A Brief History of the Tudor Age (26 page)

After the invention of printing, which had originated in Germany and the Netherlands in the 1450s and had been introduced into England by William Caxton in 1477, children were taught to read at
the ABC schools. The proportion of the labouring classes in England during the Tudor Age who could read and write was higher than is sometimes realized, especially after the Convocation of
Canterbury in 1529 ordered every parish priest to teach the children in his parish to read and write. This is clear, not only from the number of political and religious tracts which were
circulated, legally and illegally, by the contending religious factions, and by the efforts of the government to suppress them, but also by the legislation requiring the people to fill in written
forms on so many occasions. Written certificates as to the size and ingredients of the goods offered for sale had to be attached to casks of wine and honey, and to bales of cloth; watermen on the
Thames were required to carry a written document from ‘the Overseers and Rulers of all the Wherrymen and Watermen’, certifying their competence; and the Act of 1589, which tried to
restrict the very prevalent crime of horse-stealing, compelled the Tolltaker or chief officer of any fair where a horse was sold to enter in a book the Christian name, surname and place of
residence of the seller.

Girls, as well as boys, were taught to read and write. When Sir Thomas More was educating his daughters in the years after 1510, it was very unusual for girls to learn to read and write, like
royal princesses and More’s daughters; but ninety years later, Shakespeare did not think it necessary to give any explanation to his audiences as to why Rosalind and
Celia in
As You Like It
, Lady Macbeth, and the merry wives of Windsor could read the letters that they found and received, and why Olivia and Maria in
TweIfth Night
could write,
though Malvolio mentions that Maria’s letter was in a ‘Roman hand’. He meant that it was written in our modern handwriting, the ‘Italian hand’ which was beginning to
replace the Gothic handwriting which everyone in England had used before the middle of the sixteenth century.

Boys usually started studying at the grammar school at the age of seven, though Erasmus and some other educationalists thought that this was too late. According to the educational system which
the Christian Church had taken over from the theorists of ancient Rome, they were taught first the
trivium
– the three subjects, grammar, dialectic and rhetoric – and at a more
advanced stage the
quadrivium
– the four subjects of geometry, arithmetic, music and astronomy; but these classifications were widely interpreted. The boys were taught English
grammar, Latin, to write compositions in prose and verse, some elementary ancient history, geography, simple arithmetic – all done with Roman numerals – and the calculations by which
the Church calendar was ascertained; the elements of the philosophy of Aristotle, St Augustine, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas; the rules of the plainsong of Church music; the theory of the harmony of
numbers; the current theories of the medicinal value of the various plants and foods; and the movements of the celestial bodies, in an inseparable mixture of what we now call astronomy and
astrology. They were not taught any French, for although princes learned to speak perfect French so that they could talk and write to foreign sovereigns, it was very unusual for gentlemen, or even
noblemen, to understand French.

Many of the teachers in the schools, whether they were priests, monks, laymen or women, were of a low calibre. Erasmus, who had his own theories about education which he put forward in his book
De Pueris Instituendis
(On the Teaching of Boys) in
1529, thought that it was wrong that boys should be taught by women teachers, because women were too cruel, and
women teachers were often drunk. But he was not too enthusiastic about monks as teachers, because, although they were usually kind, their views were too narrow.

Erasmus was living in Basle when he wrote his book, but he had spent many years in England, as well as in his native land, the Netherlands, and he did not restrict his criticism of
schoolteachers to any particular country, though he says at one point that the teachers in France were the worst of all. Two years after he wrote the book, the English courtier and diplomat, Sir
Thomas Elyot, wrote
The Boke named the Governor
, in which he made much the same criticism of schoolmasters and their educational methods as those made by Erasmus. Both Elyot and Erasmus
believed that the reason for the low standard of education was that school teachers were underpaid, and that because of this they had a low status in society, and the profession attracted an
undesirable type of person.

Erasmus and Elyot were not the only modern-minded intellectuals who condemned the brutality of schoolmasters, and their excessive use of flogging as a punishment. The schoolmasters’
attitude was in line with the tradition of the Church, which taught that to suffer pain, particularly by flagellation, was good for a person’s soul, and helped him to enter Heaven:
‘thou shalt strike him with a rod, and shalt thereby deliver his soul from Hell.’ When distinguished men of letters like Sir Thomas More, as well as some priests and monks, whipped
themselves for their own good, it is not surprising that schoolmasters believed that it was good for boys to be repeatedly whipped. Erasmus described the case of a boy of ten, who had recently come
from the care of a loving mother to a school where the master was a priest. The priest falsely accused the boy of having committed some offence, whipped him till the boy fainted, and then said:
‘The lad, of course, has done nothing to deserve all this, but it is necessary to curb his spirit by wholesome discipline.’ Erasmus considered that this kind of schoolmaster had a very
bad effect on the boys. ‘The
school is in effect a torture chamber,’ he wrote, perhaps with a little exaggeration. ‘Blows and shouts, sobs and howls fill the
air. Then it is wondered that the growing boy hates learning, and that in riper years he hates it still.’ He added that no master would ever beat his horse or his slave as unmercifully as
schoolmasters beat the boys in their charge.

Elyot used less vivid language than Erasmus, but reached the same conclusion. ‘By a cruel and irous master the wits of children be dulled, and that thing for the which children be
oftentimes beaten is to them ever after fastidious, whereof we need no better author for witness than daily experience.’ Cranmer’s secretary, Morice, expressed the same point of view in
the account of Cranmer’s life that he wrote for John Foxe. He wrote that Cranmer told him that his father ‘did set him to school with a marvellous severe and cruel schoolmaster, whose
tyranny toward youth was such that as he thought the said schoolmaster so appalled, dulled and daunted the tender and fine wits of his scholars that they [more] commonly hated and abhorred good
literature than favoured or embraced the same.’ These comments show that cruel schoolmasters were a common phenomenon in the Tudor Age, and that the more advanced intellectuals were agreed in
condemning them.

Erasmus pointed out that royal children would never be ill-treated by their tutors as ordinary children were by their schoolmasters; but princes and princesses were subjected to reasonable
chastisement when they were naughty. This created a problem when Edward VI became King at the age of nine. Somerset and Cranmer, who always knelt to the boy when they spoke to him, were constantly
emphasizing that an infant King was as absolute a ruler as an adult King and extolling the sanctity of the person of King Edward, the English infant Josias; and they could not contemplate the
possibility of whipping the King when he misbehaved. So they invented the idea of having a whipping boy, and punishing another boy, whom the King liked very much, whenever the King did something
wrong. The King would thus
be deterred from being naughty, and would behave himself in order to spare his playmate from punishment.

Edward VI’s whipping boy was Barnaby Fitzpatrick, the son of an Irish chief who had been sent to the English court as a hostage for his father’s loyalty. He was rewarded for his
sufferings by Edward’s friendship, and by the knighthood which Edward conferred on him, though unfortunately for Sir Barnaby the King did not live long enough for him to reap the full benefit
of their childhood friendship in grants of land.

At the end of Elizabeth’s reign, a play by Samuel Rowley about Henry VIII,
When You See Me, You Know Me
, was acted on the London stage. Edward and his whipping boy appear in a
scene which was certainly intended to be farce, not tragedy, with Cranmer insisting on whipping Barnaby for the King’s offences, and Edward promising to give the whipping boy a knighthood. He
tells the whipping boy that none of the gentlemen knighted by Henry VIII had shed as much blood for their King as the whipping boy had for him. But Rowley got Barnaby’s name wrong, and was
almost certainly mistaken in thinking that Edward VI already had a whipping boy when he was Prince of Wales.

The suppression of the monasteries was a blow to education, for many of the grammar schools disappeared with the monasteries which had supported them. The nobles, gentlemen and speculators who
acquired the monastic lands were sometimes moved by their consciences and by the exhortations of the clergy to continue to maintain the grammar schools which the monks had run; but in many cases
the new owners merely used the land where the school had stood for their own profit. No one was more shocked at this than the Protestant divines who had called most loudly for the suppression of
the monasteries, for one of their objections to monasteries was that money was given to monks to pray uselessly for the souls of the dead, who had already been predestined for either Heaven or
Hell, when the money could have been put to a much better use in providing for education and other charitable work.

Even when the local gentry decided to continue to maintain a
grammar school, they often excluded poor children from the school. Morice described to Foxe how Cranmer managed
with difficulty to preserve the grammar school at Canterbury as a place of education for the sons of the poor after the great priory of Christchurch was suppressed in 1540. When the Archbishop and
a number of other commissioners met to decide the future of the school, Sir Anthony St Leger, Sir Richard Rich and another commissioner suggested that only gentlemen’s sons should be admitted
to the school; they thought that a son should follow his father’s vocation, and that only gentlemen’s sons should learn the knowledge of government; for there was as much need of
ploughmen as of any other class, and not every man could go to school. Cranmer admitted that there was much truth in this, and that if a gentleman’s son and a poor man’s son were of
equal ability, the gentleman’s son should be preferred; but he said that poor men’s children were often more studious than gentlemen’s sons, and to exclude them completely from
grammar schools would be to deny God’s right to bestow His gifts wherever He would, and as presumptuous as setting up a Tower of Babylon [sic]. He thought that if this were done, God would
punish gentlemen by making their children dolts.

A small proportion of grammar school boys went on to receive higher education in one of the two universities which had been established at Oxford and Cambridge in the thirteenth century, about
four hundred years after universities had first appeared in Italy. Women were not admitted to the university till more than 250 years after the end of the Tudor Age. The boys normally went there
after seven years at the grammar school at the age of fourteen, but exceptionally clever children sometimes started earlier, including Thomas Wolsey, the brilliant son of an Ipswich butcher, who in
1484 went to Magdalen College at Oxford at the age of eleven.

The discipline was not so excessive in the universities as in the grammar schools, but the fourteen-year-old undergraduates were sometimes whipped for misconduct, and were not exempt from the
punishment until they graduated, which they usually did
after four years’ study. The graduates continued to be under some degree of discipline at the university, for like
everyone else in Tudor society they were required to obey the orders of their superiors in the hierarchy maintained by State and Church. Fellows of the university colleges were not allowed to
marry, and had to resign their fellowships if they did; and university and college life was so closely associated with the Church, and so many university graduates were in holy orders, that it
continued, even after the Reformation, in Elizabeth’s reign, to be run in many ways along the lines of a monastery or a cathedral establishment.

The Chancellor of the University, with the Vice-Chancellor, the Proctors and their subordinate officers, had legal authority not only over the graduates and undergraduates of the university, but
over the citizens of the towns of Oxford and Cambridge, the inhabitants of the neighbouring villages, and travellers who passed through the town and area, including the English and foreign
merchants who came to the great Stourbridge Fair which was held just outside Cambridge every year during the three weeks beginning on 18 September. This sometimes led to conflicts between the
Chancellor of the University and the mayor and corporation of Oxford and Cambridge, and to the antagonism between town and gown on which so many writers have commented throughout the centuries. But
this was an uneven conflict, for the University held the upper hand, and nearly always won. The University had far more influence at court than the mayor and corporation, for most of the Privy
Councillors and other important courtiers were themselves university graduates.

The universities usually took the precaution of electing as their Chancellor one of the most powerful men at court; but in view of the fact that, under Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary, the most
powerful man at court was often denounced as a traitor a few years later, this meant that a succession of University Chancellors and High Stewards were arrested and executed for high treason. Sir
Thomas More was High Steward of Oxford University; and
at Cambridge, during the forty years between 1513 and 1553, the University had as its Chancellor Fisher, Cromwell,
Gardiner, Somerset and Northumberland. Gardiner was the only one of these to escape with nothing worse than five years in prison; all the rest lost their heads on the scaffold. Statesmen and
courtiers were more secure under Elizabeth I, and no harm befell Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the Chancellor of Oxford University, or William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the Chancellor of Cambridge
University.