A Garden of Girls; Or, Famous Schoolgirls of Former Days

by Mrs. Thomas Concannon

Before the child went to sleep, of course, he or she had his or her prayers to say. Even the smallest child had to repeat the “Our Father” and the “Apostles’ Creed.” The “Hail Mary” was learned later. The great preacher, Berthold von Regensburg, says that, if a child of seven can say the Ave Maria, as well as the Pater Noster, and the Credo, “daz ist vil wunderguot,” “better than good,” as we say in Anglo-Irish.

Mediæval children commissioned a bigger troup of angels “to guard their bed” than ours do, who are content with a protector for each corner:—“There are four corners on my bed.” Elizabeth claimed twelve angels when she “laid her down to sleep”: “Two at my head, two by my sides, two at my feet, two to cover me, two to waken me, two to show me the way to the Heavenly Kingdom.”

And, if the mediæval child awoke in the night, there was always the night-lamp burning before the Crucifix, or the picture of the dear Mother, just as it burns in so many Catholic homes to-night!

The joys of child-life in the Middle Ages only really began with the spring. We who have, in our comfortable houses, learned to rob winter of his terrors, have paid the price by losing much of that joy in the spring, which is so persistent a note in Middle High German poetry. One must realise how dreary the winter must have been in those mediæval castles to realise the “Wonne des Frühlings”—for mediæval souls—the children’s especially. Think of being shut up in semi-darkness all the winter; for there was no glass in the windows, and if the storms raged (and how they must have raged round the Wartburg!) there was nothing for it but to pull down the heavy wooden shutters, and crouch round the fire for light, and heat, and comfort. And sometimes the fire smoked, for mediæval chimneys did not “draw” well; and how little eyes must have smarted, and young nerves suffered! The heavy clothes, too, one had to wear in those cold draughty rooms must have been a torture to little bodies. No wonder they greeted the spring as the “Freudenzeit.” There was a great ceremony when they went out into the spring woods in search of the first violet. The coming of swallow and stork was treated as a great event. Many games, too, “came in” with the spring; and if a little boy of to-day could, by any chance, have a chat with a little boy of the Middle Ages, he would find that the same rigid convention which makes it impossible for a self-respecting lad to play marbles, when “it is the time” for spinning tops, or to spin tops when “it is the time” for rolling hoops, ruled in the Middle Ages. Except that it was not a “convention” then, but the result of hard necessity. Little girls play jack-stones and skip with ropes to-day at certain seasons, because their small ancestresses of seven or eight hundred years ago were forced to confine these games to this season.

But do modern children get the same delight out of nature that the children of olden times did? Except the story of little Eoin in Mr. Pearse’s exquisite book of studies of Irish childlife, Iosagan, I know of nothing in modern literature that at all reminds one of the glorious passage in which Wolfram describes the effect of the bird-song on his child hero, Parzifal. I wish I could take some dear little boys and girls I know, a-roaming the spring woods with those little German children of so many centuries ago, and see them consult their flower-oracles, and catch butterflies, and bore holes in the birch-tree and drink the sweet sap, and learn to whistle a tune on a leaf, and look for strawberries in the glades. But, alas! space is limited, and I must try to get as much of a wide subject into it as possible.

There is one amusing ceremony I must mention, particularly as it forms a convenient stepping-stone to the next division of my subject. It was a ceremony which lasted quite to the end of the Middle Ages, and fittingly belonged to a period when Grammar, the first of the Seven Liberal Arts, was always represented with a rod. On a certain day in the early summer, mediæval children went out to the woods to cut the rods, which were afterwards to be used with such effect on their own sturdy little persons. The mediæval schoolmaster had no need of a proverb to convince him that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. And even when Walther protests against the abuse of the “Gerte,” he, by no means, desires its abolition.

At the age of seven the boys passed out of the women’s apartments and were given into the hands of a governor. The girls stayed behind with a “Meisterinne”; and it was the custom at princely courts to receive the daughters of the vassals to share the lessons of the Princesses. Thus we know that, among the companions who studied with Elizabeth was her faithful friend of the bitter years to come, Guta.

Though girls and boys were educated separately, it is impossible to separate the ideals of education in the case of the two sexes. In order, indeed, to arrive at any comprehension of the ideals towards which the educators of girls in the Catholic Middle Ages strained, we must strive to realize the mediæval conception of the “verie parfit gentil knight.” For if ever it needed a certain type of woman to help to produce a certain type of man, it was during the Age of Chivalry. Moreover, the Catholic Church, the one great pedagogic authority of the Middle Ages, has always held that Education must concern itself with the Soul as well as the body of man. And “there is no sex in soul” to side with Bishop Spalding against Francis Thompson. The educational ideals held up by the Church before those who set themselves to train her sons, were for those who trained her daughters, too. The knightly virtues, “Staete” and “Maeze” (Steadfastness and Moderation) were womanly virtues, too. The pillars of chivalry, “theumuot” (= Demut, humility), and Treue (fidelity) are the pillars of all true womanhood.

Something of the spirit of the education of the period may be gathered from the definition of the word Zûht (Zucht) in the Middle High German vocabulary: “that lofty culture of the mind, which is a fruit of education, and which expresses itself in outward modesty, inward chastity, self-restraint and self-denial, and in the externals of good breeding.” The chivalrous education aimed at cultivating “Self-Knowledge, Self-Reverence and Self-Control” in a man or woman whose corporal form had been developed to something as nearly approaching the ideal of perfection as possible. And it sought perfection in all things, because of Him Who is Infinite Perfection.