And God wold graunt me my prayer,
A child ayene I wold I were.

The debate in patristic literature over the native quality of childhood, properly characterised by purity and simplicity, or as the fruit of a lustful act, tainted by original sin, was inherited by the popular literature of the Middle Ages in a number of indirect ways. Augustine, responding to the Pelagian challenge to original sin, held that

A similar portrayal of the somatic sinfulness of children is evident in the infant protagonist’s introduction in Mundus et Infans,

Yet the earlier church fathers Clement of Alexandria and Hermas offered a very different picture in the concept of népiotés, “the artless simplicity, candor and lack of affectation of the child”;⁴ an idea echoed by Isidore of Seville, who derived the etymology of puer from pur.⁵ A founding text for this idealisation of childhood was the words of Christ himself,

This counter-strain, the child’s perceived inability to sin because of his occlusion from the temptations of adulthood, is dwelt upon by Audelay: he “wot neuer wat is envy” and “hatis lechori” because greed and lust are too sophisticated for him; he “doth no trespas” because he has not yet learned how.

Both of these patristic trends were inherited by strands of church teaching in the Middle Ages. The peril attending unbaptised infants was grim, yet the child before the age of seven was seen as incapable of mortal sin, confession and communion not commencing until puberty. This draws upon the Isidorean paradigmatic division of childhood into infantia, pueritia and adolescentia, terms in which the manuscript heading of the carol, “Cantalena de puericia”, also frames its discussion. Pueritia, described as

places the locus of innocence in the absence of sin, not in the exercise of positive virtue. Clement defined the concept of népiotés as “absence de prétension ou de complication, absence de détour, du ruse ou d’hypocrisie, franchise, sincérité.”⁸ In both, the emphasis is on moral vacuity, not positive purity; neutrality not active virtue. And as a conceit this negative innocence is common to medieval songs and catches: Jacques le Grand records the “comyn prouerbe... how seeth a Chylde, it seeth no thynge,”⁹ and a couple of decades later, Heywood comments, “men saie also, childerne and fooles can not ly.”¹⁰ The innocence of absence rather than practice is pondered by the Pearl-poet when the maiden answers the charge that “I my peny haf wrang tan”, in attaining her place in heaven:

Audelay, however, presents a more naturalised picture of the attributes of childishness, contradistinct from this idealised negative purity. Alongside the discourse of having the “vii dedle synns al in fere”, is the image, “chere-stons is his tresoure”. Interpreting the child’s simplicity as virtuous resistance of sin happens in parallel with the acknowledgment of the casuistry of such interpretation: while the poet suggests that he holds the deadly sins “in fere”, “putis away” sloth and “hatis lechori”, this theologised depiction is simultaneously undermined by the natural childishness at the heart of the industry which is credited with such spirituality: the child is “bese erle and late” – but with “chere stons”: satisfying his juvenile pleasures, because as yet unaware of any others.

It has been suggested that “the inherent tendency of the evidence to reflect ideology rather than social practice” leaves a blinkered and interpreted picture of medieval children.¹² However, the Courtesy Books are concerned with raising real children, not with recommending to adults the imitation of idealised childlike virtue, and their literary naturalisation of the child goes further than Audelay’s. Their principal addressees were children, and their conception of them is one of childishness, not népiotés. They embrace the slovenliness of children which the idealising literature ignores, instructing them to behave mannerly in a household, not to spit, belch or blow their noses, tear their meat or chew it with open mouths, brandish the bones between their teeth, have dirty nails, scratch their heads, pick their teeth, talk over their superiors, gossip about their peers, or be rude to their servants. They confront the reality that children are not pure by nature, and need to be educated in a habit of cleanness and courtesy. Theirs is an ideology focused upon social practice, rather than concealing it. Injunctions resembling the following are commonplace:

Their style is childlike: usually simple rhyming quatrains; sometimes mnemonic alphabet acrostics, such as ‘The a.b.c. of Aristotel’. Caxton stipulates that children

However, their negotiation of innocence as found in religious writing is a subtle one. The theme is not absent from the Courtesy Books, but it is mediated, as the principal addressee changes to become the child, and polished adult behaviour the principal object of imitation. Shulamith Shahar cites the statutes of the Norwich Furriers’ Guild, which stipulate that “the candle in the religious procession shall be borne by an innocent child”.¹⁷ This acolyte encapsulates the reductive symbolism in which children are metonyms for purity; it is not that there is no place for this theme in the Courtesy Books, but their scrutiny of actual childish conduct leads them to reform the concept of innocence, reacting against the over-theologised and simplistic simplicity-topos. The author of ‘The Lytyll Childrenes Lytil Boke’ considers the same assertion as Audelay’s “ne he is wroth with no mon”, appealing to the thematic archetype to encourage children to be “tretable”:

The innocence-trope “remembrid bi writyng” is redeployed to persuade the juvenile reader to emulate it in not being “vengeable”. The prevailing qualities of this depiction are temper and contrariety, not sentimentalised amiability. But there is a tenderness in the reality of the characterisation: “with an apple the parties be made at one”, reminiscent of the carol’s “chere-stons”, indicating an appreciation of childishness as a separate category from népiotés; innocence apart from sinlessness; a genuine simplicity of experience distinct from an adult religious imitation of it, because for the child, the apple and the cherry-stones represent real “tresoure”: not a deliberate delight in simple fare because of a conscious choice to reject richer things, but richness itself. Similarly, the author of ‘Ratis Raving’ writes,

He doesn’t sentimentalise the picture, but circumscribes his definition of innocence so that he does not praise native childishness as though it were Christian imitative purity:

Much scholarship has been devoted to re-examining the accusation of Philippe Ariès of “l’absence complète du sentiment moderne de l’enfance” in the medieval period.²⁰ As soon as one looks away from religious literature written for adults, to that written directly to and about real children, a vivid picture of childhood and the reality of its innocence emerges, neither idealised nor theorised. Perhaps the place in the Courtesy Books where the dialogue between the distinct theme and anti-theme of childhood innocence is most acute is in those poems which purport to be ‘How the Wise Man tau3t His Son’, ‘How the Good Wijf Tau3t Hir Dou3tir’. Parental address is a common topos: ‘Ratis Raving’ is written to “my gud sone”²¹ ; Caxton's “lytil Iohn” the object of his advice in the Book of Curtesye²² ; Chaucer's “lyte Lowys” that of ‘A Treatise on the Astrolabe’²³ ; Geoffrey de la Tour-Landry’s “wel bylouyd doughters” the intended readers of his collection of cautionary tales, The Book of the Knight of the Tower.²⁴ As a form it has an innate liminality, occupying a space between the cliché of an established formula, and the genuine tenderness of a parent for a child. For example, every stanza of ‘The Good Wif Thaught Hir Doughtir’ ends with the appellation in the refrain, “my leue childe” or “my der childe”;²⁵ but the incorporation of this sentiment into the mnemonic structure of the poem does not nullify its authenticity by turning it into a formula. Rather, it punctuates the otherwise rigid advice to “make þou non iangelynge”, “laughe þou noght to lowde”, and “go þou noght to toune”²⁶ with a continually and comfortingly repeated note of affection, turning the tenor of the whole from one of discipline to affection. In this genre, innocence is not something to be cherished, but rather there is emphatic recommendation to the child to learn the ways of adulthood. The principle that guides the advice is “Loke what woman þou wolt be, and theron set thy thow3t.”²⁷ Whereas the carol-narrator complains, “a child ayene I wold I were”, these poems are designed to teach children how to lose their innocence to wisdom, and not to lose it to sin. In ‘The Good Wyfe Wold a Pylgremage’, the young girl’s sexual innocence is, in one sense, lost, because the wife-narrator seeks to disabuse her of the truth before a man does:

Lack of experience is figured not as a precious thing to be guarded, but a dangerous thing, such that the wife concludes,

Similarly, the father’s advice to his son is to recognise the frivolity of his games and see the world the way the adult does:

Aristocratic boys were often sent to other noble households for their education, and the father perhaps has in view the ramifications for the rest of the family of the adolescent’s approaching independence: as Hugh Rhodes comments, “by the Chylde yee shall perceiue the disposytion of the Gouernour.”³⁰ Manners were no casual matter in the networking of the elite. This is a long way from the “chere-stons” as “tresoure”: rather than celebrating the ingenuousness of play, the child is exhorted to wisdom beyond his years in understanding the ephemerality of “worldis weele”. It is interesting how, as a topos, these poems respond to the end of Proverbs, “the words of king Lemuel, the prophecy that his mother taught him.” Similarly, the canonical exemplar of parental advice seeks to appraise the young man of the dangers of worldly pleasures, lest he become ensnared in them:

The Courtesy Books do not utterly reject the népiotés-construction of innocence: but their mediation of it functions as an anti-theme because, in contrast to the body of literature which celebrates childhood innocence, these poems provide a practical manual of how to lose it. They explore, deeply and unsentimentally, the native quality of their addressee when not figured as a virtue, namely childishness, and the true nature of a child’s experience. They do not applaud as a spiritual feat the natural condition of being young; they do not despise innocence, but unlike the theological literature which conflates the two, they distinguish between sapient virtue and nescient naïvety, between the adult’s informed purity and the child’s unconscious purity: perhaps closer to a different biblical exhortation to imitative innocence, “be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”³²

A fascinating analogue to this is the topos of the puer senex in hagiographical literature. The child-saints are frequently found eschewing the frivolous activities of their peers: in their cradles in attitudes of devotion, arms folded and eyes raised heavenward, serious and sad as old men. The infant Nicholas “in his tendre age... eschewed the vanitees of yonge children”,³³ and Gregory wrote of Benedict,

In contrast to the trend in other religious writings to exhort adults to the emulation of childish simplicity, in the saints’ lives are examples of children without a childhood, possessing, instead of népiotés, gravity beyond their years. In their hortatory presentation of good conduct, the secular Courtesy Books resist either of these pietistically compromised glosses on childhood. Their instruction on how to operate in an adult world has a primarily socialising objective. Courtesy and piety are sister-virtues, but in the correction of the slovenliness of childish conduct, the emphasis is on earthly assimilation with the promise of heavenly reward: one author calls it “honestye” to “eate thy meate somwhat close”.³⁵ Thus their advocation of courtesy has a fundamental embrace of, not withdrawal from, the world, configuring spirituality within a framework of obeisance and advancement; those who hope for heavenly bliss as social aspirants, whose success is in learned behaviour and not an innate quality, whether the wisdom of the old or the freshness of the young. ‘The Babees Book’ concludes with the wish that

However, the Courtesy Books are themselves problematised by a different kind of innate purity, because of the social class of their addressee. They are complicated by the literature of innocence, because by nature, noble children are as unrefined as the base-born, their habits just as vulgar – as the admonitions amply demonstrate. Yet their pedigree is asserted, within the Courtesy Books and in romances, to be innate and inalienable. In the English Havelok, the royalty of the adolescent protagonist is blazoned on his body, in the “kynmerk” by which Grim recognises him as Denmark’s heir.³⁷ Even without such physical attestation, the boy-heroes Percival and Horn are distinguished by peculiar dignity and prowess. Educating the noble child to act as who he innately is, in the light of the literature of self-evincing legitimacy, is the paradoxical premise of the courtesy writing. Noble by nature, children have to be taught how not to behave “as a karle þat comys oute of a cote”.³⁸ The formula ‘lerne or be lewde’ appears as the title of one poem and is quoted in several others. The ‘Babees Book’ poet writes,

The poet contrasts the beauty and ability with which royalty has “enourmyd” them with the virtue and nurture which have to be acquired: it is an interestingly qualified assertion of what is and isn’t innate in the noble child. Having been decorated with the qualities of royalty, they are importuned “in specyalle” to learn the code of conduct, framed in moral terms: “vertue and nurture”, “nurture, and honeste.” And yet if the noble child had to acquire its courteous conduct by imitation and pedagogical literature, surely the aspiring bourgeoisie could assimilate imitative nobility also. This is evidently the question for Caxton, who printed several Courtesy Books. He wrote his prologues ostensibly for an aristocratic readership, yet relied upon the patronage of burghers and merchants to keep him in trade. Tracy Adams remarks that the Courtesy Books were “appropriated and redeployed by non-noble readers for their own self-fashioning”,⁴⁰ especially given the increasing intermarriage of the gentry and lower nobility, and the fact that in the 1430s, £40 per year was enough to qualify for the knighthood. Statements such as “[thys] book is not requysyte to euery comyn man to haue, but to noble gentylmen that by their vertu entende to come in to the noble ordre of chyualry” and “this present booke is not for a rude vplondyssh man to laboure therin, ne rede it, but onely for a clerke & a noble gentylman”⁴¹ are frequent, and while there is truth in Green’s assessment of it as “advertising talk, designed in part to entice non-noble clients with the promise of initiation into aristocratic mysteries”, it also indicates a theoretical crisis over heredity.⁴² Caxton, himself an upwardly mobile merchant, advises his son to

Copying the breeding of the “most manerly” attains the likeness, if not the birthright, of “curtiosye”; and the oblique animadversion that the hallmark conduct of the elite may be “newe founde, or auncyent” hints that it is a “guyse” not a property. His advice indicates that the exterior impression is the goal of courteous conduct,

Archetypal presentations of childhood innocence, inherited from the church fathers, are recomputed in courtesy literature that addresses itself directly to children to correct and train them, and cannot but confront the theology of their innate purity. But instead of rejecting népiotés, these authors modify the theme of negative innocence. Caxton begins his book by analysing the morality of infancy:

Yet this is very different from the treatment of the same theme in theological literature. The infancy of Christina of Markyate is described in similar terms, but to accentuate the special virtue of her self-flagellation while

Caxton does not construe “in difference /To vice or vertu” as the hagiographer, to reassert the precocious spirituality of pueritia. Instead, the Courtesy Books invert the theme, using inexperience as the pretext to present to children adult conduct as the object of imitation, rather than childish naïvety as object of imitation to the adult world. With the reversal of the addressee, theme becomes anti-theme: the patristic concept of népiotés becomes the premise for tracts whose pedagogic exhortations are “kembe your hede” and “purge your nose”.⁴⁷

Joanna Bellis, University of Cambridge

Primary Sources

1. Audelay, John, ‘And God wold graunt me my prayer’, from Bodleian Library MS Douce 302, no. 412 in The Early English Carols, ed. R.L. Greene, (Oxford, 1935).

2. Caxton, William, The Book of Curtesye, ed. F.J. Furnivall, (London, 1868).

3. Caxton, William, The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton, ed. W.J.B. Crotch, (London, 1928).

4. Furnivall, F.J., ed. ‘Lerne or be Lewde’, ‘Stans Puer Ad Mensam’, ‘The a.b.c. of Aristotel’, ‘The Babees Book, or a lytyl reporte of how young people should behave’, ‘The Boke of Keruynge’, ‘The Lytyll Childrenes Lytil Boke’ and ‘Vrbanitatis’, The Babees Book, (London, 1868).

5. Geoffrey de la Tour-Landry, The Book of the Knight of the Tower, trans. William Caxton, ed. M.Y. Offord, (Oxford, 1971).

6. le Grand, Jacques, The Boke of Gode Manners, trans. William Caxton, (London, 1507).⁴⁸

7. Lumby, J. Rawson, ed. Ratis Raving and Other Moral and Religious Pieces, in Prose and Verse, (London, 1870).

8. Mustanoja, Tauno F., ed. The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter, The Good Wyfe Wold a Pylgremage, The Thewis of Gud Women, (Helsinki, 1948).

9. Rhodes, Hugh, ‘The Boke of Nurture’, The Babees Book, ed. F.J. Furnivall, (London, 1868).

10. Russell, John, ‘The Boke of Nurture’, The Babees Book, ed. F.J. Furnivall, (London, 1868).

Other Primary Material

1. Augustine, Confessions, ed. trans. Henry Chadwick, (Oxford, 1991).

2. Augustine, St. Augustine's Confessions, Latin with English translation by William Watts (1631), Loeb Classical Library, (London, 1912).

3. Cawley, A.C. and J.J. Anderson, ed. Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, (London, 1962, 1976).

4. Chaucer, Geoffrey, A Treatise on the Astrolabe and The Prioress's Tale, from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson, (London, 1968).

5. Clarke, Adam, ed. Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments according to the Authorised Translations, translated from the Vulgate, Rheims 1582, Douai 1609; (Liverpool, 1816).

6. Clement of Alexandria, Le Pédagogue, ed. trans. Henri-Irénée Marrou and Marguerite Harl, Sources Chrétiennes, (Paris, 1960).

7. Cooper, Helen, ed. Great Grandmother Goose, (London, 1978).

8. Gregory the Great, Dialogues, Libri IV, ed. P.Antin and A.Vogue, Sources Chrétiennes, Paris, 1980.

9. Hall, Joseph, ed. King Horn: a Middle-English Romance, (Oxford, 1901).

10. Halliwell, J.O., ed. The Thornton romances; the early English metrical romances of Perceval, Isumbras, Eglamour, and Degrevant, Camden Society, (London, 1844).

11. Hamer, Richard, with the assistance of Vida Russell, ed. Gilte Legende, (Oxford, 2006).

12. Hermas, The Shepherd of Hermas, trans. Kirsopp Lake, The Apostolic Fathers, vol.II, (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1913).

13. Heywood, John, A dialogue of proverbs, ed. Rudolph E. Habenicht, (California, 1963).

14. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarvm sive Originvm, ed. W.M. Lindsay, (Oxford, 1911).⁴⁹

15. Isidore of Seville, The etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Steven. A. Barney, (Cambridge 2006).

16. Lester, G.A., ed. Three late medieval morality plays: Mankind, Everyman, Mundus et infans, (London 1981). 17. Lull, Rámon, The Boke of the Ordre of Chyualrye, trans. William Caxton, ed. Alfred T.P. Byles, (London, 1926).

18. Smithers, G.V., ed. Havelok the Dane, (Oxford, 1987).

19. Talbot, C.H., ed. trans. The Life of Christina of Markyate, (Oxford, 1959, 1987).

20. Thiébaux, Marcelle, ed. trans. Dhuoda, handbook for her warrior son, (Cambridge, 1998).

Secondary Sources

1. Adams, Tracy, ‘Noble, wyse and grete lordes, gentilmen and marchauntes: Caxton’s prologues as conduct books for merchants’, Parergon, vol.22, (Canberra, 2005).

2. Ariès, Philippe, L’Enfant et la Vie Familiale sous l'Ancien Régime, (Paris, 1960).

3. Bakke, O.M., When children became people: the birth of childhood in early Christianity, trans. Brian McNeil, (Minneapolis, 2005).

4. Barnhouse, Rebecca, The Book of the Knight of the Tower: Manners for Young Medieval Women, (New York, 2006).

5. Bonney, Françoise, ‘Enfance Divine et Enfance Humaine’, L’Enfant au Moyen-Age (Littérature et Civilisation), (Provence, 1980).

6. Brockman, Bennett A., ‘Medieval Songs of Innocence and Experience’, Children’s Literature vol.1, (New Haven, 1972).

7. Brown, Peter, The body and society: men, women and sexual renunciation in early Christianity, (London, 1989).

8. Burrow, J.A., Ages of Man: a study in medieval writing and thought, (Oxford, 1988).

9. Burrow, J.A., ‘Young Saint, Old Devil': Reflections on a Medieval Proverb’, The Review of English Studies, (Oxford, 1979),

10. Cooper, Helen, ‘Good Advice on Leaving Home in the Romances’, Youth in the Middle Ages, ed. Goldberg, P.J.P. and Felicity Riddy, (York, 2004).

11. Finucane, R.C., The Rescue of the Innocents: Endangered Children in Medieval Miracles, (Basingstoke, London, 1997).

12. Gillingham, J., ‘From ciuilitas to civility: codes of manners in medieval and early-modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, series 6:12, (Cambridge, 2002).

13. Green, Richard Firth, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the Court in the Late Middle Ages, (Toronto, 1980).

14. Hanawalt, Barbara A., Growing Up in Medieval London: the Experience of Childhood in History, (Oxford 1993).

15. Harris, L., ‘Instructional Poetry for Medieval Children’, English Studies, vol.74, (London, 1993).

16. Houlbrooke, Ralph A., The English Family 1450-1700, (New York, 1984).

17. James, Edward, ‘Childhood and Youth in the Early Middle Ages’, Youth in the Middle Ages, ed. Goldberg, P.J.P. and Felicity Riddy, (York, 2004).

18. Jewell, H.M., ‘The bringing up of children in good learning and manners’, Northern History, vol.18, (Leeds, 1982).

19. Keenan, Hugh T., ‘Children’s Literature in Old English’, Children’s Literature vol.1, (New Haven, 1972).

20. Kline, Daniel T., ‘Textuality, Subjectivity, and Violence: Theorizing the Figure of the Child in Middle English Literature’, Essays in Medieval Studies, proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association, vol.12, (Chicago, 1995).

21. McMunn, Meradith Tilbury and William Robert, ‘Children’s Literature in the Middle Ages’, Children’s Literature, vol.1, (New Haven, 1972).

22. Orme, Nicholas, Medieval Children, (New Haven, 2003).

23. Orme, Nicholas, ‘The Education of the Courtier’, English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V.J. Scattergood and J.W. Sherborne, (London, 1983).

24. Shahar, Shulamith, Childhood in the Middle Ages, (London 1990, 1992).

25. Shahar, Shulamith, ‘The old body in medieval culture’, Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, (Manchester , c1994, 1997).

26. Stevens, John, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court, (London, 1961).

27. Thomasset, Claude, ‘Quelques Principes de l’Embryologie Medievalle’, L’Enfant au Moyen-Age (Littérature et Civilisation), (Provence, 1980).

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