ÉCOUIS
. The church of Écouis (Eure) was founded by Enguerran de Marigny ca. 1310 and
finished within three years. Its original timbered ceiling was replaced by red brick in the
18th century. The 14th-century statues within are among the masterpieces of Late Gothic
sculpture: SS. Nicaise, Marguerite, François, Martin, Laurent, Cécile, Agnès, Jean-
Baptiste, and particularly a splendid Véronique displaying the head of Christ on her veil.
William W.Kibler/William W.Clark
[See also: MARIGNY, ENGUERRAN DE]
Régnier, Louis. L’église Notre-Dame d’Écouis. Paris: Champion, 1913.
EDUCATION
. The educational system in 5th-century Gaul was based on the Greco-Roman model,
which, like the Germanic one, was male-oriented. Boys were educated at home until age
seven, when they were sent to a primary school to learn to read, write, and count (unless
the family had means to provide a private tutor), then at twelve to a secondary school to
learn Greek and Latin grammar, and at fifteen possibly to one of the rare centers of
higher learning to study rhetoric. These schools declined and eventually disappeared in
the following centuries.
Germanic society emphasized the practical education of young men as warriors; their
skills were perfected largely through hunting. Christianity reoriented written culture
toward the sacred writings and taught the masses through sermons and the liturgy. In the
early Middle Ages, centers of learning were primarily religious, both clerical and
monastic. Charlemagne issued capitularies requiring each diocese and monastery to have
a school. The great monastic schools, such as Saint-Gall and Saint-Riquier, boasted fine
libraries. The program studied comprised the Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and
the Quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music); the Carolingian reform of
handwriting and the 10th-century introduction of punctuation facilitated reading. But
even greater changes were taking place outside the monastery. The church to a large
extent succeeded in christianizing the practical warrior education of the military elite
through the ideals and institutions of chivalry. Changes in the liturgy emphasized the
predominant role of the priest. And the schools that were to be the most influential in the
coming centuries, many of which were to develop into universities, were growing in
revived urban centers, such as Orléans, Paris, and Montpellier, influenced by the Italian
schools in Bologna and Salerno.
Besides these universities, municipal lay schools developed in the 12th century in
Flanders and by the 14th in many other regions. These schools, financed by the
municipalities, taught the bases of the Trivium. Colleges for poor pupils were founded,
often by papal initiative, starting in the 14th century. Children of the humbler classes
received practical and manual education in apprenticeships in the trades, and the poorest
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