Tudor background - schools

[Tom Reedy]

As I reported a few weeks or so ago, I've been reading G.J. Meyer's
*The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty*
(New York: Delacorte Press, 2010). The book is structured with
alternating chapters of narrative and background essays explaining
such topics as the Parliament, the Church, daily life, etc.

Below is an excerpt from Meyer's background chapter, "Schooling and
the schools", pp. 406-410.

SCHOOLING AND THE SCHOOLS

One of the few enduring myths about the short, sad, and largely
forgotten reign of Edward VI is that it brought a new birth of
education to Britain, an explosion in the number, availability, and
quality of schools. The myth finds support in the fact that a number
of England's oldest and most prestigious private schools proudly bear
Edward's name and claim to have been founded with money provided by
the Crown.

The truth, as usual with Tudor myths, is neither so simple nor nearly
so edifying. A great many of the so-called Edward VI schools were not
started or endowed but re-endowed during their namesake's time on the
throne. Many in fact were merely the survivors of the pillaging of
church and community property that made the Tudor era not a boon to
education but rather the interruption of a long, slow process of
educational expansion. That process had begun before Edward's father
was born (St. Paul's School, which would set the standard for grammar
schools across England, began in the same year Henry VIII became
king), and it would not recover its momentum until years after the boy-
king himself was dead.

Throughout the Tudor era education remained what it had long been in
England: a thing available, at least beyond a rudimentary level, to
only a tiny part of the population. It had begun, of course, as an
enterprise of the church; instruction had always been one of the
functions of the monasteries and the parish clergy. In 1179 the
Lateran Council in Rome had ordered every bishop to establish an
institution to train clergy for his diocesan chapter, and the
resulting "cathedral schools" had joined the monasteries as places
where young clerics could become literate and be prepared for
university. Outside the church there was, for centuries, almost no
such thing as an educational establishment and no need or demand for
one. The elite families were obliged to do little more, in
occupational terms, than manage their lands. To the extent that their
[407] male offspring aspired to anything beyond more wealth and more
power, it was usually to become warrior-knights of the kind idealized
in tales of medieval chivalry. The nobility sent their sons to each
other's castles to be trained in the martial arts, to learn to comport
themselves in a manner appropriate to their status, and to make the
kinds of connections that could pay dividends later in life. Hence the
desire to find places in the homes of the most important people
possible, and the supreme value, at the court of the young HenryVlll,
of being good at jousting and other aristocratic games. Though
education was gradually coming to seem relevant, the barely literate
could still flourish in high society.

For the great mass of people, at the end of the Tudor period no less
than at the beginning, education beyond some basic reading and perhaps
writing instruction from the local parish priest was simply not an
option. The only available careers, at the bottom of the social
pyramid, were agricultural labor and domestic service, and that was
literally as far as opportunities went. For families of greater but
still modest means, the best road to prosperity often led through
apprenticeships. Such a family could, upon payment of a bond, enter a
son (or even, in relatively rare cases, a daughter) into an indenture
contract that provided a years-long course of training in the
household of a skilled specialist in some craft or trade. Apprentices
were usually between ten and fourteen years old at the start of their
training, which lasted about seven years during which they received
food and lodging but little or no pay and were pledged to remain
unmarried and avoid drunkenness, gambling, and other forms of
misbehavior. ("Fornication within the house of his said Master hee
shall not commit," an apparently representative indenture reads,
"matrimony with any woman dureinge the said tearme hee shall not
contract.") Upon completing his apprenticeship and a further year or
so as a journeyman working for pay, the new carpenter, tailor,
cordmaker, tanner, butcher, barber, baker, or whatever would become
free to join a guild and set up shop as a master of his specialty. The
guilds regulated competition (limiting the number of shops in a
particular area and the amount of work that any member could
undertake, for example), monitored quality and maintained standards,
provided assistance to the sick or unemployed, and supported local
charities. Their aim was a stable, almost static marketplace in which
every competent participant was protected and no individual was
allowed to get too far ahead of the rest.

[408] Before becoming old enough to enter an apprenticeship, a child
might (or just as possibly might not) spend a few years in a petty
school or "dame school," basically a kind of day-care facility,
usually operated in the home of some literate member of the community,
where some degree of instruction in the basics of religion as well as
reading (but usually not writing) English was available. Girls
attended such schools, but this was as far as they could go with
education outside the home. Sons of the most prosperous and ambitious
families could proceed to grammar schools rather than into
apprenticeships, and that was where education turned serious. The
entry age for grammar school was seven, generally, and those who
completed the full course remained for about seven years. Their lives,
during those years, appear to have been positively hellish. Grammar
school pupils, like all children through the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, were regarded as miniature adults and therefore capable
of adult behavior, and all but the most exceptional schoolmasters
subjected them to iron-hard discipline. The school day started at six
in the morning-seven during the dark months of winter-and continued
until about five P.M. The heart of the curriculum was instruction in
Latin, supplemented with religion and arithmetic and sometimes a
smattering of Greek, and though the older pupils were supposedly
exposed to such classic authors as Ovid, Cicero, Virgil, and Horace,
most of their time was devoted (books being expensive and therefore
scarce except in the most generously funded establishments) to
memorization and recital by rote. Unsatisfactory performance was met
with lashings with birch canes or similar instruments. This was the
routine year-round, the only breaks occurring at Christmas and Easter
and lasting just two and a half weeks.

Latin was emphasized so heavily because it was the language of the
universities and therefore synonymous with academic achievement, and
because it was what the teachers knew. Because in most schools all age
groups were together in a single large room (most had only a single
master plus, sometimes, an assistant or "usher"), all the chanted
recitations must have created a constant racket. Even the exercises in
English would present special challenges for today's students. The
alphabet in use in England in the sixteenth century had only twenty-
four letters: u and v were the same letter (the first was used in the
middle of a word, the second at the beginning), as were i and j (j
being used as the capital form of [409] i). Though other letters were
used exactly as we use them today, in the handwritten form of four and
a half centuries ago they would be indecipherable to the modern
reader. A long-since-forgotten symbol that was almost but not exactly
the letter y represented the same sound as th (as in "ye olde
chandlery" or whatever). Roman numerals were much more commonly used
then than now, and the last in a series of Roman i's was written as a
j: thus "King Henry viij." Spelling was freely improvised and would
remain so until someone presumed to publish a guide to the subject in
1558.

From about the mid-fourteenth century on, families of means showed
increasing willingness not only to subject their sons to the grammar
school regimen but to make significant financial sacrifices in order
to do so. Their reasons were perfectly rational: in a developing
economy where subsistence farming was no longer an inescapable fate
for nearly everyone, opportunities were opening up in commerce,
government, and other fields but were available only to the educated.
And though the use of English for official purposes was no longer as
unusual as it once had been, being properly educated still meant being
at least somewhat proficient in Latin. Grammar schools were therefore
portals to advancement, increasingly in demand and increasingly
common, and some were even operated under secular auspices with lay
rather than clerical teachers. Seventeen such schools are known to
have been in operation in the county of Gloucestershire at the time of
the dissolution of the monasteries, and there is no reason to think
that an untypical number. London, where there had been only three in
1440, would have fifteen by 1660, each able to accommodate a hundred
pupils on average. This two-hundred-year emergence of a national
educational system was not accelerated but temporarily reversed by the
two decades that began with Henry VIII's attack on the monasteries and
ended with the death of his son. Where schools were allowed to
survive, they did so less often as a result of increased support from
the Crown than because patrons of particular institutions had enough
wealth or influence, either at court or in their own home districts,
to save them from destruction.

The universities began a profound process of change during those same
decades, in large measure because the most privileged families started
wanting their sons to become "gentlemen" according to the [410]
emerging fashion. Gentlemen were still expected to have basic military
skills-swords and daggers continued to be essential elements of their
attire and were not always left sheathed-but under the new code it was
no longer enough to be able to fight and hunt and hawk. No doubt in
part because of the example set by the Tudors in providing even their
daughters with superb educations, any young man hoping to make his
mark at court knew that he was going to need more than a passing
acquaintance with Latin if not other ancient languages and with
subjects ranging from rhetoric to theology, from philosophy to
astronomy. Boys from the best families continued almost without
exception to be educated by private tutors rather than at grammar
schools, but in increasing numbers they were entering Oxford or
Cambridge at the customary age of fourteen or fifteen. In the
fifteenth century Oxford's Magdalen College became the first to open
its doors to the sons of "noble and powerful personages" even if they
were not preparing for careers in the church-so long as their fathers
paid well for the privilege. By the middle of the sixteenth century a
few years at Oxford and Cambridge were a familiar rite of passage for
the well-born young. Problems arose, inevitably, as the quasi-monastic
serenity of the universities was invaded by rich young aristocrats
whose interest in the life of the mind was easily overwhelmed by the
opportunities for mischief that their new freedom put in their way.
Some of the fun-seekers went, no doubt wisely, to London's Inns of
Court instead, the inner sanctum of the English legal profession.
There they could find an education recognized as fully equal to that
available at the universities, along with the advantages of being
situated in the capital with all of its bawdy temptations.