Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English

language. This is Episode 95, Old School and New School. In this episode, we're going

to look at an important development in the early 1200s, and that was the rise of universities,

including Oxford and Cambridge. These institutions offered a new type of higher education, and

they reflected certain changes that were taking place at the time. Western Europe was becoming

more urban, more bureaucratic, and more literate, and the old educational system simply couldn't

meet the demands of this new society. So Old School learning was supplemented with

these brand new universities, and along the way the English language acquired lots of

new words to express these emerging ideas and concepts. So this time, we'll explore those

developments. But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is History

of EnglishPodcast.com, and you can sign up to support the podcast at patreon.com slash history

of English. And as always, you can reach me by email at kevinathistoryofenglishpodcast.com.

So let's turn to this episode, and let's pick up the story where we left off back in episode 93.

In that episode, we saw that King John lost control of Normandy and most of the rest of

Northwestern France in the year 1204. After that, John's realm was restricted to the British

Isles and Aquitaine in the southwest of France, and since Aquitaine was so far away, he was largely

confined to the British Isles. In fact, John not only had the title of King of England,

he was also officially the Lord of Ireland. He had actually held that title since he was a young boy.

And in the same year that John lost control of Normandy, he authorized a great fair to be

held in Ireland. He granted a license for an annual eight-day fair to take place in Dunnebrook,

which today is part of Dublin, but back in 1204, it was a small town just outside of the main city.

The Donniebrook fair was held every August for more than six centuries.

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