Summary: The Effect Of The Black Death On English Higher Education

The history of the immersion of the French language into English society is important, because it needs to be traced to follow the distinct changes that took place both before the Plague and after. The changes are vital because there was a growth in the use of French that only truly began nearly 100 years after the Norman Conquest. In the 13th and 14th century, the push towards French becoming the vernacular in the English court made more headway; the combinations of French and English terms were becoming more pronounced and the upper class was using it fluently (Kibbee, 41). However, with the upper class and aristocracy sending their children to French households in order to learn the language, the middle to lower classes had yet to catch …show more content…
Courtenay shows in The Effect of the Black Death on English Higher Education, that even with the loss of certain “masters” the loss was not total. The students that studied at these universities did so because they had opportunities within their grasps that other families did not. They had money, homes in the larger cities that the schools were established in, and good primary and secondary education. So, the acceptance of middle class student that had money to pay for school and somewhere to live was much higher than a lower-class person that had no opportunities provided to them through their family connections. However, all statistics point to the fact that the population of Oxford only declined, at the most, at a percent of 9. Which shows that the population because it was so easily replaced by newer students, was not at all a loss to leave any of an impact on the higher education spectrum. “One often encounters the assertion that the Black Death killed the leading writers and thinkers of the English universities, which in turn precipitated a qualitative decline (Courtenay, 705).” Though it can never truly be thought of as this because all the deaths that were caused by the disease, those that were lost were relatively young for their career field. “If the Black Death was a factor here, it was not in removing the great minds of that generation but in removing those who might have been the great minds of the next generation (Courtenay, 706).” The loss that the Black Death caused was not so much important in who the scholar world lost at the higher education level, but at the lower levels of the primary and secondary education levels. Coming around full circle with the loss of the lower sects of the community, there is a push towards a focus on the lower portions of the social stature once again. Without a good and decent primary education, there is no hope for the higher education levels