Lesson video

Hello, my name is Mr. Cooper, and I will be your teacher for this sixth lesson inquiry, looking at a wonderful woman called Margery Kempe and what we can learn about the mediaeval world by looking at her story.

So, if you've not had me as a teacher before, that is fine.

I asked you to do the same thing at the start of every lesson.

And this is just to keep things organised.

So piece of paper or your book, pen, obviously, put the date of, write down the date of whatever day it is that you're doing this and the title, which will be on the screen in a moment.

underline both, tidy notes, tidy minds.

And when you've done that, you may restart the video and the lesson will continue.

Just to remind you, you can pause or meet me at any point.

I won't take it personally.

It's fine, I can take it.

If I've spoken to quickly, you just want to go back over something then you could do so.

Also really, really important, please hide your phone, give it away, don't give it away, but put it somewhere so you can't see it because if you see it, distracts you, you can't focus.

I mean, it's the same for everyone including me.

So I've hidden it actually behind me right now.

So pause the video, get that done, then restart, and we'll get going with the lesson.

So when you have done the following, I will, first of all, pause the video.

I want you to write down this title, "The Book of Margery Kempe", underline it, and also the date as well, just so that you can keep track of what you're doing and when you're doing it.

And when you've done that, restart the video, and we will start with this lesson.

So on the screen, we have a picture of a woman reading a book and stirring something in a pot.

Now this isn't Margery Kempe, but we can assume that she would have looked something like this.

In fact, Margery from the age of 30 or so, started wearing only white.

And we'll be learning about what this meant later in this inquiry.

Margery Kempe actually, I'll just tell you how I came across Margery Kempe.

So I was, when lock downstairs started and I was looking through my bookshelves and I forgot that I had "The Book of Margery Kempe", and I thought what a fantastic way to learn, for me to learn, but also to teach you guys about the mediaeval world through the life of this very, very unusual woman.

Margery, as we'll be looking at in the next six lessons.

So quite a few lessons, but there's, I think we need this number of lessons to really understand who she is.

Margery, she was born in the port town of Lynn in Norfolk now called Kingsland.

When she was alive, it was called Bishops Lynn.

She was born to a wealthy family.

Her father was a very successful businessman and he also was in politics.

So he represented Lynn in the parliament, and was well known.

He was very well known.

Now, Margery, as we'll discover in the next few lessons, very interesting things happened to her.

She said that very interesting things happened to her.

So when she was in her 20s, she got married and she had a first, first of 14 children, 14 children.

Just after the birth of her first child, she was lying in bed and she was having these terrible visions.

She thought that she was being attacked by demons.

She was having an awful time.

And she said that Jesus Christ appeared to her.

Jesus Christ sat at the end of her bed as though he were a person, an actual person, and Jesus said to her, why have you given up on me when I haven't given up on you? And from that moment, Margery started a lifelong journey of developing her relationship with her religious life, her relationship with God.

And she actually doesn't really mention her 14 children or her husband at all in this book that we will be looking at.

She was much, much more interested in visiting churches and going to mass, and going on pilgrimage, these Holy journeys called pilgrimages.

So for about 40, at 40, 45 years, she cried actually.

So if you read her book and we will be reading parts of it.

She describes how every time she went to church, she cried and she didn't just cry, she screamed.

She made an absolute scene because she was so overwhelmed by the emotion she was feeling when she went to church.

Now this was, this was a problem for a lot of people at the time.

Lots of people thought she was completely insane.

Lots of people that wanted to lock her up, and lots of people even wanted to burn her.

And we'll be looking again at why that was.

But what we do know is that Margery was a very special and unusual woman.

Whether or not you believe what she said she saw, that doesn't really matter, because what we have in the form of her book, is a window into the mediaeval world.

And I'm really looking forward to introducing you to this woman.

Because when you read her book, she just comes across as a very well-meaning and misunderstood woman.

So I'm hoping that by the end of these six lessons, you will have an idea about who this woman was.

Now, what makes this story even more interesting is how do we have her book? Her book, at the end of her life, she decided to write down her story.

She asked, she couldn't read or write herself.

A priest asked to write down a story.

This book was lost for about 500 years.

We know that it existed.

We know that there was a book.

But it wasn't until this woman on the screen, a woman called Hope Emily Allen, stumbled across her book in 1934.

And the story of how she found the book is itself a good story.

So the only copy of Margery Kempe's book, everyone thought had been lost for good.

And in 1934, it was found again.

And it was found by accident.

A man living in the North of England, a man called Colonel Butler-Bowdon was looking for a ping pong bat.

Yes, that's right.

It was a summer months, and he was rummaging around in his cupboards looking for a ping pong bat and his family home in near Chesterfield.

So in the North of England.

And while he was looking for his ping pong bat, he found a pile of old books, dusty old books in this cupboard.

And he was really annoyed about it.

You know, when you open your cupboard and your parents, your carers might, might be familiar with this.

You open the cupboard and everything falls out, clothes everywhere, bits of games, just a total mess, total mess.

Well, this is what Colonel Butler-Bowdon found.

And he was so angry.

He almost choked everything on a bonfire.

He was, he didn't want to organise.

He just was like, you know what? I'm just going to burn it.

Thankfully before he puts everything on a bonfire, a friend said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, these books look really old.

They look really, really old.

There might be something special in this pile of books.

And this is exactly what was found.

So Hope Emily Allen, this woman on the screen was given access to these books and Hope Emily Allen found "The Book of Margery Kempe"" that had been lost for about 500 years.

And so these lessons that we're doing now are thanks to this woman, Hope Emily Allen, rescuing this book from a bonfire and then preserving it.

And now you'll find this copy of Margery Kempe, "The Book of Margery Kempe" in the British Library.

Now, I don't know if you, you may not have been before.

So the green arrow is pointing at the bookshelves.

And so you might have a bookshelf in your house, or you might see one at school, so that's a proper bookshelf.

That's like, that's many, many levels of books, a lot of books in the British Library.

And I was lucky enough to go actually just before the lockdown started and down there was a lovely cafe.

I remember when I used to go to cafes, it was a happy time.

So you can visit the British Library and you can go and see these amazing books.

And "The Book of Margery Kempe" is now safe and sound in the British Library, not in a dusty cupboard at risk of being shot to live on fire.

So, this is what we will be doing for the next six lessons.

And the reason we're doing this is because so far we have been studying political, well, it's likely that you've been looking at political history.

So you will very well like you will have probably done several inquiries already with me or with different teachers.

And usually the topics are about how countries and people were ruled, or how they were governed.

So fo example, William the Conqueror, Alfred the Great, what happened after the Norman conquest, the crusades, all of these different things.

And that's fantastic.

That's a really important part of studying history.

However, there's a big, there's another type of history and we call this social history, the study of how people in the past lived.

So there's still going to be mentioned of kings and queens.

There's still going to be mentioned in these ones.

But our interest in this inquiry is how people lived.

What was life like for them? And on the screens, I've just got these two images that I think kind of neatly summarised the different targets of what we're studying.

On the left, we have an image of Henry the eighth.

I love these pictures.

Matthew Paris did a painting for each of the major kings.

And then that's Henry the third there did I say Henry the eighth, I meant Henry the third, if I said Henry the eighth, it wasn't Henry the eighth, Henry the third and on the right, and we're going to look at this in much more detail in the next lesson, something called the lateral salsa.

Don't worry about those two words make no sense at all.

But we get an idea.

You can see that picture and immediately you will be thinking, something familiar is going on there.

So what I'd like you to do now is just simply pause here and what I'd like you to just write a few things down.

What kind of things would you like to know about people, about how people lived 700 years ago? You are historians during this lesson and historians, this is the question that they will typically start with.

Maybe not asking this exact question, but they're like I want to know something about what happened in the past? And then they will spend many, many years potentially reading and writing about this particular topic.

So pause here and think about what kind of things would you like to know about how people lived 700 years ago? Oh, said 800 is, you know what? 700 years, 800 years all goes.

A long time ago is the key thing.

So this is what I would quite be interested today.

What did people eat? I don't think they have, well, they definitely didn't have McDonald's back 800 years ago.

What did they eat? How did people dress? We have all these fashions now that seem to change all the time.

And this is exactly the same 800 years ago, 700 years, 800 years ago.

What did people believe and what did they value? So did they have the same kind of priorities that we have today? Were they obsessed with maybe having a great career? Do they want to make lots of money? Did they, were they interested in how they looked? So what, this is another thing that we can look at.

Another very interesting thing, the role of men and women.

And so now we live in a very different world where we have the idea of equality between men and women.

This is quite a new thing, actually.

This is quite a modern idea.

So what was it like to be a man? What was it like to be a woman 800 years ago? Where did people live? Most people didn't live in towns and cities like they do now.

So where did people live? And what jobs did people do? So what kinds of things were people spending most of their lives doing? Sorry, I'll just get back quickly.

So, these are the kinds of questions that we are going to be looking at in the next few lessons.

And "The Book of Margery Kempe" is the life story of a woman who lived seven or eight, sorry, 600 years ago.

And we can get, we can read this book.

We can read her story and we can get an idea about all of these things by reading her book.

Another question now.

I've already given a bit of a clue, actually.

So imagine you're a historian or you are a historian.

We're doing history right now.

So we are historians.

I want you to pause now.

If you wanted to find out about these things, I just had it on the screen.

Where would you find this information? And the really important thing here, as historians, we're almost like detectives.

We need to find evidence of the past.

Now the problem is there's no such thing as social media or the internet.

So you can't just go on a, you can't just search for it on the internet.

And the really, I mean, it's kind of obvious, but you can't ask anyone because they're no longer alive.

Now, if you were right, if you are a modern historian and you wanted to write about something that happened maybe 50 years ago, you could actually find someone to ask them about what happened 50 years ago.

Not so with the mediaeval world, because of course it was such a long time ago.

So pause, think about what kinds of things you might look at, or read, or go and look out to have, to be able to reconstruct the past as historians.

So, we are, we call them historical sources, not catch up different spelling, different words.

A historical source is something that historians use to find evidence of something that happened in the past.

"The book of Margery Kempe" is a historical source.

And in "The Book of Margery Kempe" we find evidence.

So this is really important.

This is kind of the basic, the basic material that historians use to write and study history.

So this is where you might find, this is the way you might find this kind of information.

Written documents, so books, letters, diaries.

So Margery Kempe of course is an example of a written document.

Images, paintings, drawings in the margins of books, statues.

Places, buildings, ruins of buildings and fields.

The field you'll understand what I say fields in a moment.

So we have on the screen, we have different, different things that historians might use to reconstruct the past.

Now, the tricky thing, the historians often find, historians often rely, or they use written documents more than the other two.

And therefore, especially with the very old with mediaeval history, and if you did the Anglo Saxon unit with me, then you'll know this especially.

People didn't write as much as they do now.

And the kind of stuff that was written down is different to what is written down now.

And so we have to use these alternative thing, these alternative sources to really understand what was going on in the past.

So you would have done this many times before.

So hopefully it will be familiar to you.

In a moment, you're going to pause the video, this video, you're going to minimise it and you're going to close it.

And then you're going to go to the next part of the lesson by clicking next in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, you're then going to read through the slides of the text.

And then you're going to answer these five questions that you'll find at the end of the slides.

There's no time limit to this, but I don't want you to be spending more than 10 minutes writing these hot questions.

And the crucial that the really important thing is, full sentences, full sentences.

It's super important that you do this.

So pause the video, read the slides on the next page and ask the comprehension questions now.

And when you've done, simply press play and we'll continue with the lesson.

So first question, what is a historical source? The acceptable answer, something historians use to learn about the past.

Good answer, a historical source is something that survives from the far past that historians use to understand what happened and why.

A source might be a picture, an official document, a letter or a diary.

So clear difference between the acceptable answer and the good answer.

The good answer is given me a lot more information and it's also, well actually the, in fact, yes, the acceptable answer is not a full sentence.

The good answer is.

Two, what is the difference between a biography and an autobiography? The acceptable answer.

One is written by the person themselves the other isn't.

Good answer, a biography is the story of the person's life.

An autobiography is the story of a person's life written by that person.

So with Margery Kempe, we have an autobiography, although it's a little bit interesting because she has self couldn't read or write.

She read it.

She told the story to a priest.

So there is some discussion about whether we can actually call it an autobiography, but for the purposes of these lessons, we will treat this as her story told by her.

Three, what is "The Book of Margery Kempe" the first example of? It's the first autobiography in English, acceptable.

Good answer, "The Book of Margery Kempe" is special because it is the first known autobiography written in English.

Most surviving sources were written in Latin, the language of the mediaeval church and of the government actually.

So it wasn't just the church.

It was also the government.

So this is why "The Book of Margery Kempe" is so special.

Aside from just being a great read, it's also one of the earliest examples we have of something written in English, rather than Latin.

Four, how were women expected to behave in the mediaeval world? Acceptable answer, they had to keep quiet.

So they're expected to keep quiet.

Good answer, women were expected to remain quiet and raise families, not cause trouble and write books like Margery Kempe.

This is why she's so much fun to learn about because she did not do what she was expected to do.

She caused a lot of trouble.

Five, why is studying social history important? Acceptable answer, not only kings matter.

True, but I think we can be a little bit more detailed in our answers.

The good answer, studying social history is important because it helps us understand how people actually lived in the past, not just who was king and which wars were fought.

It helps us to learn about why our society is the way it is today and where our beliefs and values come from.

So, yes, it's important to study who are the kings and the queens of the past and how they ruled the country.

But social history is, it's actually, it's in a sense, it's more about us because we are all, the world we live in today has not always been the way it is.

And to understand the how this has changed.

How have our beliefs changed over time, we need to study social history.

So writing activity.

Historians they read and they write.

So you've done the reading and now you're going to do some writing.

Do not panic.

This is not something that you should be worried about.

I have, I do writing activities with my A-level students because writing is, it's a skill that you have to practise.

If you didn't need to, if you didn't find this difficult, or even if you do find this difficult, you wouldn't need to be studying history.

It's all about getting better and better and better.

And I know for a fact, because I've taught students in the real world, with them in front of me, I've seen them get better and better and better.

So do not panic if you find this difficult.

This is all about, this is the first time you'll do this and you'll do this many times in the future.

So what I'd like you to do, you're going to pause here and you're going to write down which of the following statements support the view that her book is not a forgery, but the real thing.

So the reason this is such a, Margery's book is such a useful source for historians is because we can be pretty sure it's not made up.

It's not a forgery.

It's not fake.

Now how do we know that? So you would have just read about a lot of examples of this.

And on the screen, there are eight statements, all of them true, but not all of them are going to help you answer this question about whether her book is a forgery or not.

So what I'd like you to do is pause now and write down the sentences that you think will help you answer a question about whether or not her book is, how we know that her book is not a forgery.

So, on the screen, there are four statements that I think will help you answer this question.

So make sure you've got these four statements written down in your books.

And then when you've done that restart the video.

So, this is what we can say is the historical evidence that historians used to argue that Margery's book, isn't a forgery.

So the full sentence you just written down, these are other bits of evidence that's help us to know or mean we can be pretty sure it's not a forgery.

And now we're going to turn this into a nice paragraph.

This should not take you too long.

I don't want you to be doing this for more than 10 minutes maximum.

The question is, why do historians think "The Book of Margery Kempe" is trustworthy? Why can we trust what she says? Or that it's a reliable source? The first sentence has to reuse the words of the question.

And it has to clearly answer the question.

So I know straight away what you're going to be arguing in your paragraph.

Historians think "The Book of Margery Kempe" is trustworthy, because there is lots of other historical evidence that confirms what she says.

So I knew straight away what you're going to be arguing.

And so what I'd like you to do is to write that sentence down.

And then the rest of the paragraph is very simple.

You simply need to give examples and explain what these examples are.

For example, dah, dah, dah, dah, another example is dah, dah, dah, dah, and a really nice way of starting a sentences is, in addition to this.

So this is, these are just different ways to start the sentence.

What I'd like you to do is to have a go with this.

As I said, don't take too long.

Five or six sentences maximum.

And when you finish, restart video, and it will take us to the end of the lesson.

So if you'd like to, this is not in any sense compulsory, but I would love to see the work that you're producing.

You can share your work with Oak National when you do that, you know, very simply, please ask your parent or carer to share your work on Instagram, or Facebook, or Twitter, tagging @OakNational and #LearnWithOak.

Not compulsory, but I would love to see what you're producing.

So that brings us to the end of the first of six lessons in our inquiry, looking at the wonderful woman, Margery Kempe.

I hope you're looking forward to the rest of the lessons, finding out the different sides to her, having learned about the deed, that rough idea of who she was when she lived, and how the book was found.

We are now going to go through these different parts of either, looking at the mediaeval through her eyes.

So I'm looking forward to continuing these lessons with you.

There's always a quiz.

Hopefully you're used to this by now.

Just it is not a big deal.

But the goal is just to make sure that this information that you've learned are lodged in our brains, because that is one of the big goals that we're getting out of lessons is to learn stuff.

So I hope you have a lovely day wherever you are, and I will see you for the next lesson whenever you come to watch it.