Boys learning Latin

 Medieval literacy required knowledge of Latin.  Being able to read Latin was one thing (hey, even I can do it!), but anyone in the church, and for that matter many in government or commerce, would have to be able to carry out a conversation in Latin and to write it.

 Thus there were handbooks created to help those who did not know Latin learn it.  It was easier for those whose native language was one of the so-called Romance Languages (Old French, Old Spanish, Old Italian, and so on), because until the eighth or ninth century they assumed they were in fact speaking Latin.  A refresher on case endings and verb conjugations was going to be necessary.  It was a bigger challenge for those speaking a Germanic language, including Anglo-Saxon, because the vocabulary was different as well as things like noun declensions.

We have a very interesting handbook put together by a man named Aelfric Bata, intended to help boys in Anglo-Saxon England learn Latin.  It was built around handy phrases that the boys might use.  Presumably, as in modern language training, these were phrases that were meant to be memorized, then modified in use as appropriate.

Many of us in first-year French (or whatever) learned to say such scintillating phrases as, "My pen is blue," or "Where is the restaurant?" or even "I am happy to meet you."  More darkly, some modern phrase books teach us how to say things like, "I have injured my arm/ my foot/ my head," or "Please call an ambulance." 

Aelfric Bata's phrase book provides a window into what an Anglo-Saxon teacher thought his boys might need to say.  The book begins, "Master, please teach us boys how to speak Latin correctly."  The boys continue, "We don't want to seem silly or shameful when we speak."  They even ask to be beaten if they don't learn properly, which seems like an editorial emendation.

This opener suggests the boys were already speaking Latin pretty well, but there was lots to come.  Some of the dialogues suggest a rather strange scene.  "Do you have something to say to me?  Well, plowman, what do you say?  What kind of work do you do?  Have you had something to eat?  Have you had something to drink? Do you have any comrades?  Is this person one of your comrades?"  (For starters, why would a novice monk assume a plowman would converse in Latin?  And where did the comrades come from?  Did they bring lunch?)

Interestingly, if the answer to one of the questions was Yes, Aelfric Bata represented it as "etiam," which literally means "indeed."  By the twelfth century on the Continent Yes in Latin was "sic," meaning "so it is."  Fun fact:  classical Latin has no word for Yes.

A section that was meant to teach verb tenses (present, past, future, and so on) has a desperate note.  "I am doing nothing wrong, I did nothing wrong, I wasn't doing anything wrong, I will do nothing wrong, God willing."

And then there were the boys at play.  There were dialogues about baseball (or "rounders," a pre-baseball version of a game with bat, ball, and runnng the bases), batter-up, run faster, you're out, and the like.  There were also phrases like, "Watch out! The teacher's coming back!"  Sounds like Aelfric Bata was having some fun here.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval language, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.