‘Thus taughte me my dame’ – so characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales refer to things they have known from their earliest youth. These words are used by both the narrator of the ‘Manciple’s Tale’ and the tavern boy in the ‘Pardoner’s Tale’, to authorize their quotation of a piece of traditional wisdom.1 The tavern boy refers to his mother’s teaching him always to be prepared to face death (683), an example of the sombre but salutary dicta prominent in the formation of Christian children from medieval to Victorian times. The Manciple recalls his mother’s repeatedly instructing him to be sparing of speech (318–62), in terms that echo Cato’s Distichs, that most celebrated of medieval educational texts. The elementary status of the teaching is made explicit:

As this easy, almost casual reference to maternal instruction implies, the role of mothers as the first teacher of their children and the domestic environment as the place of early learning could be taken for granted among Chaucer’s fourteenth- century readers and audience. Similarly, Nicholas Orme draws attention to a ‘telling phrase in the late-medieval educational treatise Femina (“Woman”) that “woman teacheth child on book”’.

The books most likely to be used by mothers teaching their children to read and to know the essential prayers for their practice of religion were books of hours or primers which, as Patricia Cullum and Jeremy Goldberg point out, ‘regularly contained the Paternoster, the Ave, and the Creed, which all youngsters were supposed to learn by rote. Some even contain an alphabet.’ As Orme explains, reciting the alphabet was itself ‘a Christian task … pronounced like a prayer’.