is found in two chronicles of about the same date, with
slightly different details: Ralph of Coggeshall, Ghronicon Anglicanum, ed.
J. Stevenson (Rolls Ser., London, 1875), pp. 118-20; William of Newburgh,
in Chronicles: Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, ed. R. Howlett, 4 vols.
(Rolls Ser., London, 1884-9), i, pp. 82-4.
112 On this subject, see Orme, English Schools in the Middle Ages, pp.
98-100; Thomson, Descriptive Catalogue of Middle English Grammatical Texts,
passim; Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England,
pp. 73-151.
113 Orme, English Schools in the Middle Ages, pp. 107-12.
114 Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England,
p. 84.
115 Thomson, Descriptive Catalogue of Middle English Grammatical
Texts, p. 107.
116 Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England,
p. 111.
117 Ibid., p. 117; it now strikes me that the sentence may be a puzzle
rather than a list of word-elements.
118 Thomson, Descriptive Catalogue of Middle English Grammatical
Texts, p. 300.
119 S. B. Meech, "A Collection of Proverbs in Rawlinson MS D 328",
Mod. Philology, xxxviii (1940-1), p. 125.
120 Bodleian Lib., MS. Eng. poet. e. 1, fo. [26.sup.v].
121 Opie and Opie, Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, pp. 22-6.
122 A Fifteenth Century School Book, ed. W. Nelson (Oxford, 1956), p.
12.
123 Thomson, Descriptive Catalogue of Middle English Grammatical
Texts, p. 308.
124 The Vulgaria of John Stanbridge and Robert Whittinton, ed.
Beatrice White (Early Eng. Text Soc., original ser., clxxxvii, London,
1932), p. 19.
125 Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England,
p. 120.
126 Ibid., p. 77.
127 Ibid., p. 119.
 128 Brit. Lib., MS. Add. 60577: The Winchester Anthology, ed. Edward
Wilson (Cambridge, 1981), fo. [76.sup.v].
129 Ibid., fo. [76.sup.r].
130 Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England,
pp. 80-2.
131 Winchester Anthology, ed. Wilson, fo. [74.sup.v].
132 Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England,
pp. 83, 85.
133 Brit. Lib., Harley MS. 1002, fo. [72.sup.r].
134 Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England,
p. 102. This is not dissimilar to the fourth verse of the comic song "I
sawe a doge sethyng sowse", which also has the rhymes arrow-barrow-harrow:
The Early English Carols, ed. R. L. Greene, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1977), p. 289.
135 Thomson, Descriptive Catalogue of Middle English Grammatical
Texts, p. 146.
136 Ibid., p. 117, printed in Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth
Centuries, ed. R. H. Robbins, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1955), p. 104.
137 Gonville and Caius Coll., Cambridge, MS. 417/447, fo. [18.sup.v].
138 Winchester Anthology, ed. Wilson, fo. [76.sup.r].
139 Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England,
p. 100.
140 Thomson, Descriptive Catalogue of Middle English Grammatical
Texts, pp. 202, 204.
141 Winchester Anthology, ed. Wilson, fo. [76.sup.r].
142 Ibid., fo. [76.sup.v].
143 Ibid.
144 Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England,
p. 118.
145 Stanbridge, Vulgaria, ed. White, p. 23.
146 Horman, Vulgaria, fos. 64(b)-78(b).
147 Stanbridge, Vulgaria, ed. White, pp. 14, 17.
148 Orme, English Schools in the Middle Ages, pp. 139-41.
149 Gonville and Caius Coll., MS. 417/447, fo. [33.sup.r]; Orme,
Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England, p. 145.
150 Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, ed. Opie and Opie, pp. 2-7;
The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, ed. I. and P. Opie (Oxford, 1955).
151 Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, ed. Opie and Opie, p. 7.
152 For example, see Early English Carols, ed. Greene, p. 511,
material indexed under "Lulley", etc.
153 In Italy, the sixteenth-century writer Antonio Scaino claimed that
girls played football in Udine: Peter Burke, "The Invention of Leisure in
Early Modern Europe", Past and Present, no. 146 (Feb. 1995), p. 145.

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Children and the Church in medieval England.
Orme, Nicholas
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , v45 , n4 , p563(25)
Oct , 1994
ISSN: 0022-0469
Language: English Record Type: Fulltext; Abstract
Word Count: 12669 Line Count: 00972

Abstract: Children in the Middle Ages were initiated into the Church through the rites of baptism, communion and
confirmation. Meanwhile, their religious development was undertaken by their parents who taught them prayers and brought
them to masses. Later participation in the Church came in the form of involvement in liturgical celebrations as clerical
assistants or as members of guilds devoted to various saints.

Text:
109 Breviarium Sarum, i. p. clxxiv.

110 On this topic, see A. R. Wright, British calendar customs: England, ed.
T. E. Lones (Folk-Lore Society xcvii, cii, cvi, 1936-40), iii. 120-283,
passim.
111 On what follows, see E. K. Chambers, The medieval stage, London
1903, i. 336-71; C. H. Evelyn-White, 'The boy bishop (episcopus puerorum)
in mediaeval England', Journal of the British Archaeological Association ns
xi (1905), 30-48, 231-56; S. E. Rigold, 'The St Nicholas tokens',
Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology xxxiv pt II (1978),
87-101 (with bibliography); and R. L. de Molen, 'Pueri Christi imitatio:
the festival of At the beginning of Langland's 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.'(1) 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 Church's 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.(2) 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. In the mid sixteenth century, when
evidence first survives, 13-15 per cent of the population of England is
estimated to have been aged under five and a further 21-3 per cent under
fifteen.(3) About a third were therefore infants and children, by both
medieval and modern definitions. Reconstructing their religious history is
not easy and involves collecting together sparse and often casual
references in a wide variety of records: liturgical, legal, literary and
documentary. Much can be gathered, however, and the basis exists for a
study - by no means exhausted in this article - about the relationship of
Church and children between the Norman Conquest and the Reformation.
 Teaching
As Langland observed, a child was received by Holy Church 'at the
first', since baptism, by the twelfth century, was usually administered on
the day of the birth itself.(4) The midwife carried the child to church,
accompanied by the father and godparents, where the priest administered
what had once been the catechism of a convert but which now centred on a
series of ritual purifications, followed by baptism and the naming of the
child.(5) The infant emerged from the process as a member of the Church,
able to enter its holy places and provided with three godparents - two of
its own sex - to supplement the care provided by its parents.(6) The rite
of baptism was almost wholly in Latin, but a rubric instructed the priest
to give various charges to the parents and godparents and, by the fifteenth
century, texts in English existed for doing so. One such charge circulated
widely in printed versions of the Sarum Manual, the service-book containing
the pastoral offices including baptism:
God faders and godmodyrs of thys chylde, whe charge you that ye charge
the foder and te moder to kepe it from fyer and water and other perels to
the age of vii yere and that ye lerne or se yt be lerned the Pater Noster,
Ave Maria and Credo after the lawe of all holy churche and in all goodly
haste to be confermed of my lord of the dyocise or of his depute.(7)
This set an agenda for a child's upbringing containing three elements:
physical care, instruction and a further ecclesiastical ritual
(confirmation). Only the ritual was assigned to the Church; the others
belonged to the parents and godparents.
The charge reflects a situation in which church teaching was directed
towards people as a whole rather than children in particular. In principle,
the fact that everyone was baptised at birth could have led the Church to
provide a system staffed by the clergy for teaching children about the
faith. In practice, those writers who mention the clergy instructing the
laity, or failing to do so, centre on the faithful in general rather than
on children specifically. When they refer to the teaching of children, it
is usually through the medium of the adult laity. Thus the influential
decree of the Council of Lambeth in 1281, best known by its opening words
Ignorantia sacerdotum, laid down that the clergy should teach the people
(populus) about the fourteen points of the Creed, ten commandments, seven
sacraments, seven works of mercy, seven virtues and seven deadly sins - but
it does not distinguish children from people in general.(8) John Thoresby,
archbishop of York (d. 1372), who repeated this policy in his 'Lay Folk's
Catechism', assumed that the clergy's primary targets would be adults, for
he added that parents should pass on the knowledge to their children.(9)
John de Burgh in his influential handbook for clergy, Pupilla oculi (1385),
assigned the duty of teaching children to godparents; they must instruct
the godchild to be chaste, just, charitable and to know the Paternoster and
the Creed.(10) Reginald Pecock in The donet (c. 1443-9), on the other hand,
restated the duty of parents to inform their children about 'our belief and
God's law'.(11) In the case of wealthy parents and godparents, professional
help could be obtained from chaplains and friars. When Elizabeth de la
Pole, daughter of the earl of Suffolk, was being brought up in Bruisyard
Abbey in 1417, a friar was paid 6s. 8d. 'for her teaching'
(erudicionem).(12) Schools also provided religious training. The alphabet
itself was written and recited like a prayer. Children made the sign of the
cross and prayed 'Christ's cross me speed!' before pronouncing the letters,
concluding by saying 'amen'.(13) When they had mastered the alphabet, their
earliest reading texts were the three basic prayers, table graces, psalms
and antiphons. If they went on to the higher study of Latin grammar, the
sentences they studied and composed were often based on topics about God,
churches, the liturgy and morality, while the literary works they read were
dominated by Christian moral poetry.(14)
Did any of the parish clergy teach religion to children directly? It
may be unwise to discount the possibility, given the vast number of such
clergy during the medieval period: rectors, vicars, parish chaplains,
chantry priests and gild priests. But the practice seems not to have been
common until the Reformation. Even John Hooker of Exeter, recalling with
approval how his teacher John Moreman, vicar of Menheniot (Cornwall) in the
1530s, taught his parishioners the Lord's Prayer, Creed and Ten
Commandments in English, does not make any mention of children.(15) Not
until 1537-8 do we find certain English bishops - Hugh Latimer of
Worcester, Rowland Lee of Coventry and Lichfield, Nicholas Shaxton of
Salisbury and John Veysey of Exeter - ordering their parish clergy and
chantry priests to teach the Paternoster, Ave Maria, Creed and Ten
Commandments in English to children and 'young people' specifically.(16)
This seems to have been a new policy, the fruit of the Reformation's
re-emphasis on evangelism.(17) When Cranmer's First Book of Common Prayer
appeared in 1549, it contained a short catechism for the purpose of
teaching children the form and meaning of the Creed, Commandments and
Lord's Prayer - in other words a lesson and an examination.(18) It also
required the clergyman of each parish to spend half an hour in church
before evensong for this purpose, at least once every six weeks - a duty
increased to all Sundays and holy days in 1552. Here he was to instruct and
examine the children of the parish in the catechism, as a necessary
preliminary to them being confirmed by the bishop.(19) The baptismal
service continued to direct the godparents to ensure that children learned
the three basic texts, but the involvement of the clergy with this learning
seems to represent a departure from what had been normal before.
Learning by assimilation
Until the Reformation, then, most of the formal teaching of religion
to children took place, if at all, at home and school. Equally important,
and perhaps even more so, was the assimilation of religion informally, both
at home and in church. Such assimilation reflected the environment in which
it took place. In 1340-1, for example, a roll of the expenses of the
children of Edward III shows them travelling with their servants round the
outskirts of London: attending a mass here, a sermon there, and giving alms
to prisoners and other poor people, all in the manner of adult
nobility.(20) In a deprived or criminalised household, moral and religious
instruction must have been correspondingly impoverished. The glimpses of
home instruction which survive show that, as well as general guidance in
morals, good manners and the basic prayers, children were taught the
outward observances so important in medieval religion. In Chaucer's
Prioress's tale, the widowed mother trains her seven-year-old son not only
in one of the basic prayers (the Ave Maria) but in one basic observance: to
kneel and repeat it in front of every image of the Virgin that he
passes.(21) In 1431, in a case of alleged heresy, Nicholas Canon of Eye
(Suffolk) was accused of not making the sign of the cross in the proper
way. His mother had told him to cross himself against the devil with his
right hand, and when he refused, she took the hand and crossed him saying,
'In nomine Patris, Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen'. Here we see maternal
instruction at work, though in this case it was not effective since the son
(by then an adult) refused to comply.(22) In Lollard families, Bible
reading and criticisms of the contemporary Church were likely also to be
handed down, and proceedings against Lollards sometimes included their
children.(23)
The instruction of the young at home sometimes centred on family
meals. The saying of grace before and after food was a monastic observance,
which passed into use among the lay nobility by at least the fourteenth
century.(24) By the fifteenth, the custom seems to have developed by which
children (at any rate boys) said or rather led the grace. Medieval graces
took the form of short versicles and responses as well as prose prayers,
and they were taught in elementary schools - perhaps as a way of
introducing children to the liturgy. Thus in 1423, the abbot of Saffron
Walden (Essex) forbade two local chaplains from teaching small children the
alphabet and graces, but granted the request of the townspeople that each
local priest might teach such matters to a single child.(25) At Hull in
1454, children at the elementary stage of learning were taught table graces
after the alphabet.(26) By the Reformation, printed books were available
containing prayers for graces - again with children in mind. The ABC both
in Latyn and Englyshe (London 1538) contained the alphabet, the basic
prayers, nine pages of graces, and other religious material.(27) The graces
were in English and were suitable for saying before dinner or supper, with
variations for fish-eating days and the season of Easter. Meals also helped
to teach the Church's dietary laws and the varying course of the Church's
year - now festal, now penitential. In a very pious household, the role of
children at meals may have gone further. An early fifteenth-century set of
Latin instructions, apparently drawn up by a confessor for a wealthy
married layman, advises the improvement of family meals by reading aloud -
lest the tongue speak vain or hurtful things. The reading should be done
'now by one, now by another, and by your children [filiis] as soon as they
can read'.(28)
From as early as the time of King Alfred (d. 899), devout lay people
from the nobler and wealthier ranks of society imitated the clergy by
spending parts of the day in religious devotions.(29) By the fifteenth
century, personal daily plans for this purpose begin to survive. The Latin
instructions just mentioned advised the adult for whom they were written to
begin the day by rising quickly from bed and making the sign of the cross.
He should then go to church, say the short devotional service of mattins of
the Virgin (probably from a written 'book of hours'), hear mass and repeat
five decades of her psalter, i.e. one third of the rosary. Vespers should
be attended in the afternoon, while both main meals of the day - dinner and
supper - were to be preceded and followed by grace.(30) Later in the
century, as clocks became common, pious people could organise their days by
clock time. Edward IV's mother, Cecily, duchess of York (d. 1495), and
Henry VII's, Lady Margaret Beaufort (d. 1509), both had daily timetables
drawn up for them: arranging prayer, business and meals in units as short
as a quarter of an hour.(31) Some noble and gentle children and adolescents
were also brought up in this tradition. In about 1435, a plan of living for
John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, aged about twenty, recommended that he
should rise between 6.00 and 7.00 am, say the mattins, prime and lesser
hours of the Virgin with his chaplain and go to mass. In the afternoon, he
was to say the evensong of the Virgin.(32) In 1473, ordinances made for
Edward, prince of Wales (then in his third year), provided that after
rising, he should hear mattins said by his chaplains in his chamber
(probably mattins of the Virgin) before hearing mass in his chapel or
closet; like the duke, he was to attend evensong later in the day.(33)
Daily religious observances like these must have been relatively common
among the wealthy, because they also occur in the anonymous
mid-fifteenth-century Book of courtesy published by Caxton in 1477. This is
a work for children, constructed in verse to give advice to a 'little
child' or 'little John'. It seems to be aimed at boys of fairly wealthy
means who were being educated in a noble household or attending a town
grammar school. On rising, the child is advised to cross himself thrice and
to say the Paternoster, Ave Maria and Creed before dressing. He should
repeat the mattins, prime and hours of the Virgin before going to church -
apparently to hear mass. On entering the building, he should cast holy
water on himself, kneel down, knock his breast, give thanks to Christ on
the Cross and say a further set of three basic prayers. While in church, he
should be silent, not noisy. If he is serving the priest at mass, he should
not position himself too near or far away; he should kneel or stand
devoutly and make his responses with a moderate voice.(34)
Church, as this example makes clear, was an important place for
absorbing religion, and children of all ages were probably to be found
there from time to time. Even recently-born infants were members of the
Church through baptism, though the reception they received in the building
may have been unpredictable - then as now. In principle, worship in the
Middle Ages was not ill-suited to the presence of babies. The liturgy took
place apart in the chancel while the laity followed their individual
devotions in the nave, sometimes aloud. These arrangements were less easily
disturbed than post-Reformation services in which clergy and people
operated together in the nave. Some people too regarded the crying of
babies with tolerance. St Cyprian had considered the noise to be a kind of
prayer and some later moralists thought it a lament for the human
condition.(35) Langland uses the simile 'as chaste as a childe that in
cherche wepeth', which affirms the chasteness rather than blaming the
weeping.(36) But others found the presence of babies distracting. A
visitation of Lincoln diocese in the early sixteenth century was told that
in the church of Kimpton (Herts.), 'infants for the most part laugh, cry
and call out during divine service'. At Gosberton (Lincs.), one Thomas Leyk
impeded the service with an infant, apparently in a regular way.(37) Either
because of their unpredictable noise or because some parents viewed church
as a place of escape from their families, very young children were not
always taken there. In 1268, the Muchard family of Bedfordshire father,
mother and household - all went to church leaving behind a two-year-old boy
who drowned in a nearby well.(38) In 1377, Edith le Taylour of Lacock
(Wilts.) put her infant daughter in a cradle by the fire at prime while she
went to hear mass - not anticipating that chickens would enter the house
and set fire to the cradle, with fatal results.(39) In the fifteenth
century, John Hargrave of Ketton (Rutland), a toddler of fifteen months,
was left at home while his parents went to church on the vespers preceding
St Hugh's Day. The child crawled into the fire and burnt himself, and
although he was later healed through prayers to the dead King Henry VI, the
recorder of the miracle felt bound to add that going to church did not
excuse such negligence.(40)
Older children were also taken. They could, for example, be useful
chaperones for women who wished to go to church for devotion or diversion.
When two priests accompanied Margery Kempe to the church at Mintling near
King's Lynn (Norfolk) in the fifteenth century, they 'took with them a
child or two and went to the said place all together' - evidently to
preserve propriety.(41) Some children attended church on their own
initiative for reasons of devotion and even asceticism, or so hagiographers
claimed. St William of Norwich (born c. 1132) is said to have enjoyed
attending church and to have fasted three days a week when he was seven,
though his brothers did not share his enthusiasm.(42) Eustace of Faversham
stated that St Edmund of Abingdon (born c. 1175) began to fast and pray
while he was still a young boy (puerulus), and Matthew Paris's Life of
Edmund tells how, at the age of twelve, he often went to confession and
made a vow of chastity to an image of the Virgin, giving her a ring as a
token. During his adolescence, he left some fellow scholars who were
playing in a field, and prayed in front of a flowering briar where he had a
vision of the infant Christ.(43) St John of Bridlington (born in the early
fourteenth century at Thweng in Yorkshire) is said to have gone to school
in his fifth year. On coming out each day, he refused to join in childish
games but made for the church and gave himself to prayer and devotion. He
also promised to be chaste in his twelfth year.(44) If such boys were
unusual, more children must have been superficially affected by what they
saw in church. Sir Thomas Elyot observed in 1531 that the young brought
religious practices into their play. Small children, he said, 'kneeling in
their games before images and holding up their little white hands, do move
their pretty mouths as they were praying, other going and singing as it
were in procession'.(45)
We know little of how adults organised themselves in medieval
churches, let alone children. Did they stand or sit with, or in attendance
on, their parents, or in their own peer groups? The likelihood is that
several patterns were found. People of high rank would surely have kept
aloof; children were expected to adopt postures in deference to their
parents, and teenaged boys or girls may well have gathered by gender. Some
children probably went to church (as adults did) out of curiosity, in
search of company or to cause trouble. In the late twelfth century, a
little girl called Emeloth entered Durham cathedral illicitly while playing
with others of her age. Unfortunately for her, the church was forbidden to
women and she lost her senses, which she recovered only through a
pilgrimage to St Godric of Finchale.(46) Children could also be ill behaved
when services were going on. After all, so were some adults. A Bristol gild
in 1218-36 warned its members not to walk about church during services, but
to stand or kneel in the chancel as an example to other laity, and the
author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight felt it worth saying that his
hero 'sat soberly' through the vespers of Christmas Eve.(47) The writer of
Caxton's courtesy book was not being hypercritical when telling boys to be
devout and quiet in church. In the Lincoln visitations of the early
sixteenth century, the rector of Wymondham (Leics.) complained that
children and older people made so much din that no one could hear the
worship. At Kirby Bellars in the same county, it was reported that
'children there make noise indecently', with a similar effect.(48)
Vandalism must also have occurred. In 1448, the dean and chapter of Exeter
complained of the 'yong persons' who entered their cloisters to play tennis
and other games, defacing the walls and breaking the windows.(49)
Churches and clergy offered various pastoral services: communion once
a year at Easter, the solemnisation of marriage, shrines for healing, the
visitation of the sick in their homes (with communion and anointing), and
funerals. How far were these amenities extended to children? There was
certainly access to most shrines. The major collections of miracles
attributed to medieval English saints - Godric, Thomas Becket, Thomas of
Hereford, Henry VI - all feature many cases in which parents took sick
children to the saints' tombs with beneficial results.(50) Where marriage
was concerned, the Church's canon lawyers took the view by the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries that children should not wed before the age of seven
and could contract only a provisional marriage until the age of puberty
when their bond could be consummated.(51) Child marriages nevertheless took
place, even of partners under the age of seven, and these usually involved
a visit to a church and solemnisation by a priest in the manner of
adults.(52) Nor is there any doubt that children were allowed funeral
services in church before their burial. The obit accounts of Exeter
Cathedral between 1305 and 1327 include some records of funeral income,
because the cathedral possessed the monopoly of holding such rites in the
city.(53) In a few cases, the records seem to refer to children. The son of
Robert de Neweton had a funeral in 1307, the son of Sir Henry de Bodrugan
in 1308, the child of Walter Tauntifer in 1308, Thomas, son of Thomas Baker
in 1309, the son of Cheyne in 1316 and the son of O. de Haccombe in
1317.(54) A good later source, the churchwardens' accounts of Lambeth
(Surrey), which survive from 1504, record the profits of the wax left from
the candles offered at funerals or burnt around the corpse. In the twelve
months from March 1504 to March 1505, for example, wax was received in
respect of seventeen children's funerals and from the anniversary of the
'Barbon childern'. The sums were usually small ones of 2d., but rose to 8d.
in two cases and 9d. for 'Grenys child' - sums equivalent to those
generated by adults.(55) At both Exeter and Lambeth, the evidence is
probably biased in favour of the children of important people identified by
surnames, whose exequies produced offerings and perquisites. The funerals
of poor children must have been poor affairs and it is not clear whether
all had full rites such as funeral masses. Nevertheless, there seems to
have been no objection to such things purely on grounds of age; the
likelihood is that children had funerals which varied, like adult ones,
according to rank and wealth.
Three other services of the Church present more complicated problems.
One is communion.(56) By the later Middle Ages, this was normally
restricted to the priest who celebrated mass. Other people - assistants and
laity - received only the pax to kiss and holy bread when the service was
over.(57) Adults, however, took communion once a year as the special
devotion of Easter Day and at times of danger to life: childbirth,
pilgrimage and the sickbed. Before the twelfth century, communion was also
given to children - at least after baptism. This is provided for in
eleventh- and twelfth-century liturgical texts such as the 'Leofric Missal'
from Exeter and the pontificals of Douai and Ely.(58) In these texts, as in
the pontifical of Magdalen College, Oxford, dating from the twelfth
century, it was still usual for a priest to communicate the newly baptised
infant, saying in Latin 'the body of our lord Jesus Christ keep you in
eternal life'.(59) But by 1200, ideas about communion were changing.
There was now an emphasis on the Real Presence in the eucharist,
greater fear of accidents during communion and a conviction among church
leaders that reception should be accompanied by a belief in the Presence.
This militated against the giving of communion to children until they were
old enough to understand and receive the sacraments politely. The
Anglo-French theologian Robert Pulleyn (d. 1146) still recommended the
communication of a baptised infant by the priest dipping his finger in the
chalice and putting it into the child's mouth. He censured the new practice
by which children were given only unconsecrated wine at communion - a
procedure eventually extended to adults as well.(60) But in 1215 the Fourth
Lateran Council laid down that those who had reached years of discretion
should go to confession at least once a year and receive communion at
Easter. Nothing was said about children, implying that they had ceased to
be part of the eucharistic community by this date.(61)
After 1215 we find English writers rejecting children's communion
explicitly. Robert of Flamborough, writing at Paris in 1208-15, asserted
that the eucharist could not be given to those with defective
understanding, like children.(62) By the mid fourteenth century, William of
Pagula in his influential handbook for priests, Oculus sacerdotis, laid
down that 'no one should be admitted to the sacrament of the body and blood
of Christ outside the point of death unless he has been confirmed' - an
event which William thought should ideally take place at about the age of
twelve or fourteen.(63) His successor, John de Burgh, also ruled out
children in the Pupilla oculi, his larger and even more successful
handbook. 'Out of reverence for what is contained under the forms [of bread
and wine], defect of judgment and reason is excluded, as with children and
the insane.' John pushed down the age a little: 'children when they are
near to adulthood, that is to say when they are ten or eleven and when
signs of discretion and reverence towards the sacrament appear in them, may
receive communion'. Like William, he declared that no unconfirmed person
might communicate, though he made William's exception for those at the
point of death.(64) Presumably practice followed the precept of such
influential books, though there may have been exceptions for children of
important families.
Some other sacraments and rites shared a similar history. Confession
was not barred to children, and penitentials of the Anglo-Saxon period
envisaged that a confessor might have to deal with children's sexual
misdemeanours.(65) But by 1215, as we have seen, the Fourth Lateran Council
linked confession with years of discretion, implying that children were not
required to confess, and this view was followed by later writers like
William of Pagula and John de Burgh.(66) The sacrament of extreme unction
or anointing the sick resembled communion in becoming definitely barred to
the young. This rite had long involved the concept of understanding,
because the priest heard the sick person's confession and gave absolution
before administering the holy oil.(67) In the course of time, attitudes
towards the oil mirrored those towards communion; it was felt to contain
the Holy Spirit as the bread and wine contained Christ, and to require
similar reverential understanding by the recipient. This view led to a
widespread - though not necessarily universal - exclusion of children. In
1217/19, Bishop Poore of Salisbury laid down that unction should be given
'to old and young - all at least of fourteen years and above', a
restriction repeated by some but not all bishops during the thirteenth
century.(68) In 1281 the Council of Lambeth stated that unction must be
administered to those with understanding, though it discusses only the
problem of the insane,(69) and William of Shoreham, writing between about
1320 and 1333 coupled children with the insane and ruled out both:
Ther-fore this children eleth me naught, Ne forthe none wode, For hy
ne conne mende haue Of thilke holy gode.(70)
John de Burghe accords with Shoreham. 'This sacrament is not conferred
except on the adult sick who are in peril of death .... It is not given to
children because they have no spiritual infirmity contracted through actual
sin, nor can they have the disposition of devotion to this sacrament.'(71)
Other religious procedures were also affected by the growth of
emphasis on personal understanding. The Penitential of Bartholomew, bishop
of Exeter (1161-84), stated that children should not be forced to swear
oaths until they were fourteen,(72) and the vows which Edmund of Abingdon
and John of Bridlington took at about the age of twelve may have reflected
similar feelings. Up to the twelfth century, numerous boys and girls were
sent by their families to become monks and nuns in perpetuity, but during
the twelfth century the practice died out among monks though it persisted
among some friars and nuns, and the taking of monastic vows became
prohibited until an age variously reckoned at between fourteen and
eighteen. A similar threshold of the eighteenth year was established for
ordination as subdeacon - the first grade of holy orders involving a
binding commitment to celibacy.(73) There were losses and gains for
children as a result of these changes of view. They became excluded from
unction and from communion except on the deathbed but, more important, they
won greater freedom to commit themselves to marriage and the religious
life.
Rites of passage
If the Church came to emphasise more strongly the difference between
children and adults, did it mark the boundary between the two categories by
a rite of passage? In modern times, the sacraments of confirmation and
first communion have come to provide such a mark, but neither seems to have
fulfilled this role to any great extent during the Middle Ages.
Confirmation began as a part of baptism, its essential core consisting of
an imposition of hands and an anointing with chrism (oil and balsam). In
due course, these ceremonies, which conferred the gift of the Holy Spirit,
became the prerogative of bishops and were carried out after baptism itself
had been done by a priest. In Anglo-Saxon England, when bishops were often
missionaries and parish clergy were few, the connection between baptism and
confirmation remained close. St Cuthbert, bishop of Lindisfarne, laid hands
on the recently baptised.(74) Early English service-books also assume that
both rites will often or normally happen together. The pontificals of Douai
and Ely provide for the immediate imposition of chrism on an infant if a
bishop is present,(75) and that of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge
(probably from Winchester in the early eleventh century) identifies the
recipients of confirmation as infants (infantes).(76) In the next century,
the pontifical of Magdalen College states that when baptism is completed,
'if a bishop is present, [the child] should be confirmed with chrism at
once'.(77) The confirmation of the newly baptised continued to be lawful
throughout the rest of the Middle Ages. Pictures of the sacrament show
bishops with infants, often indistinguishable in size from those who are
being baptised.(78) In noble and royal households where bishops were
available, baptism was followed by confirmation until the Reformation. The
practice is mentioned in an early-Tudor chapel book of the Percy earls of
Northumberland,(79) and was observed at the births of Elizabeth I in 1533
and Edward VI four years later.(80)
Such children were exceptions, however, after the Anglo-Saxon period.
As the number of Christians grew and bishops acquired non-pastoral duties,
it became rare for them to be at hand when most infants were christened.
The baptised had to be taken to a bishop at a later date, introducing the
factors of parental willingness and episcopal accessibility. By the
thirteenth century, neglect to be confirmed was a common problem and
bishops were obliged to grant extensions of time for the duty to be
performed. In the dioceses of Chichester and Worcester, confirmation was
ordered to be done within a year of baptism; in Exeter, Wells and
Winchester, three years; in Durham and Salisbury, five. Diocesan
legislators ordered negligent parents to be suspended from entering church
or to fast but, as dioceses were often large and bishops absent, even the
legislators had to allow for difficulties in getting confirmed.(81) In
practice, the rite was often delayed until well after the periods laid
down. In 1213/14, the bishop of Salisbury envisaged children unconfirmed at
puberty, while in 1281 the Council of Lambeth complained that many people
neglected the sacrament and that 'innumerable' grew old in evil ways
without receiving it.(82) One writer, William of Pagula, even approved the
delay of confirmation until children had reached years of discretion.
Although he began with the neutral proposition that all faithful people
should receive confirmation after baptism, he qualified it by adding that
they ought by right to be admitted to confirmation by the bishop who
are fasting and of perfect age, i.e. twelve or fourteen years old, and they
should be warned to make their confession first, so that being clean they
may be worthy to receive the gift of special grace, and this is the case
with the exception of the sick and those in danger of death. It is better
then for safety that they be confirmed before the age of adulthood.(83)
This view anticipated Reformation opinions, but it does not seem to
have found support. William's more influential successor John de Burgh kept
to tradition. He recommended that children should be confirmed before
adulthood, because they would have more glory if they died young. He
followed William in saying that all candidates should fast, but indicated
confession beforehand only for those who were twelve or fourteen by the
time they received confirmation.(84) Other authorities concurred with an
early age. In the fifteenth century, William Lyndwood assembled texts in
his Provinciale ordering the confirmation of little ones (parvuli) as soon
as a bishop should come within seven miles, and John Myrc's Instructions
for parish priests recommended children to be confirmed within five years
of baptism.(85)
It took the Reformation, with its emphasis on education, to change
this consensus.(86) In the 1530s, John Hilsey, bishop of Rochester, made
one of the first proposals since Pagula that confirmation should be delayed
to the years of discretion and be preceded by an examination.(87) In 1549
Cranmer adopted this plan in the First Prayer Book of Edward VI, stating
that children should come to years of discretion and learn the catechism
before receiving confirmation. The Church 'in times past' had ordained
'that confirmation should be ministered to them that were of perfect age',
and though Cranmer recognised the existence of a practice of confirming
children early through fear that they might be in danger if they died
without it, he strove to allay this fear.(88) By 1562 the convocation of
Canterbury proposed fines of 10s. on anyone with a child aged more than
eight or an apprentice aged more than fourteen who did not know the
catechism (unless incapacitated), implying a drive to ensure confirmation
in about that span of life.(89) Even so, old habits died hard. The
perambulations of bishops and the attendance of candidates alike remained
unpredictable. In 1577 the bishop of Durham, while trying to enforce
confirmation on those who received communion under the age of thirty, was
obliged to concede that those unconfirmed over that age could communicate
if they knew the Lord's Prayer, Creed and Commandments.(90) In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as Susan Wright has shown,
confirmations continued to involve a wide range of candidates, ranging from
children as young as five to adults in their fifties.(91)
What then was the significance of confirmation? It may have had social
reverberations. A community, galvanised by its priest to attend the bishop
as he travelled nearby, may have turned up in strength for the rite --
making the event a social occasion. Each family had to find an adult
sponsor to present the candidate -- a sponsor who could not be a parent or
godparent, and whose role set up a permanent spiritual relationship within
which marriage was prohibited. The duty of candidates to fast makes one
wonder if they and their families feasted afterwards. The confirmees were
expected to visit their parish churches at an interval variously fixed at
three or eight days later, when their foreheads -- anointed by the bishop's
holy oil and bound with linen bands -- were washed into the font.(92) The
ceremony of confirmation itself, however, was short. Although some bishops
made special tours for the purpose, it was often carried out while they
travelled on normal business. One of the marks of the pastoral care of St
Hugh of Lincoln (d. 1200) was that he dismounted from his horse for the
purpose.(93) Confirmation was probably capable of making a personal impact
-- one's baptismal name could be changed -- and older children may have
felt the solemnity (or strangeness) of the occasion. But the
pre-Reformation sacrament could not act as a rite of passage for society in
general. It was administered at too wide a range of ages and it led to no
new status in practical terms, because a confirmed infant or child was
still unqualified to receive communion or unction. Even in adolescence,
there is no sign that the confession which the candidates were supposed to
make beforehand had any special importance. Nor had their first communion
afterwards. Normally, that event would have taken place at the following
Easter: often widely separated from the confirmation and always subsumed
within the ceremonies of Easter Day. The medieval Church never developed a
universal transitional rite between childhood and adulthood, and in this
respect the Church resembled the world. There, a number of transitions
happened or were observed: weaning, schooling, apprenticeship, enrolment of
boys in the frankpledge at twelve, the giving of 'cove and key' to girls at
fourteen and the coming of age of feudal heirs at twenty-one.(94) None of
these was so widely and fully commemorated as to acquire general
significance.
Children in the liturgy
As well as ministering to children in general, the Church from the
beginning of its mission to England recruited boys to do duties in church.
In Anglo-Saxon times, they were offered or recruited as monks for the rest
of their lives, but the practice of child oblation fell out of favour in
the twelfth century.(95) After this, the monastic orders took novices only
in their mid or late teens, though some of the orders of friars went on
admitting boys who were younger. Most large religious houses, however,
continued to recruit boys as secular members of their communities.(96) Such
boys might become members of the house when they grew up, but were free to
leave instead for jobs in the world. Monasteries maintained almonry boys
who received board and lodging in return for serving at masses and doing
other tasks in the church and surrounding buildings. Cathedrals, collegiate
churches and monasteries also developed polyphonic music, which required
boy choristers to enlarge the range of harmony. Boys were cheaper than
monks, secular clergy or adult servants, and the higher costs of wages
after the Black Death may have led to the employment of more boys than
before. Most religious houses had groups of them by the early sixteenth
century, ranging in number from two or three to fourteen, so that three or
four thousand nationally were working as such servers or choristers by the
eve of the Reformation.
Parish churches also relied on boys. By the end of the Middle Ages,
some of the larger and more ambitious imitated religious houses by
introducing choirs of boys and men. Ashburton (Devon) had a choir of four
men and four boys by 1481, Cirencester (Glos.) was given an endowment for
four boys to learn plainsong, pricksong and descant in 1518, while Lyme
Regis (Dorset) supported a clerk and an unspecified number of children in
1548.(97) Commoner than the chorister was the single boy assisting the
parish priest as a clerk or servant. Since the early eleventh century,
priests had been encouraged to teach the young to give them help in
church.(98) The liturgy -- both the daily services of the divine office and
the mass -- was a dialogue requiring an assistant to say the responses.
Help was valuable also in ringing bells, dressing the altar and priest,
serving at mass and carrying holy water or incense. To do these duties,
there evolved the office of holy-water clerk, or parish clerk as it became
known by the fourteenth century.(99) In the Middle Ages, this office was
often held by a boy or adolescent youth. It had a small income supplied
from fees, perquisites and sometimes contributions levied on parishioners.
During the thirteenth century, several bishops ordered that the post should
be given to scholars, at least in the churches near the cathedral and the
castle towns where schools existed and poor scholars needed support.(100)
In Exeter, schoolboys served as parish clerks until at least the middle of
the fifteenth century.(101) The play Mary Magdalene, preserved in a
manuscript of the early sixteenth century, includes a scene with a heathen
priest and his 'boy' or 'clerke' Hawkyn, which parodies the work of such
boys or adolescents. The priest orders the clerk to array the altar and
ring the bell; the clerk gives the priest his book and vestments, reads a
lesson and helps to sing the service.(102) Literary references from
Chaucer's time tend to portray the clerk as an adolescent or young man who
is sexually active and ambitious, often adroit, to seduce the maidens of
the parish.(103) By the early Tudor period, the clerk's office might also
be held by an adult on a long-term basis, like the parish clerks familiar
from the Reformation to the nineteenth century.(104) But despite the rise
in age of many clerks, there continued to be a widespread demand for boys
to act as servers in church. Caxton's Book of courtesy envisaged them doing
so, as we have seen, and The ABC both in Latyn and Englyshe of 1538
included the invitation to confession (Confitemini) and the confession
(Confiteor), both in Latin, under the heading 'To helpe a prest to
syng'.(105) This material follows the three basic prayers, before even the
graces, suggesting a wide number of young boys who needed to be able to say
the divine office or serve at mass. In the reign of James I, an elderly man
of Wotton-under-Edge (Glos.) remembered how, in about the 1540s, he was one
of two such boys who wore surplices and knelt on cushions in the parish
church while mass was said by the chantry priest.(106)
By the later Middle Ages, there were certain days in the year when
boys not only supported the liturgy but took leading roles in it. The Sarum
breviary, used in southern England, provided that boys should sing and act
a text after the eighth lesson at mattins on All Saints Day (1 November),
recalling Christ's parable of the Wise Virgins. Five boys in surplices,
their heads covered with white amices 'in the manner of virgin women' and
holding burning candles in their hands, proceeded to the high altar and
stood before it singing a text beginning Audivi vocem: 'I heard a voice
from heaven, "Come all wise virgins. Put away the oil into your vessels
until the Bridegroom arrives.'"(107) Eight weeks later, at mattins on
Christmas Day, a bareheaded boy, chosen for his good clear voice and
dressed in an alb with an amice about his neck, was assigned to appear from
behind the high altar towards the end of the first lesson.(108) He stood on
the highest altar step, facing eastwards, with a lighted torch in his left
hand. When the lesson was over, he turned to the choir and began to sing
the respond Hodie nobis celorum rex de virgine nasci dignatus est (The king
of heaven consented on this day to be born for us of a virgin).(109) This
was also dramatic: at celorum rex he raised his right hand to heaven; at de
virgine he extended it to the image of the Virgin Mary on the north side of
the altar, and at dignatus est he genuflected. The choir replied Ut hominem
perditum ad celestia regna revocaret (That He should call home outcast man
to the kingdom of heaven). Meanwhile, three other boys from the south side
of the choir and three from the north, wearing the same dress as the first,
came to the lowest step of the altar. The first boy descended to them, and
all seven faced the choir singing together Gloria in excelsis Deo (Glory to
God on high and in earth peace, goodwill towards men).
In both these services, the use of boys was meant to project the theme
of virginity. The first case also contained a suggestion of dressing up and
'role reversal', in view of the hoods drawn up 'in the manner of virgin
women'. This custom coincided -- by chance or intention -- with the start
of a season during November and December in which boys disguised
themselves, went about singing and asked for money or food.(110) Important
days in this calendar were 1, 2, 20, 23, 25 November, and 6, 28 December --
especially the latter two, St Nicholas Day and Holy Innocents Day (or
Childermas) respectively. From at least the early thirteenth century, boys
(especially scholars) often attended church on 6 December in honour of the
saint, their patron.(111) This, far more than All Saints Day, was marked by
reversal of roles. A boy was chosen to be bishop and other boys as his
clerks. They put on clerical garments, travelled around the neighbourhood
and administered blessings. Their activities were chiefly extra-mural, but
on 28 December the boy-bishop reappeared in church and took a leading part
in the liturgy. At Salisbury, he was formally installed in the choir at
vespers on the afternoon of the 27th. He led the services and administered
blessings to the people from then until the vespers of the following
afternoon.(112) In some churches he preached a sermon, two examples of
which have been preserved from the Tudor era: one from about 1498 and the
other from 1558.(113) Both were written by adults for delivery by boys to
congregations which included children. The first appears only to envisage
the presence of boys, but the second also mentions 'wenches' (i.e. girls)
and adults. Both sermons deal with childish innocence and children's need
to be trained and disciplined -- topics common in educational literature.
Nevertheless, in assuming the presence of children and addressing them,
they come nearest (outside baptism and confirmation) to constituting a
service for children, albeit but once a year.
Childermas had further extraneous customs. Special breakfasts and
dinners were held for the bishop, his entourage and other people. Groups
went round the streets as on St Nicholas Day, presenting gloves to worthies
and giving blessings. At Winchester in 1441, some of the boys dressed as
girls -- a further example of role reversal.(114) At Bury St Edmunds
(Suffolk) and elsewhere in East Anglia, some bishops seem to have
distributed alms in the form of metal tokens, which could be redeemed by
the poor in return for food, but it seems to have been more common for the
boys themselves to solicit money or gifts.(115) Indeed, the fact that 'St
Nicholas's clerks' eventually came to mean robbers, suggests that the
collectors did not lack persistence! Adults were also involved; they
stage-managed the liturgy, helped provide the feasts and sometimes took
part in the extra-mural processions. At Exeter Cathedral, for example, the
canons' servants went round with the boys.(116) In rural parishes, however,
where there were few clergy or church servants, the boys may have been less
supervised: like those who collect for the 'Guy' or sing carols today.
Eventually, the season of impersonation fell foul of Reformation attitudes
to superstitious practices. A royal proclamation of 1541 abolished the
observances of 6 and 28 December and similar ones associated with the
festivals of St Clement and St Catherine (23 and 25 November). On these
days, complained the proclamation, 'children be strangelye decked and
apparelid to counterfaite priestes, bysshopps and women, and so ledde with
songes and daunces from house to house, bleasing the people and gatherynge
of monye'.(117) The proclamation seems to have been more effective against
6 and 28 December, which had their roots in church, than against the
customs of the other two days which were largely based outside. Children --
especially boys -- continued to go about singing and asking for money or
apples on St Clement's and St Catherine's days until the nineteenth
century.(118)
Gilds
Some older children or adolescents shared in a further religious
activity: the membership of gilds. These were one of the commonest forms of
lay involvement in Church life before the Reformation, all over England,
with various social and occupational bases. Most gilds were made up of
adults, but some large organisations may have admitted children as members
too. The register of the Trinity Gild at Coventry, between about 1340 and
1450, includes various people described as the sons and daughters of their
parents, though their ages at admission are not given.(119) Gilds were also
formed by young people alone: imitating adults but excluding them. The
propensity to form such gilds occurs as early as 1264, though in this case
(the gild of young men [gilda iuvenum] at Bury St Edmunds) the members are
described as bachelarii (young adults) and formed a political group opposed
to the local abbey and its privileges.(120) The first young people's
organisation mentioned as having religious purposes occurs in the survey of
religious gilds carried out by the government of Richard II in 1389. This
was the gild of St William at King's Lynn, founded in 1388 'of yonge
scolers to mayntene and kepen an ymage of seynt Wylyam standyng in a
tabernakle in the chirche of seynt Margarete of Lenne' and to provide six
tapers of wax to burn in the church on festival days. Appropriately for a
gild of scholars, the patron was the child saint William of Norwich, killed
at the age of twelve. In form and objectives, this gild was
indistinguishable from an adult body. It met three times a year, held an
annual festival on the Feast of Relics, provided funeral masses for
brothers who died, and helped its members in need. By recruiting scholars,
it implicitly relied on the local school or schools to give it an identity,
and as such scholars could be as old as eighteen, the leadership may have
come from youths on the verge of adulthood. Or perhaps not, for the gild's
return to the king's survey stresses its members' youthfulness: 'wherfore,
as children in yonge age, hopyng in time comyng to have ben encresyd to
[i.e. by] help and counseyl of wyse men, our godes han dispent as we han
forseyd, no catelle kepende, trostende, as children, with yiftes to be
amendyd'.(121)
There may have been gilds elsewhere, or at any rate devotional cults,
made up of children. A boys' light is mentioned in the parish church of St
John, York, in 1489 and a children's light in St Michael Spurriergate in
the same city in 1519.(122) More frequent than these are references to
groups of maidens and young men. The church of St Margaret Southwark
received 3s. 9d. in 1445-55 'in dawnsyng mony of the maydens', and that of
St Mary at Hill, London, 6s. 8d. 'of the gadryng of the maydens of seint
Barnabes day' in 1512-13.(123) In Kent between 1463 and 1533, we hear of
lights in churches maintained by the bachelors or young men and the maidens
or young women, implying the banding together of such people to provide
them.(124) In Cornwall, during the same period, groups of young men have
been identified at Bodmin, Camborne, St Columb Major, St Neot and North
Petherwin, and of maidens at Antony, West Looe and Bodmin. The latter town
had an association of girls based on each of its two main streets.(125) In
Devon, there were young men and maidens at Chagford and Morebath, young men
(also called grooms) at Modbury, and two groups of young men at Ashburton
-- one undifferentiated and perhaps from the town while the other,
described as the young men 'on the land', seem to have lived in the rural
part of the parish.(126) In Somerset, there were maidens at Croscombe, and
young men (also known as 'younglings') there and at Pilton.(127) All these
groups collected money, kept lights in the church and sometimes contributed
to parish finances. At Morebath, where we know most about them, each group
chose two officers each year to handle its affairs, and the names of the
officers survive after 1526. The maidens had two men as wardens in 1527,
but this was exceptional; later, the wardens were always female until 1541
when the organisation was apparently wound up. The young men had two male
wardens until 1548 when they too disappeared -- victims, no doubt, of the
Reformation of Edward VI.(128) It is a moot point whether these were groups
of children or young adults, given that women and men tended to marry in
their mid twenties. Most likely, the groups were dominated by (and perhaps
confined to) those in their teens and early twenties with a measure of
adult status -- as the words 'groom' and 'bachelor' imply.
Reflections
The Church -- in the sense of its authorities, clergy, liturgy, laws
and buildings -- recognised the existence of children and claimed them as
members incontinently after their birth. It allowed them to attend worship
and blessed their marriages, funerals and burials. It was disinclined after
the twelfth century to permit them to receive communion or to be anointed
while sick, though communion at the point of death seems to have been
available. But this withholding, on grounds of understanding, should not be
overestimated. Most adults took communion only at Easter, while extreme
unction was mainly done at the point of death and was not intended to be
repeated within a year. The Church did not impose as many obligations on
children as on adults. It is not clear that church attendance was
obligatory or that confession was required. The two principal duties laid
upon them (or rather upon their guardians) were confirmation and the
learning of the basic prayers, with the assumption that they would also
absorb the morality, the dietary code and the customs of Christianity. In
view of its emphasis on understanding after the twelfth century, the Church
might have been expected to develop a programme for educating children.
This, however, was slow to happen. The clergy ministered to children after
baptism chiefly in their ministry to the whole Christian community. Worship
was what is nowadays called 'all age' worship, without special attention to
children except at Childermas. Instruction through sermons was directed
generally and the special education of children was left to parents,
godparents and school teachers. The direct ministry of the Church to the
young was largely one of ritual and liturgy. Did the Church shy away from
invading the rights of parents over children? It certainly did not lay its
hands on the process to the extent that came to be felt desirable at the
Reformation.
Children were girls as well as boys, and much of what has been said
relates only to boys. References to girls in records -- liturgical,
literary and documentary -- are always more sparse, though still worth
looking for. Clearly, girls like boys were expected to master the Church's
moral code and observances. Girls who had elementary education -- the
daughters of the nobility and, by the fifteenth century, those of other
wealthy families -- learnt the alphabet in its religious presentation and
the other basic prayers. Noble girls were probably brought up to repeat the
simple offices of Our Lady in Latin or English. The book of the knight of
the tower, written in France by Geoffrey de la Tour Landry in the 1370s and
printed in an English translation by Caxton in 1484, advises them to say
mattins when they rise and also the other hours.(129) In 1535, two mattins
books were purchased for Bridget Plantagenet, the ten-year-old daughter of
Viscount Lisle, during her education in the nunnery of St Mary,
Winchester.(130) Girls of lesser but still leisured condition, like the
daughters of merchants, may also have been brought up to pray daily and to
visit churches, using the basic prayers. One fifteenth-century text, The
good wyfe wold a pylgremage, makes a mother advise her daughter to pray
with good devotion.(131) Another, How the good wyfe taught hyr doughter,
tells the girl to behave meekly in church, bid her beads, observe holy days
and (in adulthood) to pay tithes and give charity to the poor.(132)
'Bidding beads' may simply have meant praying, but beads were a synonym for
the rosary commonly used to say multiples of the Paternoster, Ave Maria and
Creed. The memorial brass of Thomas Pownder, merchant of Ipswich (d. 1525),
shows not only his wife but his eldest daughter with rosaries on their
belts.(133) In churches generally, girls probably prayed the basic prayers
and may have developed devotions to particular cults (all churches had
images of Mary and often of other women saints), but the precise evidence
for this is hard to find beyond the maidens' gilds. Certainly, the role of
girls in church was less active than that of some boys. They did not
function as bishops, servers, clerks or trainee clergy except perhaps in
nunneries -- a small number of places compared with monasteries, friaries
and parish churches.(134) Outside church, it is likely that groups of older
but unmarried girls took part in semi-religious folk customs on religious
festival days. One fifteenth-century song mentions an adolescent girl
becoming pregnant by a priest through taking part in a vigil by a holy
well,(135) and the adult customs of Hocktide (men catching women on the
second Monday after Easter, women catching men on the following day) may
have extended downwards to girls and boys.(136) Many folk-customs involving
maidens are recorded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.(137)
 The Church's impact on children was complemented by their impact on
the Church. The first important object one met on entering a parish church
was their font of baptism. Large churches often contained small benches or
seats for choristers in the chancel or choir. Tombs and brasses sometimes
depict children, either as appendages of their parents or in their own
right, though their memorials are not nearly as common as adult ones.(138)
The young who were alive, as we have seen, could also have a disturbing
effect on services and buildings. They had an economic impact too. True,
this was not usually of a direct nature as it was with adults, because
children did not own property and pay tithes. Wealthy children may have
made offerings as princes and princesses did when attending masses and
sermons, but this was less likely among the majority. However, children
caused an input of money and produce by adults. Their births required their
mothers to be 'churched' or purified after forty days, when an offering had
to be made.(139) Their illnesses led to pilgrimages and offerings to images
or shrines to bring about, or give thanks for, their recovery. Their
funerals generated payments for candles, prayers and graves. The custom
crept in, apparently during the later Middle Ages, that the 'bearing sheet'
or baptismal robe of a dead infant (and perhaps by extension the best gown
of an older child) should be forfeited to the parish priest as a mortuary.
The famous case of Richard Hunne in London in 1514 began as a protest
against this custom, and in 1529 a parliamentary statute ruled out such
exactions.(140) Small but useful sums were raised by the gilds of maidens
and young men. Boys also made an economic contribution of their own through
their availability as a cheap labour force of clerks, choristers and
almonry boys. Here the Church mirrored the use of boys in household
service, craft and industry, enabling ecclesiastical duties to be done at
less cost while producing recruits to be monks, friars and secular clergy.
More widely, children represented the Church of the future. They grew up in
a Christian culture and were shaped by it -- more or less. The preferences
and failings they exhibited in adult life must often have stemmed from
their childhood experiences. As so often in the Middle Ages, there is a gap
between the reality of their involvement with the Church and the scraps of
evidence about it that survive.
1 Langland, Piers Plowman, ed. W. W. Skeat, Oxford 1969, AI 73-6, BI
75-8, CI 72-5.
2 On Langland and education, see Nicholas Orme, Education and society
in medieval and renaissance England, London-Ronceverte 1989, 243-58.
3 E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The population history of England
1541-1871, London 1981, 216.
4 On baptism in the Middle Ages, see J. D. C. Fisher, Christian
initiation: baptism in the medieval West (Alcuin Club Collections xlvii,
1965), and Peter Cramer, Baptism and change in the early Middle Ages, c.
200-c. 1150, Cambridge 1993.
5 Manuale ad vsum Sarisburiensis, ed. A. Jefferies Collins (Henry
Bradshaw Society xci, 1958), 25-43.
6 Councils & synods I: AD 871-1204, ed. D. Whitelock, M. Brett and
C. N. L. Brooke, Oxford 1981, ii. 1048-9.
7 Manuale ad usum Sarisburiensis, 32. On baptism and instruction, see
also Eamon Duffy, The stripping of the altars: traditional religion in
England c. 1400-c. 1580, New Haven, Conn.-London 1992, 53-87.
8 Councils & synods II: AD 1205-1313, ed. F. M. Powicke and C. R.
Cheney, Oxford 1964, ii. 900-5.
9 The lay folk's catechism, ed. T. F. Simmons and H. E. Nolloth (Early
English Text Society [hereinafter cited as EETS] os cxviii, 1901), 21-3;
Religious pieces in prose and verse, ed. G. G. Perry (EETS os xxvi, 1867),
2.
 10 John de Burgh, Pupilla oculi, London 1510, fos 9v-10r.
11 Reginald Pecock, The donet, ed. Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock (EETS os
clvi, 1921), 70.
12 BL, Egerton Roll 8776 m 5.
13 Nicholas Orme, 'Education in the medieval Cornish play Beunans
Meriasek',
Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies xxv (1993), 8-10.
14 On this subject, see idem, English schools in the Middle Ages,
London 1973, 102-6, and Education and society, 73-151.
15 Exeter, Devon Record Office, Z 19/18/4 (John Hooker, 'A synopsis
corographicall'), pp. 105-6.
16 Visitation articles and injunctions of the period of the
Reformation, ed. W. H. Frere and W. McC. Kennedy (Alcuin Club Collections
xiv-xvi, 1910), ii. 17, 21, 56, 63, 85, 105-6, 129.
17 Some chantry and gild priests statutorily acted as schoolmasters
from the 1380s onwards, and others may have taught schools privately, but a
requirement that all should teach is not found before the legislation of
the 1530s: Orme, English schools in the Middle Ages, 6-7, 196-7, 274-82.
18 F. E. Brightman, The English rite, 2nd edn, London 1921, ii.
778-90.
19 Ibid. 796-8.
20 PRO, E 101/389/11.
21 Chaucer, The Canterbury tales, B2 1695-1705.
22 John Foxe, Acts and monuments, ed. J. Pratt, 4th edn, London
[1877], iii. 599.
23 For example, ibid. iv. 123, 177, 182.
24 Dictionary of medieval Latin from British sources, ed. D. R.
Howlett, fasc. iv, Oxford 1989, 1099; Anglo-Norman dictionary, ed. Louise
Stone, W. Rothwell and T. B. W. Reid, London 1977-92, 339; The Oxford
English dictionary, ed. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, 2nd edn, Oxford
1989, s.v. 'grace', section 20.
25 Historical Manuscripts Commission, 8th Report, Appendix, London
1908, pt I, section ii, no. 281b.
26 Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran, The growth of English schooling 1340-1548,
Princeton, NJ 1985, 41, quoting Hull Corporation Archives, Bench Book,
IIIa, fo. 58.
27 The ABC both in Latyn & Englyshe, ed. E. B. Shuckburgh, London
1889, reproduced from the original in Emmanuel College, Cambridge (STC 19).
28 W. A. Pantin, 'Instructions for a devout and literate layman', in
J. J. G. Alexander and Margaret T. Gibson (eds) Medieval learning and
literature: essays presented to Richard William Hunt, Oxford 1976, 399.
29 Asser's life of King Alfred, ed. W. H. Stevenson, Oxford 1959,
89-90.
30 Pantin, 'Instructions', 398-422.
31 C. A. J. Armstrong, 'The piety of Cecily, duchess of York', in D.
Woodruff (ed.) For Hilaire Belloc, London 1942, 79-80; The English works of
John Fisher, ed. J. E. Mayor, pt i (EETS es xxvii, 1876), 294-5.
32 Orme, Education and society, 183.
33 Ibid. 185.
34 Caxton's book of curtesye, ed. F. J. Furnivall (EETS es iii, 1868),
4-11.
35 Cramer, Baptism and change, 118; G. R. Owst, Literature and pulpit
in medieval England, 2nd edn, Oxford 1961, 37.
36 Langland, Piers Plowman, BI 178.
37 Visitations in the diocese of Lincoln, 1517-1531, ed. A. Hamilton
Thompson, i (Lincoln Record Society xxxiii, 1940), 69, 112.
38 R. F. Hunnisett, Bedfordshire coroners' rolls (Bedfordshire
Historical Record Society xli, 1961), 9.
39 PRO, JUST 2/200 m 6.
40 P. Grosjean, Henrici VI Angliae regis miraula postuma (Subsidia
Hagiographica xxii), Brussels 1935, 156-9.
41 The book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily
Allen, i (EETS os ccxii, 1940), 200. Women are advised to take children as
chaperones on errands in the fifteenth-century poem, The thewis off gude
women: how the good wife taught her daughter, ed. Tauno F. Mustanoja,
Helsinki 1948, 184, lines 131-5.
42 Thomas of Monmouth, The life and miracles of St William of Norwich,
ed. A. Jessopp and M. R. James, Cambridge 1896, 12-14.
43 C. H. Lawrence, St Edmund of Abingdon, Oxford 1960, 203, 224-6.
44 Acta sanctorum: Octobris, v, Brussels 1786, 137-8.
45 Sir Thomas Elyot, The governor, London 1531, bk 1, ch. iv.
46 Reginald of Durham, Libellus de vita et miraculis S. Godrici
(Surtees Society xx, 1845), 403.
47 N. Orme, 'The guild of Kalendars, Bristol', Transactions of the
Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society xcvi (1978), 35; Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight, line 940.
48 Visitations in the diocese of Lincoln, i. 23, 26. For
post-Reformation examples of children's disturbances, see W. H. Hale, A
series of precedents and proceedings in criminal causes, 2nd edn, Edinburgh
1973, 268, 276, 278.
49 Letters and papers of John Shillingford, mayor of Exeter, 1447-50,
ed. Stuart A. Moore (Camden ns it, 1871), 101.
50 Reginald of Durham, Libellus de vita; Materials for the history of
Thomas Becket, ed. J. C. Robertson (Rolls Series, 1875-85); Acta sanctorum:
Octobris, i, Antwerp 1765, 610-705; Henrici VI miracula.
51 James A. Brundage, Law, sex and Christian society in medieval
Europe, Chicago-London 1987, 238, 357, 433-4.
52 Child-marriages, divorces and ratifications, ed. F. J. Furnivall
(EETS os cviii, 1897), 1-7, 10-12, 15-16.
53 Nicholas Orme, 'Mortality in fourteenth-century Exeter', Medical
History xxxii (1988), 195-203.
54 Exeter Cathedral Archives, Obit Accounts, D&C 3673, fos 74,
84v, 85v, 90v; 3764, fos 19, 25.
56 Lambeth churchwardens' accounts 1504-1645, ed. C. Drew, pt I
(Surrey Record Society xl, 1940), 1-5.
56 On this subject, see Fisher, Christian initiation, 78-87, 101-40.
57 It is not clear if children received these things; in Europe, some
authorities refused them holy bread: ibid. 106.
58 The Leofric missal, ed. F. E. Warren, Oxford 1883, 238; Manuale et
processionale ad usum insignis ecclesie Eboracensis, ed. W. G. Henderson
(Surtees Society lxiii, 1875), pt II, 136, 147, 150.
59 The pontifical of Magdalen College, ed. H. A. Wilson (Henry
Bradshaw Society xxxix, 1910), 178.
60 Robert Pulleyn, 'De Officiis Ecclesiasticis', bk I, ch. xx, PL
clxxvii, cols 392-3.
61 Decrees of the ecumenical councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner,
London-Washington 1990, i. 245.
62 Robert of Flamborough, Liber poenitentialis, ed. J. J. F. Firth,
Toronto 1971, 268.
63 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 828, fos 121V-2r.
64 de Burgh, Pupilia oculi, fos 10V, 19V-20r.
65 For example, Councils and ecclesiastical documents relating to
Great Britain and Ireland, ed. A. W. Haddan and W. Stubbs, Oxford 1869-71,
iii. 328-9.
 66 Decrees of the ecumenical councils, i. 245.
67 The Leofric missal, 238.
68 Councils & synods II, i. 90; cf. i. 146, 444, but no age seems
implied in i. 305, 596, 645 and ii. 995.
66 Ibid. ii. 905.
70 The poems of William of Shoreham, ed. M. Konrath, i (EETS es
lxxxvi, 1902), 41.
71 de Burgh, Pupilla oculi, fo. 70.
72 A. Morey, Bartholomew of Exeter, bishop and canonist, Cambridge
1937, 244.
73 Corpus iuris canonici, ed. E. Friedberg, Leipzig 1879-81, ii, cols
570-I, 1140; David Knowles, The monastic order in England, 2nd edn,
Cambridge 1963, 421.
74 Bede, 'Life of Cuthbert', in Three lives of Saint Cuthbert, ed.
Bertram Colgrave, Cambridge 1940, 252-3.
75 Manuale Eboracensis, pt II, 136, 147, 150.
76 Two Anglo-Saxon pontificals, cd. H. M. J. Banting (Henry Bradshaw
Society civ, 1989), 168-9.
77 The pontifical of Magdalen College, 178.
78 Alfred C. Fryer, 'On fonts with representations of the seven
sacraments', The Archaeological Journal lix (1902), 46-7; G. McN.
Rushforth, 'Seven sacraments compositions in English medieval art', The
Antiquaries Journal ix (1929), 83-100.
79 Bodl. Lib., MS Eng. hist. b 208, fo. 20.
80 Edward Hall, Chronicle containing the history of England, London
1809, 806, 825.
81 Councils & synods II, i. 32, 71, 298, 369, 441, 453, 591, 703;
ii. 989.
82 Ibid. i. 32; ii. 897.
83 Bodl. Lib., MS Bodley 828, fos 121V-2r.
84 de Burgh, Pupilla oculi, fo. 10r-v.
85 William Lyndwood, Provinciale, Oxford 1979, 34; John Myrc,
Instructions for parish priests, ed. Edward Peacock, 2nd edn (EETS os xxxi,
1902), 6.
86 On what follows, see J. D. G. Fisher, Christian initiation: the
Reformation period (Alcuin Club Collections li, 1970).
87 John Strype, Ecclesiastical memorials, Oxford 1822, i, pt 1, 344-7.
88 Brightman, The English rite, ii. 776-8.
89 E. Cardwell, Synodalia, Oxford 1842, ii. 510.
90 The injunctions and ecclesiastical proceedings of Richard Barnes,
bishop of Durham [ed. J. Raine] (Surtees Society xxii, 1850), 14-15.
91 Susan J. Wright, 'Confirmation, catechism and communion: the role
of the young in the post-Reformation Church', in Parish, church and people:
local studies in lay religion 1350-1750, London 1988, 203-28.
92 de Burgh, Pupilla oculi, fo. 10V; Myrc, Instructions, 20-1.
93 Magna vita Sancti Hugonis, ed. Decima L. Douie and David H. Farmer,
2nd edn, Oxford 1985, i. 126-7.
94 Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, The history of
English law before the time of Edward 1, 2nd edn, Cambridge 1968, i. 568;
ii. 438-9.
95 See above, p. 574-5.
96 On what follows, see Orme, English schools in the Middle Ages,
224-51.
97 Nicholas Orme, Education in the west of England, 1066-1548, Exeter
1976, 111, 130, 150.
98 Councils & synods I, i. 331.
99 The Oxford English dictionary, s.v. 'parish clerk'.
 100 On this subject, see Orme, English schools in the Middle Ages,
180-1.
101 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 417/447, fo. 19r; Bodl.
Lib., MS Rawlinson D 328, fo. 122v.
102 The late medieval religious plays of Bodleian MS Digby 133, ed. D.
C. Baker and others (EETS os cclxxxiii, 1982), 62-5.
103 This is already the case in Chaucer's 'Miller's Tale', The
Canterbury tales, A 3310-38; 'see also the comic poems in Secular lyrics of
the XIVth and XVth centuries, ed. Rossell Hope Robbins, 2nd edn, Oxford
1955, 21-4.
104 Material on the history of clerks is collected in The clerk's book
of 1549, ed. J. Wickham Legge (Henry Bradshaw Society xxv, 1903), pp.
xvii-lxii, where the tendency of the clerk to become an adult seems to
emerge.
105 ABC in Latyn & Englyshe, fo. 2V.
106 Orme, Education in the west of England, 198.
107 Breviarium ad usum insignis ecclesiae Sarum, ed. F. Procter and C.
Wordsworth, Cambridge 1879-86, iii. 975.
108 Ordinate Exon, ed. J. N. Dalton, i (Henry Bradshaw Society xxxvii,
1909), 64. @ @

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