Among the aristocracy of the land, the education of the boy took what was considered at that time a very practical turn--he was instructed in behaviour, in manly exercises and the use of arms, in carving at table--then looked upon as a most important accomplishment among gentlemen--and in some other branches of learning which we should hardly appreciate at present; but school learning was no mediæval gentleman’s accomplishment, and was, in that light, quite an exception, unless perhaps to a certain degree among the ladies. In the historical romances of the middle ages, a prince or a baron is sometimes able to read, but it is the result of accidental circumstances. Thus, in the romance of the “Mort de Garin,” when the empress of the Franks writes secret news from Paris to duke Garin, the head of the family of the Loherains, it is remarked, as an unusual circumstance, that the latter was able to read, and that he could thus communicate the secret information of the empress to his friends without the assistance of a scholar or secretary, which was a great advantage, as it prevented one source of danger of the betrayal of the correspondence. “Garin the Loherain,” says the narrator, “was acquainted with letters, for in his infancy he was put to school until he had learned both Roman (French) and Latin.” _De letres sot li Loherens Garins;_ _Car en s’enfance fu à escole mis,_ _Tant que il sot et Roman et Latin._ --Mort de Garin, p. 105. Education of this kind was bestowed more generally on the _bourgeoisie_--on the middle and even the lower classes; and to these school-education was much more generally accessible than we are accustomed to imagine. From Anglo-Saxon times, indeed, every parish church had been a public school. The Ecclesiastical Institutes (p. 475, in the folio edition of the Laws, by Thorpe) directs that “Mass-priests ought always to have at their houses a school of disciples; and if any one desire to commit his little ones (_lytlingas_) to them for instruction, they ought very gladly to receive them, and kindly teach them.” It is added that “they ought not, however, for that instruction, to desire anything from their relatives, except what they shall be willing to do for them of their own accord.” In the Ecclesiastical Canons, published under king Edgar, there is an enactment which would lead us to suppose that the clergy performed their scholastic duties with some zeal, and that priests were in the habit of seducing their scholars from each other, for this enactment (p. 396) enjoins “that no priest receive another’s scholar without leave of him whom he previously followed.” This system of teaching was kept up during at least several generations after the Norman conquest. CHAPTER VII. EARLY ENGLISH HOUSES.--THEIR GENERAL FORM AND DISTRIBUTION.