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00:12It's 1450. England is on the brink of civil war, and the life of one young
00:19woman is about to change forever. In a world dominated by dynastic politics,
00:28wealth and power, her future has been decided.
00:38She's one of the richest heiresses in England, and by noon, Margaret Beaufort will have married
00:43into one of the most powerful families in the country. But this is no ordinary marriage.
00:51Her husband-to-be is nearly eight years old, and she's not yet seven.
01:00These were children burdened with adult responsibility, and that, in the Middle Ages, was far from unusual.
01:14It's often said that life must have been tough for medieval children.
01:20And it's certainly true that it was hard enough just to survive.
01:28Roughly half the population would die before they reached 18.
01:35Although children grow up fast, what's surprising is that the experience of childhood could be richly rewarding.
01:44Contemporaries divided the medieval world into three orders.
01:47There were those who prayed, those who fought, and those who worked.
01:50And this was a view of the world in which everyone had a role, including children.
01:58I'm Dr. Stephen Baxter. I've been studying the medieval period for almost 20 years, mostly looking at the adult world.
02:10But I've recently learned that if we try to see this period through the eyes of children,
02:15we give ourselves a chance to view the Middle Ages in a completely new light.
02:47The medieval period spans more than a thousand years, from the collapse of Roman Britain in the 5th century,
02:54right up to the rise of the Tudor dynasty in the late 15th.
03:04During this time, lowland Britain evolved from a world of warring kingdoms into a nation, England,
03:11under one king, and with a common language, English.
03:18It was an age defined by three great challenges.
03:22The fight for survival, the fight for power, and the fight for salvation.
03:27They all demanded lives of hard work and discipline, from which not even children were exempt.
03:33And each played its role in determining what it was like to be a medieval child.
03:44By the 7th century, Christianity had swept across the country.
03:48The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and peoples had once been pagan.
03:52Now, they were converted to the Christian faith.
04:03The landscape was being transformed by the monuments of a new religion.
04:08One which was dominated by the idea of a single, all-powerful God, who offered the promise of eternal life.
04:17People were urged to engage in a battle against sin, to guarantee their place in heaven and escape the torments
04:24of hell.
04:26And children were at the heart of this struggle.
04:35There was a real tension in Christian attitudes towards children.
04:38According to some texts, children were inherently evil.
04:47None is pure from sin, not even the infant, whose life is but a day upon the earth.
04:55But other biblical texts stressed the value of children, adopting the view that children were innately pure, and possessed the
05:03capacity for ultimate wisdom.
05:09Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, thou hast perfected praise.
05:19The question of whether children were born with or without sin was central to Christianity, as society grappled with how
05:26to lead a spiritual life.
05:30And all this was acted out in the defining institutions of early Christian England.
05:37The monasteries.
05:43This is Jarrow Monastery, near Newcastle, founded in the late 7th century.
05:50The monks here devoted their lives to praying for the community at large.
05:57And it wasn't just men's work.
05:59Some monks entered the monastery at the age of seven.
06:02For their parents, it wasn't like dropping their kids off at school.
06:06Child oblates, as they were called, didn't get to go home in the afternoon.
06:10In fact, most spent the rest of their lives in the monastery.
06:14And some never got to see their parents again.
06:20This was a world dominated by sin and the search for salvation.
06:25So the sooner a child engaged in a great battle for the soul, the better.
06:31In about 680, a seven-year-old boy called Bede was sent here.
06:44Just imagine what it must have been like for him when he first arrived.
06:48First, he'd have to swap his clothes for standard-issue monastic garb.
06:54Then he'd have to learn the rules, when to eat, when to sleep, all in step with the tolling of
07:00the monastery bells.
07:02Then he'd have to wake up at midnight and again at 3am, trooping inside this chapel for services.
07:09And these were just the first of several services held throughout the day.
07:13A routine that was strictly enforced every day of the year.
07:19Bede is more commonly known as the Venerable Bede.
07:23And despite the rigours of this regime, his intellectual life blossomed.
07:28So much so that he later wrote the very first history of the English.
07:33It's extraordinary to think it's still in print and still read nearly 1300 years later.
07:42Unlike Bede, the children who didn't conform could be severely disciplined.
07:49As often as faults are committed by boys or by youths,
07:53let them be punished with severe fasts or chastised with sharp blows in order that they may be cured.
08:01Monks who make mistakes in the oratory are to be punished.
08:05But boys for such faults shall be whipped.
08:10Oblates were often the children of aristocrats, so how could their parents abandon them to this life?
08:18We might interpret this as callous behaviour by uncaring parents.
08:22But I think to do so would be to misunderstand the medieval thought world.
08:27Precisely because parents loved and cared for their children,
08:30giving them away to a monastery was just about the greatest sacrifice one could make for the love of God.
08:39So what better than to place a child in the monastery who could pray hard for their salvations?
08:44It's almost like buying an insurance policy for the sake of their own souls,
08:48but also the souls of their children and of their families and of their ancestors.
08:56It would never have occurred to their parents to postpone this out of respect for childhood.
09:13Medieval life wasn't just about the fight against sin, it was also about the fight for survival.
09:20Staying alive was a full-time job.
09:27In the Middle Ages, England was very rural.
09:31About 90% of its people lived in the countryside.
09:40They were constantly at the mercy of weather ruining their harvests,
09:44and many of them had to pay cripplingly high rents to their landlords.
09:51Like here in Barrington, a Gloucestershire village clustered around this large green.
09:58We know from Doomsday Book that one of the people who held land here in 1086 was Elfseer of Farringdon,
10:04and we know that he looked after several of the king's manners in this part of the world
10:08after the Norman conquest. He was an Englishman who made good after the conquest. Why?
10:14Because he was good at picking up rents. So one can imagine him being a rather loathed figure
10:19among the peasant families of this village, and probably a rather feared figure among the children.
10:27Doomsday Book also reveals it was a complex and hierarchical society.
10:33There were about 65 peasant families living here towards the end of the 11th century.
10:38There were 31 villani, that's a sort of medium-class peasant,
10:43eight bordari, a much poorer peasant, and 25 slaves, and there was also a priest.
10:49But of course, they were all adult males. Where are the children?
10:57They were all adult males. This place must have been teeming with children.
11:01And yet there's simply no mention of them in Doomsday Book.
11:06And that's not unusual. They're invisible in most medieval documents,
11:11because society then was dominated by men.
11:24But there's one place where remarkable evidence can tell us how hard children fought to survive.
11:34A village called Warram Percy used to stand on this Yorkshire hillside.
11:41Now, down in the valley, this is all that's left.
11:58This is a beautifully atmospheric place.
12:07A ruined church surrounded by humps and bumps in the ground where medieval houses once stood.
12:14But it's also a rather melancholy place to think that this is all that remains of a once thriving village.
12:28Graveyards are normally out of bounds to archaeologists.
12:31But here, they were allowed to excavate the cemetery.
12:36And they uncovered the largest burial ground of medieval village children ever found in England.
12:49Their remains reveal the harsh realities of medieval life in extraordinary detail.
12:57At the English Heritage Laboratory in Portsmouth, Dr Simon Mays has spent 20 years analysing their bones.
13:06When we looked at the child skeletons, one of the first things that struck us was how small they were
13:10compared with modern children.
13:12So I've laid out here the skeleton of a ten-year-old from Warram Percy, and the one we've got
13:16to compare it with is the same size as a modern ten-year-old is.
13:20So you can see the size difference between the two.
13:23Yeah, wow, that's extraordinary.
13:24So, in theory, a child of ten ought to be that big.
13:30That's right.
13:31And so what accounts for the difference between the two?
13:33I think primarily it's nutrition. It's the quality of their diet.
13:37These people are not eating a very nutritious diet.
13:40So diet helps explain the difference between these two bones.
13:43This being the ten-year-old from Warram Percy, this being what they should have been at about that age.
13:49That's right, and that translates to about a nine-inch difference in terms of standing height.
13:52So at that age, that's quite considerable.
13:55Was this child unfortunate to die so young? Was that common at Warram Percy?
13:59Well, quite a lot of them did die during childhood. About half of the skeletons we have from the church
14:05shot are of people who died before they were in their late teens.
14:08Right. Half?
14:09Half, that's right.
14:10Oh, my God. Right, that's terrifying mortality rates. 50-50 chance of actually making it to adulthood.
14:15Yeah, roughly speaking, that's right.
14:16Gosh.
14:20With stunted growth caused by poor nutrition, and half the children dead by their late teens,
14:26these bones can tell a story that Doomsday Book doesn't reveal.
14:31Just how often children lost the fight for survival.
14:37As an historian, I usually work on documents, artefacts, buildings, things left behind by adult males.
14:44And it's frustratingly rare to hear the voices of children in evidence that they themselves left behind.
14:51So it's been very moving to come here and see the physical remains of the children of Warram Percy.
15:09Despite the high infant mortality rate, this was a very young society.
15:15Roughly half the population was under 18.
15:19So there weren't enough adults to work the land and to feed and clothe everybody.
15:29Children had to be enlisted into the great challenge to survive.
15:37They helped with everything, from looking after the animals to separating the wheat from the chaff.
15:48So it's not quite child's play, but it is something that a child could do, right?
15:53Yes.
15:54Chris Russell has been using traditional medieval farming methods for over 20 years.
16:00Started at seven in the morning and you went on.
16:03Yeah.
16:05The children would have gone through this.
16:06This is a really boring job.
16:08And just made sure everything was taken out.
16:16Despite being undernourished and often sick, children were doing what we would now consider to be adult work.
16:22And relatively young boys were expected to do hard manual labour.
16:30So how old would you need to be before you would be allowed to do this sort of work, do
16:35you think?
16:36You would have been nine, ten years old as an ox boy.
16:39Yeah.
16:40Because the ox man, as it were, the chap, he may have been on the plough behind.
16:44Right, yeah.
16:45So the boy would have been doing all the running and the stumbling over the plough.
16:48Yeah.
16:48You'd be quite energetic to keep them all in straight line as well.
16:57In the constant struggle to make ends meet, children worked hard and died young.
17:05Does this suggest that medieval life was so tough that parents didn't care about their children,
17:10as we do today?
17:16The answer lies at the National Archives at Kew in West London.
17:23These are some of England's earliest coroner's roles.
17:25They were first put together in the 1270s, so they're nearly 750 years old.
17:32And you can really tell that working on them, the ink is beginning to fade.
17:37And to be honest, the script's pretty tough to read too.
17:41And reading it isn't exactly a joy either, because it tells a lot of tragic stories.
17:47You always know that every time you see a child's name in them,
17:51you know that they're going to come to a sad end.
17:53And here is a little girl, and her name was Amis, and she was the daughter of Sybil.
18:01And she was just helping her mum at home, and her mum had a lead vat full of boiling water,
18:09and poor little Amis fell into it.
18:12And her grief-stricken mother rushed across the room and tried to pull her out of the vat,
18:18but it was already too late.
18:21Amis had been killed and was scolded to death.
18:26Here, a certain five-year-old boy called Richard
18:32was helping his father by going to the well to draw water,
18:37but he fell in and clearly couldn't get out, couldn't swim, and drowned, it says, by misadventure.
18:44And his sister was the first to find him.
18:49And here we read of Robert, son of Walter.
18:53Robert was killed by lightning, and his father ran distraught across the field to try to save him,
18:59but it was too late. He was... He was dead.
19:05What these records prove is just how much parents were affected by their children's deaths.
19:11They loved them.
19:13Their compassion shows that this was a caring society.
19:18They loved them.
19:24Today, we see childhood as a distinct and precious phase of life.
19:29We try hard to give children a chance to be experimental and free from the stresses of adulthood.
19:35But was medieval childhood all work and no play?
19:39Is it not tempting to assume that childhood didn't exist at all?
19:47Well, that's precisely what some historians have argued.
19:51The pioneering book on the history of childhood, written in the 1960s, argued that there was no such thing as
19:57childhood in the Middle Ages.
19:59Children were just mini-adults.
20:01And lots of people believed it.
20:03After all, sounds plausible enough.
20:05Well, actually, no.
20:06That myth has been completely debunked.
20:13Historians have since discovered evidence that childhood as a distinct stage of life really did exist.
20:21For instance, we catch the occasional glimpse of children at play in medieval manuscripts.
20:29And Dr. Carenza Lewis is developing a theory that evidence of children's play could also be uncovered by archaeologists.
20:39She's been studying Bruegel's painting, children's games.
20:47Wow, this is amazing. What's going on here?
20:49Well, I just love this. It is children playing.
20:53It's 500 years old, but it's really showing children doing all the sorts of things we think of children.
20:58It's such a happy picture.
21:00I mean, look, you've got girls there turning around, swirling their skirts out.
21:04You've got children playing King of the Castle on a mound there.
21:08We've got knuckle bones down here, where you sort of throw something out in the air and
21:12pick stuff up before it hits the ground.
21:14There's a little play.
21:16Is that a marriage? Someone going into a nunnery, a coronation, I'm not sure.
21:20That's right, it's got a little crown on it.
21:21A little procession there, they've all put little hoods on there.
21:23There's a little girl playing with, well, I'm not sure if that's a mud pie or a dog poo,
21:27but anyway, sort of thing that children do.
21:30This painting is a riotous fantasy of children's games.
21:35Yet, Carenza Lewis believes we could find real archaeological evidence for them.
21:40I mean, if you imagine all the children in this scene were suddenly called off to bed,
21:46and they all rushed off and left, dropped everything they were playing with.
21:51What archaeological site would that leave us?
21:54So we look at this pile of bricks here.
21:57The possibility that children had arranged them like that would be ignored.
22:01This pile of standing stones here, as one game which actually describes stones put up on end in a
22:07circle, sounds like Stonehenge.
22:09Your average archaeologist wouldn't think about children.
22:13Once we've got an idea of the sort of things that children might have been doing,
22:17then we can look at our archaeological sites and look for evidence of those features.
22:23You know, I mean, this, look, someone's using an upturned pot here as a base.
22:27You can see he's running towards it, he's just touching it to prove he's touched it.
22:31And that pot is a classic medieval type.
22:34But people very rarely suggest they're being used for play.
22:38And Carenza Lewis's theory is being supported by finds of children's toys.
22:45They're copies of ordinary household objects, and they're little play items,
22:51like you'd have sort of doll's house furniture, collections of objects for children to play with.
22:56So we have got a culture of childhood in the medieval period.
23:00Children are playing, they are playing in specific ways to children.
23:04It wasn't all blood, sweat and tears.
23:11I'm youth, wild, fearless and never constant.
23:15And I spent all my time playing, running, leaping, singing,
23:20dancing, wrestling, stone casting and climbing trees to steal fruit.
23:31This reveals that, even amongst the privations of the Middle Ages, there was time for children to play.
23:40And that childhood was a distinct period, which was understood, respected and sometimes even celebrated in art.
23:57Around the 10th century, the transition from childhood to adulthood became sharply defined in law.
24:06In the early medieval period, Britain was a mosaic of small kingdoms frequently at war with one another.
24:13Within each kingdom, there were bloody rivalries, where vengeance was a personal issue,
24:19pitting one family against another.
24:29Imagine it's the 7th century and I've killed someone.
24:33The victim's family would come after me for revenge.
24:38And if they succeeded in maiming or killing me, my family would be on a bound to extract revenge from
24:44them.
24:45So we'd be locked in our vicious cycle of revenge and retribution, spiralling out of control.
24:50A blood feud.
24:55In the late 9th and 10th centuries, all that began to change.
25:01England was united as one country for the first time.
25:05And during the reigns of Adelstan, Edgar and Knut, English law was transformed.
25:13This book is a collection of early English legislation.
25:17It shows that a defining moment of transition from child to adult became recognised in law.
25:25It says in Old English,
25:27We willeth that alche a frail man beon hundred et un teerdinger je bracht.
25:34This means that once boys reached the age of 12, they became adults in the eye of the law.
25:41They had to join a teerdinger, a tithing group, which was a legal gang of 10 village men.
25:48A medieval answer to crime and punishment.
25:52The essence of the situation was this.
25:54If any one of this member of 10 people were accused of committing a crime,
26:00it was the responsibility of the other nine to bring them to justice.
26:04Or else they faced the consequences of that crime themselves.
26:08They were in a sense guilty of it.
26:12Out went blood feuds.
26:14In came a form of community policing.
26:17Every male aged 12 and over was responsible for everyone else.
26:22And there was no opting out.
26:25In this world, the consequences of not being in a gang were really very serious indeed.
26:31Because if you weren't in a tithing, you were outlawed.
26:34And that meant that anyone could kill you with impunity.
26:41This was a sophisticated piece of law.
26:43It created a new mark of manhood.
26:46And to prove your commitment to society, you had to swear an oath.
26:53By the Lord, before whom this relic is holy, I will be faithful and true to the king and newt.
26:59And love all that he loves.
27:01And shun all that he shuns, according to God's law.
27:04And never by will or by force, by word nor by work, do you ought of what is loathful to
27:10him.
27:13So you can imagine that for a 12-year-old, this would be an extraordinary moment of transition from childhood
27:20into adulthood.
27:22Performed in public with everyone else in their village around them.
27:28All this gave you an entry into the adult world with a status in society.
27:34Responsibilities, but also protection.
27:37This oath was to become one of the foundations of our common law and helped save England from lawlessness.
27:56It was a very important part of the country in the country in the country.
27:57Between about 900 and 1300, England's economy was booming.
28:02The population was growing, the land was being more intensively exploited,
28:07and there were growing opportunities to profit from trade.
28:12Sheep farming and selling wool to continental merchants helped make the heart of England and East Anglia very rich.
28:23And this increasing prosperity began to transform society with the emergence of a new social class.
28:31They were known as the gentry, not quite upper nobility, but definitely posh.
28:42They built themselves luxurious and impressive manor houses.
28:53This gorgeous place is probably the best surviving manor house anywhere in England.
28:58And the best thing is, I've got the key.
29:11Large houses like this needed servants.
29:14Many would have been adolescent boys from the surrounding hamlets and villages.
29:19Lads from the better-off peasant families, who'd be living away from home for the first time.
29:27They were a source of cheap labour, but they also had a lot to gain.
29:32This was an opportunity to better themselves.
29:37Professor Nicholas Orne is a leading authority on medieval childhood.
29:43So this is a self-supporting household.
29:46It gets its crops, its meat in from its own lands.
29:50It's got its own kitchens, brewery, bakery, stables.
29:55And in these departments, you have three or four people working, of whom at least one will be a lad
30:02who's being trained up.
30:05This is the main room of the castle, where a lot of the servants will be,
30:13especially if they're not actually doing anything.
30:15This is their kind of base.
30:18This would be home to perhaps a dozen young lads, but not all of them from peasant stock.
30:24The top servants are themselves aristocratic, you see.
30:28They are these teenage gentry boys who are learning how to receive guests,
30:35how to be polite, make polite conversations, how to serve at meals.
30:39They actually serve the lord and lady themselves.
30:43Yeah.
30:44And you've got very interesting social mix.
30:47You've got children of gentry mixing with children of much lesser families,
30:51perhaps freemen and people from lower down the social spectrum.
30:56That's right.
30:57They're actually spatially living much closer together than in Victorian households,
31:01where you have this upstairs-downstairs division.
31:04Yeah.
31:04You haven't got that.
31:05They're much more mingled together, and it's a different sort of society.
31:11If we were to imagine a 14-year-old boy coming here for the first time,
31:15perhaps the son of a freeman, would have been sort of rather surprised by the opulence of a place like
31:21this.
31:22It would have been a moment of passage in life, wouldn't it, to go from a peasant house,
31:29which was very much smaller, to this sort of place.
31:33I mean, it would certainly be good in terms of food.
31:35There will always be adequate supplies of bread, meat and beer.
31:42And in an age of assistance farming, where a lot of people don't get enough to eat at
31:46particular times of the year, I mean, that is a really good position to have.
31:50You've got your feet under the table there.
31:56The migration of young people to manor houses like Stokesy
32:00made social mobility possible, creating opportunities for children to move up in the world.
32:09Boys from relatively humble backgrounds had a chance to break free from the constraints of village life,
32:16and to have their rough edges knocked off.
32:23There's a bit of a myth that medieval lords were rather an uncouth lot, that, I don't know,
32:29you have the image of a lord gnawing away at a roasted chicken and throwing it over his shoulder
32:35when he's done. But life in the evening was all about boozing and puking and wenching.
32:41In fact, the medieval world was obsessed about courtesy, about manners.
33:03Courtesy books were popular.
33:07Evidence that children were expected to acquire good manners very young
33:11if they were to get on in life.
33:16Look thy nails be clean, it says in truth, which is a bit ironic because my
33:21my nails aren't very clean at the moment. I wouldn't make a very good medieval servant.
33:28Wretch not, nor spit too far, nor laugh or speak too loud.
33:34Do not pick your nose or let it drop clear pearls,
33:38or sniff or blow too hard, lest your lord hears.
33:51These instruction manuals were intended to teach children model behaviour.
33:56But they heard some of the realities of life in a manor household.
34:01This was essentially an all-male world, and young boys especially would have encountered bullying and brutality.
34:11You are likely to be a victim of the kind of casual violence that characterised the medieval world.
34:16According to one source, a lord's huntsman should choose a boy servant, as young as seven or eight,
34:22who was physically active and keen of sight.
34:25That boy would have to sleep with the hounds to make sure they didn't fight and bark at night.
34:30And during the day, he'd walk, feed and comb them.
34:33But if he made any mistakes, the huntsman should beat him as hard as possible,
34:37until he had a proper dread of failing to carry out his master's orders.
34:47Knowing how to be forceful, even brutal, was an important skill.
34:53The great, royal and noble dynasties of Britain and Europe were rich and powerful,
34:59and they aimed to stay that way.
35:02The inevitable conflicts between them were often settled by violent confrontations.
35:13Medieval society was organised for war.
35:16It had to be. Rebellions, civil war, running battles between the English, Scots, Irish and Welsh were common.
35:24And there were long campaigns overseas, in France, and on crusade in the Holy Land.
35:30All this created another career opportunity for boys.
35:38Lords needed to protect themselves, and they were also expected to supply warriors for the king's army.
35:47So it was a nobleman's responsibility to train up the next generation of fighting men.
35:53Learning combat skills started young, but it was possible to become one of the superstars of medieval Britain.
36:00A knight.
36:04This is William Marshall.
36:06He ended up becoming the most celebrated knight in Europe in the late 12th century.
36:12An extraordinary warrior.
36:14But before that, he had a pretty eventful childhood.
36:21At one point, when he was just six years old, he was within seconds of being hurled to his death.
36:28He'd been taken hostage by his father's enemy, King Stephen, who was now besieging his castle.
36:33The king's plan was to throw the young William into the castle, using a siege catapult.
36:41But William managed to charm the king by treating the catapult as a fantastic toy.
36:47Is it a swing? He asked, as he was being led to his death.
36:50Can I swing on it, please?
36:55The king was so moved by the child's innocent words, he called off the execution,
36:59and played a game of knights with him instead.
37:06William went on to have a remarkable career as a real knight.
37:10He excelled in the art of war and was impossibly glamorous.
37:14He fought alongside Richard the Lionheart, went on crusades and survived several sieges.
37:19William was a legend.
37:29Becoming a knight was an expensive business, so it was primarily a role for the sons of noblemen.
37:36Growing up in the Middle Ages could be richly rewarding for the wealthy.
37:40For knights, the potential gains in land and status were immense.
37:49By the late 14th century, this was just one of hundreds of castles in Britain.
37:55And this one's especially magnificent, just what a medieval castle should look like.
38:02This is Bodium in Sussex, built in the 1380s.
38:16The lord who built Bodium, Sir Edward Dalling Ridge,
38:20clearly intended the castle to be an emphatic statement of his social status and military might.
38:25It would have been a formidable stronghold,
38:28and so the ideal place to train young boys to become soldiers.
38:32It was, in effect, a military academy.
38:41And becoming a knight could start young.
38:45As long as you were of noble birth, you would be sent away to live in another castle
38:49with a lord who's already a fully trained knight, and he would teach you how to be a knight.
38:54Now, you'd start your career right at the bottom as a medieval page.
38:59And a page is effectively a servant. You're an errand boy. You're the lowest of the low, I'm afraid.
39:04So your jobs would include, oh, sweeping the courtyard, cleaning the stables, cleaning the poo.
39:10I know, pretty grim.
39:13If you had one of those...
39:14Trainees were taught how to be respectful.
39:16There was a strict code of conduct amongst knights.
39:19It would certainly be a noble knight. Now, this is called a salat helmet.
39:23You can only see through the eye holes. Who knows what a salute is?
39:29You know, in the army, when you salute your commanding officer.
39:32Now, when you raise the visor to see who's approaching you or for other people to see who you are,
39:40you lift your visor with your right hand. So that's where the salute comes from.
39:45It comes from the salat helmet.
39:48This culture of chivalry emerged during the Middle Ages
39:52and defined how noblemen should behave in war and peace.
39:57Well, you can imagine lads training here. The atmosphere, competitive, testosterone-fueled.
40:06The marshal would be running his eye over the pages to see who had potential.
40:10He'd be looking for boys who are strong, fit, and had a good eye.
40:16The challenge is like this.
40:22Climbing up ladders on the inside.
40:27Hands only.
40:36Sorry. As far as I can.
40:43And it wasn't just physical training.
40:46Leadership, tactics, and strategy were also taught to armies of young men.
40:51Success here could catapult you into a meaningful adulthood.
40:58If you showed promise, you might make it to the rank of squire,
41:02essentially a young warrior, perhaps in your mid-teens,
41:05in the hope of becoming dubbed a fully-fledged knight, maybe in your early twenties.
41:10And you'd be expected to become a brilliant horseman,
41:13and master the art of riding in full armour, so that you could compete in tournaments.
41:23There see men who can joust and who can ride.
41:28Up spring the spears, twenty feet high.
41:32Out come the swords, bright as silver.
41:36They hew at the helmets to shatter them.
41:39Out bursts the blood, in stern streams red.
41:48Chaucer, he wasn't just a poet, he was also a man who'd campaigned with the Black Prince in France.
41:54So his description comes from experience, and it gets right to the heart of what it meant to be a
41:59knight.
42:00This was a violent world, and fighting was a serious business.
42:05Young boys in castles like this, being trained to kill.
42:13He is not fit for battle, who has never seen his own blood flow,
42:17who has not heard his teeth crunch under the blow of an opponent,
42:21or felt the full height of his adversary upon him.
42:30Despite the risks, becoming a knight was a proven way for eldest sons to maintain and protect their family's wealth
42:38and honour.
42:40And for younger sons, it was their best chance of acquiring status and land.
42:45This imbued aristocratic society with a restless, dynamic energy.
42:50So warfare was just as endemic at the end of the medieval period as it was at the beginning.
43:09In the mid-14th century, when many young knights were helping England to win wars in Europe,
43:14the country faced an even deadlier threat at home.
43:24It's known as the Black Death.
43:27It had already ravaged most of Europe, and it struck Britain in the spring of 1348.
43:33Once you caught it, you'd get postulate lumps under your armpit.
43:37And then your hands and feet would go black, and within four days, you'd probably be dead.
43:57In London, people were dying so fast that in Charterhouse Square, next to Spitalfields,
44:03they had to dig mass graves.
44:08The largest one lies right here beneath my feet.
44:12According to one contemporary, people were being buried here at a rate of 200 per week.
44:19But for children, worse was to come.
44:23A second onslaught swept across England in 1361.
44:30This time it was particularly hard on the very young, who had no immunity,
44:35because they hadn't lived through the earlier epidemic.
44:38Medieval writers called it the pestilence of children.
44:46These murderous pandemics caused loss of life on a terrifying scale.
44:51According to one estimate, the population of England plummeted from around five to two and a half million.
44:59It's almost unimaginable to think that the population halved in just one generation.
45:05And because children were hit the hardest, England shifted from being a young society to an aging one.
45:11Suddenly, the Middle Ages had become middle-aged.
45:20This was one of the biggest social and economic crises England had ever faced.
45:25Labour was suddenly scarce.
45:28But this meant that young people who survived the Black Death were in great demand.
45:34For the peasantry, it was the beginning of a golden age.
45:39And children now had many more opportunities to learn a skill that would set them up for their
45:43adult lives, especially if they were prepared to travel.
45:50Take the legendary Dick Whittington, who supposedly came to London penniless,
45:56and acquired a cat that caught the rat, that lived in his master's house,
46:00winning his daughter's hand in marriage.
46:15The real Richard Whittington did come to London, where he became an apprentice to a mercer,
46:22a trader in fine cloth.
46:24And he turned out to be a natural wheeler-dealer.
46:27By the 1390s, he was selling goods worth three and a half thousand pounds to the king.
46:32That's millions in today's money.
46:34And he really did become the Lord Mayor of London.
46:37And at his death, he left a vast fortune in charity.
46:40He was a successful and popular man, a classic example of a young lad who made good through trade and
46:48apprenticeship.
46:57Apprenticeship was an urban phenomenon.
47:01Towns had been a crucial part of the English economy from as early as the 7th century.
47:06And by the 14th, they were booming.
47:09Cities like London, Bristol and York were offering new prosperity and even freedom for some adolescents.
47:20New York was one of the biggest, richest cities in the land.
47:24So getting an apprenticeship here would have been a real step up in the world.
47:35This was the place to live in medieval York.
47:40Stonegate had some of the richest real estate.
47:42So a lot of the well-to-do cloth traders lived here, had their workshops here and trained their apprentices
47:49here.
47:53This is the Merchant Adventurers Hall.
47:53Young apprentices hoped to enter a very powerful and lucrative system.
47:58They aspired to becoming masters and merchants who were rich and influential.
48:04Freemen of the city, without the ties that bound the peasants to their lords out in the villages.
48:16This is the Merchant Adventurers Hall.
48:26An astonishing space, almost untouched since it was built about 650 years ago.
48:36It's lavish design shows how rich the merchants of York had become.
48:43They formed a guild, effectively a trade association, and they built this hall as a place to meet and do
48:49business.
48:54Masters often took on apprentices who were as young as 12 years old.
48:59The relationship between them was often very precisely defined.
49:05The contracts that bound them together are kept by archivist Jill Redford.
49:11We've got a typical example here, which has the indented line.
49:19OK, wow.
49:20So, and it's so cool because of these dense teeth, teeth marks in the document.
49:26It would be written out twice on one sheet of parchment, and then cut in this wavy line,
49:32so that the two halves matched each other and only matched each other.
49:35OK, so you place them next to each other, so it's proof that these are exact originals.
49:39Yes.
49:40So that's a wonderful one from the 17th century.
49:43Yes.
49:43Put that back.
49:45And then we have one here, which is described as an indenture.
49:50Although the cuts have gone, it's been trimmed.
49:53It has, hasn't it? Yes, it's been...
49:54From 1364.
49:56OK, right, so very early.
49:58And here are the contracting parties.
50:00Wilhelmus Filius Magote de Lincone, so William, son of Magote, probably a woman of Lincoln,
50:08is contracting with John Pate of York.
50:12It's for a period of 12 years.
50:15Gosh, that's a long time.
50:16You often get terms of seven years, so 12's unusually long.
50:20I suspect maybe he was quite young if he was being apprenticed for 12 years.
50:24It may have been a way of providing him with a home as well.
50:28I mean, perhaps his mother was a widow.
50:30OK.
50:31And here are some things which the young apprentice is being banned from doing.
50:36Ad talus non ludet.
50:38He's not allowed to go and play dice.
50:41Um, OK.
50:43Or go to tabernas, go to the tavern.
50:46All right, so he's not allowed to gamble or go to the pub.
50:48That's a bit of a pity.
50:50Gosh, and this is a rather striking word.
50:53Fornicationis.
50:54So, he's not allowed to commit fornication.
50:56Not allowed to fornicate with Uxor.
50:59The wife?
51:00Gosh, right.
51:01Yes.
51:02So, she's been told not to fornicate with the master's wife,
51:05with his philia, with his daughter,
51:08or with, I think this word is an killer.
51:12So, that's a female servant.
51:14Yes, yes.
51:14He's living in the house.
51:15He's growing up as a young man.
51:17The opportunities might be there.
51:20On pain of duplicating the number of years of the contract.
51:24That's extraordinary.
51:25So, if he did it, he'd have to spend 24 years there, not 12.
51:29I can't really believe it.
51:32It's going to be pretty unpleasant, the relations between them, isn't it?
51:34Yes, yes.
51:34Yeah, you can't imagine them spending 24 years together.
51:37He'd be out on the street.
51:44The young apprentices were a very valuable source of cheap labour
51:47in the city's economy.
51:50And they must have had a real presence
51:52in the hustle and bustle of medieval York.
51:58They're indentures said they shouldn't drink, gamble, or fornicate.
52:05But that's actually a pretty good indication.
52:07There was plenty of that going on.
52:10Experienced apprentices would have earned a small wage.
52:13The idea was that they would save that money,
52:15so they could set themselves up in business
52:17once their apprenticeship was complete.
52:21But these were young adolescents with money in their pocket.
52:24And many of them would have been much more interested
52:26in going out and having a good time.
52:29Potentially, this was the time of their lives.
52:37But for those able to resist that temptation,
52:39the rewards were potentially enormous.
52:44Entry into a guild opened up new possibilities.
52:47The chance to set up your own business.
52:52This class of young, skilled craftsmen and traders
52:56made a major contribution to the flourishing
52:58and increasingly urban economy.
53:09In the Middle Ages, children clearly had to shoulder
53:13adult responsibilities at a much younger age.
53:16But their contribution to the religious, economic,
53:19and strategic well-being of the kingdom was vital.
53:25By joining the three orders, working, praying and fighting,
53:29they gained more than just survival.
53:32They had status, and for some, even independence.
53:41But not everyone enjoyed such freedom.
53:46Surprisingly, aristocratic children,
53:48the children of the rich, could be the most unfree of all.
54:00Throughout the medieval period,
54:02the ultimate source of wealth and power was land.
54:08And kings and barons, the richest people in the country,
54:12fought desperately to control it.
54:15And children were often among the casualties.
54:20If their parents died, and they stood to inherit,
54:23there was a danger they would become political pawns.
54:29In 1444, Margaret Beaufort became one of the richest heiresses in the country.
54:36When her father died, a legal guardian seized control of her whole life.
54:41And although she was only six years old,
54:44and he swiftly married her off to his own son.
54:58By the time she was 12, Margaret was living here,
55:01a royal stronghold on the south-western corner of Wales,
55:04the king of the palace, Pembroke Castle.
55:11Even the king hadn't been able to ignore her vast wealth.
55:16He dissolved her first marriage, and then married her off to his half-brother.
55:23Margaret had been manipulated into the heart of political intrigue.
55:33And now for the shocking bit.
55:35In order to secure her wealth, her husband had to make her pregnant.
55:41She was a slight 12-year-old girl, still basically a child.
55:46He was a strapping 26-year-old knight.
55:50Yet within weeks, it was clear the marriage had been consummated.
55:54Because Margaret was pregnant with her first child.
56:01Although her adult life had barely begun, young Margaret had done her duty.
56:06Within months, her husband was dead, a victim of civil war.
56:12So, just 13, twice married and now a widow, she gave birth to a son.
56:20And this little boy would change the course of history.
56:23He would become king of England, and would unite the kingdom after the Wars of the Roses.
56:27His name was Henry VII, founder of the whole Tudor dynasty.
56:36The Tudors had a profound effect on the course of English history.
56:41And by giving birth to their first king, Margaret Beaufort played a decisive role in their rise to power.
56:48She was exceptional, but in a sense, her experience wasn't.
56:54Margaret was just one of millions of medieval children who made a vital contribution to England's transformation.
57:04Like virtually everything we know about medieval children, Margaret's story was written and preserved by adults, usually adult men.
57:12That makes it hard to get at the lives of medieval children.
57:16It's as if history has muted them, failing to transmit their voices directly to us.
57:22But if we listen hard, we can still hear their distant echo.
57:26And to my mind, it's vital we try to do so.
57:29Because if not, we risk losing so much, in fact about half, of what it meant to be alive in
57:36the medieval world.
57:46And tomorrow, we have the story of a remarkable medieval child with the schooling of Thomas More's daughter in a
57:54Renaissance education.
57:55.