Southern France too kept an higher rate of literacy than northern European regions. One reason being that southern Europe kept using Roman written law as opposed to customarily law in northern Europe. This situation resulted in a need for documents (for instance wills) and required much more people being able to read and write.
So, I don’t buy the IQ hypothesis. There’s no reason to assume that people in say, Provence had better skills for abstraction than their counterparts living some hundred kilometres to the north. That’s rather a matter of need and custom.
And I’ll answer again. I’m not talking absolutes. There was never a period when there were no sources of literacy other than clergy. But there were certainly periods when the vast majority of literate people in Europe were clergy. Or are you disputing that?
The Internet Medieval Sourcebook has snippets of relevant text from those days, dealing with literacy & teaching. No scientific survey, but it indicates that things varied widely by time & place. The King’s Mirror, c 1200, has advice for laymen below the level of nobility:
The Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough, 1279, introduces us to a noble of the old school (that is, no school at all):
Following these fascinating digressions further, I discovered this site (which questions the Chronicle’s accuracy–just not on the linked page). Again, it’s not a simple story. But the writer (a woman–& there were even literate Medieval women) mentions lay scriveners & notaries.
My wife is a professor of music history at UCLA. Her specialty is the Middle Ages and she’s done extensive manuscript work. She says:
There were just as many secular scribes as church scribes during the middle ages. However, there are a number of factors that make it seem like literacy was the exclusive province of the church. In the first place, religious manuscripts were more likely to survive. Many secular writings were business and government records. They weren’t pretty, and tended to be discarded (or the parchment scraped and reused) after they weren’t useful anymore. And what old records have survived tend not to be displayed in books or museums. Scholars like my wife use them, but they’re not the sort of thing that the general public usually sees.
Also, the prayers and scriptures didn’t change or go out of fashion. Someone might still use grandma’s old prayer book, but wouldn’t be interested in reading grandma’s old book of love poetry. So that also helped church manuscripts to have a higher survival rate than secular manuscripts.
Finally, it’s true that most working scribes were trained in church schools. But it’s not like the churches were hoarding them. If you were a nobleman and needed a scribe to keep records for you, you’d just hire a church-trained scribe to work for you.
Ah … she adds another point. She says although the scribes were trained by the church, it’s not like they had direct control over them and could keep them from doing secular work. If a young cleric announced he was going to go work for the Duke to do his bookkeeping, the local bishop didn’t have the power to stop him.
Members of the nobility learned to read if they felt like it. (Or their parents felt like it.) They were usually taught by the same church-trained clerics that were keeping their records.
This is probably true, but during the middle ages the church was not just a “spiritual” enterprise; it was in direct control of significant areas - like the Bishopric of Utrecht; a state of the Holy Roman Empire bordering with (and periodically at war with) “worldly” regions.
It’s been suggested that one of the reasons for celibacy in the Church was to prevent a hereditary power structure that could be seen as a direct challenge to the hereditary nobility - the nobles of the christian countries were already willing to fight the church over matters of borders and wealth; they weren’t going to accept a virtual or true “holy royal family” within or bordering their states. WRT the Bishopric of Utrecht, the nobles of bordering Guelders and Holland continually sought influence in the appointments of Utrecht’s bishop (who usually were sons of nobility or otherwise powerful political families).
Right, I think that even if most scribes (in a particular place and time) were trained in church schools, that doesn’t mean they were all fanatical undercover warrior-spies personally dedicated to the Pope. More like the average Boston College student, I would imagine, in their inclination to funnel secrets to the Vatican.
That’s overcomplicating it. The basic issue was practical and idealistic, with the practical side being far more about preventing a family from coming to own Church land as an inheritance, and thereby transforming it into permanent noble house. The idealistic reasons come directly from Paul, not as a theological neccessity but as a preference.
See I hate it when people do this on message boards. They just throw out bullshit in the first sentence and then base their entire message on that one false premise. Arriving at the wrong conclusion is one thing; everybody has poor reasoning at times and it’s only human. But when people just believe bullshit as a premise and they just assume they’re right and don’t spend a minute of their day wondering if maybe they’re wrong or not drives me nuts. Talk about a complete lack of any kind of intellectual curiosity.
99.5% of the people in the early Middle Ages had manual labor jobs of some kind. Most were tenant farmers under landlords (the noblemen). The people of Europe were mostly farmers who built homes and had to take care of themselves, and most were serfs who were tied to the soil by the landlord class. There was no reason for them to write anything down, nor did their very simple, primitive lives allowed much in the way of cognative thought. People back then lived a lot more on instinct and survival.
Also, the World was MUCH BIGGER a thousand years ago than today. A 100 kilometers was a great distance. You could ride your horse, if there were good roads to where you are going, (the Romans built an excellent road system for the time) but most walked, and why walk to a faraway place? Most people did not venture 10 kilometers away from home their entire lives. Some, however travelled great distances, such as traders, the Vikings, the various eastern Asiatic tribes.
The religious clergy were the ones who were educated in the scriptures and writing church doctrines. The Church and the various Kingdoms were one in the same for many centuries, so it was the religious leaders who were the educated classes and were responsible for writing and recording laws of the land, religious and civil.
The King himself (take Charlemagne for example) lived in a stone house, not a castle, but a modest sized home, with some land around it with the usual farm animals and whatnot. The King and his family ate the best meat from the field, but they did not eat much better than the common farmer did. I saw a movie in High School which showed a medieval king and the conditions that they lived in. Most people think they lived in a huge palace like in a Disney fairy tale and this was far from the truth. Those castles were built in the 17th to 19th Century.
The cities were small, more like towns. There was no sanitation system which periodically caused plagues which would wipe out thousands of people, especially rats. if you ever watched “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, with the scene of “Bring out your dead!”, well this was a lot like Dark Ages Europe.
Movies cannot be relied upon to be historically accurate. Especially if you don’t even tell us which movie you are talking about. I know you’re new around here, so you might consider that this forum is here for people looking for factual answers to questions-- not stuff from movies.
Just a few comments. Today most people define literacy as the ability to read and write, but they are, in fact, separate skills. There were and are people fairly adept at reading but not at writing, so being able to read and write a letter is actually not a great working definition of literacy.
As you undoubtedly know, the Romans used written language, at least to some extent. (I seem to recall reading that literacy rates in ancient Rome hovered around 10%, but I don’t know how that figure was ascertained.) The Germanic tribes did just fine with oral expression and traditions and so did not need written language. I think we’re assuming that there was a greater need for being able to read and write than there actually was, and that literacy gained someone greater access to more information. Both assumptions are questionable.
