Whilk did wrong and whilk did right,
And whilk mayntened pees or fight,
composed his metrical chronicle, in which, desiring to lay a good foundation, and to begin from the beginning, he commences his story,
“gre by gre,
Since the tyme of Sir Noe.”
In the reign of Henry II., however, the English tongue (as distinguished from the Anglo-Saxon) had not yet assumed a literary shape. In all higher schools, public or private, the French and Latin languages were exclusively used. The Saxon or Teutonic dialect, referred to in the Gilbertine rule, was considered only fit for peasants, and even they had a certain comprehension of Latin. This is clear from many circumstances. Thus, Giraldus tells us that when Archbishop Baldwin journeyed through Wales for the purpose of preaching the Crusade, he was never so successful as when he preached in Latin. The populace, as we know, do not always measure their appreciation of a discourse by the degree in which they understand it, yet it is difficult to think that these effective sermons can have been delivered in an altogether unknown tongue. But the fact is that, in one respect, the rude ignorant peasantry of the Middle Ages were a great deal more learned than the pupils of our model schools. In a certain sort of way, every child was rendered familiar with the language of the Church. From infancy they were taught to recite their prayers, the antiphons, and many parts of the ritual of the Church, in Latin, and to understand the meaning of what they learnt, and hence they became familiar with a great number of Latin words; so that a Latin discourse would sound far less strange in their ears than in those of a more educated audience of the same class in the present day.
In many cases, indeed, the children who were taught in the priest’s, or parochial school, learnt grammar, that is, the Latin language; but all were required to learn the Church chant and a considerable number of Latin prayers, and hymns, and psalms. This point of poor school education deserves more than a passing notice. Its result was, that the lower classes were able thoroughly to understand, and heartily to take part in, the rites and offices of Holy Church. The faith rooted itself in their hearts with a tenacity which was not easily destroyed, even by penal laws, because they imbibed it from its fountain source—the Church herself. She taught her children out of her own ritual and by her own voice, and made them believers after a different fashion from those much more highly educated Catholics of the same class who, in our day, often grow up almost as much strangers to the liturgical language of the Church as the mass of unbelievers outside the fold. Can there be any incongruity more grievous than to enter a Catholic school, rich in every appliance of education, and to find that, in spite of the time, money, and method lavished on its support, its pupils are unable to understand and recite the Church offices, and are untrained to take part in Church Psalmody? The language of the Church has, therefore, in a very literal sense, become a dead language to them, and it is from other, and far inferior, sources that they derive their religious instruction. Thus they are ignorant of a large branch of school education, in which the children of a ruder and darker age were thoroughly trained; no doubt, on the other hand, they know a great many things of which children in the Middle Ages were altogether ignorant, and the question is simply to determine which method of instruction has most practical utility in it. Without dogmatising on this point, we may be permitted to regret that through any defect in the system of our parochial schools, Catholic congregations should in our own days be deprived of the solemn and thorough celebration of those sacred offices which in themselves comprise a body of unequalled religious instruction; and that in an age which makes so much of the theory of education, we should have to confess our inability to teach our children to pray and sing the prayers of the Church, as the children of Catholic peasants prayed and sang them six hundred years ago.[246]
The English schools of that period enjoyed the benefit of no other inspection than that of the parish priest and the archdeacon, “the eye of the bishop,” as he was called; and if their pupils knew little about “monocotyledons,” the “crustacea,” or grammatical analysis, they were able to recite their Alma Redemptoris and their Dixit Dominus with hearty, intelligent devotion. They knew the order of the Church service, and could sing its psalms and antiphons in the language of the Church, and to her ancient tones; and so they did not, through their ignorance, oblige their pastors to lay aside, as obsolete, the use of that office so truly called Divine, in order to substitute in its place English hymns and devotions from any less inspired source. On this point we hold their education, therefore, to have been immeasurably superior to our own, nor are we to suppose that because they learnt Latin prayers and the Church chant, they learnt nothing besides. Reading and grammar are often named as taught in parochial schools; and among the humblest class of pupils a good deal of instruction, both devotional and practical, was conveyed in English verse, which the pupils committed to memory, much as some among ourselves have, ere now, learnt to remember the number of days in each month by means of doggerel rhymes. The traditions of the Saxon schools, wherein so much use was made of these versified instructions, was kept up so late as the fifteenth century, when we shall have occasion to quote some of the methods in popular use for teaching children the succession of the English kings, the names of towns and villages, the four quarters of the globe, and the outline of the Latin accidence. The Commandments of God and the Church, the Creed, Our Father, and Hail Mary, and other similar portions of Christian doctrine, were also taught in verse, as they may still be seen in most French elementary books of religious instruction; and specimens of the English language, as it existed in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, might very fairly be selected from the different versified forms of the Hail Mary in use at these periods. I will give but one, which is supposed to belong to the early part of the thirteenth century:—
Mary ful off grace, weel thou be,