William Courtenay The Effect Of The Black Death On English Higher Education Summary

The Effect of the Black Death on English Higher Education by: William J. Courtenay is a piece that was easily broken down and ciphered into a well written piece that discredits previous historians’ thoughts. Courtenay is a well known scholar on medieval history, and is C.S. Haskins Professor of Medieval history. His article is a predeceasing article to the book he wrote Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England. Courtenay’s thesis in the article is that he is trying to prove that the Black Death did not have an effect on higher education, the Black Death actually opened the door to newer students, that would have never had chance to go to a university the opportunity to do so. The author takes his article and breaks it down into three written verses on the topic; The Oxford University Population before and after 1348: The Quantative effect, the issue of Qualitive decline, and The University and society; the response to the
Black Death.
First Courtenay states that there is no stable population, and that because of this anyone could get in to a university.
One of the main reasons for this was that people were scared of the plague, and students since they had no permanent residence at their school could quickly leave, and since most of them were from rural towns, they had no major affliction by the epidemic. The plague had a positive effect on the universities, people that could regularly not attend college could now do so, since students were leaving, now spaces were open for students form various back grounds to actually get a degree, and many new minds, and brilliant minds were now actually attending the universities. Courtenay uses the Theological Faculty and staff of Oxford to help prove his thesis;
he does so since they are the most noted to actually document on the epidemic, which he uses as a primary source. “There is no evidence that the Black Death took more than an additional five to ten percent” (Courtenay, page 56). This is speaking of the actual mortality rate being affected. On the issue of Qualitative effects of the Black Death Courtenay says that since may master would leave due to the epidemic, a quality of the education received was a possible outcome. The effect of this however would not be seen for decades after, around 1360-1375 as the author states. In his last article of defense Courtenay says that there was an actual growth in secondary education after 1348, and the Black Death. He uses a source forma colleague Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran, to show this. Courtenay ends his article to follow the Church, and the Oxford Theological faculty and staff, to explain an obvious decline within them at the fourth quarter of the 14th century. This is shown by documents showing a lesser amount of appointments in the office, especially during the reign of Edward II.
As far as positive and negative points to Courtenay’s article, he has a little bit of both. Negatively; he did not have the use of pictures or graphs to show his number documentation, and he does no go into an actual great detail about most of his defense, just stating it, he also only shows studies done at Oxford University, and not Cambridge or anywhere else, seeing that this is a paper on English higher education you would figure he would incorporate all universities. Courtenay also tries to pack as much as he could into his one article. The positives outweigh the negatives in the fact that he uses a great deal of primary and secondary sources. He also shows good percentage numbers to defend his argument; he also has a good writing set up, and follows greatly with his internal division. Courtenay also has a great section on background information in the beginning of his article. In conclusion I feel that the article did prove its original thesis very well, and that Courtenay, did very well in the fact of being able to find and use information to defend it so.