There is also evidence that adolescent children read adult fiction, such as romances, the works of Chaucer, and ballads of Robin Hood. It includes works of instruction, including short works on table manners, moral precepts, and hunting, and a few stories, notably a comic tale in verse called The Friar and the Boy.
After that date, however, children’s literature begins to survive on a significant scale in the English language. Children seldom feature in literature from England before 1400, although some romances describe how their heroes and heroines were born and brought up. Secular justice developed a similar concept of an age of legal responsibility beginning at about puberty, although there are rare references to children receiving adult punishments.īy the thirteenth century scholars based in France, such as Bartholomew Glanville, Giles of Rome, and Vincent of Beauvais, were discussing childhood and children’s education in learned writings, and by the fourteenth century children were portrayed in art-especially in scenes of everyday life in illuminated manuscripts. On these grounds they were forbidden to marry, excused from confessing to a priest, and excluded from sharing in the sacrament of the eucharist. It came to regard children under the age of puberty as too immature to commit sins or to understand adult concepts and duties. The Church led the way in making distinctions between childhood and adulthood. Medieval law-makers tended to place the boundary between childhood and adulthood at puberty, coventionally 12 for girls and 14 for boys. Making laws involved arrangements for children, because they could not be expected to bear the same responsibilities and penalties as adults. Information about adult attitudes grows in the twelfth century, an age of law-making in both the Church and in lay society. Little survives about adult attitudes to children during the Anglo-Saxon period from 500 to 1066, although burials show that children were often buried with grave-goods, like adults, and that children with deformities were cared for and enabled to grow up. Life was viewed as a sequence of stages-“the ages of man.” Infancy up to the age of 7 was viewed as a time of growth, childhood from 7 to 14 as one of play, and adolescence from 14 onwards as one of physical, intellectual, and sexual development. They thought they knew how infants grew in the womb and developed and matured after they were born. Medieval people inherited ideas about human life from the classical world. There is no evidence that these deaths lessened parental affection and care for children, however, and the interest of adults in children can be traced throughout the middle ages. It has been suggested that 25% of them may have died in their first year, half as many (12.5%) between one and four, and a quarter as many (6%) between five and nine. The death rate among medieval children was high by modern standards. Demography, the study of births and deaths, shows more of its darker side. Toys give us a positive view of medieval childhood.
There is even a self-assembly kit: a cupboard cut out of a sheet of soft metal, instead of the plastic that would be used today. The finds also include toys that girls might have liked: little cups, plates, and jugs, some sturdy enough to heat up water by a fireside. It probably circulated among the families of merchants, shopkeepers, and craft workers, as well as those of the nobility and gentry. The toy knight was made from a mould, and produced in large numbers. An adult made this toy and another adult bought it for a child, or gave a child money to buy it. Then as now, adults cared for children and encouraged their play. Then as now, they had a culture of their own, encompassing slang, toys, and games. Then as now, children liked playing with toys. It was manufactured in about 1300, and illustrates several facets of medieval childhood. This toy knight comes from a rich harvest of archaeological finds, made in the mudbanks of the River Thames in London during the last 30 years.
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