What Was Life Like for Kids in the Middle Ages?

Childhood looked a little different in Europe during the Middle Ages—a time without public school, organized sports, or the health and safety advancements we often take for granted today (not to mention the screens that transfix 21st century kids!).

The Middle Ages, or medieval period, lasted from roughly the 5th century to the late 15th century, between the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance in Western Europe. Major events of the time included the Crusades, the bubonic plague, the adoption of the printing press, the flourishing of brilliantly illuminated manuscripts, and the founding of early universities. During this time, medieval people recognized childhood as a distinct stage in life that was separate from infancy and adulthood, though this time lasted quite a bit less than it does today, explains Larisa Grollemond, associate curator of manuscripts at the Getty Museum. Childhood ended and young adulthood began at ages 12 to 14.

“Still, childhood was considered a time of development, during which children needed guidance and nurturing to grow,” Grollemond says. “Despite high child mortality rates–up to a third of infants died in their first year, and up to one half of older children died before age 5—children were generally loved and valued by their parents, and adults understood that children had different abilities and needs.”

What exactly was life like for kids in the Middle Ages? How did they spend their days, and in what ways did childhood look similar to the childhood people experience in the modern world? We invited our social media followers to ask their questions; Grollemond and Elizabeth Morrison, senior curator of manuscripts at the Getty Museum, shared their answers. Read on for a glimpse of daily life for a kid who called medieval Europe home.

Work and education

Did kids go to school?

Access to an education was highly dependent on social class. For agricultural workers, who made up the majority of the medieval population, formal education was not accessible, nor was it considered necessary.

What about kids from higher social classes? And how did schooling differ for boys and girls?

If parents of the middle class or lowest nobility wanted to get their children an education, their options were essentially all in the home or religion-based (generally Christian institutions, though there were also comparable Jewish schools that served those communities). Some monasteries educated boys with the idea that they would continue to become clergy or join religious communities, and cathedral schools in urban centers offered a specifically Christian education. Generally, “an education” in any case meant becoming literate in Latin and instruction in rhetoric and logic. A boy who completed a cathedral school might then go on to a more extensive education that would include the “quadrivium”: arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music. Some of these students might then go to a university to study law, theology, or medicine.

Boys of the lower noble classes as young as 14 could begin training as squires to receive an “education” of sorts in their training to become a knight. This might include instruction in religious topics as well as the practical combat skills and horsemanship necessary to pursue knighthood.

Girls of lower classes generally did not receive a formal education outside of domestic skills, while noble girls could be taught by their mothers, in convents by nuns, or by tutors and other women privately in the home. Noble girls learned Latin, and might also learn courtly arts appropriate to their stations including embroidery, dancing, and music often in addition to learning multiple vernacular languages and skills necessary to run a large household or estate: overseeing agricultural production, managing finances, and supervising servants.

Did they have homework?

In a sense! For students at monastic or cathedral schools, memorization of huge amounts of information was a central component of the education, and they utilized reusable wax tablets for practicing writing and arithmetic.

Did they have chores?

This was highly dependent on social class. The rural agricultural population, which made up the vast majority of the medieval population in Western Europe, had children that would have been entrusted with various household chores from quite a young age. These might include: animal care (especially of small animals like geese, chickens, goats), tending a garden, helping parents with cooking, clothing care, and agricultural work (planting seeds, harvesting), and caring for siblings.

Children of the lower social classes were generally destined to continue on in their parents’ footsteps, and most boys became agricultural laborers while girls were trained in the domestic duties associated with managing children and a household. Male children (and in a few known cases, girls) of artisan families generally learned the family trade through apprenticeship.

What might be called “middle class” children (particularly in the 15th century) left home quite young by today’s standards (10–14) and were working already in their early teens as apprentices or domestic servants in other households to help save money to eventually get married and set up a household of their own in their early to mid-20s.

Health and safety

What kinds of diseases did children get? What was life expectancy?

The exceptionally high child mortality rates during the European Middle Ages are attributed to complications from childbirth and congenital issues, infectious diseases (flu, diphtheria, measles, whooping cough, dysentery), complications of simple colds and infections, poor nutrition, and environmental risks (physical accidents, falls, etc.). A medieval child who survived until age 5 had a high likelihood of living a full life, generally into his or her 60s.

Were children really sold by poor parents?

Not sold, but given. Parents who couldn’t afford to care for their children might commit them to a convent or monastery as an oblate, or leave a child at a church or other ecclesiastical institution, or at a foundling home (for example, the Dubrovnik Orphanage opened in 1432 and featured a window where parents could leave their children without revealing their identities). It was also quite common for children to leave home as young as age 10 to serve as apprentices or domestic servants in other households.

Fun and games

What games and toys did they play with?

Despite the necessity to help with daily chores, up until ages 6 or 7, children were primarily engaged in play (if you’ve ever tried to get a 4-year-old to do a particular task, you understand why). And they played with lots of things! Some popular ones: rattles, knucklebones (a game similar to jacks), hobby horses, tops to spin, and wooden hoops that were rolled with sticks. Children played what we would call board games: backgammon and chess. Dolls were among the most common kinds of toys for children, and these were often made by parents or children themselves out of rags and other household scraps; but there is also evidence that dolls of finer materials could be purchased.

We don’t have a lot of surviving children’s toys, since they tended to be made of materials that weren’t particularly durable: wood, wax, and fabric. There are a handful of miniatures that survive in pewter, bronze, and other metals, like the one below. But mostly we rely on manuscript images and written references and descriptions to tell us about children’s games and toys.

Children also engaged in lots of different kinds of group games: make-believe play (mock tournaments), inflating animal bladders as balloons, blind man’s bluff (a type of tag in which the tagger is blindfolded), hide and seek, crack the whip (players line up, hold hands, and the leader of the chain runs back and forth to try to force players to fall or lose their grip). Seasonal activities for kids were the same as they are today: swimming, climbing trees, ice skating, snowball fights.

Did children do arts and crafts?

It seems that children made a lot of their own toys, but other than that they were engaged in learning things we might see as domestic crafts: sewing or embroidery.

Did they have pets?

Generally, no. Most domestic animals for lower classes (dogs, cats) served primarily utilitarian roles, though it must be imagined that children had fond relationships with their family’s animals. Children of the nobility were occasionally known to have kept pets, especially dogs, cats, birds, squirrels, and even monkeys.

Are there any known nursery rhymes from the Middle Ages?

We have some evidence that medieval mothers sang lullabies to their children, but unfortunately we don’t know much more than that about the specifics. Many of the nursery rhymes we know today are assumed to be older, but the versions with which we’re familiar were first recorded in the 17th century or later.

Did medieval children have absurdist humor? Like “6-7” today—the kind of humor that only makes sense or is funny when we are going through certain stages of cognitive development.

We have no evidence at all to back this up, but we’re sure medieval children found absurd things funny—a lot of the humor for medieval adults we know about are essentially poop jokes, so we have to believe that medieval kids also found delight in nonsense.

Were there books produced specifically for a child audience?

There wasn’t a category of “children’s literature” in the Middle Ages as we might think of it today, but there were definitely things created with children in mind or that children may have been interested in (sometimes by reading, but more often via an oral reading or performance): animal fables (Aesop was very popular in the Middle Ages), romances, texts for educational use on history, philosophy, science, and religion, manuals about manners and proper social conduct, and simple poetry. We also have several manuscripts we know were used to teach children to read, often with the alphabet enlarged to be easy to memorize.

What sweets did children eat?

Sweets definitely looked a little different than they do today—for children and adults, things like dried fruit and honey were treats. For wealthier folks, things flavored with ginger or cinnamon, candied nuts, and fruit tarts and cakes were eaten by children and adults alike.

Becoming an “adult”

In what ways did children transition to adulthood at ages 12 to 14?

Girls (generally aristocratic ladies more so than girls of the lower classes, who might have married in their late teens or early 20s) could be married at this age, and both boys and girls were expected to be taking on more responsibility for themselves and in their labor.

Around age 12–14, though this varied somewhat, people reached the age of competency, and so might be held legally responsible as an “adult” at that age. Those in their teens might be tried for crimes or married, but they would have been seen as young adults rather than children. In most cases, legal adulthood (for the purposes of inheritance specifically), began at 21, and most people were not married until their 20s, although noblewomen were often married at a younger age (even as young as 11) for political or financial reasons.