The Medieval 'Child

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 123, 27 May 1933, Page 9

The Medieval 'Child

To bid a child "''Go thy way sadly and answer demurely," as a .popular medieval proverb did, was to ask for the appalling table • maimers; which such children" appear to have shown (states a writer to the "Manchester Guardian'/). Manuals on table manners were innumerable''in the 'Middle Ages, and though they varied considerably in the habits they commended, they had a striking unanimity in the bad manners they denounced. After the reading of a few, the list of gaucheries becomes wcaryingiy familiar—bones should not be gnawed, nor plates licked, for "that bekmgcth to cats and dogsV; tablecloths are not for tho cleansing of knives between courses, nor should knives bo used for the picking of teeth when, toothpicks arc provided. Other sins, which in print have too vulgar an appearance, seem to havo been common, but the niediu'-al moralist, >!*p<?.:ted so absurdly exacting a standard from children at table that these, were probably indulged in as a pure .defiance, rather than because of an innate taste for them. ~■ , :. Now that wo no longer give boer ami wine to men, women, and children alike at all meals, even breakfast, we no longer run the medieval risk of training a child at' an' early age to like strong waters altogether too much. Tho medieval parent and teacher were, however, alive to tho danger. "For a child to make drink the beginning of his dinner is a gOod way to breed him up to drunkenness: whoso bestoweth wine and beer on his child beyond reasbu deformeth and abuseth him more by dishonouring his reason." The precept is reinforced by some rather strange information about , Socrates, who,I"being old, would not drink of the first cup:\for why1? His brain was light, and the first drink is ever the most'fuining and overcoming." In onu matter, then, even the most convinced medievalist cannot deny our advance: we no longer have to reckon with the problem, of^infantilc drunkenness. "HONEST AND PLAIN." An authoritarian age would naturally deny, our modern saying, "Here is a child; for God's sake let it alone," and would vehemently insist 011 cutting the child's coat according to its parents' cloth. This it did in a literal sense, for the moralists wero full of what ehildre'n ought to wear. Their clothes, of course, should bo honest and plain. "A painted and gaudy apparel is not so' fantastic in, children's eyes, but costly to the parents' purses, whereby ancient writers proclaim such parents fellowfools with their children." The child's delight in "jagged and cut" garments and all such "fantasticness" should be sternly '' reformed by wise and elder." The ancient writers are dragged in evidence again to show that bright clothes for children proclaim the parents "out of their wits and madmen." . Yet with all that,, with restrictions to right and prohibitions to left, with the birch'ready to leap out of its hidingplace on no provocation (one of the Pautoiis used to beat, her child weekly on the, same principle'that one takes a child to the dentist,quarterly as a matter of routine; yet she was not a cruel woman), children, then seem to have been as happy as they are now. When that sort of treatment was at its height London schoolboys were a byword, for gaiety, and no foreign traveller who wrote down his experiences in England failed to note the exuberant jollity of adults aiid children alike. Perhaps it is that neither authority nor. yet freedomis ablo to quench the joy of the healthy child for more than fivo minutes. Only cruelty can do that.