Much of the population did not have an opportunity to go to school. The children of laborers and small farmers had no time. City dwellers were more likely to attend school than those who lived in the country, but even there large numbers of the poor remained illiterate.
In 1536, Sir Ralph Eure took pride in the fact that he could write nothing but his own name, since he was able in that way to refute charges that he’d penned a treasonous note. He seems to have been an exception, however. Most noblemen and gentlemen were literate by the mid-sixteenth century. Many had valued learning for generations. John Howard, first duke of Norfolk, took books with him on his campaign against the Scots in 1481.
One group that tended to be well educated were “upper” servants such as the chaplain, steward, secretary, and waiting gentlewoman, all of whom might be called upon to handle accounts or write letters for their employers. Merchants, vintners, and grocers were generally literate by the 1550s. One study, of Tudor York, suggests that the overall literacy rate there may have been as high as 50% by 1603. Under the Stuarts, however, there seems to have been a decline in the level of literacy in the general population.
PENMANSHIP
The common English cursive script known as “Secretary” was widely used by scriveners. Pietro Carmeliano, one of Henry VII’s chaplains, used the “Italian” style, a cursive script developed from the Roman hand which was easier to read but also easier to forge, and it was this that was taught to Henry VIII's children. Pencils were being made of graphite in England by 1584, but the preferred writing implement was the third or fourth feather of the wing of a goose. A handful of quill pens could be purchased for 1d. In 1585, half a ream of paper and half a pound of sealing wax cost 2s. Letters were folded into an oblong shape and sealed with sealing wax imprinted with a signet ring. Ink was kept in inkhorns, small lead bottles, or pewter inkwells. The best quality ink was made from Italian oak apples (galls) and green vitriol. One ink recipe calls for two ounces of gum, two ounces of copperas, and four ounces of galls. Invisible inks were made from orange juice and onion juice and of milk and urine.
SCHOOLS
Petty Schools
Canterbury had as many as ten petty schools in the early 1600s. These were small groups, often meeting in the teacher’s house or in a church. Sometimes boys and girls met together, sometimes separately. The basics of reading and writing were taught. Educators of the time seem to have expected elementary education to last only to about age seven, after which time Latin became the most important subject in the curriculum.
Grammar Schools
The grammar school provided what we would think of as secondary education and emphasized classical learning. Those who were admitted already knew how to read and write in English. Among the subjects taught in grammar schools were ciphering (elementary arithmetic), composition (the models were Cicero for prose and Ovid and Virgil for verse), geography (which included a mix of fact and fiction and delved into astronomy and anthropology as well as natural philosophy, astrology, and navigation), history, mathematics, map drawing, Greek, and Latin. Latin in particular was important, as it was still the universal language of clergy, scholars, and the law. A Latin grammar book composed by William Lily became the required text by royal proclamation in 1540. Greek and Latin books were customarily chained to desks.
Modern languages were considered less crucial, although their usefulness in the area of foreign diplomacy became more evident as the sixteenth century progressed. Sir Richard Morrison, ambassador to Emperor Charles V from 1550 to 1553, knew Latin and German (actually Dutch) but not French. He studied Greek in his spare time and read Machiavelli in order to learn Italian. Lord Lisle, assigned to Calais, was fluent in French. Lady Lisle never bothered to learn any language but English and, although she could read, she had someone else write her letters.
Schools maintained by abbeys, such as that at Durham, which had eighteen scholars, had to be refounded after the monasteries were closed. Best known of the early grammar schools were Winchester (founded 1387), Eton (founded 1441), the Royal Grammar School in Lancaster, the New School at St. Paul’s in London (founded c. 1509), and the Westminster School (founded anew in 1540), where the boys were nicknamed “Anthony’s pigs” to distinguish them from “Paul’s pigeons” at nearby St. Paul’s. In 1561 the Merchant Taylor’s School was founded in London.
Manchester Grammar School was a free school which opened in 1516. It was modeled on the school in Banbury, Oxfordshire, and endowed through the lease of several cornmills. Anyone in Lancashire could attend and there was no age limit. In 1548, Edmund Pendilton, who had a degree of Bachelor of Grammar, was schoolmaster, but although the endowment provided funds to pay the master £10 per annum and the usher (assistant master) £5, Pendilton received only £4 1s. 9d. School began at 7 A.M. in winter and 6 A.M. in summer.
Cheltenham Grammar School (founded 1585) paid its schoolmaster £16 per annum and its usher £4. Each local boy was charged a 4d. entrance fee. Here the days ran from 6 A.M. to 6 P.M. There was no summer holiday.
Between 1558 and 1603, 136 new grammar schools were founded, bringing the total to approximately 360 in that year. Another eighty-three were founded between 1603 and 1625, and fifty-nine between 1625 and 1642.
Private Schools
At the turn of the century. private secondary schools were a growing trend. Some grammar schools had taken in boarders, but most concentrated on day boys who were either on scholarship or paid fees. The typical private school added French, German, and fencing to Latin and Greek. A 1599 census of Ealing, Middlesex, near London, includes the household of Master Peter Hayward and his son, Thomas. With them lived eighteen boys, ages six to seventeen, a mixture of sons of gentlemen, sons of merchants, and sons of yeomen.
Home Schooling and Schooling for Girls
In 1512 the earl of Northumberland’s household included a Master of Grammar who was paid 100 marks per quarter to maintain a schoolhouse at the earl’s castle at Leckinfield. In addition to the earl’s three sons, young gentlemen being fostered in his household would have been included in lessons.
Early in the sixteenth century, London was a gathering place for those interested in developing a wider and more liberal curriculum for schools and universities. Among the leaders were Desiderius Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, John Colet, Thomas Linacre, William Grocyn, and Sir Thomas More. When Henry VIII’s daughter Mary was seven, a curriculum of study was designed for her by Juan Luis Vives. A number of peers and gentlemen thereafter began to educate their daughters as well as their sons.
Girls were not permitted to attend grammar schools, and in 1543 an “Act for the Advancement of True Religion” forbade women (along with artificers, apprentices, journeymen, servingmen, husbandmen, and laborers) to read the Bible in English. Apparently they were beginning to interpret it for themselves. In many private homes, however, the resident tutor-chaplain continued to teach both girls and boys, and by 1581 it was becoming more common for girls to learn to read and write. Indeed, there was a higher degree of literacy among women at this period than at any other time until the latter nineteenth century.
In the seventeenth century, however, scholarship for women once more began to be discouraged. Girls who were taught at home learned from their mothers, with the occasional master brought in to instruct them in language, music, dance, and writing. A copy of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia was considered an appropriate gift for a young girl in 1637, but most of the acceptable books were religious in nature. The only secular volume a Puritan lady was likely to own was her herbal. At the same time, a few girls' schools began to open. Mrs. Salmon ran one at Hackney. In 1617 there was a “Ladies’ Hall” at Deptford, and Mrs. Friend’s school at Stepney charged scholars an annual fee of £21 in 1628.
HIGHER EDUCATION
The Universities
Statistics on sixteenth-century admissions to Oxford and Cambridge indicate that some scholars started there as young as eleven or twelve (there was even one nine-year-old admitt
ed to Cambridge), but most began their university studies between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. Twenty-two was old to begin and yet Cambridge did have one scholar start at thirty-eight and Oxford one at forty-eight.
Six-year scholarships were available, paying 1s. for each week of residence at a college (£2 13s. for a year, which provided for up to four weeks annual leave). Students paid for meals at the buttery.
In 1608, nineteen of the ninety justices in Kent had attended both a university (which awarded the degree Bachelor of Civil and Canon Law) and one of the Inns of Court. By 1636, over half had. In Lincolnshire in the same year, two-thirds of the county magistrates had attended either a university or one of the inns or both.
Women were excluded from Cambridge, Oxford, and the inns but several women founded colleges. Frances Sidney Radcliffe, countess of Sussex, left £5,000 in her will to found Sidney-Sussex College at Cambridge.
The Grand Tour
The idea of a grand tour to finish off a young gentleman’s education did not become fashionable until early Stuart times, but there had been individuals who traveled in Europe before that. Some had gone abroad to study at universities on the Continent. Others had been in exile during the reign of Mary I. About 800 Protestant men, women, and children, the “Marian Exiles,” settled in Emden, Wesel, Zurich, Strasbourg, Frankfort, Basle, Geneva, and Aurau from 1554 to 1558. Another group of exiles spent part or all of Mary’s reign traveling in France and Italy.
Foreign travel increased after England made peace with Spain in 1604. The Grand Tour of William Cecil, Lord Cranborne, lasted from 1608 to 1610, with a brief return to England to marry. He was accompanied by a tutor, a doctor, a brewer, and several footmen. The total cost of this two-year jaunt was over £8,500.
EDUCATION OF ROYALTY
John Skelton was Henry VIII’s first tutor until he was removed for writing satire and bawdy songs. Educated with Henry from the time he was seven were the “children of honor,” chosen for both their high birth and their handsomeness in appearance and manner. Henry’s two sisters were taught Latin, French, composition, music, dancing, and embroidery. In 1498 a Flemish girl, Jane Popincourt, was brought to court to teach the two princesses to speak French by conversing with them in that language.
Both of Henry VIII’s daughters were well educated. Elizabeth numbered Roger Ascham and John Aylmer among her tutors (Aylmer also tutored Lady Jane Grey). Ascham wrote The Scholemaster, published posthumously in 1570, which set out Elizabeth’s schedule of study for 1548 and included Greek every morning and Latin every afternoon. She continued to translate works from Greek into Latin and back again as an educational exercise throughout her life. Her brother, Edward VI, was tutored by John Cheke and John Belmain and had at least fourteen youths in his “school.”
A typical day for King James at the age of eight included prayers, Latin, composition, arithmetic, cosmography (geography and astronomy), and either dialectics or rhetoric. His son, the future Charles I, was sickly as a child but with the affectionate care of his governess, Lady Carey, he eventually learned to walk and talk. He studied Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, mathematics, music, and theology, and doubtless visited the model farm constructed at Combe to teach his sister Elizabeth about birds and beasts. In addition to chickens and cows, this farm was stocked with parrots and monkeys.
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
Education in religious beliefs and morality were inseparable from education in general in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Church and state were one, in the person of the monarch. Even before the break with Rome, the king was “Defender of the Faith” and in a position to enforce piety.
The Dissolution of the Monasteries
The Dissolution of the Monasteries was the closing of 655 monasteries, ninety colleges, and 2,374 chantries and free chapels by Henry VIII, beginning in 1536. The Chantries Act specifically closed those small monastic institutions which had been established to say prayers for their founders. Since many chantries included schools, these were closed down, too, as were the schools supported by churches and cathedrals.
The public was told that monasteries were dens of iniquity and illiteracy (some were, but not all) and that if the abbeys went to the king there would be no more need for taxes (a total fabrication). Eight cathedrals and six abbeys were exempted, but even they were looted. St. Cuthbert’s shrine in Durham was destroyed in 1537 and his body reburied in a plain tomb in 1542. In September 1538, the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury was demolished.
In 1500 there had been 10,000 monks and 2,000 nuns in 825 religious houses. For women, the religious life had offered opportunities for advancement unavailable elsewhere. Some houses also provided education. There were approximately 138 nunneries in England, about half of them Benedictine. Twenty-one were abbeys, where the community was governed by an abbess, and the remainder priories, governed by a prioress (a prioress was an abbess’s deputy). The richest were at Syon and Shaftesbury. In England the Franciscan nuns were called Minoresses and their house in London was also a prosperous one. Most nunneries, however, were small and poor, with fewer than thirty inmates. In these, little learning went on because there were few books. By the close of the thirteenth century, English nuns were no longer literate in Latin. Knowledge of French among them had all but disappeared by the fifteenth century.
The nunnery of Wallingwells, near Worksop in Nottinghamshire, attempted to escape dissolution by paying more than an entire year’s income for exemption under the 1536 act. In June 1537, the prioress reached a private agreement with a wealthy layman to lease the nunnery for twenty-one years in return for use of the convent buildings. In spite of this attempt at survival, the nunnery was dissolved in December 1539. Another group of nuns, from the Bridgettine house at Syon Abbey in Middlesex, quietly moved to Lyford Grange, near Wantage, Berkshire, and survived there as a community until 1581.
Religion and Education after the Reformation
Edward VI’s Book of Common Prayer in English came into use on Whitsunday 1549. It set forth the liturgy (order of worship) while the “Forty-two Articles” embodied the theological doctrine of the new church. Under a 1550 statute, all Catholic service books were to be destroyed and possession of one was punishable by a fine and imprisonment. In 1551, all altars were supposed to be replaced by communion tables. Although, under Queen Mary, England briefly returned to the Catholic fold, the “Elizabethan Settlement” of 1559 permanently established the Anglican Church as the church of England. A modified version of the 1552 Prayer Book and the “Thirty-nine Articles” followed.
Church services after the Reformation were not all that different from Catholic services, except that now the sermon was in English. Vestiges of Catholic ritual remained. The sign of the cross was still used during baptisms. The surplice was still worn. And women were still “churched” after childbirth. Sunday services began with prayers at 7 A.M. (5 A.M. in cathedrals and schools). Psalms were read, followed by lessons from both Old and New Testaments, a Litany, Communion if any were present to receive it, and the Decalogue, Epistle, and Gospel (with a reading of the Nicene Creed). Another psalm, a sermon or homily, and yet another psalm were followed by baptism at the font, if there were any who desired it. Children were usually baptized within the first month of life. Afternoon services began at 2 P.M. and included psalms, lessons, and a sermon. Those between the ages of six and twenty were also catechized for an hour. At fourteen the rite of confirmation was performed. All those over fourteen were required to receive Communion at Easter and twice more during the year and attend the parish church.
Local Clergy
Parish priests included curates (posts generally held temporarily by newly ordained priests), vicars, and rectors. The lower clergy included chantry priests and chaplains. Some chapels had lay readers. None of these were necessarily well educated. In 1551, John Hooper, bishop of Gloucester, reported that of the 311 clergymen in his bishopric, 168 could not repeat the Ten Commandments. The Elizabethan and
Jacobean clergy, however, slowly began to reverse this trend. In 1642, 90% of the clergy in Leicestershire had university degrees.
The Royal Injunctions of 1547 forbade religious processions to invoke divine aid, thus banning local Plough Monday processions and church ales. Instead of local saints’ days, the first Sunday of October was made a holiday (see Chapter Fifteen for more details on festivals). Rogation (a yearly confirmation of parish boundaries by walking them off) survived only as a municipal function. More injunctions, in 1559, specified that no bills or banners could be carried for Rogation and only the curate and the leading property owners of the parish could participate.
Up until 1600, many areas in the north of England did not have literate clergy or regular sermons. Because of their usefulness as preachers, James I did not take severe measures against Puritan ministers in Lancashire. Endowing lecturers to preach in remote areas was also a common practice, especially among those who made their fortune in London after leaving home. Lectureships were already popular in London, where 43% of 129 parishes had a lecturer in the 1580s. These preachers were supposed to be licensed by the bishops (who also licensed schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, surgeons, midwives, and chaplains in private homes).
Sectarianism outside the established church was relatively uncommon until archbishop of Canterbury William Laud alienated those working for reform from within the church by making “Arminian” innovations. Parliament also objected to the changes Archbishop Laud wanted. In 1642, all the bishops were expelled from the House of Lords.
The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in Renaissance England Page 19