Medieval adults had a concept of childhood as a stage of life. They believed that human beings progressed through a series of such stages, known as the 'ages of man', each with its special features. One of the oldest children's rhymes is the one called, "How many miles to Beverleyham?" , or " to Babylon", as it became later known. We learn of it at the end of the 13th century, in a Latin sermon about people who vow to be good Christians but fail to keep their word. The preacher compared them to children who play.

We learn more about medieval children's rhymes and speech from children themselves. Many went to school, especially boys and the fact that there were plenty of schools in medieval times is a testimony both to adult recognition of children's needs and to the existence of organized communities of children. Then, as now, teachers encouraged their pupils to write about things they liked and knew. Pupil's notebooks - of which a number survive after 1400, contain scraps of songs and riddles. 

The ages of man are best known today from Jacques's speech in Shakespeare's, As You Like It, which identifies seven:  babyhood, childhood, typified by a schoolboy, adolescence and four adult phases.

 Children would visit the popular fairs with their attractions of toys, trinkets toys, liquor, gingerbread babies and the peep shows. These fairs were held after the harvest was in and before the winter arrived. These fairs had developed from the earlier yearly markets and provided lots of new amusements. Here children would join in and jostle freely in the crowds, watching the bull, or the bear baiting, the dog and cock fights, or bouts of fisticuffs, or bare knuckle boxing.

As an Italian visitor commented in the 15th century, "The want of affection in the English is straightly manifested toward their children, for often having kept them at home till they arrive at the age of seven, or nine years at the utmost". 

"They put them out, both male and females to hard service in the houses of other people, binding them generally for another seven of nine years".  "And these are called opportunities and few are born who are exempt from this fate".

 "For everyone however rich he be, sends away his children, into the houses of others".

"Whilst he in return receives those of strangers into his own homes."

Good manners, courtesy and religious virtues played a vital role in the community. It was felt that all children should be subservient to all of their elders and betters. This was well illustrated in the children's books on sale to the wealthier classes.

In Arnold's The Babes Book 1475, he wrote the following, 

" When you enter your Lords place say Good Speed and with humble cheer greet all who are there present".

 "Do not rush in rudely, but enter with head up and at an easy pace and kneel on one knee only to your Lord or Sovereign". 

 "Take no seat but be ready to stand until you are bidden to sit down".

 "Keep your hands and feet at rest, do not claw your flesh, or lean against a post in the presence of your Lord, or handle anything belonging to the house".

 "But sweet children, have always your delight in courtesy and in gentleness and eschew boisterousness, with all your might".

 Play was another large part of children's' lives and was relatively well-recorded in the Middle Ages, because adults often tried to stop, or regulate it.

 In "Children's Games," by Pieter Brueghel. The boys in the bottom right of the painting are playing what is obviously a form of "Johnny-on-the-Pony." The painting was done in 1560. Brueghel, a Flemish painter, is one of the all time greats. 

Brugels "Children's Games" hangs in the Kunsthistorischen Museum in Vienna. The Metropolitan Museum of Art sells a little book dealing with this painting. In it there are blowups of details in "Children's Games" that make it easier to recognize familiar games.

The canvas-reds and greens on dark-and-light browns-consists of more than 200 children taking part in some 80 games. Many of the games, like Johnny-on-the-Pony, are easily identifiable as a form of game kids still play today.

Among the pastimes that can be identified are: Blind Man's Buff, Swimming, Leap-Frog, Balancing a Broom, Walking on Stilts, Wearing Masks, Spinning Tops, Knife-Throwing and King-of-the-Hill. There's a fascination to studying a clear reproduction of the work because you keep coming up with identifiable games.

A critique of the work says,  

 Brueghel was born about 1525, so he was about 35 when he painted "Children's Games." Not much is known about his life, and there is no indication of what moved him to paint this ode to childhood. It's notable that there isn't a schoolmarm or indeed any adult in the work, which has been called a "paradise for children."

Critic Robert Delevoy says,

  "This delightful work was wholly original; attempts to link it up with any local art tradition or to track its sources to other painters lead nowhere. What we have here is a unique encyclopidia of games indispensable to any would-be historian of the recreations of childhood through the ages." "Thanks to Brueghel's surpassing power of artistic organization, this huge crowd of romping children has been gathered into a unified composition enabling the beholder rapidly to survey the multiplicity and at the same time to form some idea of the various component movements. The artist whose sublime genius directs this world of play is at home in these higher regions where the creative impulse itself is recognized as a kind of play."

The poet John Lydgate in the 15th century, writing about the follies of youth, mentions activities such as running, leaping, dancing, wrestling, stone-casting, hunting, fishing, catching birds and climbing trees to steal fruit.  He also refers to numerous games of skill: closh  which was a kind of croquet, camping, football or hockey  shooting at butts; playing nine men's morris; two games of dice; chess; tables, backgammon; kayles, skittles; and quek.

Another 15th-century writer, whom we know only by his first name, Geoffrey, an anchorite of King's Lynn in Norfolk, wrote about play from a different point of view. Geoffrey is an unsung pioneer of English scholarship was the first person to compile English to a Latin dictionary and in doing so, the first to create an English dictionary too.  He was also original in a third sense. Unlike most later lexicographers, he meant his dictionary for children to use and he inserted a number of words that he defined as children's play. They include names of games, such as buck-hide and base-play and equipment for games: merry-totter  which was a swing or seesaw, powpe, which was perhaps a pea-shooter and shuttle.      

 Older children were often employed as apprentices in industrial crafts, following an Act of Parliament in 1536.  But even they were forbidden to play except on the holy days.