Reading, Writing

A number of aspects of historical English law and procedure involve the fact that people did not read or write. Their ignorance, however, should not be misunderstood. The problem was not so much that they could not as that they did not.

Though few could write, people who could read were not as rare as we often suppose. In the first half of the thirteenth century the practice of using documents to transfer property — not only real property but also personal property and intangibles — became routine; the practice started with the nobles (the king’s courts began demanding documents to prove title early in the century) but spread fairly quickly to all freemen. Serfs also needed documents: medieval vagrancy laws were harsh and someone who had to leave his village needed a document that explained why he had a legitimate reason to do so. While the serf himself probably could not read the document, the practice could not have existed unless the ability to read and write existed in each village.

That they could read does not necessarily mean that they did read. Early written documents were a way of transmitting oral information. Thus, letters were often read to their recipient by clerks or ssistants regardless of whether the recipient could read. Books were written to be read aloud to groups. Even technical information was transmitted orally; accounts, for example, were checked by having them read aloud, hence the term "audit" (Latin for "he hears").

The rise of writing was also, to some extent, controlled by fashion. Reading and writing are inseparable only in a modern mind. Recognizing letters and drawing them are different skills; the latter was reserved for specialists. Medieval writings were normally dictated to scribes, who took notes on wax tablets and then transferred them to parchment. To "write" (scribere) meant to make the final version on parchment; the verb for taking notes on the wax tablet was dictitare.

One thing that may have held back writing was the number of languages in use. The peasants used English; the nobility (i.e, the people who owned the land and controlled everything) spoke French; anyone who wanted to be able to deal with both groups spoke both. In addition, government documents were in Latin and an increasing number of people had to know how to read them, at least well enough to get the main thread of meaning. Almost everyone above the humblest peasants picked up a little Latin.

Another problem was the nature of writing materials. Parchment was not easy to write on and required arduous preparation. Quills had to be hand-cut and sharpened often; a scribe usually worked with a quill in one hand and a knife in the other. Ink had to be prepared; paper did not become cheap enough to use until the fifteenth century; pencils and metal pens are Renaissance inventions. Writing was therefore left to those who had the proper skills and equipment.

The wax tablets had been used by the ancient Greeks and Romans. They were made of wood coated with wax. A stylus was used to draw on the wax, revealing the darker-colored wood underneath; the remaining wax could later be scraped off and the tablet re-coated. (The Romans took to tying several of these tablets together along their edges, producing the "codex," the distant ancestor of the book.)

The practice of transmitting written documents orally and of leaving writing to specialists also enabled non-literate or barely literate people to participate in an increasingly literate society. A person could create and use documents even though he might not be able to read very well. Most people did not need to know how to write any more than you need to know how to operate an offset printer. In this way the transition from a pre-literate to a literate society could proceed slowly, as literacy and familiarity with writings gradually increased.

Although the language that they wrote (Latin) was not the language that they spoke, for much of the middle ages they did not really think of them as two different languages. They thought of themselves as using the language of the ancient Romans. The written version was Latin; the spoken version was Roman or Romanic (hence the term "Romance language"). The difference between Latin and Old French was not great enough to make them seem separate. Significant differences between spoken and written language are common; modern English is a bit unusual in having so few.

It explains a lot about romance novels of the Harlequin sort to remember that their ancestors were stories about, literally, knights in shining armor. "Romance" originally meant any book written in French (because, again, the French didn’t know they were speaking French, they thought they were still speaking the language of the Romans). Its meaning then came to include the book’s subject matter as well as its language. Most early French books were knights’ tales, and in time the tales themselves came to be called "romances." The word then specialized on one theme of the knight’s tale — "romance" in the modern sense — which became an increasingly important, and eventually the primary, element, perhaps because most early vernacular books were commissioned by or for women.