Age of ShakespeareClass 2

School ClosedOpen

The second age of man

Then, the whining school-boy with his satchelAnd shining morning face, creeping like snailUnwillingly to school.

As You Like It

Elizabethan Education

What is your legacy from the vestarian controversy?

Archbishop of Canterbury, 1588=1604

Latin biretta with pompom

Responsibility of Children

• Respect even if the parents were of lower social class

• Admonish parents who stray from biblical concepts

• Support for parents in need

Literacy – Ability to sign one’s name

Men Women

1500 10% 1%

1558 20% 5%

1600 27% 8%

Additional Evidence – Surviving Letters from Women30% from aristocracy60% from gentry10% from middling (wives or widows of lawyers, clergymen, merchants and wealthier tradesmen)

Ability to sign - men

• Aristocrats, gentry, rich merchants ~100%

• Yeomen 65%

• Husbandmen 21%

• Laborers 15%

Needs of Society for Education

• End of clerical monopoly on access to administrative positions

• Increased need for vocational literacy

• Church control lay control

• Decline of idea that education should be class restricted

– Register at Rivington, Lancashire shows level from knight to husbandman

Philanthropy

• 31% for schools during Elizabethan period

– Continued and expanded, particularly for grammar schools in early Stuart period

• 7% for religion

• 4% for hospitals (1480-1660)

Philanthropy – Bristol (1480-1660)

• Poor relief 48%

– Doles, almshouses, plans to prevent or relieve poverty

• Education 21%

• Religion 13%

• Municipal improvement 12%

Jordan, Wilbur Kitchener. "The forming of the charitable institutions of the West of England: a study of the changing pattern of social aspirations in Bristol and Somerset, 1480-1660." Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (1960): 1-99.

Changing distribution of charity

Bittle, William G., and R. Lane. "Inflation and Philanthropy in England: A Re‐Assessment of WK Jordan's Data." The Economic History Review 29.2 (1976): 203-210.

Humanist Basis

• Colet – St. Paul School – Latin by imitation

– Latin training to produce gentlemen

• Magdalen School – Latin by grammar

• Vives

– Latin training to turn the beast into the man

• Education as a cure for social problems

– Thomas Cromwell – priests to arrange basic religious and vocational education for all children

Public Education

“all may learne to write and read [English] without daunger”

But all may not to learn Latin because so many “gaping for preferment, as no goulfe hath stoore enough to suffise” is dangerous to the state

Richard Mulcaster, headmaster, Merchant Taylors’ School,

1581

Changes

Medieval

• Church control

• Church finance (often from benefactors)

• Fees

Early modern

• Secular control

• Finance by benefactors

• Generally free

Petty School

• Start at 4 or 5 years old

• ABC’s; spelling, punctuation

• Lord’s prayer

• Virtues

• Numeration (as letters or figures): addition

• Casting of accounts

Casting of accounts

£4999, 18s, 10¾d,

The Hornbook

ABC, 1561 Next steps Primer, 1570

Admission to Grammar School

• Seven years old

• Know how to read the New Testament in English

• Know accidences (inflections)

• Every town should have a school where a man or woman teach children these elements

– Advocated by Brinsley in Ludus literarius: or, the grammar schoole 1612

Paying for school

• Shrewsbury had a sliding scaleten shillings for a lord’s son; four pence for the youngest son of a local burgess.

• AlmondburyAll such poor children born in the parish of Almondbury whose parents receive weekly or other constant alms of the parish or other charity or by reason of their poverty pay no taxes to the Church or King, shall be taught in the school the Latin and Greek tongues gratis, but such poor children shall be obliged to get moss for the roof of the school and clean the desks and school without neglect to their learning.

Who went to school

From Norwich Census of the Poor – 1570

• Oldest identified at 15

• Oldest son in family

• Where indicated, daughters of ~6

• About 1/3 of poor families with school age children had a child in school

Guildhall, Stratford

King Edward VI [Grammar] School (King’s New School) First teacher in 1553, William Smart

Edward VI School, courtyard

Uppingham, Archdeacon Johnson’s Grammar School, 1584

Curriculum

Train a child in the way he should go.

Proverbs 22.6 (Hebrew)

Suffer the little children to come unto me.

Matthew 19.14 (Greek)

Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth.

Ecclesiastes 12.1 (Latin)

Custodes or asini

• Designation for

– Talking in English

– Three mistakes in rules of grammar

– Three misspellings in written work

Question for Demosthenes

What was the Chiefe Part of an Oratour?

Demosthenes: Action

What next?

Action

What next again

Action

Francis Bacon “Of Boldness”

Student declaiming from memory, 1573

“The schoolhouse should be in deed . . . The house of play and pleasure, and not the house of fear and bondage.”

Ascham quoting Wotton in The scholemaster or plaine and perfite way of teachyng children, to vnderstand, write, and speake, the Latin tong, 1570

Student declaiming from memory, 1583

Failing the test!

A dialog on education (reported by Ascham)

Cecil: [I] Wishe, that some more discretion were in many Scholemasters, in using correction, than commonIie there is. Who many times punishe rather the weakeness of nature, than the fault of the SchoIer. Whereby, many Scholers, that might eIse prove well, be driven to hate Iearning, before they knowe what Iearning meaneth: and so, are made willing to forsake their booke, and be glad to be put to any other kinde of Iiving.

William Peter: . . . the Rodde onelie was the sworde that must keepe the SchooIe in obedience, and the SchoIer in good order.

Shakespeare’s School Scenes

• Merry Wives of Windsor, Act IV, Scene 1

• Love’s Labours Lost, Act V, Scene 1

Merchant Taylor’s SchoolList of students in first form, 1607

• Ages

• Admission dates

• Requirements for probations (thrice-yearly examinations)

• Only 2/40 make it to the 6th form

Following the entering class

Exercises

• 2nd form: recite the rules for the different noun declensions and six of Aesop’s fables

• 4th form: all the rules of Latin grammar, some of Cicero’s disquisition on fortitude from De Officiis, and the first seventy-six verses of Ovid’s De Tristibus. – Greek terminations for all the noun declensions and

verb conjugations.

– Afternoon: translate an English letter into Latin as a letter, a dialogue, and a poem

School Plays

Norwich – King Edward VI Grammar School

• Yearly performance of ‘ “learned dialogue” or comedy by the boys for and audience.

A playful time

Attitudes towards football

1576 Indict sixteen persons – husbandmen, yeomen, artificers, and the like – for that they did, "with unknown malefactors to the number of a hundred, assemble themselves and unlawfully play a certain unlawful game, called football, by reason of which unlawful game there arose among them a great affray likely to result in homicides and fatal accidents.”James I "From this Court I debarre all rough and violent exercises, as the football, meeter for lameing than making able the users thereof."

Education by Gender – The Willoughbys

Francis

• ABCs

• Latin grammar books

• Grammar school education

• Latin: Cato, Cicero, Vives' dialogues, Terence, Erasmus and Valla

• Some Greek

• Ciceronian rhetoric

• Humanist script

• Arithmetic

Margaret

• English: Bible, The Book of Common Prayer

• Using counters for arithmetic

The Value of Reading

Judicial record of the fate of two participants in a burglary in I6I3

• "The said Paul reads, to be branded;”

• “the said William does not read, to be hanged".

Writing

• Grammar schools emphasized reading and speaking

• Ascham [Scholemaster, 1570] required

– Paper book for written translations from Latin

– Paper book for translations of English back into Latin

– Paper book for recording usage by Lating authors

• Writing schools as stand-alone or adjuncts

Commercial Education

• Christ’s Hospital Writing School

– Connected with Christ’s Hospital Grammar School

– Founded 1577 by Dame Ramsay

– Teach poor children to write and cast accounts

• Later independents listed as “writing masters and accountants”

Learning to write, “secretary script”Jehan de Beau-Chesne, 1602 (original published 1570)

Learning to write

Learning to write, “Italic script”

Writing – To the instructor

[For the]… Scholler to learne, it may do you pleasure,

To rule him two lines iust of a measure:

Those two lines betweene to write very iust,

Not aboue or below write that he must:

The same to be done is best with blacke lead,

Which written betweene, is cleansed with bread.

Your pen from your booke, but seldome remoue,

To follow strange hand with drie pen first proue

School rules

2015 What happens if a student brings pen knife to school?

• At best, he/she gets sent home.

1580 What happens if a student doesn’t bring a pen knife to school?

• He gets sent home

Pangram, 1650“Job a Righteous man of uz waxed poor Quickly”Written by Stephen Poynting

Middle Class Women’s Education

• Religion

• Housewifery

– needlework, dressing meat and keeping accounts

• Music

• Reading

The School Day

Start 6 a.m.

Instruction, repetition, memorization

Break for breakfast

Instruction, repetition, memorization

Break for lunch Instruction, repetition, memorization

Break for supper

Instruction, repetition, memorization

Finish 7 p.m.

Estimate six hours of exercise/hour of instruction

Grammar school routine

• Given a selection from an ancient author to study

• Next day between 9 and 11

– Master calls on those selected “by fear or confidence in their looks

– Repeat the passage clearly without the book

– Commended of beaten

Commonplace book, An edited collection of striking passages noted in a single place for future reference.

Early 17th century

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Who went on to higher education

1575-1639

• 50% gentlemen and above

• 41% below gentleman

• 9% clergy of all levels

• Based on self-assessment at matriculation