A century of children's books

by Florence V. Barry

The successors of these old schoolmasters devised a book for parents which they might share with their children. This was the Gesta Romanorum, a collection of stories put together in Latin about the fourteenth century to serve as texts for “Moralities”. It became the popular story-book of the Middle Ages, and a woodcut in the early editions shows a whole family gathered round the fire on a winter night telling stories to pass the time.

This was no book for children, even in the days before nurseries; yet it contained variants of the Arabian Tales, a story that Chaucer afterwards used for his “History of Constance”, and two strands of the Merchant of Venice plot.

Travellers’ tales, also shared between men and children, filled a gap between the truthful records of King Alfred and Caxton’s new-discovered wealth of romance. Marco Polo and other voyagers brought back stories and fables from the East; Sir John Mandeville wrote of “the Meruayles of Ynde and of other diuerse Coûtries”. These cross the border between truth and fancy much as children do; but children knew them only from hearsay.

Caxton alone, had he been so minded, could have filled a child’s library; for besides his Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, he printed Sir Thomas Malory’s Noble Histories of King Arthur with many romances of his own translating and legends and lives of Saints. He was actually the first printer and editor of the very books which Locke, in the eighteenth century, prescribed for children: Æsop’s Fables and The History of Reynard the Fox; but Caxton intended none of these for children. The Fables showed men their follies; and Reynard was then a satire that ridiculed unjust rulers under the figures of beasts. For children, he chose the kind of books that their parents would buy: the instructive Parvus et Magnus Chato, with its woodcut print of a monastery school; Stans Puer ad Mensam, a museum of quaint formalities, and The Book of Courtesy, addressed to “Lytyl John” in “tendre enfancye”.

Thus early did grown-up persons monopolise the pleasures of fiction, while they prepared handbooks of learning and courtesy for youth. Chaucer, it will be remembered, wrote a scientific treatise instead of a story for his little boy; and The Babees Book, designed for the royal wards and pages of the fifteenth century, had not a word of romance or fable; nothing but precepts of fair behaviour, and lessons that should teach those “Bele Babees” how to give their reasons smoothly, “in words that are gentle but compendious”.

There were many such books, nor were they all confined to children of gentle birth. The Book of Courtesy was for the sons “of gentleman, yeoman or knave”, and Symon’s Lesson of Wisdom (1500) “for all manner children”.

As for Caxton’s successors, they were content with his ideas about children’s books; it was simply a choice between manners and learning. Wynkyn de Worde, though he printed the splendid romance of Bevis of Southampton, gave his child-readers a “Wyse Chylde of Thre Year Old” that could answer the fearful question: “Sage enfaunt, how is the skye made?”; and William Copland produced The Secret of Secrets of Aristotle, “very good to teach children to read English”, while he lavished the adventures of Guy of Warwick upon their parents.

It is true that the child of the sixteenth century had much to compensate him for a lack of books. If he dwelt in the country, he saw Robin Hood and St. George played out upon the village green, or if in a town, he might meet with strange merchantmen in any street. He lived in an age of practical romance, and could match you the exploits of Guy or Bevis any day from the adventures of his neighbours. Moreover the Elizabethan child, if he could not read the old stories, at least had a chance of hearing them set to a new measure. Puttenham in his Art of English Poesie (1589) writes of the “Blind Harpers and such like taverne Minstrels” who sang “stories of old time” to ballad tunes: “the tale of Sir Topas, the reportes of Bevis of Southampton, Guy of Warwick, Adam Bell and Clymme of the Clough, and such other old romances or historical rimes”.

But a boy had to evade his schoolmaster before he could listen to such things; and the schoolmaster saw to it that he had no English story-books. The new learning, which poured out its treasures for scholars, meant little more to the average boy than longer hours of study and more stripes; and reformers in education, although they looked upon him as a creature of promise, and were concerned to make his lot more bearable, came no nearer than their predecessors to the secrets of his mind.

Companies of schoolboy-players,—the children of the Chapel, or of Paul’s—might make the most of such plays as they could understand; and the Queen’s wards had times of “honest recreation” when they might tell each other stories; but their hours with tutors and music-masters would astonish the youth of these days.