The goal of the current work has been to construct a more rounded picture of the education process beneath university level in later medieval France. As has been shown, there was an abiding concern with elementary and grammar instruction, both as a theoretical study and as something worthy of the attention of authorities such as Church and Commune. Medieval concerns with education are reflected in the documentary evidence. While charters and receipts do not communicate the opinions of specific persons, they do demonstrate that bodies of individuals, making up chapters and councils, sought to control educational activities that lay within the spheres of influence that they had or wished to have.1 Archival sources also allow for a reconstruction of the socio-economic realities of elementary and grammar education where a given authority invested substantial sums of money in the fabric of schools, the welfare of pupils, and the rewards given to teachers. They indicate the relative wealth and poverty of schoolmasters and, occasionally, the economic and social standing of pupils. The picture of medieval education reconstructed here has been fragmented by the nature of the sources. Nevertheless, the picture is one where elementary and grammar instruction was valued in and of itself and as a means to progress to university. It was something approved of by a diverse cross-section of medieval society, rich and poor, educated and illiterate. Furthermore, the details that have been recorded – such as discussions of timetables and curricula, debates over which master took precedence and which authority had the right to name teachers, and the memoires of past pupils – all overwhelmingly underline the important and frequent role that education played in medieval lives.

Lyon in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries serves as an intriguing example of a city and its schools. As discussed in Chapter One, Lyon spent much of the period between the Burgundian incursions of the sixth century and its formal annexation by France in 1312 in a borderland area. Not only was it in a political borderland between West and East Francia – later France and Germany – but it also lay at a confluence of cultural influences between northern Europe and the Mediterranean. As such, it displayed pedagogical tendancies similar to these different areas.