The culture of children in medieval England. (2025)

Anyone wishing to study the history of children in the Middle Agescould well begin with the chapters about them in the famousencyclopaedia On the Properties of Things, compiled by Bartholomew theEnglishman in the mid-thirteenth century and translated into English byJohn Trevisa in 1398. Here are accounts of conception and birth, thefunctions of midwives and nurses, and the characteristics of infants,boys and girls.(1) The discussion of boys includes a remark worthexamining. As Trevisa expressed it, "they love talkynges andcounsailles of suche children as they bene, and forsaken and voydencompanye of olde men".(2) Boys, in other words, prefer eachother's fellowship to that of their elders. The observation has aspecial interest today when the nature of medieval childhood is a matterof debate. One influential writer on the subject, Philippe Aries, hasargued that children did not lead separate lives from adults. In hisopinion, the mature and the young lived closely together, working andplaying in similar ways, with the result that adults did not generallyview children as a distinct group or childhood as a special era oflife.(3) Shulamith Shahar, the author of the best recent survey ofmedieval children, takes the opposite view. She grants the fact thatpeople lived in close proximity with one another. But, she asks, werethere not differences between the lives of men and women, masters andservants, and therefore also adults and children? For her, there wereindeed such distinctions, causing adults to have a well-developedconcept of childhood and even of stages within it.(4)

The present article relates to this debate, or rather to one of itsaspects. It is not primarily about adults and their relationship withchildren, but about children and what belonged to them in terms of aculture. What did the young possess by way of goods, activities, speech,folklore and imagination which were distinctively theirs?(5) Thesetopics have received little attention before 1550 compared with thepost-Reformation era, when the Opies and Sir Keith Thomas havereconstructed childhood as it was lived by children rather than viewedby adults.(6) There is a good deal of evidence about children'sculture in England before 1550, but it is widely diffused amongliterary, documentary, pictorial and archaeological sources. Suchevidence is hard to collect and easily overlooked. Material is much moreplentiful in all the sources after 1300 than before, and the presentstudy necessarily centres on the 250 years from then until 1550, thoughrelevant earlier material is included. The aim of the study is to surveythe main categories of evidence, to show what each reveals, and toconsider what answers can be given to the major questions prompted bythe history of children's culture. Did their culture differ fromthat of adults (one of the strands in the debate provoked by Aries)? Wasit simple or sophisticated in its nature and resources? Was ithomogeneous or did it vary according to gender, age, rank, wealth orlocality? Was it constant or did it change historically? Does it showchildren to have altered in basic respects between those times and now?

Evidence for children's culture in the Middle Ages is to befound 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. Adultwriters, however, were slow to make mention of children and theirculture, even casually, and relatively little survives before thefourteenth century.(7) What does is blurred by adults' ownassumptions; boys tend to be described in terms of activities, girls interms of character.(8) Coroners' records of accidental deaths arethe most dispassionate accounts, but relate only to a small minority ofchildren.(9) Visual sources centre chiefly on the depiction of scenes ofeveryday 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 earlysixteenth-century France), all in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Volumeslike these contain valuable pictures of children using toys and playinggames, but they may be biased towards the activities of thewell-provided and most come from continental Europe rather than England.A third source exists in archaeological finds, which are beginning toyield important evidence about manufactured metal toys from about 1300onwards.(10) Unfortunately, ground conditions scarcely permit thesurvival of toys of wood or fabric, and the context of finds isfrequently uncertain. A ball, a brooch or a chessman by itself does notestablish use by a child or an adult. Fourthly, there are school-books,several dozen of which survive after about 1400, some compiled bymasters but others by pupils themselves. These are the earliest examplesof children's own writing, but they were written only by boys undersupervision in classrooms and it is hard to decide what came from themaster and what from the pupil. A further general difficulty in thewritten sources relates to gender. Medieval writers frequently speak of"children", or pueri in Latin, terms which included girls aswell as boys. Often, however, they seem to have only boys in mind, andwhen they single out a sex it is usually the male one. Girls are asdisadvantaged in the history of medieval children as women are in thatof adulthood. The present article uses the word "children" tomean both sexes from birth until about the mid-teens. When it appears inreferences 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 ofchildren's culture. They may be given by adults and embody an adultpurpose, like education, but they may also be used by children inoriginal ways. Girls and boys may adapt their elders' possessionsfor play, or make toys of their own without the involvement of olderpeople. The earliest toy of childhood, the rattle, obviously belongs tothe category supplied by adults. It occurs as punung, meaning somethingthat creaks, in a late Old English glossary,(11) and survivesarchaeologically by the sixteenth century. Rattles recovered from thatperiod 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 thenoise.(12) The first literary mention of the word "rattle"occurs in 1519 when the Tudor schoolmaster William Horman includes it inhis book of Vulgaria (English and Latin translation sentences forschools). "I wyll bye a rattell to styll my baby for cryenge"- evidently a reference to manufactured rattles available forpurchase.(13) Dolls, or poppets or puppets as they were called before1700, are mentioned in literature by the early fifteenth century, theoldest references being to rag dolls made by children themselves.(14) Atext of 1413 compares idle knights and squires to "legges ofclowtes, as childeren maken popetis for to Pleyen with whyle they benyonge",(15) and not long afterwards a Scottish writer noticedchildren making "a cumly lady of a clout".(16) In 1583, thePuritan Philip Stubbes derided women's fashions as"mawmets" (another word for doll) "of rags and cloutescompact together".(17) But dolls were also made by adults on acommercial basis. William Tyndale wrote in 1537 that "a chylde . .. yf he crye . . . men styll with a poppet",(18) and WilliamTurner's Herbal (1562) likens certain roots to "littlepuppettes and mammettes which come to be sold in England inboxes".(19) In 1582, the crown set a duty of 6s. 8d. per gross ofimported "puppets or babies for children".(20) Many of theseimported puppets were probably made of wood to withstand transport, likethe simple painted truncheon-shaped dolls in the Museum of Childhood atBethnal Green, London. Others may have been of wax. Small human imagesof wax were manufactured to be offered at shrines, and the makers couldhave supplied wax dolls without much difficulty.(21)

There were also toys requiring strength and skill. The top occurs inthe Old English version of Apollonius of Tyre, dating from the earlyeleventh century, and an example in maple-wood from the same century hasbeen found at Winchester.(22) As a toy it is mentioned in several latermedieval sources: sometimes large and driven by a whip as at Winchester,sometimes small and meant to be spun by the fingers. Tops of the secondkind were known as scopperils, from a root meaning "to jumpabout", and a source of about 1425 mentions both the scopperil andthe top "that children play with".(23) When Thomas More wishedto have Childhood shown on a painted cloth in the early sixteenthcentury, 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 acockerel in the cruel sport of burying the bird in the ground and aimingsticks or arrows at its head.(25) At least one child played with a toycart. This was Henry, the five-year-old son of Edward I, in 1273; it wasbought for 7d. and cost 2d. to be mended when it was broken.(26) Asimple kind of hobby-horse was in use by the fifteenth century, when aScottish text talks of children who "mak a wicht [white] hors of awand".(27) Another mention occurs later in the same century in amiracle story involving the five-year-old son of a man named RobertNorth who lived near the Thames. The boy, who suffered from a growth onhis 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 onmy wooden horse". That meant, remarked the miracle collector, noton the stick which small children use in their games.(28) Manufacturedhobby-horses are shown in continental manuscript pictures.(29)

By 1300, craftsmen were producing model toys which imitated objectsfrom adult life.(30) In France, ceramic specimens are known,(31) butthose so far recovered in England are metal ones made of lead-tin alloyusing moulds, and therefore capable of being mass-produced. They aresimilar in form to brooches and pilgrim badges - which suggests thatthey were produced by the same craftsmen and sold in shops, at fairs orby pedlars. One complete figure [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE 1 OMITTED] andone similar fragment have been found in London, portraying knights inarmour on horseback, 55 mm. high - typical toy soldiers. To judge fromthe armour, they date from about the reign of Edward I. Mechanical toysare represented by a hollow bird of about the same date, 27 mm. high,originally mounted on a stand; when the bird was pivoted, a separatelymounted tongue moved in and out of its beak. [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE 2OMITTED] Most common are small jugs and ewers, 35-45 mm. high, furnishedwith handles and sometimes with lids and spouts. They are complementedby standing cups and plates, all 24-27 mm. in size, suitable formake-believe meals and playing at housekeeping. [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE3 OMITTED] Miniature tripod cauldrons and skillets of copper alloyappear in about the sixteenth century, and were robust enough to havebeen placed by a hearth to heat the water. Other small objects from thesame century include bowls, cutlery, fire-irons and candlesticks; thereeven survives part of an ornate cupboard, stamped from a flat sheet ofalloy and ready to be assembled in the manner of a modern Airfix kit.[ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE 4 OMITTED] The Tudor period also furnishesexamples of flat human figures, 50-75 mm. high, dressed like gentlemenand gentlewomen in datable costume. These have arms like handles,allowing a string or ribbon to be threaded through, so that the dollcould be danced like a puppet. Together, such objects suggest thatwealthier children in towns, where most of the alloy models have beenfound, were well provided with small toys to play with, and there is nodifference between such toys and modern ones. The lead-tin modelsespecially went on being made in fairly similar forms down to theIndustrial Revolution.

What of poor children? They may not have been altogether unprovidedwith quality toys, if we can posit skilful fathers making such thingsfor their offspring. But even the poorest children could make toys bythemselves from valueless materials at hand. Indeed, even the childrenof the rich might do so. Gerald of Wales, recalling his childhood atManorbier, Pembrokeshire, in the 1150s, tells how he and his brothersplayed with sand and dust (perhaps on the nearby beach), they buildingtowns and palaces, he churches and monasteries.(32) At about the sametime, in 1152, the five-year-old William Marshal, later earl ofPembroke, is said to have fought the game of chevalers or knights withKing Stephen at Newbury, Berks. The game involved picking plantains orsimilar stalks with a knob at the top and hitting one against the otherto knock off the head, in the manner of conkers.(33) The best account ofchildren's private toy-making comes from the fifteenth-centuryScottish didactic poem Ratis Raving. Rait, the apparent author, was agentleman who wrote to advise his son about the seven ages of life. Hewas unusually observant about childhood, which he considered to coverthe first three ages. In the earliest, till they were three, childrenwere concerned only with food, drink and sleep. In the second, fromthree to seven, they began to make things: gathering flowers, buildinghouses with sticks, and using bread, stalks, sedges and rags to make ahorse, 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; Tomak 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 cumlylady of a clout, And be rycht besy that about To dicht it fetesly withflouris And luf the pepane [puppet] paramouris.(34)

This must have gone on universally, but it took the originality (oreccentricity) of a Rait to record it in writing.

Playing with toys may seem to be the activity most specific tochildren, and the most distinct from the culture of adults. Even today,however, the child's toy resembles (or does duty in) adultmodel-making and -collecting, and in medieval times dolls too were adultobjects, as Aries reminds us.(35) The English mystic Margery Kempe,travelling through Italy in 1414, met a woman who journeyed about withan image of the infant Christ, which other women dressed with clothes asan act of reverence. Margery, seeing this happen, fell into tears forlove of the holy child.(36) Similar dolls of Christ and Mary are said tohave been carried round by women in the north of England duringAdvent.(37) Votive offerings at shrines might take the form of doll-likehuman figures,(38) or dolls might be used for purposes of witchcraft.The word "poppet" occurs as early as the fourteenth centuryfor a figure made for magic purposes.(39) In the 1530s, it was possiblefor images from dissolved religious houses to be given to children astoys, or so we are told by the cleric Roger Edgeworth. Preaching atBristol in 1539-40, he complained that:

nowe, at the dissolucion of monasteries and of freers houses, manyimages have bene caryed abrod and gyven to children to playe wyth all.And when the chyldren have theym in theyr handes, dauncynge theim aftertheir childyshe maner, commeth the father or the mother and saythe: WhatNasse [i.e., Agnes], what haste thou there? The childe aunsweareth (asshe is taught) I have here myne idoll; the father laugheth and maketh agaye game at it. So saithe the mother to an other, Jugge [i.e., Joan],or Thommye, where haddest thou that pretye idoll? John our parisheclarke gave it me, saythe the childe, and for that the clarke must havethankes and shall lacke no good chere.(40)

Edgeworth was a conservative who would have shared Margery'sreverence for doll-like images. He witnesses, however, to a change ofattitudes in which some adults regarded religious images as idols ordolls in a pejorative sense, and after the Reformation this became theofficial view. The Elizabethan Second Book of Homilies (1563) comparedadults worshipping images to small girls who "play with littlepuppets".(41)

II GAMES AND EXPLORATIONS

A wide variety of evidence can be gathered about children'sgames, from the play of toddlers to that of adolescents."Handy-dandy", guessing in which hand a small object ishidden, is referred to by the poet Langland in the 1360s, and may havebeen played by adult and child or between children; the name, with itssuggestion of baby-talk, implies that infants played it.(42) Anotherpoet, the blind John Audelay, musing on childhood in the 1420s, wrotethat children are not covetous; they are quite content withcherry-stones.(43) This is the earliest of several references to a gameor games with these objects, one of the games being known as"cherry-pit" from the hole into which the stones werethrown.(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 hisVulgaria: "Playenge at cheriston is good for children".(45)Board-games were well developed, and a boy and girl competing at ninemen's morris are pictured in a fourteenth-century manuscript of theFrench Romance of Alexander.(46) Rait associated such games with thethird stage of life, from seven to fifteen, when he believed that humansreached the age of reason:

Now at the tablis [backgammon], now at the ches, Weill oft and seldinat the mes [mass], And mekle with playing at the dyce - That werk yhithald I maist wnwys.(47)

Rait himself disliked them - chess and backgammon lead to absencefrom mass and dice are unwise - but not all adults shared this view.Chess was sometimes regarded as educational. It was used to symbolizethe ranks of society and their duties, and there were. books on thesubject.(48) As for dicing, when Edward the Black Prince was ten in1340, money was paid for him not only to play "ad bill'"- a physical game with a stick - but also "ad talos" (dice orknuckle-bones) with his mother the queen, Sir John Chandos and the boysof his chamber.(49)

"You shall have a throw", says one boy to another in aBristol school-book of about the 1420s, "for a button of yourwristlet".(50) The liking of children to collect such things asbuttons and beads is illustrated by the chief archaeological excavationof a school that has yet been carried out. The Carmelite friary atCoventry, closed in 1538, was occupied from about 1545 to 1555 by thefree grammar school of the town. The friary church became the classroomand the choir-stalls (which survive at a different site) served as desksfor the pupils. During this period, numerous small objects fell into thefoundations beneath the stalls and were recovered during the excavationin the 1970s. Many were of iron or copper, including arrowheads,buckles, buttons, pins, fragments of knives, and small trinkets such asa cross, bells and a Jew's harp. A large number of small coppertags from the ends of laces - about four hundred of them - suggests thatthey were used as currency or as weapons for teasing other pupils. Therewere beads of glass, paste and bone, two children's teeth, discsand counters made from tile and shale, and marbles of green and redsandstone, brick and clay. These marbles antedate the earliest recordsof words for them - "alley", "marble" and"taw" - providing a salutary reminder of the limitations ofliterary sources.(51)

Next, there were physical and team games. These, for girls andyounger boys, may well have centred on singing and dancing, as they didin later times. Trevisa noted that young children are "witty tolerne caroles [songs sung while dancing]", and Wanton in Mundus etInfans could dance and whistle on a willow pipe.(52) But onlookers, malethemselves, tended to notice only the more energetic games of olderboys. Flemish and French illuminated manuscripts of the later MiddleAges liked to include such games in scenes of daily life, includingsnowballing, blind man's buff, bowls, and a guessing game in whichone child holds its face in the lap of a second - perhaps "hotcockles", first recorded in literature in 1549.(53) WilliamFitzStephen mentions ball games in London at the end of the twelfthcentury,(54) and Rait lists them together with running as typical of thethird age of childhood, from seven to fifteen:

Now at the prop [target?] and vthir quhill Ryne at baris [run atbars, a game] and at the ball, And at the caich play with all.(55)

Hand- and football games were popular throughout the later MiddleAges.(56) One of them, tennis, emerges as a name in the fifteenthcentury, and was first played against a wall. The shepherds in theWakefield cycle of plays gave baby Jesus a ball to "go to thetenys",(57) and the dean and chapter of Exeter complained about1448 of "yong persons" who entered their cloister to play at"the toppe, queke, penny prykke and most atte tenys, by the whichthe walles of the saide cloistre have be defowled and the glas wyndowesall to-brost".(58) Queke should have been a quiet game - it wasplayed with a chess-board - but the alarm about penny-prick isunderstandable, since it apparently involved the shooting of arrows at apenny 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 ofgrasses and sedges, and this propensity was encouraged by fathers,guardians and masters, apparently among all social ranks. EdwardI's son Henry had two arrows bought for his use in 1274 at the ageof five.(59) Henry V had a sword in 1397 when he was nine, and his sonHenry VI was provided with eight in the 1420s, "some greater andsome smaller, for to learn the king to play in his tender age", aswell as a little "harness" or suit of armour for his visit toFrance in 1430 when he was eight.(60) Children's bows were adistinct commodity by 1475, when the wood for them was imported fromSpain.(61) One was bought for Henry VII's son Arthur in 1492 whenhe was five, and his sister Margaret shot a buck with a bow at Alnwickin 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-oldJohn Phuch as he aimed at a target in 1271,(63) and children playingwith arrows caused a similar accident to the four-year-old Thomas Fowleof Marden, Kent, in the fifteenth century.(64) Eventually, in 1512, aroyal statute ordered that boys should join the system by which adultmen 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 twoarrows and bring them up to shoot. Play became formally merged withmilitary training.(65)

The liking of children to imitate adults in their play is veryancient, if not natural to humanity. A famous story of the young Cyrusof Persia playing as king of the boys was told by Herodotus and wasknown in late medieval England.(66) A school-book from Magdalen College,Oxford, about 1500 refers both to Cyrus and to one of the school'sown pupils acting the lord with his companions: choosing a carver, abutler and a porter, and causing a boy to be beaten.(67) Playing atkings 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 Uskreported that the children (pueri) of London gathered together inthousands and chose kings. "They made war upon each other andfought to their utmost strength, whereby many died, stricken with blowsor trampled underfoot or crouched in narrow ways - much to the wonder ofthe people what this might foreshow." We would interpret this asthe boys' excitement at recent political changes; Adam regarded itas a portent of the plague of 1401, when many of the combatantsdied.(68) The Cornish topographer Richard Carew remembered how in 1549,again at a time of rebellion, the boys of Bodmin School divided into twofactions, one of the old religion, one of the new, each with a captainand 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 orungraciousness) 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 againgathered near London in Finsbury Fields "to play a new game: sometoke Wyates parte and some the quenes and made a combacte in thefeldes". Renard the Spanish ambassador reckoned the number at threehundred and heard that several were wounded; "most of them",he wrote, "have been arrested and shut up in theGuildhall".(70)

Less formal than games but no less formative were explorations,forays and experiments. These come into our view mainly incoroners' records and miracle stories which tell of accidents tochildren - usually at home or at work, but occasionally during times ofplay.(71) A little girl aged four was drowned as she played with a duckand tried to put it into the river.(72) Robert son of John of St Botulphof London, aged seven, was injured climbing with other boys on pieces oftimber in Kiron Lane in 1322, as was the three-year-old Beatrice Shirleyof Wiston, Sussex, while playing with other small children under a stackof faggots in the fifteenth century.(73) Boys especially wanderedafield, hunting for birds and their nests. In the same century, ThomasScott of Burnham climbed a tree one Sunday morning for a prank or totake young birds from a nest; he fell thirty feet but survived throughbeing nursed in the nearby nunnery and saved by prayers to King HenryVI.(74) An early sixteenth-century French manuscript in the BodleianLibrary shows boys going fowling with bows and seeking a nest in atree,(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 thebyrdes how they flycker theyr wynges In the pytfale, I say, yt passethall thynges.(76)

Wanton in Mundus et Infans watches for sparrows' nests and alsotorments animals:

Yea, sirs, I can well geld a snail And catch a cow by the tail- Thisis a fair cunning!(77)

In an age when life was cheap, food hard to come by and mutilation alegal punishment, the teasing and chasing of birds and animals must havebeen 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 ortormenting animals. Age was distinguished chiefly by fellowship;children were more likely to play with other children because of similarstrength, skill and availability. Adults were sometimes present atchildren's games as spectators (as we shall see at the ShroveTuesday football in twelfth-century London) or as supervisors (as laiddown in the archery legislation). But the war games in Bodmin and Londonshow that boys, at any rate, were capable of planning and executingactivities on their own and against the laws of their elders. And foreach event so great as to find record, there must have been thousands ofsmaller everyday ones.

III

THE CALENDAR OF CHILDHOOD

The Opies, the pioneers of modern children's folklore, haveshown us that boys and girls observe a calendar in which AprilFool's Day, Mischief Night, Hallowe'en and Guy Fawkes Day areamong the chief festivities. Other games and activities come in and outof fashion, not always at the same time of the year.(78) In medievalEngland, culture as a whole was strongly influenced by the calendar,both of the natural year and of the church, and it is reasonable tosuppose that the young were affected by these cycles, as were theirelders.(79) We know that children in great households sometimes tookpart in dramatic interludes on major festivals, such as the Macro playMankind.(80) We may guess that they joined in the egg customs of Easterand the games and processions of May Day, although it is not usuallyclear what roles they played and how far their Christmas, New Year,Easter or May Day differed from those of adults. There are also signsthat children had a calendar of their own: not wholly independent of theadult one but certainly semi-detached from it.

The first English witness to a children's calendar seems to bethe poet Alexander Barclay in his translation, published c.1518, of thesixth Eclogue of the Italian humanist Mantuan (Battista MantovanoSpagnuoli). Mantuan had noted that every time of life has its joys:children, for example, like playing at ball with a bladder. Barclayaltered this to observe how games vary not with one's age but withthe seasons. He lengthened the account of ball-playing and added twoother activities, one in summer and one in early spring:

Loke in the stretes beholde the little boyes Howe in fruite seasonfor 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 manmay them beholde. They have great pleasour, supposing well to dine, Whenmen be busied in killing of fat swine. They get the bladder and blowe itgreat and thin With many beanes or peasen put within; It ratleth,soundeth and shineth clere and fayre When it is throwen and caste vp inthe ayre. Eche one contendeth and hath a great delite With foote andwith hande the bladder for to smite . . .(81)

Accidentally or instinctively, Barclay seems to have identified threeof the main peaks of children's activity. The periods he mentions -Lent, the fruit season and the time when pigs were killed (usually inNovember) - all figure in that respect in other sources.

The first of these seasons, Lent, was preceded by Shrove Tuesday inFebruary or early March, depending on the date of Easter, to which itwas tied. Shrove Tuesday was a date of special importance in thechildren'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 toschoolboys, but it is not clear whether this reflects reality or simplythe better survival of records relating to schools. According to theearliest major witness, William FitzStephen, describing what happened inLondon at the end of the twelfth century, "Every year, on the daycalled Carnilevaria, boys from the schools bring fighting cocks to theirmaster, and the whole forenoon is given up to boyish sport; for theyhave a holiday in the schools that they may watch their cocks dobattle".(82) The practice continued throughout the later MiddleAges. It seems to have taken place in the morning, as FitzStephenasserts, and the birds (dead or alive) seem to have been appropriated bythe boys' schoolmasters. At Gloucester School in 1400, it wasagreed that fifteen cocks should be sent to the priory of St Oswaldwhich had a claim over the school - showing that the bodies were arecognized perquisite.(83) At Ely School in the fifteenth century, thefighting was set as a topic for Latin verse composition and a poemsurvives 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 sporthim with the children".(85) Only with the approach of theReformation did the custom begin to fall out of favour with some adults.John Colet forbade cock-fighting in his statutes of 1518 for StPaul's School, London, and this was copied at Hugh Oldham'sfoundation, Manchester Grammar School, in 1525.(86)

Cock-fighting is not the only physical activity recorded during theLenten season. According to FitzStephen, Shrove Tuesday was also a dayfor 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 amuch-frequented game of ball. The scholars of each school have their ownball, and almost all the workers of each trade have theirs also in theirhands. EIder men and fathers and rich citizens come on horseback towatch the contests of their juniors, and after their fashion are youngagain with the young.(87)

The London battles of 1400 happened in Lent and those of 1554 were inMarch, nearly all of which fell within Lent that year. Barclay, as wehave seen, associated tops (another outdoor activity) with the season,and one wonders if this was a conscious reflection of the scourging ofJesus or of penitent sinners, and encouraged as such by adults. In 1520,the city council of York ordered men to prevent their childrendisturbing the peace by sounding clappers on Maundy Thursday and GoodFriday. On these days, it was customary to summon people to church withportable clappers, not bells - a practice which the junior population inYork apparently took to extremes!(88) Clearly, Lent was an appropriatetime for physical play because it came with drier ground and longerdays, but it is possible that the fasting and solemnity of the periodwas itself a factor, causing a restlessness which found an outlet ingames, battles and naughtiness. In what they did in Lent, childrenpartly accorded with, and partly disorganized, the calendar of theirelders.

A second peak of activity accompanied the fruit and harvest season,from about June to September. Here, food was an important object. Manyreferences testify to the liking of medieval children for fruit,especially apples and pears - no doubt reflecting a diet restricted insugar - and the enjoyment of them (licitly or illicitly) may have beenpopular in summer and early autumn. The English "LuttrellPsalter" of 1335-40 has a marginal illustration of a boy up a tree,apparently picking cherries, with an angry man beneath.(89) In the samevein, the poet Lydgate confessed to stealing apples in his youth,sparing neither hedge nor wall,(90) and Wanton in Mundus et Infans vowsthat when going to school:

Some good-man's garden I will assay Pears and plums topluck.(91)

Nutting too was popular. One of the miracles of Henry VI, relating tothe late fifteenth century, tells how Joan Barton of Leicestershire,aged nine, was accidentally injured while looking for filberts in agarden 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 arecognized holiday, and they presented some of their spoils to theheadmaster and fellows.(93) By about 1600, Holy Cross Day (14 September)is mentioned as a day of general nutring in England.(94) A furtherfood-based custom, roasting beans, is also mentioned in the collectionof Henry's miracles. A house at Berkhamsted, Herts., was nearlyburnt by a nearby bonfire on the Sunday before St Matthew's Day (21September), but was saved by the dead king's intervention. Thefire, says the miracle collector, was the result of a children'sgame (puerorum ludo), "for children are accustomed in the autumn toburn beans or peas in their stalks, so that they may eat them halfburnt".(95)

The third period of excitement unfolded as winter approached. Theopening day of November, All Saints' Day, was an important stage inthis respect, apparently being seen as the start of winter. The killingof animals traditionally began on this day, providing bladders for ballgames, and may thereby have opened the football season.(96) In church,the liturgy of the day began to sound the theme of Advent. At SalisburyCathedral, the liturgical model for churches in southern England, thetext known as the respond which followed the eighth lesson at matinsreferred to the wise virgins awaiting the coming of the bridegroom, andwas sung by choristers with their hoods up "in the manner of virginwomen".(97) By accident or design, this liturgical impersonationintroduced the season when boys, both in and out of church, dressed upas other people, sang songs and asked for money or food. The practicewas followed (perhaps to varying extents in different places) on AllSaints' 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, theirpatron.(98) The festival, much more than All Saints' Day, wasmarked by licensed "role reversal". A boy was chosen as bishopand other boys as his clerks. They put on clerical garments, travelledround the neighbourhood, administered blessings and solicited gifts.Most of this took place in streets and houses, but on 28 December, theboy-bishop reappeared in church and took a leading part in the liturgy.At Salisbury, he was formally installed in the choir at vespers on theafternoon of the 27th. He led the services and gave the blessing.(99) Insome places he preached a sermon, two of which survive from the Tudorera.(100)

Holy Innocents' Day had further extraneous customs. Specialbreakfasts and dinners were held for the bishop, his entourage and otherpeople. Parties went round the streets as on St Nicholas's Day,presenting gloves to worthies, repeating the blessings and gatheringmoney. Indeed, the fact that the term "St Nicholas'sclerks" eventually came to mean robbers suggests that the boys didnot lack persistence! There was adult involvement in all this, in thatmen stage-managed the liturgy, helped provide the feasts, and sometimestook part in the extra-mural processions. At Exeter Cathedral, forexample, the canons' servants went round with the boys.(101) In theparishes, however, where there were few clergy or church servants, theboys may have been less supervised, like Guy Fawkes collectors or carolsingers today. When the Reformation came, the season of impersonationfell foul of new definitions of superstitious practices. A royalproclamation of 1541 sought to abolish the observances on 6 and 28December and on the feasts of St Clement and St Catherine (23 and 25November). On these days, complained the proclamation, "children bestrangelye decked and apparelid to counterfaite priestes, bysshopps andwomen, and so ledde with songes and daunces from house to house,bleasing the people and gatherynge of monye" - a practice itforbade.(102) The abolition seems to have been most successful inrespect of 6 and 28 December, which were church-based and thereforesusceptible to control. On 23 and 25 November, when the festivitieslargely took place outside, boys continued to wander about singing andasking for money or food until the nineteenth century.(103)

The schools had a calendar of their own, affecting a smaller numberof children, chiefly boys. Schools, then as now, seem to have operated asystem of three terms - Michaelmas, Christmas and Easter - and there arereferences in school-books to the starting and ending of these. Thisrhythm may have produced its own calendar customs. Sir Keith Thomas hasdrawn attention to the practice, after the Reformation, of schoolboysmarking special holidays like Shrove Tuesday by a real or mock exclusionof the master from school.(104) I have found only one pre-Reformationallusion to this custom of "barring-out", which occurs in aLatin and English poem or song from a late fifteenth- or earlysixteenth-century school-book of unknown provenance. It starts with abold, even threatening, stanza in Latin:

Ante finem termini baculum portamus: Capud hostiarii frangeredebemus; 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 theusher's [deputy master's] head! If the master asks us where weare going, we reply to him briefly, "That's not for you toknow".)

This is followed, however, by a series of petitions in Latin andEnglish, in which the master is flattered by being called a nobleteacher and requested to terminate school:

O pro nobilis doctor, now we youe pray Ut velitis concedere to gyffehus leve to play . . .; Ergo nos rogamus, hartly and holle, Ut isto diepossimus to brek upe the scole.(105)

It would be unwise to assert that barring-out did not exist in theMiddle Ages, since we know so little of the details of school life. Butif the lack of references to it reflects the real situation, it may bethat barring-out was less called for before the Reformation becauseschools were more varied in their timetables. The year was punctuated byfestivals involving holidays; masters were usually self-employed and mayhave been indulgent about suspending lessons. After the Reformation,festivals decreased. More schools were endowed and regulated bystatutes, and the school year became more fixed and rigid. Barring-outmay have been a response to this change.

The relationship of children to adults within the calendar seems toresemble the relationship within games. Much was common to the twogroups, in this case the adaptation of activity to the seasons of natureand the celebration of the major festivals. Young and old might jointogether at meals (it seems to have been the practice, at least in uppersociety, for children to say grace at the table),(106) or in sometheatrical performances. Equally, the age-groups separated. Adults hadself-contained activities relating to the drama and to fund-raising;children had their own distinctive roles in November and December and atShrovetide. Less officially, but more widely, children gathered food and(perhaps) lit their own bonfires. As in their games, they retained theability to act independently of parents and masters.

IV VISIONS

In the history of toys, games and children's organizations wedepend very much on what we are told by adults. What have children toldus about themselves? One apparent source is to be found in visions,usually in relation to the cults of saints. It begins early on. Bede inhis Ecclesiastical History tells of a young boy (puerulus) dying of theplague in the monastery of Selsey, Sussex, who saw and reported a visionof Sts Peter and Paul dressed in rich clothes, who foretold his deaththat day but the survival of everyone else in the community.(107) Anumber of similar instances could be collected from miracle literatureup to the late fifteenth century. They originate from boys and girlsalike, but they have been written up by adults and they relate to arather narrow range of subjects. Usually, the child (like Bede's)sees beautiful dignified figures, very much as he or she would haveencountered them in art. Less often, the vision was sinister, like thatclaimed by a boy of about eleven at Cambridge in 1462. Walking at duskin the lane between King's College and Clare Hall, he saw an oldman with a long beard and poor clothing from whom he wished to flee butcould not. He was told to return the next night to receive news; on thesecond night he was warned to come back on the third. Finally, the oldman condescended to reveal his message: the onset of more pestilence,famine and death than anyone living had known. Questioned by a doctor oftheology and others, the boy said that he did not see the figure walkingon the ground, and the conclusion was that he had met a spirit.(108)

A few of these visions are more bizarre, suggesting mentaldisturbance. One such case occurs among the miracles of St Thomas ofHereford, collected in the early fourteenth century. Christian Nevenonof Inglethorpe, Norfolk, a puella (girl) perhaps in her teens, was vexedfor five years by a devil who promised her gifts to sleep with him, butwas kept at bay when she made the sign of the cross. One day, he tookher to a lovely place and showed her wonders, including a table withdelectable food, but she escaped again by crossing herself, though shelater fell ill and became paralysed - a condition from which she wasfreed by the saint.(109) The chronicle of Thomas Walsingham of St Albansrelates the case of a youth or young man (iuvenis) of the household ofWilliam, Lord Greystoke, who was riding through a field of wheat in1343. The wheat rippled like the sea and out of it peered the head of asmall red man (homunculus). The more the rider watched him, the more hegrew in stature. He seized the youth's bridle and led him throughthe wheat to a beautiful lady attended by many damsels. She ordered himto be put down from his horse, lacerated in his skin and flesh, andflayed. Then, cutting open his skull, she took out his brain, and closedup the head again. She had the youth put back upon his horse and senthim away. As a result, he grew insane and had to be chained up, but hisgirlfriend stayed faithful to him and led him to many shrines to curehim. At last, after six years of misery, he had a dream at Beverley inwhich he saw the beautiful lady again. Once more, she opened his headbut this time she put back the brain. Restored to sanity, he married thegirl and they had fifteen sons; after she died, he took holy orders andbecame the rector of a parish. There was a sequel to the story. Whilethe rector was celebrating mass and elevating the host, the red man cameonce more and surrendered his power. "Your keeper now", hesaid, "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 edgeof a pit at Woolpit near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, human in form,wearing clothes and with a green tinge to their skins. Cryinginconsolably, they were taken to the house of a nearby knight where theyrefused food until beanstalks were brought; these they wanted to eat,but had to be shown how to find the beans inside. The boy, apparentlythe younger of the two, languished and soon died, but the girl survived.She grew accustomed to a normal diet and lost her original colour. Dulybaptised, she entered the service of the knight and eventually gotmarried at King's Lynn. They may have been orphans from thebackwoods who lived wild and became anaemic through lack of a balanceddiet, but the girl told a different story. When she was asked about theland she came from, she said that its people were green and that therewas no sun but a glow in the sky like that which comes after sunset. Oneaccount of her story adds that the land was that of St Martin and thepeople were Christians; it was not far from our country, but was partedfrom 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 wentthrough the cavern and discovered a path into our world, but could notfind the way to return. Unfortunately, it is impossible to trace backthe story with certainty to the girl or to adult invention. It isattached to a child and it claims to be a child's own story but, asso 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 befound in school-books: anthologies of Latin and English texts andexercises studied in grammar schools.(112) Several dozen such bookssurvive from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, some of whichappear to have been compiled by or for schoolmasters or by young adultssuch as monks, but many by schoolboys in their teens and perhaps evenyounger. The school-book grew out of individual quires of paper on towhich the writer copied the standard grammatical texts and poems of theschool curriculum, together with his working notes and exercises. It wastherefore a personal anthology and could be used to jot down names ofownership, pen-trials, private memoranda, scraps of songs or poems, andscribbles like "I am a good boy, and so and so is a bad one".This unofficial material is interesting, but it requires carefulhandling. We need to be sure that it was written when the writer was aschoolboy, not later in life like the similar material which survives inadult commonplace-books. We have to be able to judge the origin of thematerial. A phrase such as "Ego sum bonus puer quem deus amat"("I am a good boy whom God loves") may look like aschoolboy's own attempt at expressing himself in Latin, but itoccurs in several manuscripts and was evidently a well-known phrase. Theboy may have identified himself with it, but he did not invent it.

The main interest of school-books for our purposes lies in theexercises: short Latin passages of a sentence or two, sometimes withEnglish translations. Such passages were known as latins (latinitates)or, when accompanied by English, as vulgars (vulgaria). Between the1480s and the 1530s, four English schoolmasters - John Anwykyll, WilliamHorman, John Stanbridge and Robert Whittinton - published collections ofvulgaria for schools, similar in form to those of the school-books.(113)As usual, there are problems with this kind of evidence. Some schoolexercises were certainly set by the master, like the four printedcollections. Others may have been the pupils' own invention, butthis cannot be demonstrated for certain. Their relevance lies not intheir origin, therefore, but in their substance. Masters composed theexercises (or allowed pupils to compose them) with reference to thekinds of things that would interest their pupils and keep them attachedto their work. Topics were chosen which related to the schoolroom, thepupils and the everyday world outside the school doors. These rangedfrom family life to trades, occupations and political matters like theking or war. Food is frequently referred to, no doubt because itintroduced further Latin vocabulary, but also implying the penchant ofpupils for eatables, especially of festive and seasonal kinds. There arereferences to animals, to hunting and to games like Horman'scherry-stones. Most precious are the bits of oral culture: sayings,riddles and poems or songs current among the young. Whether thismaterial got in because the master collected it (as a kind of earlyfolklorist) or because the material was suggested by the pupil(s) is notclear, but it is there and it feels authentic, not artificial.

The content of school-books comes rernarkably close to the materialcollected by Iona and Peter Opie in The Oxford Dictionary of NurseryRhymes (1951) and The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959). Inthese books, the Opies examined the oral culture of children in recenttimes 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". Thereis abuse and foul language. There are incantations and ceremonies. Thereare allusions to public events, to sex and to the supernatural -especially ghosts. Nearly all these categories are represented in thefifteenth-century school-books, and they provide an earlier body ofevidence than has been hitherto available on these topics - perhaps theearliest body that exists in England. Even texts which we know to haveemanated from masters, like the printed vulgaria, are often remarkablyschoolboyish, which is one of the reasons why it is hard to distinguishbetween the influence of master and pupil. Somehow much that was currentamong schoolboys seems to have found its way into the school-books,though there is also much that comes from adults such as proverbs, moraladmonitions and religious references. This adult material is excludedfrom the present study, for fear that it represents an alien ingredient.

Let us look at some of these categories in more detail. Children liketricks of language - puns, puzzles, tongue-twisters and riddles - andthis was encouraged in schools as a way of commanding their sympathy. ALincoln manuscript contains a tongue-twister in English, with a Latintranslation:

Thre gray gredy geys [geese] Fliyng over three greyn gresy furs[furrows]; The geys was gray and gredy; The furs was greyn andgresy.(114)

Similar words occur in tongue-twisters collected orally during thethe nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Riddles were popular withchildren, as they were with adults, and some school-books have smallcollections of them. This ancient example comes from a group of seven inLatin, 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, acounting-out rhyme or a taboo avoiding the word "four", whichis the answer:

On feler then [one more than] thre and fewer than fyvy [five] Y haddevpon 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, onepresumes, by the master but they must also have been expected to appealto the pupils:

Al pi pen ca bas tot [nas?] habet quot habet grus

runs a jumble of Latin syllables, found at Barlinch, Somerset. It hasto be unscrambled, and the answer is supplied in the text:

Pica habet tot albas pennas quot habet grus. (The magpie has as manywhite feathers as the grouse.)(117)

A Devon school-book contains the following:

??

This can be solved by dodging between the lines and repeating thesyllables. Two lines are then produced:

Pastorum rumpas pasture reprime metas Iudice celorum rumpetur turmamalorum,

with the rough meaning "Put back the broken boundaries of theherdsmen's pasture" and "The troops of the wicked arebroken apart by the iudge of the heavens".(118) Finally, there isnonsense and the Opies' category of "tangletalk". Thisexample also comes from Devon:

Iij heddelyse men playd at ball, I heddelyse man servit themall.(119)

It is a variant of something found in longer form in an adultcollection of songs from the fifteenth century:

I saw iij hedles playen at a ball, An hanlas [handless] man servedhem [them] all; Whyll iij mouthles men lay and low [laughed], Iij leglesa-way hem drow [drew them].(120)

Versions of the same rhyme, and similar rhymes, occur inchildren's folklore down to the present day.(121) They are not adhoc inventions but were handed down and became widely current. As thetexts of the "headless men" demonstrate, they circulated amongadults as well as children.

Learning language, as Caliban found, enables the learner to curse.Moralists, especially in the sixteenth century, criticized the verbalrudeness of children (especially boys) and its toleration by theirparents. If they call their mother "whore" or their father"cuckold", wrote a schoolmaster about 1500, the parents laughand treat it as a joke.(122) The school-books confirm that abuse waspopular, and show us some of the terms and forms employed. It could takethe form of scribbling on someone else's pages. The school-book ofWalter Pollard, a Devon schoolboy, contains (not in his ownhandwriting):

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. Thewords employed suggest that the schoolboys adopted many of the abusiveterms 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". Moreelaborately, a simile could be used, as at Oxford, "His nose islike a shoynge horne",(124) or in this example from Barlinch:

Tu es instar suis que duodecim porcellos vberelactat. (You are like asow suckling twelve piglets.)(125)

Once or twice, we come across short rhymes of the kind that pupilsmay have chanted at each other, with the formula "I have somethingnice, and you have something nasty". This one occurs in themorality play Mankind, but is presented there as if it were said in aschool:

I have etun a dyschfull of curdys, And I have schetun [shitten] yowrmowth full of turdys.(126)

Another, from Barlinch, is in Latin, but it is followed by oneEnglish phrase which suggests that the starting-point was a verse inEnglish:

Ego habebo scuticam, tu habebis petuitam. Ego habebo rosam et tuhabebis catarrum.

Y woll have the wypp [and you will have the pip (disease). I willhave the rose and you will have a snotty nose.](127)

In all this there is one thing missing: swear-words involving God. Asthese were common in society, the school seems to have filtered themout. In practice, boys must have known and often have used them.

Adults directed abuse at groups of people whom they disliked, andschoolboys picked up similiar prejudices. A Winchester school-booklambasts friars, animal-wardens, publicans and shoemakers:

A fox and a fullymert [polecat], a frere and a haywarde, Stondynge ona rowe, A tapyster stondyng ther by, The best of the company ys an oldeschrewe.(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 Weshall turn ther arse agayne the wynde For [they] stynke lykedogges.(129)

Another, from Lincoln, has a fragment of a song against the Scotswhich can be reconstructed with the help of the Latin. It seems to havebeen inspired or revived by the defeat of the Scottish force in Franceat 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 thuthederward, And on the wyyld wenyng com thu hamward; Ther was thu castynin 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 homein the waning (both unlucky times). They were thrown as in awrestling-match, metaphorically breaking their necks.

A contrary mood altogether, verging on sentimentality, is noticeablein the treatment of birds and animals. Most school exercises have a gooddeal to say on this subject - presumably reflecting the ubiquity of petsand livestock and the liking of boys for fowling. One from Winchesterhas noises for speaking to animals, "Hye dog hy", "schowehenne schowe".(131) Another from Lincoln mentions "Copyl ourheyn" (i.e., Copple, or little top, the hen's name), and a dogwith white feet or one named Whitefeet.(132) A third has several linesabout the jay. It looks at first sight like a popular rhyme, but mayhave been specially written to incorporate Latin terms for animalnoises:

At my house I have a jay He can make mony diverse leye He can barkingas a fox He can lowe as a noxe He can crecu as a gos He can remy as anasse in his cracche He can croden as a froge He can barken as a dogg Hecan cheteron as a wrenne He can chateryn as a henne He canne neye as astede; Such a byrde yt were wode to fede.(133)

A Bristol manuscript contains a verse reminiscent of "Who KilledCock 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 ofa fable:

Harys and voxys, myys and rattys, Prayed reremys [bats], fiyys andgnattis That they schold arme ham with olde mattis To vese [drive] outof towne hondys and cattis.(135)

A fourth, from north-east Wales, goes further. It has three similarfour-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 withhelmet and armour, the second describes the hare putting on her shoesand awaiting the hounds, while the third portrays the miller followed byhens (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 livedin a society interested in magic and ghosts. Officially, a school mightdistance itself from such things, as at Exeter:

A general rumour is spreading among the people that the spirits ofthe air, invoked by necromantic art to find mines of gold, silver andazure, and other treasures in hidden places, have appeared in bodilyform, stirring up great tempests in the air which are not yet over, itis believed, nor yet allayed.(137)

A Winchester pupil, on the other hand, could allude to (and perhapseven 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 havegoddys curse: The wyche dowghter and hurse,(138)

while a Bristol school-book has a sentence which looks like the sortof 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 asthose which aimed to give you positive knowledge. One of the latteroccurs in a Norfolk school-book:

Yf thu wyl know ho [who] haw stole thi godis, wryth this letterys invirgyn wax and put under thin hed, and he xal [shall] aperyn in thislepe that hat[h] thi godis.

The letters to be written are "de. so. an & s b sfallacio".(140)

The world of adulthood cast shadows, too, in the matters of love andsex. Love is represented in three short verses in a Winchestermanuscript. The first two look like scraps of popular songs, though thelast, with its quadruple rhyme, may be an ad hoc piece by the master orpupil:

Wedde me Robyn and brynge me home; Haue I owght, have I nowght, thanI am a dame.(141)

Flowres in myn herber, Thay growe grene; But yff my ladye luff mewele, My dogge wylle dye for tene [grief].(142)

Undyrnethe a lover [louvre] Pluckyde I a plover; Goo to Johane GloverAnd sey that I love her By the lyghte of the mone; See that hit be soodoon.(143)

These, it might be argued, are stray bits of adult culture and tellus nothing of pupils' views of love, but sex undoubtedly found itsway into schoolboys' lives even in school, where the masteradmitted it either to teach morality or simply because of itspopularity. A scholar at Barlinch wrote: "Si sis vir fortis non destua robora scortis" ("If you are a strong man, do not giveyour powers to whores"),(144) and Stanbridge made boys translate"He lay with a harlot al nyght".(145) The most adventurous inthis respect was William Horman, headmaster first of Eton, then ofWinchester. His Vulgaria include a whole section on vices and impropermanners, in which a pupil might learn that "a comen woman lyveth byher body" and elegantly render into Latin "an excedyngestronge hore". He would learn of men who "defloured manywomen", "kepeth other mennys wyves", "gropethuncleanly children and maydens" and even keep a "suster openlyas she had be his true wedded wyfe".(146) There is a similaropenness about the lavatory. Stanbridge's Vulgaria, published in1509, includes such sentences as "I go to syege" (i.e., to siton the latrine) and "I am almost beshytten".(147) True, thisis the material of lessons, not pupils' private talk. Its interestis that it suggests fewer brakes upon such talk, less need forfurtiveness, than was the case in later centuries.

A modern observer might also wish to ask what attitudes schoolboyshad to authority and to social ranks. Obviously, they understood suchthings; playing at lords or armies implies a sympathy with the world inwhich they existed. In the school setting, boys were under the controlof a master who levied corporal punishment. Beating is a frequentsubject in school exercises, though it is often treated humorously - apoint worth noting, though one which also ignores the fear and paininvolved. At the same time, school exercises imagine the animosity ofpupils against their masters, the wish for revenge and the evasion ofcontrol through playing truant. There is a small genre ofschoolboys' songs like the end-of-term example, whose authorship(adult or child)is impossible to establish, in which the schoolmasterand usher are threatened with violence for their tyranny.(148) Attitudesto social ranks are less clear. School-books sometimes mention thewealth and rank of imaginary pupils and their parents, who can rangefrom a squire and landholder to poorer struggling people, but the booksdo not pursue the matter. This may reflect the fact that grammar schoolstook their pupils from a relatively narrow range of ranks (gentry,citizens, yeomanry and poorer boys with more important patrons), or thatschoolmasters wished to avoid disputes over social ranking. Perhaps forthe same reason, bullying is not much mentioned, though an Exeterschool-book mentions having one's clothes torn by bad boys and anOxford one describes how a scholar was mugged in the city at dusk.(149)The material of the books probably does insufficient justice to thesnobberies 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 variegatedmass of short verses, some invented for use with children, others takenfrom adult songs or writings of the day. The Opies, who have collectedand studied this material in The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes andThe Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, have analysed the various kinds ofrhymes: infant amusements, counting-out formulae, practical verse,tongue-twisters, riddles, popular songs, political squibs and soon.(150) Although most of the nursery rhymes current in the nineteenthand twentieth centuries cannot be traced before 1600, the Opies made thereasonable conjecture that similar rhymes existed in the Middle Agestoo. The riddles "Two legs sat on three legs" and "Whitebird featherless" are found in Latin during the eighth and tenthcenturies, while "I have a young sister", "Thirty dayshath September", and an analogue of the mock-Latin "Infirtaris" occur in English texts of the fifteenth.(151) Theschool-books support this view. Coming from the world of older boys,they are not direct evidence of the rhymes told to or spoken by thosewho were younger. The only rhymes which we can postulate being used withvery young children are lullabies, and most of these do not survive intheir original form but merely as a motif in adult poetry.(152)Nevertheless, the school-books show that the kind of material found innursery rhymes after 1600 was current among older boys, with elements ofamusement, mystery and romance which would have been assimilable byyounger children. What has not yet been found, curiously, is much in theway of the miniature stories with human characters which make up so manynursery rhymes, like "Humpty Dumpty", "Jack andJill", "Little Bo-peep" and "Jack Horner".There seems no reason why such stories should not have existed, but sofar nothing closer to them has been found than "Flowres in mynHerber", "Joan Glover" and the miller in "TheCricket and the Grasshopper".

VI CONCLUSION

How distinctive, then, was children's culture in medievalEngland? There were few striking differences of content from the cultureof adult life. Language, once it was mastered, seems to have been commonto children and adults, though there may of course have been slang orprivate usages particular to the young. An interest in jokes and puzzleswas shared by both groups and the same was true of games, the majorityof which were played by people of many ages. Then as now, toys were themost distinctive possessions of children, but even these had adultanalogues. Both cultures were complex rather than simple. Just as adultlife encompassed piety and anticlericalism, romantic love and fabliausatire, so children could move swiftly from religious to non-religiousactivities on St Nicholas's Day or practise cruelty to animalswhile holding sentimental views about them. Adults and children wereoften 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 shareof the proceeds, as in the fund-raising. Thus far, we have to agree withAries. But he has not given sufficient weight to the times when adultsand children did things separately. Records like those of coroners andmiracles confirm the view of Trevisa that medieval children liked towander away from their elders and have adventures with one another. Theywere capable of planning some major exploits and many petty onesindependently of, or against, their elders. The culture of children alsodiffered in its resources. Children were weaker physically, lessexperienced, more poorly provided with money or tools, and less able tocommunicate over long distances. An army of boys was limited in effectcompared with a force of men.

It is less easy to chart the variations in children's cultureaccording to region, gender and social rank. The Opies have been able todemonstrate what is common and regional in the children's cultureof the twentieth century, but the information available before 1550 isinsufficient to show what varied locally. In the case of gender andrank, the material is heavily biased in favour of boys, and wealthierboys 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 andliterate culture, but not necessarily a narrower one. They had access tothe resources of streets and workshops and, perhaps, a greater freedomto roam and have adventures. Girls figure chiefly in terms of dolls andgames of the less strenuous kinds, but coroners' records hint atmore active play which medieval observers - to our disappointment -failed or refused to notice.(153) The chronology of cultural change isalso indistinct within the later Middle Ages. We do not know enough tosay how children's culture developed from one century to another.Change is clearer in the longer perspective, when we compare the culturethen with culture today. The culture of medieval English childrendiffered in its context: the social system and the standard of living.Equally, it shared important elements with our culture. Childhood hascertain constants - play, imitation and physical weakness. Medievalchildren, like ours, were inventive in making things for themselves.Then as now they formed groups and had adventures, and although theirformal games often differed from ours in terms of rules and equipment,there was a similar framework of skills and objectives. Manufacturedtoys were already available. Children's rhymes and folklore, as theOpies have shown, have endured in similar forms (as opposed to precisedetails) over many centuries. The calendar customs of the later MiddleAges are most distinctively different. These underwent some modificationin the sixteenth century when the boy-bishop disappeared andcock-fighting came under disapproval, but most of them (includingcock-fighting) continued in the same or similar forms down to thenineteenth century. On the whole, the children's culture of thelater Middle Ages seems to differ from ours in details rather than inprinciples. It is also linked to ours by evolution, not dissociated.What we have studied does not suggest that a concise date or even aperiod will ever be defined at which a medieval culture of childrenturned into a modern one.

Nicholas Orme University of Exeter

1 On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa's Translation ofBartholomaeus Anglicus, De Proprietatibus Rerum, ed. M. C. Seymour etal., 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, entriesindexed under "Aries"; B. Hanawalt, Growing Up in MedievalLondon (New York, 1993), pp. 7-8, 89.

5 Another important aspect, religion, is treated in a separatearticle: Nicholas Orme, "Children and the Church in MedievalEngland", 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 andPlayground (Oxford, 1969); I. and P. Opie, The Singing Game (Oxford,1985); Keith Thomas, Rule and Misrule in the Schools of Early ModernEngland (Stenton Lectures, ix, Reading, 1976); Keith Thomas,"Children in Early Modern England", in Gillian Avery and JuliaBriggs (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 theProperties of Things, ed. Seymour et al., i, pp 300-2; and WilliamFitzStephen in the passages cited at nn. 54, 82 and 87 below.

8 On this subject, see Nicholas Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry: TheEducation 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 worthconsulting, is Joseph Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People ofEngland, ed. William Hone (London, 1876), esp. pp. 485-513. W. Endreiand L. Zolnay, Fun and Games in Old Europe (Budapest, 1986), is alsouseful. On the archaeology of toys, see Geoff Egan, Base-Metal Toys(Finds Research Group, 700-1700, datasheet x, Oxford, [1985]); GeoffEgan, The Medieval Household (Museum of London, Finds from MedievalExcavations in London ser., London, forthcoming); Martin Biddle, Objectand Economy in Medieval Winchester, 2 vols (Winchester Studies, vii,Oxford, 1990), ii, pp. 692-709. For European analogies, see Jan Baart etal., Opgravingen in Amsterdam (Haarlem, 1977), pp. 452-71; Pierre Richeand 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 ThyrdeEpistles 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 ExeterCathedral", 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 MedievalWinchester, ii, p. 706.

23 O.E.D., s. vv. "top", "scopperil"; for apicture 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 fromOxford in about 1500: Nicholas Orme, Education and Society in Medievaland Renaissance England (London, 1989), p. 136.

26 Hilda Johnstone, "The Wardrobe and Household of Henry Son ofEdward 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 Richeand 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 Streetand 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 EmilyAllen (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, newedn (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 atthe Whitefriars, Coventry, c.1545 - c.1557/8", Post-MedievalArchaeology, 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'sbuff); 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. Robertsonand 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, DisputedPleasures: Sport and Society in Preindustrial England (New York, 1991),has several references to these games, though early records often failto 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 EdwardI", 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. in12 (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. (RollsSer., 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 thatBound, 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 Angliaeregis 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 ofFolklore", Past and Present, no. 148 (Aug. 1995), pp. 89-116.

80 The Macro Plays, ed. Mark Eccles (Early Eng. Text Soc., originalser., 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 EnglishGrammatical 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 theCounty 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 SelectCollection 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 inMedieval England", pp. 18-20; Hutton, Rise and Fall of MerryEngland, pp. 53-4; Shulamith Shahar, "The Boy Bishop's Feast:A Case Study in Church Attitudes towards Children in the High and LateMiddle Ages", in The Church and Childhood, ed. Diana Wood (Studiesin Church Hist., xxxi, Oxford, 1994), pp. 243-60.

99 Breviarium ad usum insignis ecclesiae Sarum, ed. Procter andWordsworth, i, cols. ccxxix-ccxlv.

100 J. G. Nichols, "Two Sermons Preached by the BoyBishop", 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 theCathedral (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 (probably20 November) as one of these disguising festivals: Chambers, MedicevalStage, 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 Reliquiaeantiquae, 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 EcclesiasticalHistory 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, ActaSanctorum, 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, withslightly different details: Ralph of Coggeshall, Ghronicon Anglicanum,ed. J. Stevenson (Rolls Ser., London, 1875), pp. 118-20; William ofNewburgh, 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 GrammaticalTexts, passim; Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and RenaissanceEngland, 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 GrammaticalTexts, 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 apuzzle rather than a list of word-elements.

118 Thomson, Descriptive Catalogue of Middle English GrammaticalTexts, p. 300.

119 S. B. Meech, "A Collection of Proverbs in Rawlinson MS D328", 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 GrammaticalTexts, 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. EdwardWilson (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 rhymesarrow-barrow-harrow: The Early English Carols, ed. R. L. Greene, 2nd edn(Oxford, 1977), p. 289.

135 Thomson, Descriptive Catalogue of Middle English GrammaticalTexts, p. 146.

136 Ibid., p. 117, printed in Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVthCenturies, 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 GrammaticalTexts, 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 claimedthat girls played football in Udine: Peter Burke, "The Invention ofLeisure in Early Modern Europe", Past and Present, no. 146 (Feb.1995), p. 145.