Medieval Royal Tutors

[biofreak659]

Hello all! I am looking for any good overviews of medieval tutors of either royalty or nobility. England and France (and other Normanish places) are preferable, but any information is useful at this point. I'm particularly interested in the qualifications of tutors, and some politics involved in their appointment. Teaching schedules would also be useful. Thanks!

Comments

[dsrtao]

So... that's a thousand year period covering about two hundred countries at various times. England gets conquered by the Danes and the Normans. France doesn't have a single language in common.

Can you pick a particular century and area? You'll get more useful information.

E.g. "Paris around 1100CE" or "Charlemagne's court and a generation or three later" can help focus.

[kitarella_imagines]

Also the official/noble language of England was French after the Norman Conquest of 1066 for about 300 years, because all the monarchs and court officials were French (i.e. they got rid of the original English court, I expect they killed them.)

Hope this is helpful.

[biofreak659]

This is for historically informed fantasy, not actual historical fiction. I'm just looking for a reference point, and unfortunately there's some anime series clogging my search results and Google isn't as good as it used to be.

Trust me, I have tried searching for 'occitan tutor plantaganet' and been only able to find information on later period governesses, which while interested, is not useful for my purposes.

[dsrtao]

So you want something like Amy McElroy's _Educating the Tudors_ but earlier?

[jenett]

The thing is - besides it being a very long period - a lot of this was very personal. I'm currently reading a bunch of Henry I / Eleanor of Aquitaine material for an ongoing project, and the tutoring is mostly "We found someone and handed the kid over to them" - not a ton of documentation about what was involved, and the choices were mostly "fostering in a family connected with the child's family and politically allied." And it's *way* before any kind of formal accreditation for teaching (that's mostly a 19th century thing, though there's somewhat more formality once we start getting universities. Even then, though, a lot of that is a sort of *shrug, the university decide who is teaching for their own reasons*.

(This is also the period where you start getting formal grammar schools in England, but those are a whole different thing than tutoring, obviously.)

You're probably going to find the most info if you narrow down on specific individuals and see what you can find about them and their education/training. But it's also probably not going to get super detailed about things like specific works (For example, Thomas Ashbridge's The Greatest Knight (a biography of William Marshall) has a modest amount about William Marshall and education - both Marshall's own education, and him becoming Henry the Young King's mentor - but it doesn't get into things like specific texts or learning materials, because that just wasn't documented a lot of the time.)

[biofreak659]

Thank you so much! This is incredibly helpful!

[melannen]

Depending on how broadly you want to define the middle ages, Roger Ascham was Elizabeth I's tutor and is mildly famous in his own right, so there's a fair amount of info about him and his career out there. He also wrote a guidebook for tutors to the nobility. This is well into the 1500s though.

Generally, especially for royalty, it's likely to be more specific than general - after all there weren't really enough crown princes around for there to be an entire profession of tutors to the crown prince! Often (like Ascham) it would be an eminent scholar, possibly one who had already had some kind of government position, who is specifically asked to do the job as an honor, but each one would be taking a slightly different path to get there. And also especially in times of war or civil war (which was much of the middle ages in England and France) they might have had a very unstable home life that would disrupt their education. Also as you go farther back the education is going to be less and less regular (and less well-documented) until you end up with early kings who mostly had a military apprenticeship and might not even know how to read.

You might do better finding a specific royal who is a good parallel to your time and place, and looking up information about their tutors specifically. You can likely expand from there, once you have a start. For example, Henri II Plantagenet's wikipedia article has a section that talks about his education, where he was being shuttled around between different noble households and tutored by all different sorts, and you could follow up on the information about any of them.

[oldshrewsburyian]

The fact that you say "Normanish places" makes me think you might secretly be thinking of the Angevin Empire. But the fact that you are asking about "teaching schedules" and "the qualifications of tutors" makes me think that you might not actually know anything about what you are looking for. What gender and age(s) are the kids in question? And, importantly, what subjects are involved? Your likeliest bet, really, is Some Guy who knows Latin and has both minor orders and lovely manners. You don't get celebrity tutors (except Abelard, which becomes, famously, a whole situation.)