The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)
Page 37
Merchant Taylors’, where Richard Mulcaster was headmaster, was exceptional in believing that music was ‘among the most valuable means in the upbringing of the young’ and in having singing and instrumental music taught throughout the school as a ‘daily exercise’. In few schools, so it seems, was a modern language taught except as an extra. History and geography were similarly neglected.31
The school day was long, and holidays were short, sixteen days at Christmas and twelve at Easter being usual. In one typical school there was a half-holiday on Thursdays but on this day, as on others, homework had to be done. On Sundays and holy days pupils had to ‘report in due time to the school house and from thence by two and two, in order to go to divine service’. At Sandwich school ‘at every Christmas time, if the master do think it “meet”, one comedy or tragedy of chaste matter in Latin was played, the parts [being] divided to as many scholars as may be and to be learnt at vacant times’.32 Other schools, too, notably St Paul’s, performed plays; some organized outings to collections of pictures and curiosities; others took part in public disputations, as various London grammar school pupils did in the churchyard of the priory in Smithfield on the eve of St Bartholomew’s Day. Shrewsbury mounted a military parade with a band. But extracurricular activities were rare and leave from the schoolroom seldom permitted.
In the schoolroom pupils still sat on long forms, one form usually accommodating pupils of similar abilities but widely different ages. At a Wolverhampton school in 1609, sixty-nine pupils aged between six and eighteen were grouped into six forms. The top form had only two boys, one seventeen, the other eighteen. A lower form included one boy aged nine and two others of seventeen. Since learning was based on oral instruction and repetition and on reading aloud in unison, schoolrooms were very noisy, particularly so in those many schools in which all the pupils were contained in a single hall or at most two or three large rooms.
The increase in the number of charity schools in the seventeenth century was almost matched by that of ‘Dissenting Academies’ of which there were about thirty at its close. They were founded by Puritan clergy expelled from the Church, but their pupils were not limited to the sons of Dissenters; and many Anglican parents were drawn to these academies by the greater emphasis then placed upon science and mathematics and upon English and other modern languages rather than upon the classics which were, in some of the more strict, condemned as heathen works all of whose ‘filthy places’ would be ‘wisely passed over’.33 This rejection of the classics as the dominating subject in a school’s curriculum was also apparent in establishments founded by Quakers who had opened fifteen boarding schools by 1671, including two that were co-educational and two for girls.34
It was still generally considered, however, that to educate girls to the same standard as boys was unseemly, most people agreeing with Lady Newdigate who expressed a wish in her will that her sons should be brought up in ‘good learning’ and her daughters in ‘virtuous and godly life’.35 The statutes of some schools, Harrow for example, specifically excluded girls in accordance with the views of a commentator on female education who wrote in 1524, ‘Many men put great doubt whether it should be expedient and requisite or not for a woman to have learning in books of Latin or Greek. And some utterly affirm that it is not only neither necessary nor profitable, but also very noisome and jeopardus.’36 There were, however, by the end of the century several boarding establishments for the daughters of the rich.
The gentlewoman we spoke of doth continue her course in teaching still [a letter of that time runs]. Her rates are thus, 16 pounds a year apiece, for diet, lodging, washing and teaching them to work, reading, writing and dancing, this cometh to £32 a year. But for music you must pay besides … She hath teachers for viol, singing, lute and virginals.37
But such establishments were extremely rare as, indeed, were such model pupils as Lady Jane Grey who learned Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish and French when she was six, and Hebrew, Chaldee and Arabic before she was seventeen. When Roger Ascham visited her and found the rest of her family out hunting, she is said to have commented, ‘But I [think] all their sport in the Park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I find in Plato. Alas, good folk, they never felt what true pleasure meant.’38 Queen Elizabeth I was equally learned. Ascham said of her when he was her tutor, ‘She readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day than some Prebendaries of this Church do in a whole week.’ She could read Latin as well, and she could speak it without stopping for a word. She spoke French, Spanish and Italian, too, and even Welsh. She could talk intelligently on any intellectual topic and liked to spend three hours a day reading history. She spent hours, too, with a pen or a needle between her extraordinarily long, white fingers until her handwriting and needlework were both of an exquisite beauty. But the queen and Lady Jane were peculiarly privileged, and it was not until the next century that girls were likely to share the experiences of Lucy Apsley, daughter of the Lieutenant of the Tower of London, who at the age of seven, so she said, had ‘at one time eight tutors in different qualities, language, music, dancing and needlework … My genius was quite averse from all but my book, and I was so eager of that my mother, thinking it prejudiced my health would moderate me in it; yet this rather animated than held me back, and every moment I could steal from my play I would employ in any book I could find, when my own were locked up for me.’39
Such learning in a girl was strongly deprecated by King James I who, refusing to have his daughters taught Latin, expressed the belief that ‘to make women learned and foxes tame had the same effect: to make them more cunning’.40 His great-granddaughter, Queen Mary, was notoriously ill-educated, though she had at least been taught French. Modest, pious, charitable and sweet-natured, she busied herself with gardening, collecting porcelain, embroidery and housework and, when she returned to England from The Hague, where her court had been ‘remarkable only for dullness and decorum’, she ran about, ‘talking a great deal and looking into every closet and conveniency, and turned up the quilts of the bed, just as people do at an inn, with no sort of concern in her appearance’.41
Her sister, Queen Anne, had as few compelling interests, apart from hunting and racing. She had strong, indeed often obstinate views, but she never seemed fully to understand what was happening in the world or even in her own country. Her knowledge of history and geography, as of art and literature, was lamentable. She is said to have been fond of music and to have played the guitar as a girl, but in later life she did not even listen to her own band. Her conversation was that of a kindly, unambitious and unimaginative woman who liked her food, enjoyed playing cards and gambling, and was excessively concerned with the niceties of etiquette. She spoke chiefly ‘upon fashions’, the Duchess of Marlborough said, ‘and rules of precedence, or observations upon the weather, or some such poor topics’. She had a remarkably retentive memory, ‘but chose to retain in it very little besides ceremonies and customs of courts, and such like insignificant trifles’.42
Women who had had a good education, or were unusually clever, were expected to hide the fact. There was a well-known proverb, ‘Beware of a young wench, a prophetess and a Latin woman’; and although Lucy, Countess of Huntingdon, for instance, had been taught Latin as well as French and Italian and various other accomplishments, she was advised by her mother on her marriage merely to ‘make herself fit conversation for her husband’.43
Some women were undoubtedly well educated, if not at school, perhaps by their brothers’ tutors whose lessons they shared, or under the guidance of an open-minded father who did not resent, as so many of his contemporaries did, what were taken to be masculine accomplishments in a lady. But there were, even in the middle of the seventeenth century, a very high proportion of women in England who were not even barely literate. It has been estimated that in London in 1640 as many as about 80 per cent of all women were illiterate, while in East Anglia the proportion was very nearly 100 per cent.44
Even so relatively liberal an educatio
nalist as Richard Mulcaster, who considered it right and proper that girls should be educated, believed that they should be allowed learning only ‘with respect to their ends’.45 And certainly in most girls’ schools the curriculum was heavily weighted in favour of needlework and manners, deportment and such accomplishments as might make an appealing wife. Basua Makin, the clever daughter of a Sussex clergyman, lamented that young ladies were taught nothing except how to ‘frisk and dance, to paint their faces, to curl their hair and put on a whisk’; while Hannah Woo Uey, author of The Gentlewoman’s Companion and other books on domestic practice, commented acidly, ‘Most in this depraved later Age think a woman Learned and Wise enough if she can distinguish her Husband’s bed from another’s.’46
Painting was taught in some schools, a form of shorthand in a few. Hannah Woolley thought it as well that a young lady should be taught how to carve a joint of meat, an art not yet adopted by the gentlemen of the household.47 But there were very few girls’ schools indeed that included the subjects offered at Basua Makin’s school at Tottenham High Cross, among them Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, French, Spanish and ‘Experimental Philosophy’; and even here half the school day was devoted to ‘Dancing, Music, Singing, Writing and Keeping Accounts’.48 As for the education offered to poor girls, this was largely confined to subjects which might prove useful in later life: at one village school in Sussex in 1699, the dame put her children to making clothes. Reading and writing were also occasionally taught but classes in these were given by visiting schoolmasters and were evidently considered of less importance.49
At schools run by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, as soon as the boys could ‘read competently well’, so it was observed in 1706, the master taught them ‘to write a fair legible hand, with the grounds of arithmetic to fit them for apprentices or service’; while the girls, having been taught how to read, learned how ‘to knit their stockings and gloves, to mark, sew, make and mend their clothes’.50 ‘A Shift [was] hung up in the School [at Oswestry in 1713] for the best Spinner, [a Head-dress] for the best Sewer, a Pair of Stockings for the best Knitter.’ At the Red Maids’ Hospital at Bristol, a charity school run by ‘one grave painful and modest woman of good life and conversation’, the forty poor girls, all dressed in the red uniforms from which the school took its name, were indentured for seven years to the mistress and taught English and sewing, the profits of the sewing work going to the mistress.51 At other charity schools in the early eighteenth century it cost £75 a year to provide schooling and clothing for fifty boys, but only £60 for the same number of girls.52
For those who could afford the fees there were constantly growing numbers of boarding and day academies for girls in England. In the earlier part of the seventeenth century there were, for example, Mrs Friend’s academy at Stepney where £21 a year was charged for teaching writing, needlework and music; Mrs Perwich’s school at Putney where 800 girls over seventeen years of age were taught music, dancing, singing and handicrafts by sixteen masters who also helped to organize the school orchestra; at Putney there were several ‘schools and colleges for young gentlewomen’ to which John Evelyn made a special trip by barge in 1649. By the middle of the century there were, in fact, academies for girls in every large town in England; and, whatever the limitations of their curricula, they did serve a valuable purpose. There were those, of course, like John Aubrey, who looked back to the good old days when ‘the boys were educated at the monasteries, the young maids not at Hackney schools, etc, to learn pride and wantonness, but at the nunneries where they had examples of piety, humility, modesty and obedience’.53 Yet many who had experience of girls’ schools had cause to be grateful to them. One of these was Sir Ralph Verney who in the 1640s had a great deal of trouble with his orphan ward, Betty, ‘a pestilent wench’, in her guardian’s opinion, ‘of a cross, proud lazy disposition’. Verney decided to send her to a boarding school to learn ‘diet, teaching and other things’ at a cost of £25 a year. At this Betty violently protested and her guardian commented, ‘She is a strange perverse girl and so averse from going hither that she doth not sticke to threaten her own death by her owne hands, though my girls [who have been there] give all the commendation that can be of that school.’ Despite her violent objections, Betty was packed off and a few months later ‘one ne’er saw soe great a change in countenance, fashion, humour and disposition [and all for the better] in any body, neyther could i imagine it possible it could have beene wrought soe soone’.54
25 Undergraduates and Tutors
In a book written for the guidance of students in 1622, Henry Peacham wrote, ‘For the companions of your recreation consort yourself with gentlemen of your own rank and quality; for that friendship is best contenting and lasting. To be overfree and familiar with inferiors argues a baseness of spirit and begetteth contempt.’1 This was familiar and often reiterated advice. ‘You are maintained with the best of your rank,’ Simonds D’Ewes told his younger brother, then at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, ‘dishonourate not yourself by your unseemly associating with pensioners and subsizers though of other colleges.’2
Oxford and Cambridge were now generally considered as finishing schools for the sons of gentlemen rather than as seminaries for the Church as they had been in the Middle Ages.3 ‘They were erected by their founders at the first only for poor men’s sons,’ wrote William Harrison:
But now they have the least benefit of them, by reason the rich do so encroach on them … It is in my time an hard matter for a poor man’s child to come by a fellowship (though he be never so good a scholar and worthy of that room) … and yet, being placed, most of them study little other than histories, tables, dice and trifles … Besides this being for the most part either gentlemen or rich men’s sons, they oft bring the universities into much slander. For, standing upon their reputation and liberty, they ruffle and roist it out, exceeding in apparel and banting riotous company … And for excuse when they are charged with breach of all good order, think it sufficient to say that they be gentlemen.4
The poorer, lower-class students, most of them intending to take holy orders, were certainly in a noticeable minority. Many new scholarships had been founded for the poor in recent years, yet, even so, as the numbers of undergraduates grew, the proportion of those from poor families remained very small. In the 1630s the fathers of boys sent to Cambridge from Thetford grammar school were listed as one knight, three esquires, nine gentlemen, two rectors and one tailor; and from Aylsham grammar school as one esquire, thirteen gentlemen, two clergymen and two drapers.5 It has been estimated that in the seventeenth century half the peerage went to university, though very few undergraduates of noble birth took degrees, leaving this to those plebeians who were headed for the Church and who had to spend up to seven years before attaining the degree of Master of Arts.6 Some rich and noble undergraduates did conscientiously attend lectures, study Latin and the other subjects which were now an essential part of the curriculum, grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music and Greek – Hebrew, Arabic, ancient history and geometry were added in the seventeenth century7 – but many troubled themselves little with what did not interest them.
Whether or not they took degrees, however, a high proportion of the distinguished men of the day attended either Oxford or Cambridge. The churchmen, Jewel and Hooker; the scholars, Camden and Thomas Harriot; the poet, Donne; the dramatist, Beaumont; the composer, Dowland; the geographer, Hakluyt; the martyrologist, John Foxe; and Sidney and Ralegh were all at Oxford. Burghley, Walsingham, Lord Keeper Bacon, Gresham, Cavendish and Coke, Spenser and Marlowe, and the Earls of Oxford, Essex and Southampton were at Cambridge.8
The differences between rich and poor were very marked. Since 1576, while the sons of noblemen and knights had been allowed to wear light-coloured clothes of velvet and silk, others had been restricted to black gowns and black caps. And in hall undergraduates sat at different tables according to their rank, the lowest table – at which sat ‘people of low condition
’ – being served, so Thomas Cogan said, ‘with boiled beef and pottage, bread and beer and no more’.9 At their High Table the rich employed the poor to wait upon them as sizars; the eldest son of Sir William Thorold did so in the 1630s at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he paid a former school-fellow at Melton Mowbray school, the son of a draper, to attend to his wants.10 Indeed, the poor were often compelled to undertake such menial tasks in order to exist. The living costs at Oxford rose from about £20 a year in 1600 to £30 a year in 1660; and even boys with good scholarships found it difficult to raise these sums without making extra money by working.11 According to his biographer, John Prideaux, later Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, was one of those who had to put their hands to the most menial tasks at the outset of his university career:
A good gentleman of the Parish [in Devon] took some compassion on him and kept him sometime at school until he had gotten some smattering in the Latin tongue and School learning. Thus meanly furnished, his Genius strongly inclined him to go to Oxford, and accordingly he did so, in a very poor habit and sordid (no better than leather breeches) to seek his Fortune … Here [at Exeter College] he is said at the beginning to have lived in very mean Condition and to have gotten his Livelihood by doing servile offices in the kitchen.12
All undergraduates, whether rich or poor, now lived in colleges rather than in inns and lodging-houses as their Continental contemporaries did; and they were subject to severe discipline which their youth was deemed to require. The minimum age of entry was fifteen, but this apparently was widely ignored. Sir Philip Sidney was fourteen when he went to Christ Church, Oxford; and in the late sixteenth century almost a fifth of freshmen at Oxford were under fourteen. Some were less than thirteen. Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of ten, though he did not matriculate until two years later. The average age of entry at Cambridge in Stuart times was sixteen.13