Fish forms an important part of the Portuguese diet. Lampreys are found in the Lima and shad (sável) in the Tagus and Douro, and trout are bred in the numerous new reservoirs or albufeiras. But the sea is by far the greatest source. In ancient times the most important catch was the tunny. The Romans also relished garum, made of preserved fish. The chain of tanks and industrial plants of Phoenician times can be traced from Lisbon to the Algarve, and also extends to North Africa. After the discovery of America, the great fishery was the Newfoundland Banks, and a large sailing-fleet built at Aveiro and Figueira da Foz left Lisbon every year to catch cod, which was dried to make bacalhau. With the imposition of national limits, this fish is now imported. Sailing-ships are still built at Figueira and Aveiro, where the Dom Fernando, the largest of the nineteenth-century schooners, was rebuilt in 1998 to serve as a naval museum.

The usual sea-going fishing-craft is the trawler or traineira, with both sail and engines. The main deep-sea fishing is for the sardine, the tunny, and a variety of fish, some not easily translatable into English. Smaller trawlers serve for in-shore fishing and are joined by wooden rowing-craft which have elongated prows like crescentmoons and are painted in bright colours. The sheltered lagoons of the Algarve abound in shellfish and in decorative small craft.

The principal sea-fisheries from north to south are: in the Minho, Viana do Castelo, with its festival in the middle of August dedicated to Nossa Senhora da Agonia, who protects fisherfolk; Oporto draws its supplies mainly from Matosinhos, the fishing-village out of which the deep-sea Port of Leixões sprouted to accommodate ocean-liners; south of the Douro, Aveiro remains an active fishery but Figueira da Foz is now best known as a summer resort.

Nazaré was one of the fishing-ports associated with Alcobaça, and is famous for the customs of its fisher-folk and their tartan shirts and skirts. Until recently the boats were drawn up by teams of men and women or by oxen which waited by the beach: these have given way to tractors. Peniche is the largest port for catching and canning sardines. While Nazaré is open and exposed, Peniche has the advantage of two beaches, one sheltered from gales from the north and the other from the south.

Portugal was a monarchy for eight centuries, and has been a republic since 1910. As every Portuguese schoolchild knows, its first king was Afonso Henriques, who was born in about 1109 and lived until 1185. He replaced his mother Queen Teresa in 1128, seized Santarém from the Muslims and took Lisbon after a long siege in 1147, thus carrying the frontier from the Mondego to the Tagus and beyond. He used the title of king from 1139 or 1140. Our pupil may or may not have been told that King Afonso I defeated five Muslim kings in the battle of Ourique and that his victory was assured by the aid of St James, or Santiago, mounted on a white charger. The great historian Alexandre Herculano (1811–77) found no contemporary evidence for the apostolic intervention, but concluded that the Portuguese state owed its existence to the strong arms of Afonso Henriques and the barons of the Douro valley who had brought him up. The conquest of Lisbon was achieved with the aid of several thousand crusaders who put in at Oporto on their way to Palestine. Many were Anglo-Normans from southern and eastern England. Expansion, first in the Iberian Peninsula and then in the overseas Discoveries, is a main theme of Portuguese history, in which the Ancient Alliance played its part. All Portuguese know this and are often surprised that many English visitors do not.

The notion of a Portugal suddenly springing into existence at the behest of Afonso Henriques is almost as extravagant as the visitation of St James. Our intelligent child knows that there was a county of Portugal long before it became a kingdom, that it was governed from the castle of Guimarães, where Afonso was born, and that his parents were Count Henry, a Burgundian, and Dona Teresa, on whom the county was bestowed by her father, Alfonso VI of Leon. Tarásia, as she was always called, was styled queen as the daughter of an emperor, but, as was customary, took her husband's rank. After he was killed in 1112, she governed as queen for sixteen years, and was so recognised by more than one pope.

The territory of Portugal had been founded, or at least claimed, in 868 by one Vimara Peres, a count of southern Galicia.

Portugal is a land, its people, and their language. It is not one of the larger European states, comprising about a fifth of the Iberian Peninsula. Its population is about ten million, comparable with those of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined, Norway and Sweden combined, Belgium, or Greece. Yet its language is more widely spoken than French, German, or any other European tongue, except English and Spanish. This is due largely to the vastness and growth of Brazil, which exceeds in population any state of Europe, even Britain and France combined. Portuguese has also been implanted in a large part of Africa south of the Sahara, and exists in places in Asia as far as Macau in China, and in Timor in Oceania. Its most remarkable feature has been its capacity to expand and endure. Both Portuguese and Castilian were once the provincial Latin of the late Roman army spoken only in small areas.

Though the language is as Latin as Italian and much more so than French, the word Portugal – like Castile – would have meant nothing to an ancient Roman. He would have heard of the Further Province or of Lusitania, but the political divisions of antiquity were effaced by the Muslim expansion into Europe of ad 711. Portugal emerged, as did the other states of the Peninsula, from the Christian Reconquest. The name is first used in the ninth century, when it applied to the area of Oporto. Portugal reached its present limits in about 1250, since when its frontiers have scarcely altered.

The expansion of Europe began when the Portuguese conquered the North African port of Ceuta in 1415. Soon after, Portuguese navigators annexed the Atlantic Isles of the Madeiras and the Azores. Both groups had been uninhabited since the formation of the world, and are therefore properly Portuguese. A distinction is made between ‘continental Portugal’ and the ‘adjacent isles’. Madeira is 600 miles south of Lisbon and the Azores 800 miles to its west. In the fifteenth century, when Vasco de Gama took two years to find the sea-route to India and to return, and in 1519 when Fernão de Magalhães (Magellan) set out on the first circumnavigation of the globe, these distances did not seem enormous. Nowadays, the islands are reached from Lisbon by air in two or three hours.

Lisbon has a magnificent setting on hills at the mouth of the Tagus, which broadens into an inland sea, the Mar de Palha, before passing through a channel to reach the ocean. By convention the hills are seven, like those of Rome, but in fact the slopes are many and some very steep. On the height to the east stands the castle of St George, formerly regarded as the true seat of authority. It is separated from another height, the Alto, by a cleft, once an arm of the sea, and the city grew up between these and the water-front. It has now spread in all three directions on the north bank and has acquired suburbs on the other side, the Outra Banda. From a height, as the aeroplane approaches, it is a maze of red tiles and white walls, with the hills of Palmela and the sandy shores curving away toward the south. On landing, the missing dimension is restored and the vision becomes reality.

The airport at Portela de Sacavém is by modern standards near the centre: about four miles. It joins function with fantasy in the fashion of today, not architecture, but marbled like a bank with a façade of fountains. The taxi-rank is orderly, and there are buses; the underground, the Metro, is still on the way. The hotels are mainly near the centre. Lisbon sprawls but most of its inhabitants are flat-dwellers and its centre is compact; for the same reason, it is subject to traffic-jams in the busy hours and agreeably quiet at weekends. Much of the Baixa, the lower town, is easily covered on foot, and more of the city by the underground. The yellow trams which were one of the joys of Lisbon have been greatly reduced and replaced by long vehicles with trailers, or by buses of one or two decks. It is perhaps necessary, for, like all other cities, Lisbon has been overwhelmed by the proliferation of private cars. But it is a pity that Lisbon transport, like London buses, should be disfigured by aggressive and tasteless advertising. There are four elevators, three of them funicular, to avoid climbing the steeper places.

The castle of St George with its light fawn-coloured walls stands out above the city and is a useful landmark, being visible from many points.

The city of Oporto is the undisputed capital of the north, second only to Lisbon and metropolis for the province of the Minho, the source of Portuguese nationhood and the most populous rural region. It is about half the size of Lisbon, but has enveloped the surrounding townships without obliterating them. It is the port of entry and interchange for the teeming countryside to the north and for the valley of the Douro. One may still be aroused in the middle of the city by the crowing of cocks, even if the creaking of wains has given way to traffic-jams. It and its territory have given the name Portugal, and the word attached itself to the wines of the middle Douro. The true centre of the producing area is sixty miles away. The large barrels or pipes were formerly brought down the river on the characteristic rabelos, barges with a single sail, broad in the beam and of shallow draught, and deposited at the ‘lodges’ – lojas – of Vila Nova de Gaia on the south bank of the river. They have been replaced by other modes of transport, but a few are moored outside the lojas, with the names of the companies inscribed on their sails, rather as Vasco da Gama's sails were embroidered with scenes of Portuguese history, if the Lusiads is to be believed. They are brought out for an annual race.

Oporto – the Port – is built, like Lisbon, on the north bank of a great river, and its traditional centre, the cathedral, stands on a high bluff overlooking the stream two hundred feet below. There is no inland sea, but the river is nipped between the cathedral hill, formerly called Windy Hill, the Pena Ventosa, and another height surmounted by the Convent of the Pilar. The oldest part of the city lies below the cathedral where the river widens. The sea is four miles away at Foz, where a sandspit reduces the clearance to a hundred yards or so. The entrance may be dangerous, and only smaller ships reach the wharves to load wine and unload a variety of imports. For liners and freighters, a large mole has been built at Leixões on the ocean. The old walled city was an oblong including the cathedral and about a mile of water-front.

Travellers who are also bird-watchers will find much to admire in Portugal. While the ‘British list’ has a little over two hundred varieties, the Portuguese exceeds three hundred, named by W C Tait in 1924, or two hundred and eighty named in 1973 by R Carey, who deals only with the south. The difference of nearly fifty per cent is partly because Portugal lies on a main migration route, receiving passengers from continental Europe on their way south and some African species on their way north. It is also due to the absence of any large industrial area and the survival of much countryside in the shape of mountainside, forests and open fields. There are several reserves, such as the coast north of Oporto at Mindelo, the National Park of Gerez-Penedo, the seashore of the Algarve, and the Berlenga Isles off the coast. Against this is the practice of eating birds, advertised in small restaurants with the sign: Há pássaros. There are two words for ‘birds’: larger kinds, such as chickens and above, are aves; small birds are pássaros, or with the diminutive, passarinhos.

There are eighteen warblers, thirteen gulls and eight terns: having no binoculars, I am not able to distinguish them. Birds not seen at all in the British Isles are: vultures, rare wanderers from the Spanish mountains; egrets; the purple gallinule, now confined to the reserve in the Algarve; and the serin, which can be heard in Lisbon. The azure-winged magpie is a native of China, found fifty years ago only at Montijo, on the south bank of the Tagus near Lisbon, but now reported from many places. Its spread will not surprise those who have witnessed the explosion of the magpie.

Among species now extinct in Britain are the stork, which is quite common and nests in towers, electricity-poles and elsewhere in villages: it is easily recognised and its clappering is a distinctive sound. The black stork is rare. The avocet is uncommon, and the great bustard survives in places in the Algarve and Alentejo. Cranes winter in parts of the Alentejo.

Birds extremely scarce in Britain include the hoopoe, bee-eater, golden eagle, osprey and kite. The hoopoe is a spring and summer visitor, common in the Alentejo, and the bee-eater also divides its time between Portugal and Africa: it occurs from the Douro southwards.

Sacheverell Sitwell, who paid five visits to Portugal, says: ‘in Portugal there are no painters’, adding: ‘what is lacking in Portugal where decorative painting is nearly always bad is the brush of a Tiepolo. There are moments when one longs for even a third-rate Italian painter. But Italy is the land of painting, and Portugal is no more to be reproached for want of that than England, for here too it is no part of our native genius.’ I happen to be writing in the house of J M W Turner, R A and take these remarks for what they are worth. Sitwell is a child of the grand tour with a remarkable gift of reminiscence: everything he sees reminds him of something else. Perhaps Portugal ought to be Mediterranean, but it is not. Sitwell does not (I think) complain that there are no Scottish painters or no Icelandic painters. He loves Portugal, but has manoeuvred himself into being disappointed.

Greco-Roman pictorial art survives in mosaics rather than painting. Both forms were rejected by Islam, and the tradition disappears. Christian Europe inherited the Roman preoccupation with permanence and in the early middle ages preferred stone. Painting emerges between illumination and polychrome figure-sculpture: the former is minute and precise and the latter applies pigments to a stone surface without much subtlety. Early stone figures have little classical line, and the addition of colour does not make them more convincing. By the fourteenth century, the tombs of Alcobaça had acquired great narrative and decorative power, but have not the qualities of painting for which wood and ivory were more suitable. Queen Philippa brought the poems of John Gower to Portugal, but there is no evidence that she brought painting. Royal marriages were at times preceded by the exchange of portraits. In about 1428 van Eyck came to Portugal on a mission to arrange for Philippa's daughter Isabel to marry Duke Philip ‘the Good’ of Flanders. He was perhaps the first acknowledged great painter to visit Portugal. The first known royal portrait is that of Philippa's husband, John I, who died in 1433. There are a dozen manuscripts with miniatures dating from the twelfth-century Book of Birds (Livro das Aves) to the Missal of Lorvão of the fifteenth, with coloured drawings of rural work for each month of the year, a prelude to the art of painting.

In early times the Castle of St George and the mosque/cathedral were the centre of Lisbon. The eastern side was cast in a secondary part by the epic of the Discoveries and the growth of Atlantic trade. King John V, the Most Faithful, wishing to have a permanent Portuguese cardinal, erected Occidental Lisbon as the see of his Patriarch: in the nineteenth century the trend was continued with the opening of the Avenida and the central station of the Rossio. To the east, there was no Oriental Lisbon: Pombal seems to have thought of the iron foundries as a potential industrial belt, a tendency encouraged in the twentieth century by the emergence of factories along the water-front. This has now been reversed, partly by the establishment of the airport at the Portela de Sacavém and then by the removal of the main railway-terminus to Santa Apolónia. The commemoration of Vasco da Gama's opening of the sea-route to India was the occasion for an exhibition on a large scale and the building of the Vasco da Gama Bridge completed in 1998, with two elegant high spans and a long causeway skimming the water to Montijo on the Outra Banda, giving access to the Alentejo and Algarve and relieving pressure on the crowded first bridge. The opportunity was seized to create a new suburb named Oriente, with a graceful station and a forest of palm-trees planted for the occasion.

The main railway-line follows the north bank of the Tagus to Santarém. The main road to the centre and north diverges beyond Vila Franca de Xira, which until 1966 was the lowest point at which the Tagus was crossed by road. The river here has an extensive water-plain broken up into islets running for nearly twenty miles – the lezirias – giving some of the most fertile land in Portugal. They were formerly royal property, but were privatised in favour of a company in 1836. Vila Franca is the centre of cattle-country. The mounted campino, in his stocking-cap and waistcoat, controls the herds of cattle with his lance. For the festivities in early July he decks himself in a green cap and red waistcoat. Portuguese bull-fighting is a risky display of horsemanship, punctuated by teams of teasers on foot. The victim, though bewildered, is not killed, but recycled, if that is the word.

The sudden collapse of the Spanish Goths in ad 711 arose from their own dissensions and from the dynamic expansion of Islam, which had conquered Egypt in 642, been held for a time at Carthage, and then at a bound reached the Straits of Gibraltar, reducing Eastern Rome, the Byzantine Empire, to a shadow of itself. The Greeks had occupied North Africa for less than two centuries and had revived the western church both in Lusitania and in the Suevic kingdom of Braga. They had been driven out by the Goths before 615, but rarely regarded the rulers of the west as anything more than a barbarian division of the Roman army that had seized power and perpetuated itself. The Gothic kings of Toledo lived in some state, but they and their nobles were no better landlords than the absentee Roman senatorial order they had replaced, and were much closer at hand. A faction seeking to overthrow Roderic, ‘the last of the Goths’, sought aid from North Africa. The first invasion, of Berbers, killed Roderic and seized Toledo and its treasure: the second, of Arabs, occupied Seville and overcame the last resistance at Mérida. The two Muslim forces then joined and toured the provinces, receiving the capitulation of governors and counts: it is supposed that they reached Portugal and Galicia before being recalled to Damascus, but the evidence is slight. The caliph in Baghdad had not authorised a permanent occupation, and could hardly have envisaged that his successors would continue to govern in Portugal until about 1245, and in Spain until the fall of Granada in 1492. The difference is significant. We cannot expect to find an Alhambra or a Generalife in Portugal because the Christian Reconquest had been completed there before the Nasrid kingdom of Granada was founded. The only Portuguese province with an Arabic name is the Algarve. To northerners it is the deep south, but from an Arabic orientation it was the far west. The garb is the sunset and is also the name of Morocco, the Magrib.

At first, the invaders did not much care about the north-west, but thought of pursuing the conquest into Gaul. They formed a ‘military colony’, which made use of the Gothic faction that had brought them, but did not restore the monarchy. Many of the conquering Berbers returned to Africa.

Architecture is undertaken by those who have the means to engage in it. There are two styles for which Portugal is famous, that called Manueline after King Manuel I, who disposed of great wealth resulting from the opening of trade with the East, and the baroque of John V, which arose from the profusion of Brazilian gold and diamonds in the eighteenth century. Both mingle innovation with forms and practices of the past. It is unwise to look for a purity of style which obeys only some imaginary text-book. Buildings may be secular or ecclesiastic or both. There is a break with the past when rulers and nobles ceased to hold castles or towers and built palaces or mansions. There is no specific moment at which this occurs; King Manuel built the Paços da Ribeira in Lisbon in about 1500, without at once abandoning the castle of St George. Ecclesiastical architecture usually obeys traditional norms, but in a country with limited natural resources the building of a cathedral might take a century. The five great cathedrals of Oporto, Braga, Coimbra, Lisbon and Évora were built on the site of older religious buildings, and may be regarded as making a new start. The great monastic church of St Mary of the Victory at Batalha, near Leiria, one of the finest buildings in Europe, was begun to commemorate the victory of Aljubarrota in 1385 but was extended by the ‘chapels’ added more than a century later and left ‘imperfeitas’ or unfinished. In less wealthy places, it was usual to add new fronts to older buildings when need arose and resources permitted. By the eighteenth century, the existing cathedrals and churches could only be decorated, either with tiles or gilded woodwork. This is often described (and dismissed) as ‘baroque’. In fact, the enormous palace-monastery of Mafra, perhaps intended to be the largest in Europe, explores a wide range of architectural and artistic possibilities of the age without indulging in either azulejos or gilt. It was the work of a south-German named Ludwig, trained in Rome where his name became Ludovice. He seized the golden opportunity to bring together the best available craftsmen. In some ways, Mafra is less ‘baroque’ than St Paul's in London.

The first reader of this script remarked that I might have said more about contemporary Portugal. The thought had occurred to me, but it was not my intention to be involved in the complexities of today's world scene, of which future historians will take care. Nor can I pretend to be an expert on the night-life of cities, of which any hotel porter knows more than I. The entry of Portugal into the Euro-zone has been smoothly done, but its economic consequences can hardly be measured. It is no more difficult to travel in Portugal than in any other part of Europe, and less expensive, safer and pleasanter than most. The face of Lisbon is changing, but less offensively than that of London: its traffic jams may be noisier but they last less. There has been no wholesale abandonment of the countryside, and the flooding of water-courses for hydroelectric and agricultural ends makes an agreeable addition to a varied landscape.

Contemporary Portugal is not a great power and no longer the seat of a far-flung empire. Lisbon and especially the Algarve are more cosmopolitan. Those returning from Goa have been fully absorbed, but there are no whole sectors of activity in Indian hands, as has happened in London. The restaurants remain predominantly European, though Chinese are sufficiently represented. Even in the national game of futebol, Portugal prevails. Lisbon has more Africans than before. They come to study and work. It is the centre of the Portuguese communities of autonomous Africa, to which Portugal can offer a salutary friendship and an alternative to petty tyrants and predatory capitalism.

The Portuguese past is built into the present. The splendid new bridge across the Tagus to link Lisbon with the Alentejo and the Algarve was built to commemorate Vasco da Gama's opening of the sea-way to India in 1498, the climax of the epic Discoveries, with Pedro Álvares Cabral's discovery of Brazil in 1500. As well as the handsome modern station of Oriente, the event has produced the new oceanic aquarium, said to be the finest in the world, which replaces the more modest affair at Dafundo, the fruit of King Carlos's oceanic excursions. The pioneer of the Portuguese voyages of discovery, Prince Henry, was commemorated by the imposing collective monument at Belém, erected at the quincentenary of his death in 1940.

The name Portugal is indissolubly associated with that of Port-wine. Both words derive from the city of Oporto, which does not itself produce wine, but stores and exports the justly esteemed vintages of the Upper Douro valley, beginning some fifty miles to the east and continuing as far again to the Spanish frontier. It has enjoyed its reputation since the beginning of the eighteenth century and is still the most beautiful vineyard in the world. Port-wine became the country's leading export, and was widely consumed in Britain, serving even to restore the energies and spirits of university dons after the dispiriting exertion of teaching. Before 1680, the wine brought from Portugal was ‘Lisbon wine’, red or white. The change was due to a number of factors: the intermittent wars of England and France, which interrupted the trade in claret with Bordeaux; the Methuen treaty which stabilised the rates of duty; and the discovery of gold in Brazil, which made the ‘Portuguese trade’ eminently desirable. By then there were English merchants established in Oporto, and wine could be bought more advantageously there than in Lisbon. The wine obtained its unique quality by being ‘fortified’ with brandy, which strengthened it and made it keep better. Yet it was never more than a small proportion of Portugal's total production.

Even in 1930, port amounted to only 7 per cent of the total. Lisbon, the area between the ocean and the Tagus, had 20 per cent of all wine production, and Santarém, the Ribatejo, 15 per cent. Leiria, Braga and Viseu – the valley of the Dão – could also claim to exceed Oporto. Total Portuguese production ranked it with that of much larger countries: Italy, France, Spain and (for a time) Algeria. The vine is adaptable and now thrives almost everywhere. It prefers warm soil, with sufficient rain in the winter and spring, and a hot ripening-season. It does not like standing water, and though it flourishes on both banks of the Minho, it finds much of Spanish Galicia too wet. Nor does it enjoy tropical heat, such as is found in parts of the Alentejo. It has long been grown south of Lisbon at Palmela and Setúbal, and has more recently been extended into the eastern Alentejo round Évora.

Childhood as an object of study has been seen as the creation of Philippe Ariès (1914–84), a French agricultural development expert by profession and free-lance historian in his spare time. His L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime, first published in 1960, was issued two years later in English, under the misleading title Centuries of Childhood – misleading because to English-speaking readers it appeared to be a study of childhood in isolation, rather than a study of the child in the family. Where other historians of the family have sought to identify the development of affectivity primarily by studying the relations between husband and wife, Ariès, unconstrained by the conventions of professional academic history, had the brilliant idea of tracing changes in family structures via the emotional relations between parents and children.

The book was an attempt to answer the question whether the idea of the family has diminished in the face of the twin processes of modernization and industrialization as divorce, once unknown, proliferates and parental authority is eroded. Ariès’s answer is that as ‘a value, a theme of expression, an occasion of emotions’, the family only arrived in the early nineteenth century. Physical changes in domestic housing allowed the modern nuclear family, which Ariès sees as emerging at this period, to cut itself off from the world. Publicness, defined as sociability, is therefore held to characterize the Ancien Régime, while privacy, defined as the retreat into the home and into self-sufficient family relationships, is seen as a modern condition.

Privacy now is ideological: it gives priority to the particularistic relations between parents and children which are a hallmark of modernity. For Ariès, the pre-modern family is an institution for securing the continuation of the patrimony, for providing training in conduct and thereby inculcating respect for the good order of society. None of this requires the emotional bonds between its members that characterize the modern family, which understands itself as organized round its love for the children. Ariès generally acknowledges that parents loved their children in the pre-modern era, but argues that parental love was not thought of as a defining feature of family life.

In 1301 a series of ordinances was issued for York which was designed to regulate trade in response to the difficulties caused by the residence of the royal court within the city. One of the more remarkable of these was that baldly entitled ‘pigs and prostitutes’. The juxtaposition is a very telling one. Not only were pigs symbolic of lust, but they created problems by wandering the streets. So did prostitutes, whose feet, like the archetypal harlot of the book of Proverbs, ‘will not abide within the house’. Thus when the mother in The Good WyfeWold a Pylgremage warned her daughter, ‘rene thou not fro hous to house lyke an Antyny gryce’ [piglet], she was intimating that such behaviour implied a lack of chastity. Clearly within clerical, didactic and civic governmental sources women’s mobility was frowned upon. Here we may note that only two of Chaucer’s pilgrims were female, the Prioress and, more significantly, that singular creation of anti-feminist discourse, the Wife of Bath. The movement of women may have been regarded as in some way particularly subversive, but the labour legislation of the later fourteenth century warns us that all migration was seen in some quarters to be subversive. The Commons’ petition against vagrants of 1376, for example, saw in the mobility of labourers ‘the great impoverishment, destruction and ruin of the commons’ and hinted darkly that such migrants often became ‘staff strikers’ (clearly the medieval equivalent of New Age travellers) who ‘lead an idle life, commonly robbing poor people in simple villages’. But neither the petition against vagrants nor Chaucer’s fictional pilgrims are simple mirrors of society. Any perusal of conventional historical sources reveals that medieval men and women were both highly mobile and that such mobility played an essential part of the functioning of a complex society. The purpose of this paper is to try to reconcile these two perspectives.

There is a wealth of evidence to indicate that medieval society was highly mobile and that significant numbers of people would have moved from their natal homes during the course of their lives.

Social attitudes towards children are an important means towards understanding the past. It is through the procreation of children that a society seeks to perpetuate itself. Securing this continuity is thus one of the most important goals of any society. By examining attitudes towards children and childhood we are presented with a tool which allows us to expose the social values and aspirations, the weight of a society’s fears and pressures and its basic rules and norms. The question of attitudes towards children and childhood was raised by Philippe Ariès’s book Centuries of Childhood, first published in French in 1960. Ariès argued that throughout the Middle Ages, and up until the seventeenth century, the concepts of childhood and family were very differently understood from those which developed subsequently. In his opinion, prior to the seventeenth century children were not recognized as entities separate from adults and were in fact perceived to be merely ‘small adults’. Avariety of reactions, both positive and negative, followed the publication of Ariès’s theory. These served to place the topics of children and childhood at the forefront of historical research, just as they are in the fields of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. This paper will examine the place of children in Jewish society of northern France and Germany during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the light of the debate about Ariès’s thesis.

During the Middle Ages the Jewish group in Christian countries perceived itself to be threatened by the Christian society that surrounded it. The threat was multi-faceted and stemmed among other things from the knowledge that Christians could and did convert Jews to Christianity by force, by inducement, or by persuasion. In the long era of persecution and forced expulsion following the first Crusade of 1096, Jews as a community concluded that Christians intended to focus their missionary efforts particularly on Jewish children. This concern of the Jews was predicated on active attempts by both ecclesiastical and lay authorities to take control of Jewish children. For example, in 1497 in Portugal all Jewish children were forcibly baptized, undoubtably as a preliminary to baptizing their parents.

Some time in the early 1190s a knight, identified only as ‘B’, who had been cured of a severe illness, decided to enter the religious life in the monastery from which he held his land. He also required his under-age son to take the habit as a monk. Unfortunately, the boy did not adapt to the monastic life and, having reached the age of ‘discretion’, after only ten weeks he absconded. With the support of other relatives he then claimed his father’s goods back from the abbot. The relatives swore that the boy had been under age and unwilling when he took the habit and, on encountering resistance from the abbot, took the case to the papal curia. In 1195 Pope Celestine III (1191–98) ruled that if it were true that the boy had not been willing to be professed and had left the monastery when he had attained the age of discretion, he was to be considered free and was not to be compelled to return to the monastery. He was also free to demand the goods of his father which belonged to him by succession. Celestine’s decision was of such significance that it was included in the Decretal collection drawn up for Gregory IX (1227–41) and established as a precedent for later disputes.

This case raises interesting questions about the relationship between parental responsibility and religious vocation. In this episode there were other relatives who could help the boy and seem to have done so with some vigour, pursuing his cause all the way to the pope. But the dispute also reveals the dilemma for the parent who wished to do something for the good of their soul and yet had responsibility for children. The knight wished to take the habit and resolved the problem of his son as he saw fit. Presumably, as eventually happened in this case, relatives might quite often take on the children of such individuals. But what if there were no relatives? Oblation, in spite of a slight waning in popularity from the twelfth century, remained a common way of providing for children.