Page 30 - British Museum: SYTYGIB Medieval Castle

For poor kids – both girls and boys – education was simply too expensive.
It cost money to have a teacher or a tutor, and peasants had very, very little of that. Poor kids also had no time to be educated – they were expected to work from a young age, and were almost considered adults by the age of 11 or 12.
It’s hard to go to school when you spend all day toiling in the fields doing backbreaking farm work to feed the people in the castle. Remember that next time you have a tantrum about doing PE.
Speaking of tantrums, if you were badly behaved in class in the Middle Ages, you wouldn’t be given a talking to or get a stern glare from the teacher. Ooooooh no.
Back then it would be a much more painful punishment – a beating by stick or by hand usually.
As horrible as it sounds, that was very common – in fact it was encouraged, as it was thought that being whacked was actually good for the child. Medieval writers wrote that pain helped students memorise their mistakes, that fear was “the origin of wisdom” and that beating could “instil morality into the students”.
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