Discover the Surprising School Supplies Medieval Children Couldn’t Learn Without

Ever wonder what it was like to hit the books back in the medieval days? Spoiler alert: It wasn’t exactly a walk in the scroll-filled park. Formal schooling was the exclusive club for the ultra-wealthy or those destined for the church choir, with most education happening in religious hideouts like monasteries—definitely not your average neighborhood school. The rest of the folks? Well, most couldn’t read a word and stuck to learning the family trade. And forget about colorful classrooms or buzzing chatter; imagine dim candlelight flickering off stone walls, the quiet so thick you could hear a quill scratch a note on a wax tablet. Latin ruled the roost, and pupils wrestled with the Seven Liberal Arts instead of TikTok dances. Fancy a peek into the medieval classroom survival kit, from waxy notebooks to the trusty quill and yes—knives? Dive in, you might just rethink your backpack essentials! LEARN MORE

Formal schooling in medieval times was typically reserved only for the children of the very wealthiest families, who were often trained by private tutors or at home, or else those who were being lined up to join the church; for that reason, most schools were typically joined to or associated with religious establishments, like cathedrals and monasteries. Although municipal schools existed in the Middle Ages, they too were often organized around a fairly religious education. The vast majority of the rest of the population, ultimately, remained largely illiterate, and so would only be trained or schooled in their family’s trade or business. 

Education itself, naturally, looked a lot different from today. Lessons would typically be taught in the scholarly language of Latin, and would follow the classical route of the Seven Liberal Arts—that is, the “trivium” subjects of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the “quadrivium” of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.

In the classroom itself, pupils would use and be supplied with a very different set of school supplies than students are today. 

CANDLES 

With no electrical lighting, medieval education was conducted by candlelight—typically in bare classrooms with stone walls, wooden benches, and little to no windows or natural light. Classrooms were therefore cold, uncomfortable, and deathly quiet, with the daily reading, memorization, and recitation exercises conducted in silence. 

TEACHER’S TEXTBOOK

Before the printing press came along (and for a time, even after it did) books were hugely expensive, time-consuming to put together, and ultimately rarely encountered in medieval times. A schoolteacher might have a handful of books in their classroom, if that, which their students would not be expected to get their hands on. Instead, pupils would typically write down lessons or passages recited from a textbook by their teacher. 

WAX TABLETS 

But what would the pupils write those notes on if paper was so rare and prohibitively expensive? Well, long before classroom exercise books became common, school pupils wrote, copied down recitations, and made their own notes on cheaper wax-coated wooden tablets that, unlike pen and ink, had the added bonus of being reusable. Consisting of a hinged wooden panel coated in a layer of beeswax and plant oil, students could scrape their notes into the waxy surface of the tablet using a pointed stylus, and then wipe the wax clear again afterward. 

QUILLS 

Once students had mastered writing in wax—or if a student’s work was for whatever required to be made permanent—then they would graduate from a stylus to a quill pen. Made by sharpening a bird’s feather (and, contrary to most images of quill pens, trimming or removing the plume so that you could actually see what you were writing!), quill pens had to be constantly maintained, and so would be kept continually sharp by the teacher using a blade or scissors. Paper or parchment (which only became widely available toward the end of the medieval era) would then be used, along with an ink made of oak galls or soot, to prepare permanent documents or classroom records. 

KNIVES

A knife would come in handy in keeping a quill or stylus sharp, of course, but knives were already a quintessential everyday tool in medieval times. Whether it was cutting bread or fruit at lunchtime, or carving your name onto the furniture, keeping a knife on you would have had its obvious advantages. 

COUNTING BOARD 

In arithmetic lessons, medieval students would often use a simple abacus-like frame to help with their calculations known as a counting board. Although known as a “board,” in practice anything marked, drawn, or engraved with a set of straight lines for keeping track of figures could be used here, so long as individual counters (often beans or stones) could be easily moved along them. 

SATCHEL