I can’t tell you how great it feels to be writing a blogpost now. The last two weeks have been absolutely hectic for me with the PGCE and my mental health has taken a toll for the worse. But now I’m ahead with my lesson planning and have realised that I’m doing very well in the taught part of the course, I can sit down and write a blogpost. Given my current focus in life is “education, education, education” to quote Tony Blair (honestly though, with the possible exception of last year, when has it ever been otherwise), lets return to Guibert and have look at his education
But first, lets hear a bit about his birth and early upbringing.
As I said in the previous post, Guibert’s parents were from the lower rungs of
the Northern French warrior aristocracy. I also mentioned that Guibert and his
mother were very close, if not in an entirely healthy way and that he struggled
to relate or sympathise with his father, who was a knight. Guibert remarks
eloquently in his autobiography that “in two sense of the word I was the last
of her children” – Guibert was the youngest out of his several brothers and
sisters, and by the time he wrote his autobiography in the 1110s, when he was
in his sixties, he was the only one of them left alive. Guibert also says that
he was his mother’s favourite child, though he doesn’t try and make himself out
as special for it – “aren’t mothers usually more affectionate with their last
born.” Guibert also imagines his mother watching over him lovingly in Heaven,
as well as sighing with despair whenever he strays from the path of virtue that
she set out for him.
Guibert’s mother had gone through a terrifying experience to
give birth to him. The perils of premodern childbirth are often exaggerated in
popular history. While concrete statistics from the Middle Ages can’t be obtained,
from the much better sixteenth and seventeenth century parish register evidence
it seems more likely to have been in the realm of 2 - 3 in 100 women dying in
childbirth rather than 33 in 100, as some people might imagine it to be so when
they think of “ye olden days.” In other words, you were more likely to have a couple
of women in your village or neighbourhood die in childbirth than close family
members. Still, let’s not downplay it. Death from childbirth was a real enough
and accepted possibility before modern medicine that, as we know from, again,
early modern sources, women would make plans for how their husbands would honour
their memory and their surviving children’s upbringing if something did go horribly
wrong either when they went into labour or immediately after delivery, to say
nothing of the extreme pain that would have been felt in any case in an age
before modern anaesthetics. And in the case of Guibert’s mother things almost
did go horribly wrong for her. Guibert relates them in chapter 3:
As she approached the end of her pregnancy my mother had
been in the most intense pain throughout the season of Lent. How often she
reproached me in later years for those pangs of childbirth when she saw me
straying and following the slippery downhill path! Finally Holy Saturday, the
solemn vigil of Easter, dawned. My mother was wracked with continuous pain. As
the hour of delivery approached, the pains increased, but they were presumed to
lead to a natural delivery. Then I turned around in her womb, with my head
upward. My father, his friends, members of the family, all feared for both our
lives. The child, they thought, was hastening the mother’s death; and the offspring’s
exit from the world at the very moment he was being denied an entrance to it
added to their sense of pity. On that day, except for the solemn liturgy that
is celebrated at a certain hour, the offices usually sung for members of the
household were not scheduled. The family held an urgent meeting. They rushed to
the altar of the Mother of God. To the one who was, and ever will be, the only
Virgin to give birth, they made the following vow and left it as an offering at
our Lady’s altar: if the child were male, it would be consecrated a cleric in
God’s service and hers; if the child were of the lesser sex, it would be given
over to a corresponding religious vocation.
At that moment a frail little thing came forth, looking
almost like an aborted fetus, except that it was born at term. It looked like a
most miserable being, and the only reason for rejoicing was that the mother had
been saved. The tiny human being that had just seen the light was so lamentably
frail that it looked like the corpse of a stillborn baby. The little reeds that
sprout in mid-April in this part of the country are fuller by comparison than
were my little fingers. On the same day, as I was brought to the baptismal font
– this was often related to me as a joke when I was a child, and even during my
adolescence – a woman kept rolling me from one hand to the other and saying “Do
you think this little creature is going to live? I guess mother nature never
quite finished this one. She gave him an outline more than a body.” All of
these things foreshadowed the way I am living own.
(Source: “A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert de
Nogent” edited and translated by Paul J Archambault, Pennsylvania University
Press (1996), pp 10 – 11)
This is all trademark Guibert de Nogent – gloomy and
self-deprecating, yet lively and well-written. And sure enough, the circumstances
of Guibert’s birth did set him on his general trajectory in life. Because of
that vow made when his mother was in labour, Guibert was destined for a career
in the church. Had he been a girl, he would have had to become a nun. Because
he was a boy, he therefore had to be trained up to become a priest or a monk. This
wasn’t altogether unusual in a medieval aristocratic family. Normally, though
depending on how many children there were in the family, at least one child,
male or female, would be given a religious vocation. Having one of your
children serve in a church or monastery dedicated to a powerful saint would
enable them to pray for their patron saint to petition God to have mercy on
your family’s souls and grant them a place in Heaven. In a way it was a kind of
insurance. Also, to have a relative occupy a high-enough position in the church
(a deacon, an abbot/ abbess or bishop) was always advantageous given the wealth,
authority and connections that came with those offices. A mixture of piety and
family strategies were always in the equation.
Guibert claims that his mother was most committed to this
plan for Guibert, while his father had doubts about whether a religious
vocation was the best plan for him when, as it turned out, baby Guibert wasn’t
so sickly after all. But fate intervened to keep Guibert on the path that had
been set out for him before his birth:
I was hardly born, I had scarcely learned to grasp my
rattles, when you made me an orphan, dear God, you who were my father-to-be.
Yes I was just eight months old when my physical father died: thank you so much
for having permitted this man to die in a Christian state of mind. Had he lived
he unquestionably would have tried to block the providential design you had for
me. My physical build, combined with an alacrity of spirit natural for my age,
seemed, in fact to direct me towards a worldly vocation; so nobody doubted that
my father would break the vow he had made when it came time for me to begin my
education. O good provider, you have managed a resolution that worked well for
the well-being of both of us: I was never deprived of the rudiments of your
teachings, and he never broke the oath to you.
(Source: Ibid, p 14)
Once again, we have to be careful as to whether Guibert is
being strictly truthful about all this. Not only is there the obviously parallel
with Augustine, but also it was a hugely common trope in early medieval saints’
lives, especially from the seventh and eighth centuries, to claim that the
mother was always supportive of their child’s religious vocation, whereas the father
was sceptical or outright opposed to it. The Life of St Gertrude of Nivelles,
an early Carolingian hagiography of a Merovingian-era saint, is a case in point,
and given that Guibert wrote about saints he was probably familiar with this
literature. At the same time, there’s no good reason to be dismissive of his
testimony. But anyway, Guibert’s father died in 1056 when he was only eight
months old, and so his mother, who did not remarry, was left in complete charge
of his upbringing. To give due thanks to Jesus and the Virgin Mary for saving
her life, she was insistent that her son grow up to be a monk or a priest.
If Guibert was going to be a monk or a priest, he would need
to be able to read and write, and of course that meant reading and writing in
Latin. Latin was of course not Guibert’s mother tongue, which would have been
the Picard dialect of Old French. By Guibert’s day, learning Latin wasn’t easy.
There’s a lot of debate as to when exactly the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire
evolved into the earliest versions of the modern Romance languages. But
everyone would more or less agree that this had happened everywhere by about
900, so more than a century and half before Guibert was born. Arguably, Latin
would have been in some respects easier to grasp for Guibert as Frenchman than if
he were a Dane, an Irishman or an Anglo-Saxon, given the similarity of most of
the vocabulary, but the grammar, spelling and pronunciation wouldn’t have come
naturally at all. Indeed, about 100 years before Guibert was born, an Italian
cleric and grammarian called Gunzo got mightily offended when he visited the
monastery of St Gall (in modern Switzerland) and the German monks there
corrected him for using a noun in the accusative case instead of the ablative
after a particular preposition like he was some ignoramus. Learning Latin in
the eleventh century was thus something that didn’t come naturally to anyone
(other than linguistic geniuses), just as is very much the case today. Since
this was an age before printing, it was very hard to produce large numbers of
standardised Latin textbooks, dictionaries and other indispensable teaching
tools. How much Latin anyone was able to learn, and to what standard, thus varied
a lot in the Middle Ages. On the one hand, you could find plenty of priests and
monks who only really knew enough Latin to recite prayers and hymns, draft
basic legal and administrative documents like charters and read bits of the Vulgate
Bible. On the other hand, a sizeable minority had an almost perfect knowledge
of Classical Latin and were well-versed in ancient Roman literature. Guibert
was closer to that end. He quotes Sallust and Virgil on a number of occasions
in his autobiography and he was clearly comfortable with writing in it about
deeply personal subjects. But that doesn’t mean he found learning Latin easy:
I began to study Latin. Some of the basics I learned as
best as I could, but I could hardly make sense of it. My dear mother, who
really wanted me to be a scholar, decided to turn me over to a private tutor. In
the recent past, and even during my childhood, there had been such a shortage
of teachers that you could find hardly any in the towns and really any in the
cities. When one did happen to find some, they knew so little that they couldn’t
even be compared to the wandering scholars of the present day. The man that my
mother decided to send me to had been studying grammar late in life, and he was
all the more incompetent in his art for having absorbed so little of it in his
youth. He was a very modest man, though, and he made up in honesty for what he
lacked in literary knowledge.
(Source: Ibid, p 14)
Guibert leaves it quite ambiguous as to how he received his
earliest schooling. But clearly it didn’t work very well and so he required a
private tutor if he was to get to grips with Latin grammar. Guibert speaking
about the shortage of teachers in his childhood (the 1060s) compared to at the
time of writing (the 1110s) shows just how aware he was of the huge social
changes taking place in his lifetime. This period saw a massive expansion of
secondary and higher education in Western Europe as new urban schools, typically
based in cathedrals, took shape. Some cathedral schools had existed since the
mid-ninth century, but their number greatly increased in the late eleventh and
twelfth centuries and they marked a significant change from the school system of
the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, based around royal courts and monasteries.
Why so many sprung up in this period cannot be answered here, because it would
basically mean tapping into all the major changes (political, economic, social
and cultural) taking place in the period 1060 – 1215. But its effect was that
there were more graduates around who were in need of employment. And like with
the great expansion of secondary and higher education in Britain in the period
1945 – 1970, but unlike with the post-1997 expansion, this was easily found.
That was in part because the number of local churches, which needed priests, was
growing across western Europe, but also because landed aristocracies were
growing in size across Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries alongside
the proliferation of castles, which we talked about before. It’s likely that
Guibert’s family had only been part of the knightly class for a couple of
generations before him. These aristocrats needed educated men to act as their personal
secretaries and administrators on their estates – written documents were a much
more powerful tool for squeezing higher rents out of peasant tenants than just sending
a bunch of men on horses with iron helmets and swords into the village at harvest-time,
which was why bishops and monasteries were always the most ruthlessly efficient
landlords. They also needed private tutors to educate their children, as was
the case for Guibert’s mother who was quite ahead of the curve for the 1060s.
Chartres Cathedral, home of one of the most famous schools in the eleventh and twelfth centuries
How Guibert’s mother found his tutor is a very interesting
story in itself. Of course, she didn’t leave an advert of Gumtree or visit an
online agency. Instead, having consulted her household chaplains, she headhunted
the private tutor of Guibert’s cousin. He was quite comfortable in his job –
the boy’s parents got on well with him and gave him room and board (pretty good
employment benefits). But his pedagogy, whatever its virtues, was wasted on
Guibert’s cousin:
The boy for whom he was responsible for was handsome and
aristocratic-looking, but allergic to the liberal arts, recalcitrant to any
form of discipline, and for his age quite a liar and a stealer. He could put up
with no form of supervision, seldom came to school, and could be found hiding
in the vineyard just about every day.
(Source: Ibid, p 15)
Every secondary school teacher will have encountered someone
like this boy. I have yet to personally encounter anyone like that, as someone who
is only one term into a PGCE, but at my first placement school I have regularly
heard my colleagues talking about such individuals with despair. Mutatis
Mutandis. Thus, Guibert’s mother was able to snap him up, admittedly after the
teacher had a strange dream. How did young Guibert find his new teacher? We’ll hear
more about that next time.
