Lesson video

Hello, this is Mr. Cooper, tuning in for your third lesson of six on our inquiry, looking at the mediaeval world through the life of Margery Kempe.

I hope you just did the quiz, just to make sure we've got the stuff that we've learnt in the previous lessons in our brains before we start today's.

And as always, same routine at the start of this lesson.

So piece of paper, your book, whatever you're using, and I'd like you to write the date of whatever day it is today, title, underline both, and then off we go.

Hide your phone.

Hide it from yourself.

Very important.

So when you've done that, restart the video, and we'll get going.

So we are now going to be looking at mediaeval trade in today's lesson.

So this is the third of the six lessons and very, very important parts of Margery's life.

Margery lived in a port town.

Her family were a trading family, and that is what made her family so rich.

So could you please write the date of whatever day it is, title, "Mediaeval Trade," underline, and off we go.

Pause if you need to, and then restart when you're ready.

So what I would like you to do is to look at the screen now.

Now, this is a cope.

Now, I wonder if you can work out what this cope might be.

You'll also see there are lots of beautiful images, people all over it.

So I'd like you to just look very closely at this and see if you can work out what it is.

It's a type of clothing, naturally, just to give you a clue.

So I'll have a go at this, and then restart when you've had a really close inspection of what's in front of you.

So this cope is this.

So on the left-hand side, we have a Catholic bishop.

And just to give you an idea of how it was worn.

So in the green circle, we have this hanging down.

So it's worn like a cloak, basically, a cloak.

Now, what's special about this cope is that it was made, the cloth was made in Italy, but the stitching, the images were embroidered, that's the word we use, were drawn, were stitched onto the cloth in England.

And so we have a very good example of a beautiful piece of work, of handicraft, that was made partly in Italy, a lot, many, many miles away, and partly in England.

Now, this was made about 30 or 40 years before Margery Kempe was born, but this is the kind of beautiful thing that England was known for.

The workshops in England were known for making these beautiful, beautiful copes.

Now, we're going to zoom in.

We're going to zoom in here.

So here we have a close-up of the Virgin Mary on the left, so the mother of Jesus Christ, and on the right, the Father.

And the Catholic Church teaches that the Virgin Mary was crowned as queen of heaven.

And so here we have an image of that, and actually there are several other images of different parts of the Virgin Mary, so for example, the three wise men visiting her and the angel Gabriel coming to visit her.

So this was a religious cloak.

And here we have another zoom in here.

This is a little monster made out of pearls.

Actually, you can see the pearls, and you can.

The detail that's gone into this, you can also see around the sides, this was made of velvet.

So velvet was a very new kind of material from this time.

So we have.

And the way velvet was made was a very sort of, was a very difficult process.

So again, we see the skill that goes into this was really impressive.

And then the last one, we'll zoom in here.

Oh, yeah, so there we have.

It's a bit blurry, but we have.

On the left-hand side, we have Mary with a small Jesus in her arms, and then we have the three wise men going to visit her.

So this is about the nativity.

This cope was one of the most beautiful examples of mediaeval cloth-making, and it was what England was known for.

Well, it was one of the things England was known for at this time.

And it made many workshops in England, very, very famous.

So what I'd like you to do is have a go at these four questions and see if you can work out which are true and which are false, and then correct them if you can.

Now, I did mention the answers to each of these.

If you need to rewatch it, that's fine.

Don't worry.

If not, we'll go through the answers together.

But there's a problem with each one, and I want you to correct them as you go through.

So have a go.

Don't panic if you're not sure.

So pause now.

Have a go.

So here we have the answers.

The first one, the Butler-Bowdon Cope was worn by a bishop, not a king, to show off their wealth and power.

So bishops, a religious leader, very powerful at this time.

Two, the cope was made between 1330 and 1350, so, yeah, before Margery was born, but that sort of period we're talking about.

The cope was weaved in Italy and embroidered in England.

It's the other way around.

So this shows us.

This is really important because it shows that there was a trading relationship between Italy and England, two different countries.

And it was made of silk velvet, a new method of cloth-making.

So silk velvet was new and became very popular.

And the images are scenes from the life of Mary, the mother of Jesus, not the Battle of Hastings.

You might have seen something called the Bayeux Tapestry in a different inquiry.

So that's also a very beautiful piece of work, but this particular cope was about Mary, the mother of Jesus.

Now, this is.

We've already looked at the "Luttrell Psalter" in great detail.

What I want you to do now is work out what is going on in this picture.

So pause here and have a look.

Hopefully it's not too difficult to work out what's going on.

So we have a sheep pen, and here's a sheep, just because I love this picture of the sheep.

It's a happy sheep, clearly.

England became wealthy because of its sheep.

As well as growing wheat, most of the countryside was dedicated to sheep farming.

We see two men in the sheep pen.

One is milking the sheep, which is what.

Yeah, I don't think people often drink sheep milk now, but you can drink sheep milk.

And then the other guy, I don't think.

It looks like he's trying to strangle the sheep.

He's not.

I think he's trying to shear the sheep to get the wool.

The quality of wool produced by sheep in mediaeval England was some of the best in Europe, and that is why England became so wealthy and why Margery's family became so wealthy, partly because of this trade in sheep wool.

Everybody in Europe wanted English wool.

It was really good quality stuff.

I never want you to forget that sheep.

Just every time you're feeling sad or you're feeling stressed or lonely, think of that sheep smiling kindly at you with his little bell around his neck.

Now, do not panic.

This is a map.

I know there's lots of lines everywhere.

I'm going to talk you through it.

So this is a map of Europe, and the lines, each line represents a different route that people travelled who wanted to buy and sell things.

So we have England in the top left, sorry, Britain in the top left up there.

And then we have all these different lines connecting up the big towns in Europe.

Now, for our purposes, we're focusing in this orange circle up here.

So this orange circle, the black lines there, these are what we call the Hanseatic routes.

Now, you'll be reading about this in a short moment, so don't worry too much.

But the Hanseatic League was an alliance, a group of towns, all of them working with each other.

And Margery's family was a big part of this world, so much so that one of her sons moved from Lynn in Norfolk to Danzig.

You might be able to support Danzig inside the orange circle.

So this was a connected world.

People travelled.

Trade is moved around all over Europe.

And English wool especially you would've found down in Italy and even further.

So the point of this map is to really show us how connected Europe was.

Now, of course, most people didn't travel very much.

Most people were in the villages.

They didn't leave the villages.

But this didn't mean they weren't connected through these different trade routes around Europe.

And Margery on her travels would've travelled along a lot of these routes.

And we'll be looking at this in more detail in the next few lessons.

Like you to have a go at doing now.

Fill in the gaps.

So what you might want to do is write out this paragraph, leaving space for the words, and fill in the gap.

It's very simple, so have a go.

Pause here, have a go, and then restart when you're done.

Here are the correct answers.

So mediaeval England became famous for its wool, which was traded all over Europe.

The most important trading centre was London, but places like Lynn also mattered a lot for merchants.

England was connected to the wider world through its links to the Hanseatic League, which was also connected to important cities in France and Italy.

So this is a summary really of what we've just been talking about.

How was England connected to the wider world? Why was it connected to the wider world? Well, one of the reasons was because of its wool.

People became very rich as a consequence of sheep wool.

Now, same as we've done many times before, five questions, and this is what you're going to do.

You're going to pause the video in a moment.

You're going to go to the next part of the lesson by clicking next at the bottom right-hand corner of the slides of the screen.

You're going to read through the slides, using the glossary if you need to, and then you going to answer these five questions in full sentences.

I cannot make this clearer.

It must be full sentences because we are practising our writing, but also if you don't write full sentences, you won't know what you were being asked about, and the words won't make any sense, so it's a waste of time.

So really important that you practise writing full sentences.

So pause now, read the slides, answer questions, and start when you're ready.

So first question, how do we know that Margery was wealthy? The acceptable answer, she wore gold and had businesses.

Good answer, we know that Margery was wealthy because she describes how when she was in her 20s, she wore gold pipes in her hair and started businesses.

Only wealthy people could afford to do these things.

So again, from her book, we can get a pretty good idea of the kind of social class she belonged to.

And she liked looking good.

We're all guilty of that.

And as we'll discover, she decided that actually that was not really the best way to spend her time.

Next question, what important jobs did Margery's father have? Acceptable answer, he was a mayor, Good answer, Margery's father was the mayor of the booming port town of Lynn.

He also represented the town in Parliament several times.

Hopefully you've talked about, you've learnt about Parliament in previous lessons.

If not, don't worry.

The key thing really is that Margery came from a very important family, a wealthy, important family, which makes what she then did after all the more surprising.

Three, what did merchants do? Acceptable answer, they bought and sold things.

Good answer, in mediaeval England, merchants bought and sold products and goods, like wool and beeswax.

They transported them often over long distances.

So the reason merchants.

The reason things were expensive, the harder it was to get hold of it, the more expensive it was.

And so things like beeswax, which were needed for the candles in all the churches, they came, that about was mainly from the Baltic, the Baltic Sea, the country on the Baltic Sea, and that's what the Hanseatic League was especially good at finding, getting hold of.

So question four, what was the main product sold by English merchants? The acceptable answer, wool.

The good answer, the main product that English merchants sold was wool, which was known as the best quality in Europe.

Again, the clear difference here between the acceptable and the good answer, the good answer is a full sentence, not a single word like it is in the acceptable answer.

Five, why was the Hanseatic League set up? Acceptable answer, so merchants could make more money.

Yes, but I think we need to be a little bit more detailed about the Hanseatic League.

The good answer, the Hanseatic League was set up because the merchants who lived in the trading cities of northern Europe realised that if they worked together, they could protect their interests and therefore make more money.

So basically these merchants, they wanted to make as much money as they could, and they realised if they looked out for each other, if they made this deal with each other, then they could protect themselves from greedy kings or from dangerous attacks.

So this is why the Hanseatic League was set up.

And this, again, was the world that Margery was part of, this world connected to the rest of Europe.

Last bit, so writing activity.

Historians, we read and we write.

And good writing is one of the goals that we have from these lessons.

So writing activity, what made England so wealthy in the mediaeval period? So on the basis of what we've looked at in the lesson today, we hopefully have a pretty clear answer: sheep.

I never thought I'd be shouting sheep into a computer like I just have done.

However, this is the simple answer.

However, of course, as we've looked at, we need to be able to turn this into a proper paragraph, a full paragraph, not simple single words.

So what I'd like you to do now, you've done this before, pause here, pick the correct sentences That would help you answer a question about what made England wealthy.

On the screen, there are six statements.

Some of them will help you answer this question.

Others won't.

I'd like you to write down.

Read through each sentence.

Write down the ones that you think are going to be useful bits of knowledge to help you write this paragraph.

So pause now and have a go.

So actually four of the six, I think, are going to be very useful for you.

The two ones that I've struck out, interesting, true, but not really relevant right now for our question, which is about what we've learnt in the previous lesson.

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

And then when you've done that, restart the video, and we'll continue to the last part of our lesson.

So what made England so wealthy in the mediaeval period? Very simple task.

First sentence, as I've said before, clearly and directly answers the question straight away.

The amount of times that I've had to tell my A Level students to do this.

It's not just year sevens that need to learn this.

It is everybody throughout your school career.

So get this sorted now, and you'll be well sorted for when you all do history A Level.

That is the goal.

I want you all doing history A Level.

Whoever is watching this, do history A Level.

Anyway, back to the task.

I want you to do this.

England became wealthy in the mediaeval period thanks to what? So complete that sentence.

And then using the bits of knowledge that we've just written down from the previous slide, simple write a few sentences explaining the answer that you've given.

This was because.

This meant that.

That is why.

Now, you don't have to use all three.

You might want to use different ones as well.

That is fine.

And I don't want you to be spending more than 5 or 10 minutes writing this paragraph, three or four sentences just to bring together all the stuff that we've learnt in the lesson today.

And when you've done that, restart the video, and we'll then go to the last, and then we'll go to the close of the lesson.

So if you'd like to, again, not compulsory, just because I'd love to see the work you're producing, if you'd like to, please ask your parent or carer to share your work on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, tagging @OakNational and #LearnwithOak.

To be clear, this is not compulsory, but I would love to see the work you're producing.

So if you can, please do.

So that brings us to the end of our third lesson of six in this particular inquiry.

I hope you found it interesting.

I certainly did.

We're getting to know Margery as we go through these lessons.

I'm a big fan of Margery, and it's a real pleasure to be able to tell you about her.

So when you've done this, short quiz, five questions.

Get it done just to make sure these bits of information are stuck in your head.

And have a great day wherever you are.

See you next time.