Quite honestly, I doubt even Arthur would be able to write.
The point of becoming a Lord of the Manor was that you paid clerics to do that. It's about as likely as teaching your heir to put up shelves when the manor is full of carpenters.
Think of the cost of learning to write, even with slates and slate pencils it wasn't cheap. As late as 1950 pencils were so expensive that a box of new pencils was a highly prized gift to a child,. My grandmother never got out of the habit of conserving pencil stubs.
Reading was taught precisely so people could read aloud (it wasn't quite the private thing we think of today), and writing was seen as an entirely separate task,
We take for granted that "learning our letters" involves holding something in our hands and copying them,, but that was a radical invention at the end of the eighteenth century and didn't really spread until the nineteenth. Until then, learning your letters involved look-say.
My vague memory tells me that Margaret Spufford was the expert on this, but I've been following information on this for some time--once historians realised that writing and reading were seen as very distinct tasks, it completely rewrote the history and understanding of illiteracy, Reading turned out to be much more widespread than they thought, but writing actually less widespread, because it was associated with certain jobs. I've just been reading a book called A Calculating People by Patrica Cline Cohen and was surprised to find that many middle class women learned to read but not write as late as the mid-eighteenth century, and that even basic ciphering (numbers) wasn't taught to women until the 1820s. Again, the issue was that numbers was a professional skill and seen as very difficult, so even boys weren't taught arabic numerals until their early/mid teens (in 1820 arithmatic was a college level subject). People used "ready reckoners", printed tables that contained conversions and lists of multiplications--mind you, with the mess that is imperial weights and measures, I can seee why.
Sorry, drifting here, but what people were and are taught is part of the current project.
no subject
The point of becoming a Lord of the Manor was that you paid clerics to do that. It's about as likely as teaching your heir to put up shelves when the manor is full of carpenters.
Think of the cost of learning to write, even with slates and slate pencils it wasn't cheap. As late as 1950 pencils were so expensive that a box of new pencils was a highly prized gift to a child,. My grandmother never got out of the habit of conserving pencil stubs.
Reading was taught precisely so people could read aloud (it wasn't quite the private thing we think of today), and writing was seen as an entirely separate task,
We take for granted that "learning our letters" involves holding something in our hands and copying them,, but that was a radical invention at the end of the eighteenth century and didn't really spread until the nineteenth. Until then, learning your letters involved look-say.
My vague memory tells me that Margaret Spufford was the expert on this, but I've been following information on this for some time--once historians realised that writing and reading were seen as very distinct tasks, it completely rewrote the history and understanding of illiteracy, Reading turned out to be much more widespread than they thought, but writing actually less widespread, because it was associated with certain jobs. I've just been reading a book called A Calculating People by Patrica Cline Cohen and was surprised to find that many middle class women learned to read but not write as late as the mid-eighteenth century, and that even basic ciphering (numbers) wasn't taught to women until the 1820s. Again, the issue was that numbers was a professional skill and seen as very difficult, so even boys weren't taught arabic numerals until their early/mid teens (in 1820 arithmatic was a college level subject). People used "ready reckoners", printed tables that contained conversions and lists of multiplications--mind you, with the mess that is imperial weights and measures, I can seee why.
Sorry, drifting here, but what people were and are taught is part of the current project.