Hogwarts and Medieval Education
The Founders
Wemyss has an excellent essay on the Founders’ geographical origins here ( link), placing Godric in the moors of the West Country, Salazar in the Fenlands of East Anglia, Helga as a Viking descendant in Wales, and Rowena as a Saxon whose family ended up in Scotland. I wonder a bit more about Salazar’s origins here ( LJ / DW). But this raises another question: how did they meet and decide to form a school, and how did they gain enough magical knowledge to be qualified teachers in the first place?
Monasteries, Cathedral Schools, and Early Universities
By the Founders’ time, the Church had been the center of learning for centuries. If you wanted to be literate, learn Latin, study theology and mathematics and philosophy, read rare and valuable books (which was pretty much all of them), etc., you went to a monastery. The Viking raids destroyed many of the monasteries and put a hold on a lot of scholarship, but by the 10th century they were starting to rebuild, cathedral schools teaching boys the seven liberal arts and theology were growing more common, and ancient Greek and Roman texts had started trickling back into Europe from the Arab world with some new additions in fields from philosophy to optics to medicine from scholars like Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Some cathedral and monastic schools, as well as independent groups of scholars, developed into universities, including Oxford possibly as early as 1096 and Cambridge in 1209. Due to their origins, universities were often church-run or at least strongly tied to the church, and Oxbridge fellows were required to be celibate and ordained right up until the 19th century even if they weren’t teaching theology.[ 1] Boys started university around age 14 - young enough to be “young sorcerers” in need of magical training. Hogwarts, while definitely an early example, fits into this rising scholarly institutional development.
Because education was so strongly tied to the Church during this period, I suspect that the Founders (or at least some of them) were associated with the Church in some fashion. Witchcraft wasn’t exactly popular, but it wasn’t really stomped on until the 15th century. Charlemagne’s Council of Frankfurt outlawed belief in witchcraft in 794, but also condemned the persecution of supposed witches, for an example of earlier official attitudes. Furthermore, magic wasn’t well separated from what we would recognize as science, alchemy being one example. Nor was it always called magic and associated with demons - sometimes it was miracles and God got the credit. So although relations between the Church and witches and wizards were not usually good, they might not always have been too terrible, and it’s possible that in the Potterverse, some magic was being taught in the monasteries and that magical church officials were tolerated if they seemed pious enough. The Fat Friar, whenever he lived,[ 2] might have been one of these. (Although I’ll note that friars were supposed to be itinerant and poor, so he might have been able to keep under the radar even in a time of strained relations.) Bible passages like Matthew 17:20 could have provided some justification: their magic was simply evidence of their great faith.
The fact that all the Founders seem to have had children might seem like a strike against their being involved in the church, but it’s easy to work around. They might simply have had kids before taking orders. Even if they didn’t, due to their small numbers wizards probably had different ideas on clerical celibacy than Muggles - not that 10th-century Muggles were much good at clerical celibacy anyway - so they might not have seen their vocation as stopping them from reproducing. I noticed that none of them were mentioned as having spouses, and none of their surnames - if they were surnames and not epithets - seem to have survived, so perhaps they had illegitimate children but followed the rules enough not to actually get married.[ 3] Maybe Godric was a younger son in a noble family who got sent to the church to become Bishop of Whatsit-on-Wherever, purely for the good career prospects rather than any vocation, and he acted like a secular noble, complete with hunting, mistress and children, and swordfighting. (Who but a noble needs a sword, anyway?) Alternatively, they got their early educations in monastic schools or nunneries, and kept in touch with their friends from those days. (Maybe Godric was a secular noble, originally intended for the church but promoted to heir when his elder brother died, and donated generously to Slytherin Abbey, run by his good school buddy Sal.) Or, since clerical celibacy was strongly encouraged but wasn’t absolutely positively the rules until the Gregorian reforms of 1073, maybe they felt they had no reason not to marry. Take your pick.
So, they were tied to the church in some capacity, which is where they got all their learnings, and which brought them together in the first place when they ended up at the same institution, or at least started up a professional correspondence. The church was growing less and less woman-friendly, but they could have known of earlier traditions in which women could be considered equal spiritual and intellectual companions, and of the double monasteries ruled by powerful abbesses in which this more or less actually happened. (This was less common after the post-Viking revival.) That plus the low wizarding population could have been the reason they started a coeducational school, unlike… well, all the other universities. Matchmaking was serious business. Anyway, they decide that magical studies aren’t up to par, and so dream up Hogwarts, a medieval monastic/cathedral school plus proto-university for the advanced student, specializing in magical studies, and head off to an undisclosed location in Scotland.
Hogwarts
This brings us to the castle, which they built (Rowena supposedly designed the moving staircases). They chose a spot in what’s now Scotland, although at the time maybe it was Strathclyde or Northumbria or something - far enough south that for dramatic purposes we can hypothesize that Rowena’s Old English-speaking family owned it.[ 4] Or maybe Hengist of the recently-founded Hogsmeade invited them with a promise of land for the school. Maybe it was just Hogsmeade village and a big house before the Founders got to it, or maybe they had some wooden motte and bailey setup. Whatever was there previously, the Founders upgraded to a stone castle. The early 11th century would have been just about at the beginning of the stone castle fad, although it didn’t really get going in England until after 1066, when the Normans had a big castle construction boom. But they could have been early adopters.
Anyway, it was a good, secure location: witch hunting didn’t get serious until a few centuries later, but it wasn’t that long ago that Vikings had been terrorizing just about everyone in Europe, and Hogsmeade is far inland and in the mountains. It probably isn’t possible to navigate all the way up to the lake even in a longboat. If Viking wizards pulled the same trick as Durmstrang and magically transported their ships into inland lakes, though, it’s no wonder they got a giant squid to guard it. And - taking “a thousand years ago” loosely - if they saw the Norman invasion coming, being in a remote location might have seemed attractive for that reason as well. Hogsmeade, being a magical settlement, was a good neighbor, possibly with a lot of yummy pigs running around the meadows.
If Jodel is right - and she probably is - Hogwarts Castle wasn’t just a school as we think of it. It was the premier magical research facility; they would have covered all branches of study, including magical medicine, and so were also the predecessor of St. Mungo’s. Being near the largest concentration of witches and wizards in Britain, they probably also hosted the Wizard’s Council/Wizengamot, at least in the summer. Magical youths could meet potential marriage partners (harder to do when you’re scattered across the country and never run into each other). Finally, she notes that it would have been a refuge for displaced witches and wizards.
They would have taught more than magic, too. As far as we know, they weren’t just taking noble magical children - there might be what, two of those at any given time, max? Besides, even a lot of nobles of the day were illiterate, never mind peasants. So they would have had to teach a lot of their students to read, unless they paid for them to go to a Muggle monastic school first. Religion still would have played a role. Both the religion and the magic would have made at least basic Latin a useful subject (and maybe Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, or a number of other languages - the spell “Avada Kedavra” is supposedly from Aramaic). Again, because they were probably dealing mainly with children with no prior academic education, they probably taught at least the basics of the seven traditional liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic,[ 5] music,[ 6] arithmetic,[ 7] geometry,[ 8] and astronomy.[ 9] Most students wouldn’t need to know more than the basics, since they were probably farmers (well, astronomy would be useful for farmers; maybe that’s another reason it stayed in the curriculum so long), but the advanced students could have been regular proto-Renaissance scholars. Salazar, with his family coming from Spain, probably had some valuable Greek, Roman, and Arabic texts, which drew magical scholars to Hogwarts from all over. (Plus they wanted to know what that runespoor in Toledo said.) They also decided which kinds of students they each preferred to teach, and modified Godric’s hat to do the sorting for all future generations. Oh, and Salazar had a little basilisk research project...
After an unspecified length of time, they all got into a power struggle.[ 10] We don’t know all the details, but one part of the conflict supposedly involved Slytherin not trusting Muggleborns.[ 11] Now, if he or his father grew up in Basque country where witches and wizards were common (if you believe the Arab commentators), this might help explain his attitude. There, the magical community seems to have been powerful, ubiquitous, and probably in charge; the Muggles who lived with them would have given their allegiance to the magical community. Britain, while it might have had more witches and wizards than average (all those Welsh Animagi alone make the island sound like a hotbed of magical activity), was another story. The king might have a magical advisor sometimes - and many did even in our world (Elizabeth I had John Dee, e.g.) - but magic-users were far from running the place, and didn’t get the same respect. A noble Muggleborn child might come to Hogwarts, learn magic, and then grow up to use it against one of the few other magic-users on the island, because they were from opposing families and their loyalties still lay with their families rather than with their fellow witches and wizards. One wonders whether this played a role in that “clash of friend on friend” along with whatever else the Founders were arguing about, and provided at least some of the “external deadly foes.”[ 12] They might give away secrets to their Muggle families - it would be a lot easier to claim a rival was performing evil, treasonous magic (and thus you should get all their land once they’re executed) if you could provide evidence that they really were doing magic, for instance, and with all the magic-users on the island gathered into one school, it was a lot easier to find out which noble families to target.
Whether or not any of these things ever happened is an open question, but Slytherin could well have been more anxious that they would just because the whole situation was so foreign to him, even without throwing in any hypothetical Dark Arts-related dementia. And maybe he was right about the security risk, at least partly. Just a few centuries later they were cutting themselves off from Muggles almost entirely, and it seems like Muggleborns are pretty strongly encouraged to leave the Muggle world to this day, so it isn’t like even the modern, moderate wizarding view is as far from Slytherin’s as current Gryffindors would like to believe. danajsparks has an interesting theory ( link) that Slytherin was open to taking any students from families with magical traditions and good morals (“pure” blood), from whatever country, and the other Founders didn’t want any Normans but would take local kid with no family history of magic, which could fit - Slytherin’s students might have better odds of prioritizing magical people sticking together and keeping their traditions intact over Muggle political conflicts. (Might.)
Through the Ages
Anyway, Hogwarts chugged along, and despite eventually adopting the Muggle school calendar and assessment tests in similar years as Muggle schools (and easing off the religion angle), it never quite developed into a modern Muggle-style school of any variety. It isn’t a modern university - it starts with the basics of magic, not at an already advanced level, and everyone goes - and the population is too small to support one of those anyway. (Especially scholarly types probably enter specialized programs, like a Healer apprenticeship, or study with a noted authority, as seems to have happened with Dumbledore and Flamel.) But it isn’t a quite a primary school or a high school/upper level school either, since it doesn’t teach very young children or things like basic literacy anymore, but also isn’t an intermediate level of magical study. It has also clearly dropped many non-magical academic subjects such as composition, logic, regular math, and any science that doesn’t involve magical ingredients (we know Arthur can’t even pronounce “electricity,” and you can probably forget atomic theory or germ theory). It’s a peculiar hybrid of trade school, high school, cathedral school, and medieval university. Interestingly, in the books themselves we never see any of the teachers with spouses or children - almost as if they’ve taken orders.
Footnotes
[ 1] Except Isaac Newton, who managed to wriggle out of ordination.
[ 2] Who thinks he might be Friar Tuck, just for fun? And do you suppose he, or Robin or one of the Merry Men, was especially good at casting Disillusionment Charms to help them hide in the forest? I bet there was more to it than wearing Lincoln green.
[ 3] For some real fun… we don’t know who Helena Ravenclaw’s father was, and the only men we know for sure Rowena spent time with were Godric and Salazar. Who wants to take bets?
[ 4] Yes, that’s a problem considering how long the Hogwarts Express takes to get from London to Hogsmeade. Oh dear, maths. Maybe they go really slowly so the kids can bond on the train and the first-years can get a dramatic view of the castle by night as they cross the lake.
[ 5] Maybe they should bring this one back…
[ 6] I bet it’s useful for more than calming Cerberi. If Arithmancy is math-based magic, surely there’s music magic too.
[ 7] Good for doubling potions recipes and for Arithmancy, no doubt.
[ 8] Useful for making astronomical charts, among other things.
[ 9] Said charts could then be used for farming or Divination or impressing people at court.
[ 10] That’s what the Hat said. It wasn’t just Slytherin vs. the other three, although his leaving finally calmed things down.
[ 11] That’s what Binns said. Not that he hated them or thought they were impure, although that’s possible. Not trusting them, however, is a slightly different issue.
[ 12] Skipping ahead a few centuries, you just know that Houses York and Lancaster were aligned with opposing Hogwarts houses. I so want a story where Elizabeth Woodville and Richard III were old school rivals. And the Princes Apparated (solo or side-alonged) out of the Tower.
Wemyss has an excellent essay on the Founders’ geographical origins here ( link), placing Godric in the moors of the West Country, Salazar in the Fenlands of East Anglia, Helga as a Viking descendant in Wales, and Rowena as a Saxon whose family ended up in Scotland. I wonder a bit more about Salazar’s origins here ( LJ / DW). But this raises another question: how did they meet and decide to form a school, and how did they gain enough magical knowledge to be qualified teachers in the first place?
Monasteries, Cathedral Schools, and Early Universities
By the Founders’ time, the Church had been the center of learning for centuries. If you wanted to be literate, learn Latin, study theology and mathematics and philosophy, read rare and valuable books (which was pretty much all of them), etc., you went to a monastery. The Viking raids destroyed many of the monasteries and put a hold on a lot of scholarship, but by the 10th century they were starting to rebuild, cathedral schools teaching boys the seven liberal arts and theology were growing more common, and ancient Greek and Roman texts had started trickling back into Europe from the Arab world with some new additions in fields from philosophy to optics to medicine from scholars like Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Some cathedral and monastic schools, as well as independent groups of scholars, developed into universities, including Oxford possibly as early as 1096 and Cambridge in 1209. Due to their origins, universities were often church-run or at least strongly tied to the church, and Oxbridge fellows were required to be celibate and ordained right up until the 19th century even if they weren’t teaching theology.[ 1] Boys started university around age 14 - young enough to be “young sorcerers” in need of magical training. Hogwarts, while definitely an early example, fits into this rising scholarly institutional development.
Because education was so strongly tied to the Church during this period, I suspect that the Founders (or at least some of them) were associated with the Church in some fashion. Witchcraft wasn’t exactly popular, but it wasn’t really stomped on until the 15th century. Charlemagne’s Council of Frankfurt outlawed belief in witchcraft in 794, but also condemned the persecution of supposed witches, for an example of earlier official attitudes. Furthermore, magic wasn’t well separated from what we would recognize as science, alchemy being one example. Nor was it always called magic and associated with demons - sometimes it was miracles and God got the credit. So although relations between the Church and witches and wizards were not usually good, they might not always have been too terrible, and it’s possible that in the Potterverse, some magic was being taught in the monasteries and that magical church officials were tolerated if they seemed pious enough. The Fat Friar, whenever he lived,[ 2] might have been one of these. (Although I’ll note that friars were supposed to be itinerant and poor, so he might have been able to keep under the radar even in a time of strained relations.) Bible passages like Matthew 17:20 could have provided some justification: their magic was simply evidence of their great faith.
The fact that all the Founders seem to have had children might seem like a strike against their being involved in the church, but it’s easy to work around. They might simply have had kids before taking orders. Even if they didn’t, due to their small numbers wizards probably had different ideas on clerical celibacy than Muggles - not that 10th-century Muggles were much good at clerical celibacy anyway - so they might not have seen their vocation as stopping them from reproducing. I noticed that none of them were mentioned as having spouses, and none of their surnames - if they were surnames and not epithets - seem to have survived, so perhaps they had illegitimate children but followed the rules enough not to actually get married.[ 3] Maybe Godric was a younger son in a noble family who got sent to the church to become Bishop of Whatsit-on-Wherever, purely for the good career prospects rather than any vocation, and he acted like a secular noble, complete with hunting, mistress and children, and swordfighting. (Who but a noble needs a sword, anyway?) Alternatively, they got their early educations in monastic schools or nunneries, and kept in touch with their friends from those days. (Maybe Godric was a secular noble, originally intended for the church but promoted to heir when his elder brother died, and donated generously to Slytherin Abbey, run by his good school buddy Sal.) Or, since clerical celibacy was strongly encouraged but wasn’t absolutely positively the rules until the Gregorian reforms of 1073, maybe they felt they had no reason not to marry. Take your pick.
So, they were tied to the church in some capacity, which is where they got all their learnings, and which brought them together in the first place when they ended up at the same institution, or at least started up a professional correspondence. The church was growing less and less woman-friendly, but they could have known of earlier traditions in which women could be considered equal spiritual and intellectual companions, and of the double monasteries ruled by powerful abbesses in which this more or less actually happened. (This was less common after the post-Viking revival.) That plus the low wizarding population could have been the reason they started a coeducational school, unlike… well, all the other universities. Matchmaking was serious business. Anyway, they decide that magical studies aren’t up to par, and so dream up Hogwarts, a medieval monastic/cathedral school plus proto-university for the advanced student, specializing in magical studies, and head off to an undisclosed location in Scotland.
Hogwarts
This brings us to the castle, which they built (Rowena supposedly designed the moving staircases). They chose a spot in what’s now Scotland, although at the time maybe it was Strathclyde or Northumbria or something - far enough south that for dramatic purposes we can hypothesize that Rowena’s Old English-speaking family owned it.[ 4] Or maybe Hengist of the recently-founded Hogsmeade invited them with a promise of land for the school. Maybe it was just Hogsmeade village and a big house before the Founders got to it, or maybe they had some wooden motte and bailey setup. Whatever was there previously, the Founders upgraded to a stone castle. The early 11th century would have been just about at the beginning of the stone castle fad, although it didn’t really get going in England until after 1066, when the Normans had a big castle construction boom. But they could have been early adopters.
Anyway, it was a good, secure location: witch hunting didn’t get serious until a few centuries later, but it wasn’t that long ago that Vikings had been terrorizing just about everyone in Europe, and Hogsmeade is far inland and in the mountains. It probably isn’t possible to navigate all the way up to the lake even in a longboat. If Viking wizards pulled the same trick as Durmstrang and magically transported their ships into inland lakes, though, it’s no wonder they got a giant squid to guard it. And - taking “a thousand years ago” loosely - if they saw the Norman invasion coming, being in a remote location might have seemed attractive for that reason as well. Hogsmeade, being a magical settlement, was a good neighbor, possibly with a lot of yummy pigs running around the meadows.
If Jodel is right - and she probably is - Hogwarts Castle wasn’t just a school as we think of it. It was the premier magical research facility; they would have covered all branches of study, including magical medicine, and so were also the predecessor of St. Mungo’s. Being near the largest concentration of witches and wizards in Britain, they probably also hosted the Wizard’s Council/Wizengamot, at least in the summer. Magical youths could meet potential marriage partners (harder to do when you’re scattered across the country and never run into each other). Finally, she notes that it would have been a refuge for displaced witches and wizards.
They would have taught more than magic, too. As far as we know, they weren’t just taking noble magical children - there might be what, two of those at any given time, max? Besides, even a lot of nobles of the day were illiterate, never mind peasants. So they would have had to teach a lot of their students to read, unless they paid for them to go to a Muggle monastic school first. Religion still would have played a role. Both the religion and the magic would have made at least basic Latin a useful subject (and maybe Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, or a number of other languages - the spell “Avada Kedavra” is supposedly from Aramaic). Again, because they were probably dealing mainly with children with no prior academic education, they probably taught at least the basics of the seven traditional liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic,[ 5] music,[ 6] arithmetic,[ 7] geometry,[ 8] and astronomy.[ 9] Most students wouldn’t need to know more than the basics, since they were probably farmers (well, astronomy would be useful for farmers; maybe that’s another reason it stayed in the curriculum so long), but the advanced students could have been regular proto-Renaissance scholars. Salazar, with his family coming from Spain, probably had some valuable Greek, Roman, and Arabic texts, which drew magical scholars to Hogwarts from all over. (Plus they wanted to know what that runespoor in Toledo said.) They also decided which kinds of students they each preferred to teach, and modified Godric’s hat to do the sorting for all future generations. Oh, and Salazar had a little basilisk research project...
After an unspecified length of time, they all got into a power struggle.[ 10] We don’t know all the details, but one part of the conflict supposedly involved Slytherin not trusting Muggleborns.[ 11] Now, if he or his father grew up in Basque country where witches and wizards were common (if you believe the Arab commentators), this might help explain his attitude. There, the magical community seems to have been powerful, ubiquitous, and probably in charge; the Muggles who lived with them would have given their allegiance to the magical community. Britain, while it might have had more witches and wizards than average (all those Welsh Animagi alone make the island sound like a hotbed of magical activity), was another story. The king might have a magical advisor sometimes - and many did even in our world (Elizabeth I had John Dee, e.g.) - but magic-users were far from running the place, and didn’t get the same respect. A noble Muggleborn child might come to Hogwarts, learn magic, and then grow up to use it against one of the few other magic-users on the island, because they were from opposing families and their loyalties still lay with their families rather than with their fellow witches and wizards. One wonders whether this played a role in that “clash of friend on friend” along with whatever else the Founders were arguing about, and provided at least some of the “external deadly foes.”[ 12] They might give away secrets to their Muggle families - it would be a lot easier to claim a rival was performing evil, treasonous magic (and thus you should get all their land once they’re executed) if you could provide evidence that they really were doing magic, for instance, and with all the magic-users on the island gathered into one school, it was a lot easier to find out which noble families to target.
Whether or not any of these things ever happened is an open question, but Slytherin could well have been more anxious that they would just because the whole situation was so foreign to him, even without throwing in any hypothetical Dark Arts-related dementia. And maybe he was right about the security risk, at least partly. Just a few centuries later they were cutting themselves off from Muggles almost entirely, and it seems like Muggleborns are pretty strongly encouraged to leave the Muggle world to this day, so it isn’t like even the modern, moderate wizarding view is as far from Slytherin’s as current Gryffindors would like to believe. danajsparks has an interesting theory ( link) that Slytherin was open to taking any students from families with magical traditions and good morals (“pure” blood), from whatever country, and the other Founders didn’t want any Normans but would take local kid with no family history of magic, which could fit - Slytherin’s students might have better odds of prioritizing magical people sticking together and keeping their traditions intact over Muggle political conflicts. (Might.)
Through the Ages
Anyway, Hogwarts chugged along, and despite eventually adopting the Muggle school calendar and assessment tests in similar years as Muggle schools (and easing off the religion angle), it never quite developed into a modern Muggle-style school of any variety. It isn’t a modern university - it starts with the basics of magic, not at an already advanced level, and everyone goes - and the population is too small to support one of those anyway. (Especially scholarly types probably enter specialized programs, like a Healer apprenticeship, or study with a noted authority, as seems to have happened with Dumbledore and Flamel.) But it isn’t a quite a primary school or a high school/upper level school either, since it doesn’t teach very young children or things like basic literacy anymore, but also isn’t an intermediate level of magical study. It has also clearly dropped many non-magical academic subjects such as composition, logic, regular math, and any science that doesn’t involve magical ingredients (we know Arthur can’t even pronounce “electricity,” and you can probably forget atomic theory or germ theory). It’s a peculiar hybrid of trade school, high school, cathedral school, and medieval university. Interestingly, in the books themselves we never see any of the teachers with spouses or children - almost as if they’ve taken orders.
Footnotes
[ 1] Except Isaac Newton, who managed to wriggle out of ordination.
[ 2] Who thinks he might be Friar Tuck, just for fun? And do you suppose he, or Robin or one of the Merry Men, was especially good at casting Disillusionment Charms to help them hide in the forest? I bet there was more to it than wearing Lincoln green.
[ 3] For some real fun… we don’t know who Helena Ravenclaw’s father was, and the only men we know for sure Rowena spent time with were Godric and Salazar. Who wants to take bets?
[ 4] Yes, that’s a problem considering how long the Hogwarts Express takes to get from London to Hogsmeade. Oh dear, maths. Maybe they go really slowly so the kids can bond on the train and the first-years can get a dramatic view of the castle by night as they cross the lake.
[ 5] Maybe they should bring this one back…
[ 6] I bet it’s useful for more than calming Cerberi. If Arithmancy is math-based magic, surely there’s music magic too.
[ 7] Good for doubling potions recipes and for Arithmancy, no doubt.
[ 8] Useful for making astronomical charts, among other things.
[ 9] Said charts could then be used for farming or Divination or impressing people at court.
[ 10] That’s what the Hat said. It wasn’t just Slytherin vs. the other three, although his leaving finally calmed things down.
[ 11] That’s what Binns said. Not that he hated them or thought they were impure, although that’s possible. Not trusting them, however, is a slightly different issue.
[ 12] Skipping ahead a few centuries, you just know that Houses York and Lancaster were aligned with opposing Hogwarts houses. I so want a story where Elizabeth Woodville and Richard III were old school rivals. And the Princes Apparated (solo or side-alonged) out of the Tower.