Did peasants go to school in the middle ages?

Answer 1

Clearly, most medieval peasants did not go to school.

We are assured that almost no peasants were educated in the Middle Ages. I wonder about this. Pope Leo III, who crowned Charlemagne as Emperor, was from a peasant family, and obviously was not illiterate. I have found names of many schools that ran in the Middle Ages, and some were not run by the Church. Beverley Grammar School, in Yorkshire, was founded as a state supported school in 700 AD, a hundred years before Charlemagne was crowned emperor, and is still running today. And we are assured that when Charlemagne took the throne, very few people could read.

My best guess is that conventional wisdom about schooling in the Middle Ages is wrong. Nevertheless, I think most medieval peasants did not go to school.

Answer 2

Of course they did. How do you think they got from one castle to the other. Haven't you ever seen Monty Python??

Unfortunately that's only in a few cases. Largely peasants did not travel. They were tied to the land on which they sowed and rarely left their local village due to a lack of funds and lack of transport.

There were however reasons why a peasant would travel, a peasant would frequently travel in order to trade produce (although this would not a long distance). Moreover, a peasant may be forced to travel away from a village permanently, most likely as a result of public disgrace, such as a conviction of witchcraft whereby the convicted is banished from a village due to a lack of severity or the local rulers not wanting to pay for an executioner.

Answer 3

Peasants were usually not educated to read or write, and learned their skills working with family and neighbors.

There were educated peasants, however. Particularly intelligent peasant children were sometimes sent to cathedral schools or monasteries for education.

We should bear in mind that some peasants were freemen, and even serfs were much freer than a lot of people think. Both King Alfred the Great of England and Charlemagne had educational policies that aimed at educating all of freeman rank and above. Charlemagne's system was in Latin, but in the case of King Alfred's system, the education was to be in English.

There is a link below to a related question.

Answer 4

Very few boys did and almost no girls, since the only schools were run by the Church for boys who wanted to become clerics, priests or monks. Several such schools were built at Dunstable in Bedfordshire and here the famous traveller and writer Alexander Neckham taught as a master from around 1174.

Neckham had himself been educated at the Benedictine Abbey at St Albans in Hertfordshire - many Abbeys and Priories ran schools for boys interested in a life in the Church. Neckham went to Paris in 1178 to study at the university there; he returned to Dunstable to teach again, before joining the Augustinian canons at Cirencester, becoming their abbot in 1213.

So schooling was only available through the Church, either at a Church school or a monastic school, and only for boys wishing to join the Church later in their lives.

Most children learned at home, or received a very simple education from the local parish priest. This would not be much more than learning to count, and perhaps to write their own name.

Answer 5

Schools certainly existed in the middle ages, but not the kind that we have now. There was no such thing as public education, and most people never went to school or learned how to read. However universities existed in which Greek and Latin were studied, and classical texts from Greece and Rome. Theology was studied.

Answer 6

Middle Age peasants did not go to school.

Answer 7

none