A Medieval Childhood: Games With Frontiers

In Nicholas Orme’s fine essay on the nature of play and childhood in the Middle Ages he counters the assertion made by Phillippe Ariès in Centuries of Childhood (1962) that medieval childhood was a myth, that our formative years were spent as little adults, with minimal time for play. Orme focuses on the nature of children’s recreation through toys and descriptions of their games. Many of these games, such as the ‘cobnut’ and ‘cherry-stone’, recorded by Sir Thomas More, are incomprehensible to us now but represent every child’s ability to create a random set of rules around the objects to hand. The Tudor poet Alexander Barclay noted how the more inventive ‘get bladders, fill them with peas till they rattle, then use them for handball or football’. More structured games also existed, requiring specialist equipment. In 1440 Geoffrey, a Dominican monk in King’s Lynn, compiled a dictionary for schools entitled Promptorium Parvulorum, ‘a prompter for little ones’, which contains an early mention of tennis.