i

FOREWORDS.

“The naturall maister Aristotell saith that euery body be the course
of nature is enclyned to here & se all that refressheth &
quickeneth the spretys of man1 / wherfor I haue thus
in this boke folowinge2” gathered together
divers treatises touching the Manners & Meals of Englishmen in
former days, & have added therto divers figures of men of old, at
meat & in bed,3 to the end that, to my
fellows here & to come, the home life of their forefathers may be
somewhat more plain, & their own minds somewhat rejoiced.

The treatises here collected consist of a main one—John
Russell’s Boke of Nurture, to which I have written a separate
preface4—extracts and short books
illustrating Russell, like the Booke of Demeanor and Boke of
Curtasy, and certain shorter poems addressed partly to those whom
Cotgrave calls “Enfans de famille, Yonkers of account, youthes
ii


of good houses, children of rich parents (yet aliue),” partly to carvers
and servants, partly to schoolboys, partly to people in general, or at
least those of them who were willing to take advice as to how they
should mend their manners and live a healthy life.

EDWARD THE FOURTH’S HENCHMEN

The persons to whom the last poems of the present collection are
addressed, the

the “Bele Babees” and “swete Children,” may be likened to the “young
gentylmen, Henxmen,—VI Enfauntes, or more, as it shall please the
Kinge,”—at Edward the Fourth’s Court; and the authors or
translators of the Bokes in this volume, somewhat to that sovereign’s
Maistyr of Henxmen, whose duty it was

“to shew the schooles5 of urbanitie and
nourture of Englond, to lerne them to ryde clenely and surely; to drawe
them also to justes; to lerne them were theyre barneys; to haue all
curtesy in wordes, dedes, and degrees; dilygently to kepe them in rules
of goynges and sittinges, after they be of honour. Moreover to teche
them sondry languages, and othyr lerninges vertuous, to harping, to
pype, sing, daunce, and with other honest and temperate behaviour and
patience; and to kepe dayly and wekely with these children dew
convenity, with corrections in theyre chambres, according to suche
gentylmen; and eche of them to be used to that thinge of vertue that he
shall be moste apt to lerne, with remembraunce dayly of Goddes servyce
accustumed. This maistyr sittith in the halle, next unto these Henxmen,
at the same boarde, to have his respecte unto theyre demeanynges, howe
manerly they ete and drinke, and to theyre communication and other
formes curiall, after the booke of urbanitie.” (Liber Niger in
Household Ordinances, p. 45.)

That these young Henxmen were gentlemen, is expressly stated,6
iii


and they had “everyche of them an honest servaunt to keepe theyre
chambre and harneys, and to aray hym in this courte whyles theyre
maisters he present in courte.” I suppose that when they grew up,
some became Esquires, and then their teaching would prove of use,
for

“These Esquiers of houshold of old [were] accustumed, wynter and sumer,
in aftyrnoones and in eveninges, to drawe to lordes chambres within
courte, there to kepe honest company aftyr theyre cunnynge, in talkyng
of cronycles of Kings and of other polycyes, or in pypeyng or harpyng,
synging, or other actes martialles, to help occupy the courte, and
accompany straungers, tyll the tyme require of departing.”

But that a higher station than an Esquier’s was in store for some of
these henchmen, may be known from the history of one of them. Thomas
Howard, eldest son of Sir John Howard, knight (who was afterwards Duke
of Norfolk, and killed at Bosworth Field), was among these henchmen or
pages, ‘enfauntes’ six or more, of Edward IV.’s. He was made Duke of
Norfolk for his splendid victory over the Scots at Flodden, and Anne
Boleyn and Catherine Howard were his granddaughters. Among the ‘othyr
lerninges vertuous’ taught
iv


him at Edward’s court was no doubt that of drawing, for we find that ‘He
was buried with much pomp at Thetford Abbey under a tomb designed by
himself and master Clarke, master of the works at King’s College,
Cambridge, & Wassel a freemason of Bury S. Edmund’s.’ Cooper’s
Ath. Cant., i. p. 29, col. 2.

RICH MEN’S EDUCATION IN EARLY ENGLAND.

The question of
the social rank of these Bele Babees6a, children, and Pueri who stood at
tables, opens up the whole subject of upper-class education in early
times in England. It is a subject that, so far as I can find, has never
yet been separately treated7, and I therefore throw
together such few notices as the kindness of friends8 and my own chance grubbings have collected;
these as a sort of stopgap till the appearance of Mr Anstey’s volume on
early Oxford Studies in the Chronicles and Memorials,
a volume which will, I trust, give us a complete account of
early education in our land. If it should not, I hope that Mr Quick
will carry his pedagogic researches past Henry VIII.’s time, or that one
of our own members will take the subject up. It is worthy of being
thoroughly worked out. For convenience’ sake, the notices I have
mentioned are arranged under six heads:

One consideration should be premised, that manly exercises, manners
and courtesy, music and singing, knowledge of the order of precedency of
ranks, and ability to carve, were in early times more important than
Latin and Philosophy. ‘Aylmar þe kyng’ gives these directions to
Athelbrus, his steward, as to Horn’s education:

v

King Horn, E. E. T. Soc., 1866, ed. Lumby, p. 7.9

So in Romances and Ballads of later date, we find

Tryamore, in Bp. Percy’s Folio MS. vol. ii. ed. 1867.

Lord of Learne, Bp. Percy’s Folio MS. vol. i. p. 182, ed.
1867.

Chaucer’s Squire, as we know, at twenty years of age

Which of these accomplishments would Cambridge or Oxford teach? Music
alone.10a That, as Harrison says, was one of
the Quadrivials,
vi


‘arithmetike, musike, geometrie, and astronomie.’ The Trivium was
grammar, rhetoric, and logic.

HOUSES OF NOBLES AND CHANCELLORS WERE SCHOOLS.

1.
The chief places of education for the sons of our nobility and gentry
were the houses of other nobles, and specially those of the Chancellors
of our Kings, men not only able to read and write, talk Latin and French
themselves, but in whose hands the Court patronage lay. As early as
Henry the Second’s time (A.D.
1154-62), if not before11, this system
prevailed. A friend notes that Fitz-Stephen says of Becket:

“The nobles of the realm of England and of neighbouring kingdoms used to
send their sons to serve the Chancellor, whom he trained with honourable
bringing-up and learning; and when they had received the knight’s belt,
sent them back with honour to their fathers and kindred: some he used to
keep. The king himself, his master, entrusted to him his son, the heir
of the realm, to be brought up; whom he had with him, with many sons of
nobles of the same age, and their proper retinue and masters and proper
servants in the honour due.” —Vita S. Thomæ,
pp. 189, 190, ed. Giles.

Roger de Hoveden, a Yorkshireman, who was a clerk or secretary to
Henry the Second, says of Richard the Lionheart’s unpopular chancellor,
Longchamps the Bishop of Ely:

“All the sons of the nobles acted as his servants, with downcast looks,
nor dared they to look upward towards the heavens unless it so happened
that they were addressing him; and if they attended to anything else
they were pricked with a goad, which their lord held in his hand, fully
mindful of his grandfather of pious memory, who, being of servile
condition in the district of Beauvais, had, for his occupation, to guide
the plough and whip up the oxen; and who at length, to gain his liberty,
fled to the Norman territory.” (Riley’s Hoveden, ii. 232, quoted
in The Cornhill Magazine, vol. xv. p. 165.)12

vii

All Chancellors were not brutes of this kind, but we must remember
that young people were subjected to rough treatment in early days. Even
so late as Henry VI.’s time, Agnes Paston sends to London on the 28th of
January, 1457, to pray the master of her son of 15, that if the boy
“hath not done well, nor will not amend,” his master Greenfield “will
truly belash him till he will amend.” And of the same lady’s treatment
of her marriageable daughter, Elizabeth, Clere writes on the 29th of
June, 1454,

“She (the daughter) was never in so great sorrow as she is now-a-days,
for she may not speak with no man, whosoever come, ne not may see nor
speak with my man, nor with servants of her mother’s, but that she
beareth her on hand otherwise than she meaneth; and she hath since
Easter the most part been beaten once in the week or twice, and
sometimes twice on a day, and her head broken in two or three places.”
(v. i. p. 50, col. 1, ed. 1840.)

The treatment of Lady Jane Grey by her parents was also very severe,
as she told Ascham, though she took it meekly, as her sweet nature
was:

“One of the greatest benefites that God ever gave me, is, that he sent
me so sharpe and severe Parentes, and so jentle a scholemaster. For when
I am in presence either of father or mother, whether I speake, kepe
silence, sit, stand, or go, eate, drinke, be merie or sad, be sewyng,
plaiyng, dauncing, or doing anie thing els, I must do it, as it
were, in soch weight, mesure, and number, even so perfitelie as God made
the world, or els I am so sharplie taunted, so cruellie threatened; yea
presentlie some tymes, with pinches, nippes, and bobbes, and other waies
which I will not name for the honor I beare them, so without measure
misordered, that I thinke my self in hell till tyme cum that I must go
to M. Elmer, who teacheth me so jentlie, so pleasantlie, with
soch faire allurementes to learning, that I thinke all the tyme nothing
whiles I am with him. And when I am called from him, I fall on
weeping.” —The Scholemaster, ed. Mayor.

The inordinate beating13 of boys by
schoolmasters—whom he
viii


calls in different places ‘sharp, fond, & lewd’14—Ascham denounces strongly in the first
book of his Scholemaster, and he contrasts their folly in beating
into their scholars the hatred of learning with the practice of the wise
riders who by gentle allurements breed them up in the love of riding.
Indeed, the origin of his book was Sir Wm. Cecil’s saying to him “I have
strange news brought me this morning, that divers scholars of Eton be
run away from the school for fear of beating.”

Sir Peter Carew, says Mr Froude, being rather a troublesome boy, was
chained in the Haccombe dog-kennel till he ran away from it.

But to return to the training of young men in nobles’ houses.
I take the following from Fiddes’s Appendix to his Life of
Wolsey:

John de Athon, upon the Constitutions of Othobon, tit. 23,
in respect to the Goods of such who dyed intestate, and upon the Word
Barones, has the following Passage concerning Grodsted
Bishop of Lincoln15 (who died 9th Oct., 1253),—

BP. GROSSETETE TAUGHT NOBLES’ SONS.

“Robert surnamed Grodsted of holy memory, late Bishop of Lincoln, when
King Henry asked him, as if in wonder, where he learnt the Nurture in
which he had instructed the sons of nobles (&) peers of the Realm,
whom he kept about him as pages (domisellos16),—since he was not descended from a
noble lineage, but from humble (parents)—is said to have answered
fearlessly, ‘In the house or guest-chambers
ix


of greater kings than the King of England’; because he had learnt from
understanding the scriptures the manner of life of David, Solomon, &
other Kings15.”

Reyner, in his Apostol. Bened. from Saunders
acquaints us, that the Sons of the Nobility were placed with
Whiting Abbot of Glastenbury for their Education, who was
contemporary with the Cardinal, and which Method of Education was
continued for some Time afterward.

There is in the Custody of the present Earl of Stafford,
a Nobleman of the greatest Humanity and Goodness, an Original of
Instructions, by the Earl of Arundell, written in the Year 1620,
for the Benefit of his younger Son, the Earl of Stafford’s
Grandfather, under this Title;

Instructions for you my Son William, how to behave your self at
Norwich.

In these Instructions is the following paragraph, “You shall in all
Things reverence honour and obey my Lord Bishop of Norwich, as
you would do any of your Parents, esteeminge whatsoever He shall tell or
Command you, as if your Grandmother of Arundell, your Mother, or
my self, should say it; and in all things esteem your self as my Lord’s
Page; a breeding which youths of my house far superior to you were
accustomed unto, as my Grandfather of Norfolk, and his Brother my
good Uncle of Northampton were both bred as Pages with Bishopps,
&c.”

Sir Thomas More, who was born in 1480, was brought up in the house of
Cardinal Morton. Roper says that he was

“received into the house of the right reverend, wise, and learned
prelate Cardinal Morton, where, though he was young of years, yet would
he at Christmas-tide suddenly sometimes step in among the players, and
never studying for the matter make a part of his own there presently
among them, which made the lookers on more sport than all the players
beside. In whose wit and towardness the Cardinal much delighting would
say of him unto the nobles that divers times dined with him, This
child here waiting at the table, Whosoever shall live to see it, will
prove a marvellous man. Whereupon for his better furtherance in
learning he placed him at Oxford, &c.” (Roper’s Life of More,
ed. Singer, 1822, p. 3.)

Cresacre More in his Life of More (ed. 1828, p. 17) states the
same thing more fully, and gives the remark of the Cardinal more
accurately, thus:— “that that boy there waiting on him,
whoever should live to see it, would prove a marvellous rare man.”17

YOUNG NOBLES IN WOLSEY’S HOUSEHOLD.

Through Wolsey’s household, says Professor Brewer, almost all the
x


Officials of Henry the Eighth’s time passed. Cavendish, in his Life of
Wolsey (vol. i. p. 38, ed. Singer, 1825) says of the Cardinal, “And
at meals, there was continually in his chamber a board kept for his
Chamberlains, and Gentlemen Ushers, having with them a mess of the
young Lords, and another for gentlemen.” Among these young Lords, we
learn at p. 57, was

“my Lord Percy, the son and heir of the Earl of Northumberland,
[who] then attended upon the Lord Cardinal, and was also his servitor;
and when it chanced the Lord Cardinal at any time to repair to the
court, the Lord Percy would then resort for his pastime unto the queen’s
chamber, and there would fall in dalliance among the queen’s maidens,
being at the last more conversant with Mistress Anne Boleyn than with
any other; so that there grew such a secret love between them that, at
length they were insured together, intending to marry18.”

Among the persons daily attendant upon Wolsey in his house,
down-lying and up-rising, Cavendish enumerates “of Lords nine or ten,
who had each of them allowed two servants; and the Earl of Derby had
allowed five men” (p. 36-7). On this Singer prints a note, which
looks like a guess, signed Growe, “Those Lords that were placed
in the great and privy chambers were Wards, and as such paid for
their board and education.” It will be seen below that he had a
particular officer called “Instructor of his Wards” (Cavendish,
p. 38, l. 2). Why I suppose the note to be a guess is, because
at p. 33 Cavendish has stated that Wolsey “had also a great number
daily attending upon him, both of noblemen and worthy gentlemen, of
great estimation and possessions,—with no small number of the
tallest yeomen that he could get in all his realm; in so much that well
was that nobleman and gentleman that might prefer any tall and comely
yeoman unto his service.”

In the household of the Earl of Northumberland in 1511 were “..yong
gentlemen at their fryndes fynding,19 in my lords house for
xi


the hoole yere” and “Haunsmen ande Yong Gentlemen at thir Fryndes
fynding v[j] (As to say, Hanshmen iij. And Yong Gentlemen iij”
p. 254,) no doubt for the purpose of learning manners, &c. And
that such youths would be found in the house of every noble of
importance I believe, for as Walter Mapes (? ab. 1160-90 A.D.) says of the great nobles, in his poem
De diversis ordinibus hominum, the example of manners goes out
from their houses, Exemplar morum domibus procedit eorum. That
these houses were in some instances only the finishing schools for our
well-born young men after previous teaching at home and at College is
possible (though the cases of Sir Thomas More and Ascham are exactly the
other way), but the Lord Percy last named had a schoolmaster in his
house, “The Maister of Graimer j”, p. 254; “Lyverays for the
Maister of Gramer20 in Housholde: Item
Half a Loof of Houshold Breide, a Pottell of Beere, and two White
Lyghts,” p. 97. “Every Scolemaister techyng Grammer in the Hous C
s.” (p. 47, 51). Edward IV.’s henxmen were taught grammar;
and if the Pastons are to be taken as a type of their class, our nobles
and gentry at the end of the 15th century must have been able to read
and write freely. Chaucer’s Squire could write, and though the custom of
sealing deeds and not signing them prevailed, more or less, till Henry
VIII.’s time, it is doubtful whether this implied inability of the
sealers to write. Mr Chappell says that in Henry VIII.’s time half our
nobility were then writing ballads. Still, the bad spelling and grammar
of most of the letters up to that period, and the general ignorance of
our upper classes were, says Professor Brewer, the reason why the whole
government of the country was in the hands of ecclesiastics. Even in
Henry the Eighth’s
xii


time, Sir Thomas Boleyn is said to have been the only noble at Court who
could speak French with any degree of fluency, and so was learned enough
to be sent on an embassy abroad. But this may be questioned. Yet Wolsey,
speaking to his Lord Chamberlain and Comptroller when they

KNOWLEDGE OF FRENCH.

“showed him that it seemed to them there should be some noblemen and
strangers [Henry VIII. and his courtiers masked] arrived at his bridge,
as ambassadors from some foreign prince. With that, quoth the Cardinal,
‘I shall desire you, because ye can speak French, to take the
pains to go down into the hall to encounter and to receive them,
according to their estates, and to conduct them into this chamber’
(Cavendish, p. 51). Then spake my Lord Chamberlain unto them
in French, declaring my Lord Cardinal’s mind (p. 53).”

The general21 opinion of our
gentry as to the study of Letters, before and about 1500 A.D., is probably well represented by the opinion of
one of them stated by Pace, in his Prefatory Letter to Colet, prefixed
to the former’s De Fructu22.

xiii

It remains that I now explain to you what moves me to compile and
publish a treatise with this title. When, two years ago, more or less,
I had returned to my native land from the city of Rome, I was
present at a certain feast, a stranger to many; where, when enough
had been drunk, one or other of the guests—no fool, as one might
infer from his words and countenance—began to talk of educating
his children well. And, first of all, he thought that he must search out
a good teacher for them, and that they should at any rate attend school.
There happened to be present one of those whom we call gentle-men
(generosos), and who always carry some horn hanging at their
backs, as though they would hunt during dinner. He, hearing letters
praised, roused with sudden anger, burst out furiously with these words.
“Why do you talk nonsense, friend?” he said; “A curse on those stupid
letters! all learned men are beggars: even Erasmus, the most learned of
all, is a beggar (as I hear), and in a certain letter of his calls τήν κατάρατον
πενίαν (that is, execrable poverty) his wife, and vehemently
complains that he cannot shake her off his shoulders right into βαθυκήτεα πόντον,
that is, into the deep sea. I swear by God’s body I’d rather that
my son should hang than study letters. For it becomes the sons of
gentlemen to blow the horn nicely (apte), to hunt skilfully, and
elegantly carry and train a hawk. But the study of letters should be
left to the sons of rustics.” At this point I could not restrain myself
from answering something to this most talkative man, in defence of good
letters. “You do not seem to me, good man,” I said, “to think
rightly. For if any foreigner were to come to the king, such as the
ambassadors (oratores) of princes are, and an answer had to be
given to him, your son, if he were educated as you wish, could only blow
his horn, and the learned sons of rustics would be called to answer, and
would be far preferred to your hunter or fowler son; and they, enjoying
their learned liberty, would say to your face, ‘We prefer to be learned,
and, thanks to our learning, no fools, than boast of our fool-like
nobility.’” Then he upon this, looking round, said, “Who is this person
that is talking like this? I don’t know the fellow.” And when some
one whispered in his ear who I was, he muttered something or other in a
low voice to himself; and finding a fool to listen to him, he then
caught hold of a cup of wine. And when he
xiv


could get nothing to answer, he began to drink, and change the
conversation to other things. And thus I was freed from the disputing of
this mad fellow,—which I was dreadfully afraid would have lasted a
long time,—not by Apollo, like Horace was from his babbler, but by
Bacchus.

APPRENTICESHIP IN HENRY VII.’S TIME.

On the general subject it should be noted that Fleta mentions nothing
about boarders or apprentices in his account of household economy; nor
does the Liber Contrarotulatoris Garderobæ Edw. I^mi
mention any young noblemen as part of the King’s household. That among
tradesmen in later times, putting out their children in other houses,
and apprenticeships, were the rule, we know from many statements and
allusions in our literature, and “The Italian Relation of England”
(temp. Hen. VII.) mentions that the Duke of Suffolk was boarded out to a
rich old widow, who persuaded him to marry her (p. 27). It also
says

The want of affection in the English is strongly manifested towards
their children; for after having kept them at home till they arrive at
the age of 7 or 9 years at the utmost, they put them out, both males and
females, to hard service in the houses of other people, binding them
generally for another 7 or 9 years. And these are called apprentices,
and during that time they perform all the most menial offices; and few
are born who are exempted from this fate, for every one, however rich he
may be, sends away his children into the houses of others, whilst he, in
return, receives those of strangers into his own. And on inquiring their
reason for this severity, they answered that they did it in order that
their children might learn better manners. But I, for my part, believe
that they do it because they like to enjoy all their comforts
themselves, and that they are better served by strangers than they would
be by their own children. Besides which, the English being great
epicures, and very avaricious by nature, indulge in the most delicate
fare themselves and give their household the coarsest bread, and beer,
and cold meat baked on Sunday for the week, which, however, they allow
them in great abundance. That if they had their own children at home,
they would be obliged to give them the same food they made use of for
themselves. That if the English sent their children away from home to
learn virtue and good manners, and took them back again when their
apprenticeship was over, they might, perhaps, be excused; but they never
return, for the girls are settled by their patrons, and the boys make
the best marriages they can, and, assisted by their patrons, not by
their fathers, they also open a house and strive diligently by this
means to make some fortune for themselves; whence it proceeds that,
having no hope of their paternal inheritance, that all become so
xv


greedy of gain that they feel no shame in asking, almost “for the love
of God,” for the smallest sums of money; and to this it may be
attributed, that there is no injury that can be committed against the
lower orders of the English, that may not be atoned for by money.
—A Relation of the Island of England (Camden Society,
1847), pp. 24-6.

“This evidently refers to tradesmen.23 The note by the Editor24 however says it was the case with the
children of the first nobility, and gives the terms for the Duke of
Buckingham’s children with Mrs Hexstall. The document only shows that
Mrs Hexstall boarded them by contract ‘during the time of absence of my
Lord and my Ladie.’”

The Earl of Essex says in a letter to Lord Burleigh, 1576, printed in
Murdin’s State Papers, p. 301-2.

“Neverthelesse, uppon the assured Confidence, that your love to me shall
dissend to my Childrenne, and that your Lordship will declare yourself a
Frend to me, both alive and dead, I have willed Mr
Waterhouse to shew unto you how you may with Honor and Equity do
good to my Sonne Hereford, and how to bind him with perpetual
Frendship to you and your House. And to the Ende I wold have his Love
towardes those which are dissended from you spring up and increase with
his Yeares, I have wished his Education to be in your Household,
though the same had not bene allotted to your Lordship as Master of the
Wardes; and that the whole Tyme, which he shold spend in England
in his Minority, might be devided in Attendance uppon my Lord
Chamberlayne and you, to the End, that as he might frame himself
to the Example of my Lord of Sussex in all the Actions of his
Life, tending either to the Warres, or to the Institution of a Nobleman,
so that he might also reverence your Lordship for your Wisdome and
Gravyty, and lay up your Counsells and Advises in the Treasory of his
Hart.”

GIRLS SENT OUT TO LADIES’ HOUSES.

That girls, as well as boys, were sent out to noblemen’s houses for
their education, is evident from Margaret Paston’s letter of the 3rd of
April, 1469, to Sir John Paston, “Also I would ye should purvey for your
sister [? Margery] to be with my Lady of Oxford, or with my Lady of
Bedford, or in some other worshipful place whereas ye think best, and I
will help to her finding, for we be either of us weary of other.” Alice
Crane’s Letter, in the Paston Letters, v. i.
xvi


p. 35, ed. 1840, also supports this view, as does Sir John
Heveningham’s to Margaret Paston, asking her to take his cousin Anneys
Loveday for some time as a boarder till a mistress could be found for
her. “If that it please you to have her with you to into the time that a
mistress may be purveyed for her, I pray you thereof, and I shall
content you for her board that ye shall be well pleased.” Similarly Anne
Boleyn and her sister were sent to Margaret of Savoy, aunt of Charles
V., who lived at Brussels, to learn courtesy, &c., says Prof.
Brewer. Sir Roger Twysden says that Anne was “Not above seven yeares of
age, Anno 1514,” when she went abroad. He adds:

“It should seeme by some that she served three in France successively;
Mary of England maryed to Lewis the twelfth, an. 1514, with whome she
went out of England, but Lewis dying the first of January following, and
that Queene (being) to returne home, sooner than either Sir Thomas
Bullen or some other of her frendes liked she should, she was preferred
to Clauda, daughter to Lewis XII. and wife to Francis I. then Queene (it
is likely upon the commendation of Mary the Dowager), who not long after
dying, an. 1524, not yet weary of France she went to live with
Marguerite, Dutchess of Alançon and Berry, a Lady much commended
for her favor towards good letters, but never enough for the Protestant
religion then in the infancy—from her, if I am not deceived, she
first learnt the grounds of the Protestant religion; so that England may
seem to owe some part of her happyness derived from that Lady.”
(Twysden’s Notes quoted by Singer in his ed. of Cavendish’s Life of
Wolsey, 1825, p. 57.)

As Henry VIII. fell in love with his wife’s maid of
honour,—“began to kindle the brand of amours” at the light of Anne
Boleyn’s beauty, “her excellent gesture and behaviour,”—so we find
in later times rich young men became enamoured of poor young women
staying in the same house with them. Mr Bruce sends me an instance:

PRIVATE TUITION IN EARLY ENGLAND.

2.
Home and Private Education. Of these, more or less must have been
going on all over England, by private tutors at home, or in the houses
of the latter. “In five years (after my baptism) I was handed over
by my father to Siward, a noble priest, to be trained in letters,
to whose mastery I was subdued during five years learning the first
rudiments. But in the eleventh year of my age I was given up by my own
father for the love of God, and destined to enter the service of the
eternal King.” —Orderic, vol. ii. p. 301, ed.
Prevost.

xviii

From Adam de Marisco’s Letters, 53, we find that Henry and Almeric,
the eldest and youngest sons of the Earl of Montfort, were put under
Grosseteste for tuition, he being then a Bishop. At Paris, John of
Salisbury (who died in 1180) gained a living by teaching the sons of
noblemen,—(instruendos susceperam, ? took them in to
board). —Metalogicus, lib. 11, c. 10.

Henry of Huntingdon says, “Richard, the king’s (Henry I.’s) bastard
son, was honourably brought up (festive nutritus) by our Bishop
Robert (Blote of Lincoln), and duly reverenced by me and others in the
same household I lived in.” —Anglia Sacra, vol. ii.
p. 696. Giraldus Cambrensis speaks of beating his coætanei et
conscolares terræ suæ, of being reproved for idleness by his uncle,
the Bishop of St David’s, and of being constantly chaffed by two of his
uncle’s chaplains, who used to decline durus and stultus
to him. Also he alludes to the rod. Probably there was some sort of
school at either Pembroke or St David’s24a.—De Rebus a se Gestis, lib. 1,
c. 2.25

The Statutes of a Gild of young Scholars formed to burn lights in
honour of some saint or other, and to help one another in sickness, old
age, and to burial, will be printed for us by Mr Toulmin Smith in the
Early English Text Society’s books this year.

Under this head of Private Tuition we may class the houses of Abbots,
where boys of good birth were educated. In his History of English
Poetry, section 36, vol. iii. p. 9, ed. 1840, Warton says:

“It appears to have been customary for the governors of the most
considerable convents, especially those that were honoured with the
mitre, to receive into their own private lodgings the sons of the
principal families of the neighbourhood for education. About the year
1450, Thomas Bromele, abbot of the mitred monastery of Hyde near
Winchester, entertained in his own abbatial house within that monastery
eight young gentlemen, or gentiles pueri, who were placed there
for the purpose of literary instruction, and constantly dined at the
abbot’s table. I will not scruple to give the original words, which
are more particular and expressive, of the obscure record which
preserves this curious anecdote of monastic life. ‘Pro octo
gentilibus pueris apud dominum abbatem studii causa perhendinantibus, et
ad mensam domini victitantibus, cum garcionibus suis ipsos comitantibus,
hoc anno, xviil. ixs. Capiendo pro26…’” This, by the way,
xix


was more extraordinary, as William of Wykeham’s celebrated seminary was
so near. And this seems to have been an established practice of the
abbot of Glastonbury, “whose apartment in the abbey was a kind of
well-disciplined court, where the sons of noblemen and young gentlemen
were wont to be sent for virtuous education, who returned thence home
excellently accomplished.27” Richard Whiting,
the last abbot of Glastonbury, who was cruelly executed by the king,
during the course of his government educated near three hundred
ingenuous youths, who constituted a part of his family; beside many
others whom he liberally supported at the universities.28 Whitgift, the most excellent and learned
archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, was educated
under Robert Whitgift his uncle, abbot of the Augustine monastery of
black canons at Wellhow in Lincolnshire, “who,” says Strype, “had
several other young gentlemen under his care for education.” (Strype’s
Whitgift, v. i. ch. i. p. 3.)

Of Lydgate—about 1420-30 A.D.
I suppose—Prof. Morley says in his English Writers, vol.
ii. Pt. I. p. 423:

“After studying at Oxford, Paris, and Padua, and after mastering with
special delight the writings of such poets as Dante, Boccaccio, and
Alain Chartier, Lydgate opened at his monastery of Bury St Edmund’s a
school of rhetoric in which he taught young nobles literature and the
art of versifying!”

Richard Pace says in his De Fructu, 1517:

“Now the learning of music too demands its place, especially from me
whom it distinguished when a boy amongst boys. For Thomas Langton,
bishop of Winchester (the predecessor of him who is now living), whose
secretary I was, when he had marked that I was making a proficiency in
music far beyond my age (as himself—perchance from his too great
affection for me—would point out and repeatedly say), ‘The talent
of this lad,’ he said, ‘is born for greater things,’ and a few days
afterwards he sent me, to pursue the study of literature, into Italy, to
the school at Padua, which then was at its greatest prime, and
benevolently supplied the annual expenses, as he showed wonderful favour
to all men of letters, and in his day played the part of a second
Mecænas, well remembering (as he ofttimes said) that he had been
advanced to the episcopal dignity on account of his learning. For he had
gained, with the highest commendation, the distinctions of each law29 (as they say now-a-days). Also he so highly
prized the study of Humanity30 that he had boys
and youths
xx


instructed in it at a school in his house; And he was vastly delighted
to hear the scholars repeat to him at night the lessons given them by
the teacher during the day. In this competition he who had borne himself
notably went away with a present of something suitable to his character,
and with commendation expressed in the most refined language; for that
excellent governor had ever in his mouth the maxim that merit grows with
praise.”31

EDUCATION AT HOME AND AT TUTORS’.

Palsgrave in 1530 speaks of “maister Petrus Vallensys, scole maister
to his [Charles, Duke of Suffolk’s] excellent yong sonne the Erle of
Lyncolne.”

Roger Ascham, author of the Scholemaster, &c., born in
1515,

“was received at a very youthful age into the family of Sir Antony
Wingfield, who furnished money for his education, and placed Roger,
together with his own sons, under a tutor whose name was Bond. The boy
had by nature a taste for books, and showed his good taste by reading
English in preference to Latin, with wonderful eagerness. This was the
more remarkable from the fact that Latin was still the language of
literature, and it is not likely that the few English books written at
that time were at all largely spread abroad in places far away from the
Universities and Cathedral towns. In or about the year 1530, Mr Bond the
domestic tutor resigned the charge of young Roger, who was now about
fifteen years old, and by the advice and pecuniary aid of his kind
patron Sir Antony, he was enabled to enter St John’s College, Cambridge,
at that time the most famous seminary of learning in all England … he
took his bachelor’s degree in 1531, Feb. 18, in the 18th year of his age
[“being a boy, new bachelor of art,” he says himself,] a time of
life at which it is now more common to enter the University than to take
a degree, but which, according to the modes of education
xxi


then in use, was not thought premature. On the 23rd of March following,
he was elected fellow of the College.” Giles’s Life of Ascham, Works,
vol. i. p. xi-xiv.

Dr Clement and his wife were brought up in Sir T. More’s house.
Clement was taken from St Paul’s school, London, appointed tutor to
More’s children, and afterwards to his daughter Margaret, p. 402,
col. 1.

What a young nobleman learnt in Henry the Eighth’s time may be
gathered from the following extracts (partly given by Mr Froude, Hist.,
v. i. p. 39-40) from the letters of young Gregory Cromwell’s tutor,
to his father, the Earl of Essex, the King’s Chief Secretary.

“The order of his studie, as the houres lymyted for the Frenche tongue,
writinge, plaienge att weapons, castinge of accomptes, pastimes of
instruments, and suche others, hath bene devised and directed by the
prudent wisdome of Mr Southwell; who with a ffatherly zeale and amitie
muche desiringe to have hime a sonne worthy suche parents, ceasseth not
aswell concerninge all other things for hime mete and necessary, as also
in lerninge, t’expresse his tendre love and affection towardes hime,
serchinge by all meanes possible howe he may moste proffitte, dailie
heringe hime to rede sumwhatt in thenglishe tongue, and advertisenge
hime of the naturell and true kynde of pronuntiacõn therof, expoundinge
also and declaringe the etimologie and native signification of suche
wordes as we have borowed of the Latines or Frenche menue, not evyn so
comonly used in our quotidiene speche. Mr Cheney and Mr Charles in lyke
wise endevoireth and emploieth themselves, accompanienge Mr Gregory in
lerninge, amonge whome ther is a perpetuall contention, strife, and
conflicte, and in maner of an honest envie who shall do beste, not
oonlie in the ffrenche tongue (wherin Mr Vallence after a wonderesly
compendious, facile, prompte, and redy waye, nott withoute painfull
delegence and laborious industrie doth enstructe them) but also in
writynge, playenge at weapons, and all other theire exercises, so that
if continuance in this bihalf may take place, whereas the laste Diana,
this shall (I truste) be consecrated to Apollo and the Muses, to
theire no small profecte and your good contentation and pleasure. And
thus I beseche the Lord to have you in his moste gratious tuition.

STUDIES OF YOUTHS, TEMP. HEN. VIII. AND ELIZABETH.

The next Letter gives further details of Gregory’s studies—

xxii

“But forcause somer was spente in the servyce of the wylde goddes, it is
so moche to be regarded after what fashion yeouth is educate and browght
upp, in whiche tyme that that is lerned (for the moste parte) will nott
all holelie be forgotten in the older yeres, I thinke it my dutie
to asserteyne yo^r Maistershippe how he spendith his tyme….
And firste, after he hath herde Masse he taketh a lecture of a Diologe
of Erasmus Colloquium, called Pietas Puerilis, whereinne is described a
veray picture of oone that sholde be vertuouselie brought upp; and
forcause it is so necessary for hime, I do not onelie cause him to
rede it over, but also to practise the preceptes of the same, and I have
also translated it into Englishe, so that he may conferre theime both
to-githers, whereof (as lerned men affirme) cometh no smalle profecte32 … after that, he exerciseth his hande in
writing one or two houres, and redith uppon Fabian’s Chronicle as longe;
the residue of the day he doth spende uppon the lute and virginalls.
When he rideth (as he doth very ofte) I tell hime by the way some
historie of the Romanes or the Greekes, whiche I cause him to reherse
agayn in a tale. For his recreation he useth to hawke and hunte, and
shote in his long bowe, which frameth and succedeth so well with hime
that he semeth to be therunto given by nature.”

Ellis, i. 343-4.

Of the course of study of ‘well-bred youths’ in the early years of
Elizabeth’s reign we have an interesting account by Sir Nicholas Bacon,
Lord Keeper, father of the great Bacon, in a Paper by Mr J. Payne
Collier in the Archæologia, vol. 36, Part 2, p. 339, Article
xxxi.33 “Before he became Lord Keeper, Sir
Nicholas Bacon had been Attorney of that Court” [the Court of Wards and
Liveries] “a most lucrative appointment; and on the 27th May, 1561, he
addressed a letter to Sir William Cecil, then recently (Jan., 1561) made
Master of the Wards, followed by a paper thus entitled:—’Articles
devised for the bringing up in vertue and learning of the Queenes
Majesties Wardes, being heires males, and whose landes, descending in
possession and coming to the Queenes Majestie, shall amount to the
cleere yearly value of c. markes, or above.’” Sir Nicholas asks the new
Master of Wards to reform what he justly calls most “preposterous”
abuses in the department:—“That the proceeding hath bin
preposterous, appeareth by this: the chiefe thinge, and most of price,
in wardeship, is the wardes mynde; the next to that, his bodie; the
xxiii


last and meanest, his land. Nowe, hitherto the chiefe care of
governaunce hath bin to the land, being the meaneste; and to the bodie,
being the better, very small; but to the mynde, being the best, none at
all, which methinkes is playnely to sett the carte before the horse”
(p. 343). Mr Collier then summarises Bacon’s Articles for the
bringing up of the Wards thus: “The wards are to attend divine service
at six in the morning: nothing is said about breakfast,34 but they are to study Latin until eleven; to
dine between 11 and 12; to study with the music-master from 12 till 2;
from 2 to 3 they are to be with the French master; and from 3 to 5 with
the Latin and Greek masters. At 5 they are to go to evening prayers;
then they are to sup; to be allowed honest pastimes till 8; and, last of
all, before they go to bed at 9, they are again to apply themselves to
music under the instruction of the master. At and after the age of 16
they were to attend lectures upon temporal and civil law, as well as
de disciplinâ militari. It is not necessary to insert farther
details; but what I have stated will serve to show how well-bred youths
of that period were usually brought up, and how disgracefully the duty
of education as regards wards was neglected…. It may appear singular
that in these articles drawn up by Sir Nicholas, so much stress is laid
upon instruction in music35; but it only serves
to confirm the notion that the science was then most industriously
cultivated by nearly every class of society.” Pace in 1517 requires that
every one should study it, but should join with it some other study, as
Astrology or Astronomy. He says also that the greatest part of the art
had perished by men’s negligence; “For all that our musicians do
now-a-days, is almost trivial if compared with what the old ones
(antiqui) did, so that now hardly one or two (unus aut
alter) can be found who know what harmony is, though the word is
always on their tongue.” (De Fructu, p. 54-5.) Ascham, while
lamenting in 1545 (Toxophilus, p. 29) ‘that the laudable
custom of
xxiv


England to teach children their plain song and prick-song’ is ‘so
decayed throughout all the realm as it is,’ denounces the great practise
of instrumental music by older students: “the minstrelsy of lutes,
pipes, harps, and all other that standeth by such nice, fine, minikin
fingering, (such as the most part of scholars whom I know use, if they
use any,) is far more fit, for the womanishness of it, to dwell in the
Court among ladies, than for any great thing in it which should help
good and sad study, to abide in the University among scholars.”

NEGLECT OF EDUCATION BY MOTHERS.

By 1577 our rich people, according to Harrison, attended
properly to the education of their children. After speaking “of our
women, whose beautie commonlie exceedeth the fairest of those of the
maine,” he says:

“This neuerthelesse I vtterlie mislike in the poorer sort of them, for
the wealthier doo sildome offend herein: that being of themselues
without competent wit, they are so carelesse in the education of their
children (wherein their husbands also are to be blamed,) by means
whereof verie manie of them neither fearing God, neither regarding
either manners or obedience, do oftentimes come to confusion, which (if
anie correction or discipline had beene vsed toward them in youth) might
haue prooued good members of their common-wealth & countrie, by
their good seruice and industrie.” —Descr. of Britaine,
Holinshed, i. 115, col. 2.

This is borne out by Ascham, who says that young men up to 17 were
well looked after, but after that age were turned loose to get into all
the mischief they liked:

“In deede, from seven to seventene, yong jentlemen commonlie be
carefullie enough brought up: But from seventene to seven and twentie
(the most dangerous tyme of all a mans life, and most slipperie to stay
well in) they have commonlie the rein of all licens in their owne hand,
and speciallie soch as do live in the Court. And that which is most to
be merveled at, commonlie the wisest and also best men be found the
fondest fathers in this behalfe. And if som good father wold seek some
remedie herein, yet the mother (if the household of our Lady) had
rather, yea, and will to, have her sonne cunnyng and bold, in making him
to lyve trimlie when he is yong, than by learning and travell to be able
to serve his Prince & his countrie, both wiselie in peace, and
stoutlie in warre, whan he is old.

“The fault is in your selves, ye noble mens sonnes, and therfore ye
deserve the greater blame, that commonlie the meaner mens children cum
to be the wisest councellours, and greatest doers, in the weightie
affaires of this realme.” —Scholemaster, ed. Mayor,
p. 39-40.

Note lastly, on this subject of private tuition, that Mulcaster in
xxv


his Elementarie, 1582, complains greatly of rich people aping the
custom of princes in having private tutors for their boys, and
withdrawing them from public schools where the spirit of emulation
against other boys would make them work. The course he recommends is,
that rich people should send their sons, with their tutors, to the
public schools, and so get the advantage of both kinds of tuition.

Girls’ Home
Education. The earliest notice of an English Governess that any
friend has found for me is in “the 34th Letter of Osbert de Clare in
Stephen’s reign, A.D. 1135-54. He
mentions what seems to be a Governess of his children, ‘quædam
matrona quæ liberos ejus (sc. militis, Herberti de Furcis)
educare consueverat.’ She appears to be treated as one of the
family: e.g. they wait for her when she goes into a chapel to pray.
I think a nurse would have been ‘ancilla quæ liberos ejus
nutriendos susceperat.’” Walter de Biblesworth was the tutor of the
“lady Dionysia de Monchensi, a Kentish heiress, the daughter of
William de Monchensi, baron of Swanescombe, and related, apparently35a, to the Valences, earls of Pembroke, and
wrote his French Grammar, or rather Vocabulary36, for her. She married Hugh de Vere, the
second son of Robert, fifth earl of Oxford. (Wright.) Lady Jane Grey was
taught by a tutor at home, as we have seen. Palsgrave was tutor to Henry
VIII.’s “most dere and most entirely beloved suster, quene Mary,
douagier of France,” and no doubt wrote his Lesclaircissement de la
Langue Francoise mainly for her, though also “desirous to do some
humble service unto the nobilitie of this victorious realme, and
universally unto all other estates of this my natyfe country.” Giles Du
Guez, or as Palsgrave says to Henry VIII., “the synguler clerke, maister
Gyles Dewes, somtyme instructor to your noble grace in this selfe tong,
at the especiall instaunce and request of dyvers of your highe estates
and noble men, hath also for his partye written in this matter.” His
book is entitled “An Introductorie for to lerne to rede, to pronounce
& to speke French trewly: compyled for the Right high, excellent,
and most vertuous lady The Lady Mary of
xxvi


Englande, doughter to our most gracious soverayn Lorde Kyng Henry the
Eight.”

UNIVERSITY EDUCATION IN EARLY ENGLAND.

3.
English University Education. In early days Cambridge and Oxford
must be looked on, I suppose, as mainly the great schools for boys,
and the generality of scholars as poor men’s children,37 like Chaucer’s ‘poore scolares tuo that
dwelten in the soler-halle of Cantebregge,’ his Clerk of Oxenford, and
those students, gifts to whom are considered as one of the regular
burdens on the husbandman, in “God speed the Plough.” Mr Froude says,
Hist. of England, I. 37:

“The universities were well filled, by the sons of yeomen chiefly. The
cost of supporting them at the colleges was little, and wealthy men took
a pride in helping forward any boys of promise38, 38a
(Latimer’s Sermons, p. 64). It seems clear also, as the
Reformation drew nearer, while the clergy were sinking lower and lower,
a marked change for the better became perceptible in a portion at
least of the laity.”

But Grosseteste mentions a “noble” scholar at Oxford (Epist.
129), and Edward the Black Prince and Henry V. are said to have been
students of Queen’s College, Oxford. Wolsey himself was a College tutor
at Oxford, and had among his pupils the sons of the Marquess of Dorset,
who afterwards gave him his first preferment, the living of Lymington.
(Chappell.)

xxvii

The legend runs that the first school at Oxford was founded by King
Alfred39, and that Oxford was a place of study
in the time of Edward the Confessor (1041-66). If one may quote a book
now considered to be ‘a monkish forgery and an exploded authority,’
Ingulfus, who was Abbot of Croyland, in the Isle of Ely, under William
the Conqueror, says of himself that he was educated first at
Westminster, and then passed to Oxford, where he made proficiency in
such books of Aristotle as were then accessible to students,40 and in the first two books of Tully’s
Rhetoric.—Malden, On the Origin of Universities, 1835,
p. 71.

In 1201 Oxford is called a University, and said to have
contained 3000 scholars; in 1253 its first College (University) is
founded. In 1244, Hen. III. grants it its first privileges as a
corporate body, and confirms and extends them in 1245. In his reign,
Wood says the number of scholars amounted to 30,000, a number no
doubt greatly exaggerated.

In the reign of Stephen, we know that Vacarius, a Lombard by birth,
who had studied the civil law at Bologna, came into England, and formed
a school of law at Oxford41 … he remained in
England in the reign of Henry II. On account of the difficulty and
expense of obtaining copies of the original books of the Roman law, and
the poverty of his English scholars, Vacarius [ab. 1149, A.D.] compiled an abridgment of the Digests
and Codex, in which their most essential parts were preserved, with some
difference of arrangement, and illustrated from other law-books…. It
bore on its title that it was “pauperibus presertim destinatus;”
and hence the Oxford students of law obtained the name of
Pauperists.—Malden, p. 72-3.

POVERTY OF UNIVERSITY SCHOLARS.

Roger Bacon (who died 124841a) speaks of a
young fellow who came
xxviii


to him, aged 15, not having wherewithal to live, or finding proper
masters: “because he was obliged to serve those who gave him
necessaries, during two years found no one to teach him a word in the
things he learned.” —Opus Tertium, cap. xx. In 1214 the
Commonalty of Oxford agreed to pay 52s. yearly for the use of poor
scholars, and to give 100 of them a meal of bread, ale, and pottage,
with one large dish of flesh or fish, every St Nicholas
day.—Wood’s An. i. 185. Wood’s Annals (ed. Gutch, v.
i. p. 619-20) also notes that in 1461 A.D. divers Scholars were forced to get a license
under the Chancellor’s hand and seal (according to the Stat. 12 Ric.
II., A.D. 1388, Ib.,
p. 519) to beg: and Sir Thos. More says “then may wee yet, like
poor Scholars of Oxford, go a begging with our baggs & wallets,
& sing salve Regina at rich mens dores.” On this point we may also
compare the Statutes of Walter de Merton for his College at Oxford,
A.D. 1274, ed. Halliwell, 1843,
p. 19:

Cap. 13. De admissione scholarium.

Hoc etiam in eadem domo specialiter observari volo et decerno, ut circa
eos, qui ad hujusmodi eleemosinæ participationem admittendi fuerint,
diligenti solicitudine caveatur, ne qui præter castos, honestos,
pacificos, humiles, indigentes, ad studium habiles ac proficere
volentes, admittantur. Ad quorum agnitionem singulis, cum in dicta
societate fuerint admittendi sustentationis gratia in eadem, ad annum
unum utpote probationis causa primitus concedatur, ut sic demum si in
dictis conditionibus laudabiliter se habuerint, in dictam congregationem
admittantur.

See also cap. 31, against horses of scholars being kept.

Lodgings were let according to the joint valuation of 2 Magistri
(scholars) and two townsmen (probi et legales homines de Villa).
Wood, i. 255. An. 15 Hen. III. A.D. 1230-1.

In the beginning of the 15th century it had become the established
rule that every scholar must be a member of some college or hall. The
scholars who attended the public lectures of the university, without
entering themselves at any college or hall, were called chamber
dekyns, as in Paris they were called martinets; and frequent
enactments were made against them.—Malden, p. 85, ref.
to Woods Annals, 1408, -13, -22, and 1512, &c.

The following are the dates of the foundations of the different
Colleges at Oxford as given in the
University Calendar:—

xxix

UNDERGRADUATE’S EXPENSES AT OXFORD, 1478.

‘The Paston Letters’ do not give us much information about studies or
life at Oxford, but they do give us material for estimating the cost of
a student there (ii. 12443); they show us the
tutor reporting to a mother her son’s progress in learning (ii. 130),
and note the custom of a man, when made bachelor, giving a feast: “I was
made bachelor … on Friday was se’nnight (18 June, 1479), and I made my
feast on the Monday after (21 June). I was promised venison against
my feast, of my Lady Harcourt, and of another person too, but I was
deceived of both; but my guests held them pleased with such meat as they
had, blessed be God.” The letter as to the costs is dated May 19,
1478.

On this account Fenn says,

“he (Wm. Paston) had expended £6 5s. 5¾d. from the time he
left his mother to Easter last, which this year fell on the 22nd March,
from which time it was now two months, & of the expenses ‘since
incurred’ he says ‘they be not great.’ We may therefore conclude the
former account was from the Michaelmas preceding, and a moderate one; if
so, we may fairly estimate his university education at £100 a-year of
our present money. I mean that £12 10s. 11½d. would
then procure as many necessaries and comforts as £100 will at this
day.”

What was the basis of Fenn’s calculation he does not say. In 1468,
the estimates for the Duke of Clarence’s household expenses give these
prices, among others:

* Poor ones.

This sum would make the things named nearly 14 times as dear now as
in 1468, and raise Fenn’s £100 to about £180; but no reliance can be
placed on this estimate because we know nothing of the condition of the
beves, muttons, veles, and porkys, then, as contrasted
xxxi


with ours. Possibly they were half the size and half the weight. Still,
I have referred the question to Professor Thorold Rogers, author of
the History of Prices 1250-1400 A.D., and he says:

“In the year to which you refer (1478) bread was very dear, 50 per cent.
above the average. But on the whole, wheat prices in the 15th century
were lower than in the 14th. Fenn’s calculation, a little below the
mark for wheat, is still less below it in most of the second necessaries
of life. The multiple of wheat is about 9, that of meat at least 24,
those of butter and cheese nearly as much. But that of clothing is not
more than 6, that of linen from 4 to 5. Taking however one thing
with another, 12 is a safe general multiplier.”

This would make the cost of young Paston’s university education £150
11s. 6d. a year.

Mr Whiston would raise Fenn’s estimate of £100 to £200. He says that
the rent of land in Kent in 1540 was a shilling or eighteenpence an
acre,—see Valor Ecclesiasticus,—and that the tithes
and glebes of the Dean and Chapter of Rochester, which were worth about
£480 a-year in 1542, are now worth £19,000.

The remaining Oxford letter in the Paston volumes seems to allude to
the students bearing part of the expenses of the degree, or the feast at
it, of a person related to royal family.

“I supposed, when that I sent my letter to my brother John, that the
Queen’s brother should have proceeded at Midsummer, and therefore I
beseeched her to send me some money, for it will be some cost to
me, but not much.”

The first school at Cambridge is said to have been founded by Edward the
Elder, the son of Alfred, but on no good authority. In 1223 the term
University was applied to the place. The dates of the foundations
of its Colleges, as given in its Calendar, are:

FEW NOBLEMEN AT CAMBRIDGE.

Lord Henry Brandon, son of the Duke of Suffolk, died of the
xxxii


sweating sickness then prevalent in the University, on the 16th July,
1551, while a student of Cambridge. His brother, Lord Charles Brandon,
died on the same day. Their removal to Buckden was too late to save them
(Ath. Cant., i. 105, 541). Of them Ascham says, ‘two noble
Primeroses of Nobilitie, the yong Duke of Suffolke and Lord H.
Matrevers were soch two examples to the Courte for learnyng, as our
tyme may rather wishe, than look for agayne.’—Scholemaster,
ed. Mayor, p. 62. Besides these two young noblemen, the first 104
pages of Cooper’s Athenæ Cantabrigienses disclose only one other,
Lord Derby’s son, and the following names of sons of knights:44

CAMBRIDGE MEN.

Queen Elizabeth’s favourite, Lord Essex, was at Trinity College,
Cambridge. See his letter of May 13, from there, in Ellis, series II. v.
iii. p. 73; the furniture of his room, and his expenses, in the
note p. 73-4; and his Tutor’s letter asking for new clothes for ‘my
Lord,’ or else ‘he shall not onely be thrid bare, but ragged.’

Archbp. Whitgift45, when B.D. at
Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, A.D. 1563,
“bestowed some of his time and abilities in the instruction of ingenious
youth, sent to the college for education, in good learning and Christian
manners. And among such his pupils, were two noblemen’s sons, viz. the
Lord Herbert, son and heir to the Earl of Pembroke; and John, son and
heir to the Lord North.” (Life, by Strype, ed. 1822, vol. i.
p. 14.)

While Whitgift was Master of Trinity, Strype says he had bred up
under him not only several Bishops, but also “the Earls of Worcester and
Cumberland, the Lord Zouch, the Lord Dunboy of Ireland, Sir Nicolas and
Sir Francis Bacon. To which I may add one more, namely, the son of Sir
Nicolas White, Master of the Rolls in Ireland, who married a Devereux.”
(Life, i. 157, ed. 1822.)

NOBLES AND GENTLEMEN AT OXFORD.

A search through the whole of the first volume of Wood’s Athenæ
Oxonienses, comprising a period of nearly 100 years, has resulted in
the following meagre list of men of noble or knightly birth who
distinguished themselves. There are besides many men of “genteel
xxxiv


parents,” some of trader-ones, many friars, some Winchester men, but no
Eton ones, educated at Oxford.

The number of friars and monks at the Universities before the
Reformation, and especially at Oxford, must have been large. Tanner
says,

In our universities … were taught divinity and canon law (then,
t. Hen. III., much in vogue), and the friers resorting thither in
great numbers and applying themselves closely to their studies, outdid
the monks in all fashionable knowledge. But the monks quickly perceived
it, and went also to the universities and studied hard, that they might
not be run down by the friers.49 And as the
xxxvi


friers got houses in the universities, the monks also got colleges
founded and endowed there50 for the education of
their novices, where they were for some years instructed in grammar,
philosophy, and school divinity, and then returning home, improved their
knowledge by their private studies, to the service of God and the credit
of their respective societies. So that a little before the Reformation,
the greatest part of the proceeders in divinity at Oxford were monks and
Regular canons.

FAVOURITISM OF THE RICH IN THE UNIVERSITIES.

By Harrison’s time, A.D. 157751, rich men’s sons had not only pressed into
the Universities, but were scrooging poor men’s sons out of the
endowments meant only for the poor, learning the lessons that Mr Whiston
so well shows our Cathedral dignitaries have carried out
xxxvii


with the stipends of their choristers, boys and men. “Les gros
poissons mangent les menus. Pro. Poore men are (easily) supplanted
by the rich, the weake by the strong, the meane by the mighty.”52 (Cotgrave, u. manger.) The law of
“natural selection” prevails. Who shall say nay in a Christian land
professing the principles of the great “Inventor of Philanthropy”?
Whitgift for one, see his Life of Strype, Bk. I. chap. xiii.
p. 148-50, ed. 1822. In 1589 an act 31 Eliz. c. 6, was passed to
endeavour to prevent the abuse, but, like modern Election-bribery Acts
with their abuse, did not do it.

“at this present, of one sort & other, there are about three
thousand students nourished in them both (as by a late serveie it
manifestlie appeared). They [the Colleges at our Universities] were
created by their founders at the first, onelie for pore men’s sons,
whose parents were not able to bring them up unto learning: but now they
have the least benefit of them, by reason the rich do so incroch upon
them. And so farre hath this inconvenence spread itself, that it is in
my time an hard matter for a pore man’s child to come by a fellowship
(though he be neuer so good a scholer & worthie of that roome.) Such
packing also is used at elections, that not he which best deserveth, but
he that hath most friends, though he be the worst scholer, is alwaies
surest to speed; which will turne in the end to the overthrow of
learning. That some gentlemen also, whose friends have been in times
past benefactors to certeine of those houses, doe intrude into the
disposition of their estates, without all respect of order or statutes
devised by the founders, onelie thereby to place whome they think good
(and not without some hope of gaine) the case is too too evident, and their attempt would
soone take place, if their superiors did not provide to bridle their
indevors. In some grammar schooles likewise, which send scholers to
these universities, it is lamentable to see what briberie is used;

BAD EXAMPLE OF RICH MEN AT COLLEGE.
for yer the scholer can be preferred, such briberye is made, that pore
men’s children are commonly shut out, and the richer sort received (who
in times past thought it dishonour to live as it were upon almes) and
yet being placed, most of them studie little other than histories,
tables, dice & trifles, as men that make not the living by their
studie the end of their purposes; which is a lamentable bearing. Besides
this, being for the most part either gentlemen, or rich men’s sonnes,
they oft bring the universities into much slander.53 For
xxxviii


standing upon their reputation and libertie, they ruffle and roist it
out, exceeding in apparell, and hanting riotous companie (which draweth
them from their bookes into an other trade). And for excuse, when they
are charged with breach of all good order, thinke it sufficient to saie,
that they be gentlemen, which grieveth manie not a little. But to
proceed with the rest.

“Everie one of these colleges haue in like manner their professors or
readers of the tongs and severall sciences, as they call them, which
dailie trade up the youth there abiding privatlie in their halles, to
the end they may be able afterwards (when their turne commeth about,
which is after twelve termes) to show themselves abroad, by going from
thence into the common schooles and publike disputations (as it were
In aream) there to trie their skilles, and declare how they have
profited since their coming thither.

“Moreover in the publike schooles of both the universities, there are
found at the prince’s charge (and that verie largelie) five professors
& readers, that is to saie, of divinitie, of the civill law,
physicke, the Hebrew and the Greek tongues. And for the other lectures,
as of philosophie, logike, rhetorike and the quadriuials, although the
latter (I mean, arithmetike, musike, geometrie and astronomie, and
with them all skill in the perspectives are now smallie regarded in
either of them) the universities themselves do allowe competent stipends
to such as reade the same, whereby they are sufficiently provided for,
touching the maintenance of their estates, and no less encouraged to be
diligent in their functions.”

On the introduction of the study of Greek into the Universities, Dr
S. Knight says in his Life of Colet:

The age at which boys went up to the University seems to have varied
greatly. When Oxford students were forbidden to play marbles they could
not have been very old. But in “The Mirror of the Periods of Man’s Life”
(? ab. 1430 A.D.), in the
Society’s Hymns to the Virgin and Christ of this year, we find
the going-up age put at twenty:

This is confirmed by young Paston’s being at Eton at nineteen (see
below, p. lvi). In 1612, Brinsley (Grammar
Schoole, p. 307) puts the age at fifteen, and says,

“such onely should be sent to the Vniuersities, who proue most ingenuous
and towardly, and who, in a loue of learning, will begin to
xl


take paines of themselues, hauing attained in some sort the former parts
of learning; being good Grammarians at least, able to vnderstand, write
and speake Latine in good sort.

“Such as haue good discretion how to gouerne themselues there, and to
moderate their expenses; which is seldome times before 15 yeeres of age;
which is also the youngest age admitted by the statutes of the
Vniuersity, as I take it.”

FOREIGN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION.

4.
Foreign University Education. That some of our nobles sent their
sons to be educated in the French universities (whence they sometimes
imported foreign vices into England57) is witnessed by some verses in a Latin Poem
“in MS. Digby, No. 4 (Bodleian Library) of the end of the 13th or
beginning of the 14th century,” printed by Mr Thomas Wright in his
Anecdota Literaria, p. 38.

An English nation or set of students of the Faculty of Arts at
Paris existed in 1169; after 1430 the name was changed to the German
nation. Besides the students from the French provinces subject to the
English, as Poictou, Guienne, &c, it included the English, Scottish,
Irish, Poles, Germans, &c. —Encyc. Brit. John of
Salisbury (born 1110) says that he was twelve years studying at Paris on
his own account. Thomas a Becket, as a young man, studied at Paris.
Giraldus Cambrensis (born 1147) went to Paris for education; so did
Alexander Neckham (died 1227). Henry says,

Montpelier was another University whither Englishmen resorted, and is
to be remembered by us if only for the memory of Andrew Borde, M.D.,
some bits of whose quaintness are in the notes to Russell in the present
volume.

Padua is to be noted for Pace’s sake. He is supposed to have been
born in 1482.

Later, the custom of sending young noblemen and gentlemen to
Italy—to travel, not to take a degree—was introduced, and
Ascham’s condemnation of it, when no tutor accompanied the youths, is
too well known to need quoting. The Italians’ saying, Inglese
Italianato è un diabolo incarnato, sums it up.59

MONASTIC AND CATHEDRAL SCHOOLS.

5.
Monastic and Cathedral Schools. Herbert Losing, Bp. of Thetford, afterwards Norwich, between
1091 and 1119, in his 37th Letter restores his schools at Thetford to
Dean Bund, and directs that no other schools be opened there.

Tanner (Not. Mon. p. xx. ed. Nasmith), when mentioning “the
use and advantage of these Religious houses”—under which term
xlii


“are comprehended, cathedral and collegiate churches, abbies, priories,
colleges, hospitals, preceptories (Knights Templars’ houses), and
frieries”—says,

“Secondly, They were schools of learning & education; for every
convent had one person or more appointed for this purpose; and all the
neighbours that desired it, might have their children taught grammar and
church musick without any expence to them.60

In the nunneries also young women were taught to work, and to read
English, and sometimes Latin also. So that not only the lower rank of
people, who could not pay for their learning, but most of the noblemen
and gentlemen’s daughters were educated in those places.”61

xliii

LYDGATE’S TRICKS AT SCHOOL.

As Lydgate (born at Lydgate in Suffolk, six or seven miles from
Newmarket) was ordained subdeacon in the Benedictine monastery of Bury
St Edmunds in 138962, he was probably
sent as a boy to a monastic school. At any rate, as he sketches his
early escapades—apple-stealing, playing truant, &c.,—for
us in his Testament63, I shall quote
the youth’s bit of the poem here:—

Harleian MS. 2255, fol. 60.

At these monastic schools, I suppose, were educated mainly the boys
whom the monks hoped would become monks, cleric or secular; mostly the
poor, the Plowman’s brother who was to be the Parson, not often the
ploughman himself. Once, though, made a scholar and monk there, and sent
by the Monastery to the University, the workman’s, if not the
ploughman’s, son, might rule nobles and
xlv


sit by kings, nay, beard them to their face. Thomas a Becket, himself
the son of poor parents63a, was sent to be brought up in the
“religious house of the Canons of Merton.”

In 1392 the writer of Piers Plowman’s Crede sketches the then state
of things thus:

Here I might stop the quotation, but I go on, for justice has never
yet been done66 to this noble
Crede and William’s Vision as pictures of the life of
their times,—chiefly from the profound ignorance of us English of
our own language; partly from the grace, the freshness, and the
brilliance of Chaucer’s easier and inimitable verse:—

EDUCATION OF FIELD LABOURERS.

There is one side of the picture, the workman’s son turned monk, and
clerk to a lord. Let us turn to the other side, the ploughman’s son who
didn’t turn monk, whose head was ‘shet’ in the straw, who delved
and ditched, and dunged the earth, eat bread of corn and bran, worts
fleshless (vegetables, but no meat), drank water, and went miserably
(Crede, l. 1565-71). What education did he get? To whom
could he be apprenticed? What was his chance in life? Let the
Statute-Book answer:—

A.D. 1388. 12º Rich. II.,
Cap. v.

Item. It is ordained & assented, That he or she which used to
labour at the Plough and Cart, or other Labour or Service of Husbandry
till they be of the Age of Twelve Years, that from thenceforth they
shall abide at the same Labour, without being put to any Mystery or
Handicraft; and if any Covenant or Bond of Apprentie (so) be from
henceforth made to the Contrary, the same shall be holden for none.

A.D. 1405-6. 7º Henri IV., Cap.
xvii.

. . . . . And Whereas in the Statutes made at
Canterbury among other Articles it is contained That he or she that
useth to labour at the Plough or Cart, or other Labour or Service of
Husbandry, till he be of the age of Twelve Years, that from the same
time forth he shall abide at the same Labour, without being put to any
Mystery or Handicraft; and if any Covenant or Bond be made from that
time forth to the contrary, it shall be holden for none: Notwithstanding
which Article, and the good Statutes afore made through all parts of the
Realm, the Infants born within the Towns and Seignories of Upland, whose
Fathers & Mothers have no Land nor Rent nor other Living, but only
their Service or Mystery, be put by their said Fathers and Mothers and
other their Friends to serve, and bound Apprentices, to divers Crafts
within the Cities and Boroughs of the said Realm sometime at the Age
of Twelve Years, sometime within the said Age, and that for the
Pride of Clothing and other evil Customs that Servants do use in the
same; so that there is so great Scarcity of Labourers and other Servants
of Husbandry that the Gentlemen and other People of the Realm be
greatly impoverished for the Cause aforesaid: Our Sovereign Lord the
King considering the said Mischief, and willing thereupon to provide
Remedy, by the advice & assent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal,
and at the request of the said Commons, hath ordained and stablished,
That no Man nor Woman, of what Estate or Condition they be, shall put
their Son or Daughter, of whatsoever Age he or she be, to Serve as
Apprentice to no Craft nor other Labour within any City or Borough in
the Realm, except he have Land or Rent to the Value of Twenty Shillings
by the Year at
xlvii


the least, but they shall be put to other labours as their Estates doth
require, upon Pain of one Year’s Imprisonment, and to make Fine and
Ransom at the King’s Will. And if any Covenant be made of any such
Infant, of what Estate that he be, to the contrary, it shall be holden
for none. Provided Always, that every Man and Woman, of what Estate or
Condition that he be, shall be free to set their Son or Daughter to take
Learning at any manner School that pleaseth them within the Realm.

A most gracious saving clause truly, for those children who were used
to labour at the plough and cart till they were twelve years old67. Let us hope that some got the benefit
of it!

These Acts I came across when hunting for the Statutes referred to by
the Boke of Curtasye as fixing the hire of horses for carriage at
fourpence a piece, and they caused me some surprise. They made me wonder
less at the energy with which some people now are striving to erect
“barriers against democracy” to prevent the return match for the old
game coming off.—However improving, and however justly
retributive, future legislation for the rich by the poor in the spirit
of past legislation for the poor by the rich might be, it could hardly
be considered pleasant, and is surely worth putting up the true barrier
against, one of education in each poor man’s mind. (He who americanizes
us thus far will be the greatest benefactor England has had for some
ages.)—These Statutes also made me think how the old spirit still
lingers in England, how a friend of my own was curate in a Surrey
village where the kind-hearted squire would allow none of the R’s but
Reading to be taught in his school; how another clergyman lately
reported his Farmers’ meeting on the school question: Reading and
Writing might be taught, but Arithmetic not; the boys would be getting
to know too
xlviii


much about wages, and that would be troublesome; how, lastly, our gangs
of children working on our Eastern-counties farms, and our bird-keeping
boys of the whole South, can almost match the children of the
agricultural labourer of 1388.

NO BONDSMAN’S SON TO BE AN APPRENTICE.

The early practice of the Freemasons, and other crafts, refusing to
let any member take a bondsman’s son as an apprentice, was founded on
the reasonable apprehension that his lord would or might afterwards
claim the lad, make him disclose the trade-secrets, and carry on his art
for the lord’s benefit. The fourth of the ‘Fyftene artyculus or fyftene
poyntus’ of the Freemasons, printed by Mr Halliwell (p. 16), is on
this subject.

Articulus quartus (MS. Bibl. Reg. 17 A, Art. I., fol. 3,
&c.)

I should like to see the evidence of a lord’s son having become a
working mason, and dwelling seven years with his master ‘hys craft to
lurne.’

In the following section, the attribution of quotes is sometimes
obscure. The text layout has been kept as close as possible to the
original.

POST-REFORMATION CATHEDRAL SCHOOLS.

Cathedral Schools. About the pre-Reformation Schools I can
find only the extract from Tanner given above, p. xlii. On the
post-Reformation Schools I refer readers to Mr Whiston’s Cathedral
Trusts, 1850. He says:

xlix

“The Cathedrals of England are of two kinds, those of the old and those
of the new foundation: of the latter, Canterbury (the old archiepiscopal
see) and Carlisle, Durham, Ely, Norwich, Rochester, and Worcester, old
episcopal sees, were A.D. 1541-2
refounded, or rather reformed, by Henry VIII. … Besides these, he
created five other cathedral churches or colleges, in connexion with the
five new episcopal sees of Bristol, Chester, Gloucester, Oxford, and
Peterborough. He further created the see of Westminster, which was …
subsequently (A.D. 1560) converted to
a deanery collegiate by Queen Elizabeth … (p. 6). The preamble of
the Act 31 Henry VIII. c. 9, for founding the new cathedrals, preserved
in Henry’s own handwriting, recites that they were established ‘To the
intente that Gods worde myght the better be sett forthe, cyldren
broght up in lernynge, clerces nuryshyd in the universities, olde
servantes decayed, to have lyfing, allmes housys for pour folke to be
sustayned in, Reders of grece, ebrew, and latyne to have good
stypende, dayly almes to be mynistrate, mending of hyght wayes, and
exhybision for mynisters of the chyrche.’”

“A general idea of the scope and nature of the cathedral
establishments, as originally planned and settled by Henry VIII., may be
formed from the first chapter of the old statutes of Canterbury, which
is almost identical with the corresponding chapter of the statutes of
all the other cathedrals of the new foundation. It is as follows:

“On68 the entire number of those who have their
sustentation (qui sustentantur) in the cathedral and metropolitical
church of Canterbury:

“First of all we ordain and direct that there be for ever in our
aforesaid church, one dean, twelve canons, six preachers, twelve minor
canons, one deacon, one subdeacon, twelve lay-clerks, one master of
the choristers, ten choristers, two teachers of the boys in grammar, one
of whom is to be the head master, the other, second master, fifty boys
to be instructed in grammar,69 twelve poor men to be maintained at the costs
and charges of the said church, two vergers, two subsacrists
(i.e., sextons), four servants in the church to ring the bells,
and arrange all the rest, two porters, who shall also be barber-tonsors,
one caterer,70 one butler, and one
under butler, one cook, and one under-cook, who, indeed, in the number
prescribed, are to serve in our church every one of them in his own
order, according to our statutes and ordinances.”

l

In the Durham statutes, as settled in the first year of Philip and Mary,
the corresponding chapter is as follows:

On71 the total number of those who have their
sustentation (qui sustentantur) in the cathedral church of Durham.

“The nature of these schools, and the desire to perpetuate and
improve them, may be inferred from ‘certein articles noted for the
reformation of the cathedral churche of Excestr’, submitted by the
commissioners of Henry VIII., unto the correction of the Kynges
Majestie,’ as follows:

The tenth Article submitted. “That ther may be in the said
Cathedral churche a free songe scole, the scolemaster to have yerly of
the said pastor and prechars xx. marks for his wages, and his howss
free, to teache xl. children frely, to rede, to write, synge and playe
upon instruments of musike, also to teache ther A. B. C. in
greke and hebrew. And every of the said xl. children to have wekely
xiid. for ther meat and drink, and yerly vi^s
viii^d. for a gowne; they to be bownd dayly to syng and
rede within the said Cathedral churche such divine service as it may
please the Kynges Majestie to allowe; the said childre to be at comons
alltogether, with three prests hereaffter to be spoke off, to see them
well ordered at the meat and to reforme their manners.”

Article the eleventh, submitted. “That ther may be a fre grammer
scole within the same Cathedral churche, the scole-master to have
xx^li. by yere and his howss fre, the ussher x^li.
& his howss
li


fre, and that the said pastor and prechars may be bound to fynd xl.
children at the said grammer scole, giving to every oon of the children
xiid. wekely, to go to commons within the citie at the pleasour of the
frendes, so long to continew as the scolemaster do se them diligent to
lerne. The pastor to appointe viii. every prechar iiii. and the
scolemaster iiii.; the said childre serving in the said churche and
going to scole, to be preferred before strangers; provided always, that
no childe be admitted to thexhibicion of the said churche, whose father
is knowne to be worthe in goodes above ccc^li., or elles may
dispend above xl^li. yerly enheritance.” —Ibid.,
p. 10–12.

“Now £300 at that time was worth about £5,000 now, so that these
schools were designed for the lower ranks of society, and open to
the sons of the poorer gentry.

“An interesting illustration of this [and of the class-feeling in
education at this time] is supplied,” says Mr Whiston, “by the narrative
of what took place—

“when the Cathedral Church of Canterbury was altered from monks to
secular men of the clergy, viz.: prebendaries or canons, petty-canons,
choristers and scholars. At this erection were present, Thomas Cranmer,
archbishop, with divers other commissioners. And nominating and electing
such convenient and fit persons as should serve for the furniture of the
said Cathedral church according to the new foundation, it came to pass
that, when they should elect the children of the Grammar school, there
were of the commissioners more than one or two who would have none
admitted but sons or younger brethren of gentlemen. As for other,
husbandmen’s children, they were more meet, they said, for the plough,
and to be artificers, than to occupy the place of the learned sort; so
that they wished none else to be put to school, but only gentlemen’s
children.

POOR MEN’S SONS HAVE HEADS AS WELL AS RICH ONES’.
Whereunto the most reverend father, the Archbishop, being of a contrary
mind, said, ‘That he thought it not indifferent so to order the matter;
for,’ said he, ‘poor men’s children are many times endued with more
singular gifts of nature, which are also the gifts of God, as, with
eloquence, memory, apt pronunciation, sobriety, and such like; and also
commonly more apt to apply their study, than is the gentleman’s son,
delicately educated.’ Hereunto it was on the other part replied, ‘that
it was meet for the ploughman’s son to go to plough, and the artificer’s
son to apply the trade of his parent’s vocation; and the gentleman’s
children are meet to have the knowledge of government and rule in the
commonwealth. For we have,’ said they, ‘as much need of ploughmen as any
other state; and all sorts of men may not go to school.’ ‘I grant,’
replied the Archbishop, ‘much of your meaning herein as needful in a
commonwealth; but yet utterly to exclude the ploughman’s son and the
poor man’s son from the benefits of learning, as though they were
unworthy to have
lii


the gifts of the Holy Ghost bestowed upon them as well as upon others,
is as much to say, as that Almighty God should not be at liberty to
bestow his great gifts of grace upon any person, nor nowhere else but as
we and other men shall appoint them to be employed, according to our
fancy, and not according to his most goodly will and pleasure, who
giveth his gifts both of learning, and other perfections in all
sciences, unto all kinds and states of people indifferently. Even so
doth he many times withdraw from them and their posterity again those
beneficial gifts, if they be not thankful. If we should shut up into a
strait corner the bountiful grace of the Holy Ghost, and thereupon
attempt to build our fancies, we should make as perfect a work thereof
as those that took upon them to build the Tower of Babel; for God would
so provide that the offspring of our first-born children should
peradventure become most unapt to learn, and very dolts, as I myself
have seen no small number of them very dull and without all manner of
capacity. And to say the truth, I take it, that none of us all
here, being gentlemen born (as I think), but had our beginning that way
from a low and base parentage; and through the benefit of learning, and
other civil knowledge, for the most part all gentlemen ascend to their
estate.’ Then it was again answered, that the most part of the nobility
came up by feats of arms and martial acts. ‘As though,’ said the
Archbishop, ‘that the noble captain was always unfurnished of good
learning and knowledge to persuade and dissuade his army rhetorically;
who rather that way is brought unto authority than else his manly looks.
To conclude; the poor man’s son by pains-taking will for the most part
be learned when the gentleman’s son will not take the pains to get it.
And we are taught by the Scriptures that Almighty God raiseth up from
the dunghill, and setteth him in high authority. And whensoever it
pleaseth him, of his divine providence, he deposeth princes unto a right
humble and poor estate. Wherefore, if the gentleman’s son be apt to
learning, let him be admitted; if not apt, let the poor man’s child that
is apt enter his room.’ With words to the like effect.”

R. Whiston, Cathedral Trusts,
p. 12-14.

The scandalous way in which the choristers and poor boys were done
out of their proportion of the endowments by the Cathedral clergy, is to
be seen in Mr Whiston’s little book.

6.
Endowed Grammar Schools. These were mainly founded for citizens’
and townsmen’s children. Winchester (founded 1373) was probably the only
one that did anything before 1450 for the education of our gentry. Eton
was not founded till 1440. The following list of endowed schools founded before 1545, compiled for
me by
liii


Mr Brock from Carlisle’s Concise Description, shows the dates of
all known to him.

About 1174 A.D., Fitzstephen speaks
of the London schools and scholars thus:—I use Pegge’s
translation, 1772, to which Mr Chappell referred me,—

“The three principal churches in London75 are privileged by grant and ancient usage
with schools, and they are all very flourishing. Often indeed through
the favour and countenance of persons eminent in philosophy, more
schools are permitted. On festivals, at those churches where the Feast
of the Patron Saint is solemnized, the masters convene their scholars.
The youth, on that occasion, dispute, some in the demonstrative way, and
some logically. These produce their enthymemes, and those the more
perfect syllogisms. Some, the better to shew their parts, are exercised
in disputation, contending with one another, whilst others are put upon
establishing some truth by way of illustration. Some sophists endeavour
to apply, on feigned topics, a vast heap and flow of words, others
to impose upon you with
lv


false conclusions. As to the orators, some with their rhetorical
harangues employ all the powers of persuasion, taking care to observe
the precepts of art, and to omit nothing opposite to the subject. The
boys of different schools wrangle with one another in verse; contending
about the principles of Grammar, or the rules of the Perfect Tenses and
Supines. Others there are, who in Epigrams, or other compositions in
numbers, use all that low ribaldry we read of in the Ancients; attacking
their school-masters, but without mentioning names, with the old
Fescennine licentiousness, and discharging their scoffs and sarcasms
against them; touching the foibles of their school-fellows, or perhaps
of greater personages, with true Socratic wit, or biting them more
keenly with a Theonine tooth: The audience, fully disposed to laugh,

Of the sports of the boys, Fitzstephen gives a long description. On
Shrove-Tuesday, each boy brought his fighting cock to his master, and
they had a cock-fight all morning in the school-room.76 After dinner, football in the fields of the
suburbs, probably Smithfield. Every Sunday in Lent they had a
sham-fight, some on horseback, some on foot, the King and his Court
often looking on. At Easter they played at the Water-Quintain, charging
a target, which if they missed, souse they went into the water. ‘On
holidays in summer the pastime of the youths is to exercise themselves
in archery, in running, leaping, wrestling, casting of stones, and
flinging to certain distances, and lastly with bucklers.’ At moonrise
the maidens danced. In the winter holidays, the boys saw boar-fights,
hog-fights, bull and bear-baiting, and when ice came they slid, and
skated on the leg-bones of some animal, punting themselves along with an
iron-shod pole, and charging one another. A set of merry scenes
indeed.

“In general, we are assured by the most learned man of the thirteenth
century, Roger Bacon, that there never had been so great an appearance
of learning, and so general an application to study, in so many
different faculties, as in his time, when schools were erected in every
city, town, burgh, and castle.” (Henry’s Hist. of England, vol. iv.
p. 472-3.)

In the twenty-fifth year of Henry VI., 1447, four Grammar schools
were appointed to be opened in London77 for the education of
lvi


the City youth (Carlisle). But from the above lists it will be
seen that Grammar Schools had not much to do with the education of our
nobility and gentry before 1450 A.D.

AN ETON BOY IN A.D. 1478.

Of Eton studies, the Paston Letters notice only Latin versifying, but
they show us a young man supposed to be nineteen, still at school,
having a smart pair of breeches for holy days, falling in love, eating
figs and raisins, proposing to come up to London for a day or two’s
holiday or lark to his elder brother’s, and having 8d. sent him
in a letter to buy a pair of slippers with. William Paston,
a younger brother of John’s, when about nineteen years old, and
studying at Eton, writes on Nov. 7, 1478, to thank his brother for a
noble in gold, and says,

“my creanser (creditor) Master Thomas (Stevenson) heartily recommendeth
him to you, and he prayeth you to send him some money for my commons,
for he saith ye be twenty shillings in his debt, for a month was to pay
for when he had money last; also I beseech you to send me a hose cloth,
one for the holy days of some colour, and another for working days (how
coarse soever it be, it maketh no matter), and a stomacher and two
shirts, and a pair of slippers: and if it like you that I may come with
Alweder by water”—would they take a pair-oar and pull down? (the
figs and raisins came up by a barge;)—“and sport me with you at
London a day or two this term-time, then ye may let all this be till the
time that I come, and then I will tell you when I shall be ready to come
from Eton by the grace of God, who have you in his keeping.” Paston
Letters, modernised, vol. 2, p. 129.

This is the first letter; the second one about the figs, raisins, and
love-making (dated 23 Feb. 1478-9) is given at vol. ii.
p. 122-3.

Tusser, who was seized as a Singing boy for the King’s Chapel, lets
us know that he got well birched at Eton.

I was rather surprised to find no mention of any Eton men in the
first vol. of Wood’s Athenæ Oxonienses (ed. Bliss) except two,
who had first taken degrees at Cambridge, Robert Aldrich and William
Alley, the latter admitted at Cambridge 1528 (Wood, p. 375,
col. 2). Plenty of London men are named in Wood, vol. 1. No
doubt in early times the Eton men went to their own foundation, King’s
(or other Colleges at) Cambridge, while the Winchester men went to their
foundation, New College, or elsewhere at Oxford. In the first volume of
Bliss’s edition of Wood, the following Winchester men are noticed:

POST-REFORMATION GRAMMAR SCHOOLS.

That the post-Reformation Grammar Schools did not at first educate as
many boys as the old monastic schools is well known. Strype says,

“On the 15th of January, 1562, Thomas Williams, of the Inner Temple,
esq. being chosen speaker to the lower house, was presented to the
queen: and in his speech to her … took notice of the want of schools;
that at least an hundred were wanting in England which before this time
had been, [being destroyed (I suppose he meant) by the dissolution
of monasteries and religious houses, fraternities and colleges.] He
would have had England continually flourishing with ten thousand
scholars, which the schools in this nation formerly brought up. That
from the want of these good schoolmasters sprang up ignorance: and
covetousness got the livings by impropriations; which was a decay, he
said, of learning, and by it the tree of knowledge
lviii


grew downward, not upward; which grew greatly to the dishonour, both of
God and the commonwealth. He mentioned likewise the decay of the
universities; and how that great market-towns were without schools or
preachers: and that the poor vicar had but 20l. [or some such
poor allowance,] and the rest, being no small sum, was impropriated. And
so thereby, no preacher there; but the people, being trained up and led
in blindness for want of instruction, became obstinate: and therefore
advised that this should be seen to, and impropriations redressed,
notwithstanding the laws already made [which favoured
them].—Strype, Annals of the Reformation, vol. i.
p. 437.

Of the Grammar Schools in his time (A.D. 1577) Harrison says:

Besides these universities, also there are a great number of Grammer
Schooles throughout the realme, and those verie liberallie endued for
the better relief of pore scholers, so that there are not manie
corporate townes, now under the queene’s dominion that have not one
Gramer Schole at the least, with a sufficient living for a master and
usher appointed to the same.

There are in like manner divers collegiat churches, as Windsor,
Wincester, Eaton, Westminster (in which I was sometime an unprofitable
Grammarian under the reverend father, master Nowell, now dean of Paules)
and in those a great number of pore scholers, dailie maintained by the
liberality of the founders, with meat, bookes, and apparell; from whence
after they have been well entered in the knowledge of the Latine and
Greek tongs, and rules of versifying (the triall whereof is made by
certain apposers, yearlie appointed to examine them), they are sent to
certain especiall houses in each universitie79, where they are received & trained up in
the points of higher knowledge in their privat halls till they be
adjudged meet to show their faces in the schooles, as I have said
alreadie.

Greek was first taught at a public school in England by Lillye soon
after the year 1500. This was at St Paul’s School in London, then newly
established by Dean Colet, and to which Erasmus alluded as the best of
its time in 1514, when he said that he had in three years taught a youth
more Latin than he could have acquired in any school in England, ne
Liliana quidem excepta, not even Lillye’s excepted. (Warton,
iii. 1.) The first schoolmaster who stood up for the study of
English was, I believe, Richard Mulcaster, of King’s College,
Cambridge, and Christ Church, Oxford. In 1561 he was appointed the first
head-master of Merchant-Taylors School in London, then just founded as a
feeder or pro-seminary for St John’s
lix


College, Oxford (Warton, iii. 282). In his Elementarie, 1582, he
has a long passage on the study of English, the whole of which I print
here, at Mr Quick’s desire, as it has slipt out of people’s minds, and
Mulcaster deserves honour for it:—

STUDY OF ENGLISH RECOMMENDED IN 1582-1612.

“But bycause I take vpon me in this Elementarie, besides som frindship
to secretaries for the pen, and to correctors for the print, to direct
such peple as teach childern to read and write English, and the
reading must nedes be such as the writing leads vnto, thererfor,
(sic) befor I medle with anie particular precept, to direct the
Reader, I will thoroughlie rip vp the hole certaintie of our
English writing, so far furth and with such assurance, as probabilitie
can make me, bycause it is a thing both proper to my argument, and
profitable to my cuntrie. For our naturall tung being as beneficiall
vnto vs for our nedefull deliuerie, as anie other is to the peple which
vse it: & hauing as pretie, and as fair obseruations in it, as anie
other hath: and being as readie to yield to anie rule of Art, as anie
other is: why should I not take som pains to find out the right writing
of ours, as other cuntrimen haue don to find the like in theirs? &
so much the rather, bycause it is pretended, that the writing thereof is
meruellous vncertain, and scant to be recouered from extreme confusion,
without som change of as great extremitie? I mean therefor so to
deall in it, as I maie wipe awaie that opinion of either
vncertaintie for confusion, or impossibilitie for
direction, that both the naturall English maie haue wherein to
rest, & the desirous st[r]anger maie haue whereby to learn. For the
performance whereof, and mine own better direction, I will
first examin those means, whereby other tungs of most sacred antiquitie
haue bene brought to Art and form of discipline for their right writing,
to the end that by following their waie, I maie hit vpon
their right, and at the least by their president deuise the like to
theirs, where the vse of our tung, & the propertie of our dialect
will not yeild flat to theirs. That don, I will set all the
varietie of our now writing, & the vncertaine force of all our
letters, in as much certaintie, as anie writing can be, by these
senen precepts,— 1. Generall rule, which
concerneth the propertie and vse of ech letter:
2. Proportion which reduceth all words of one sound
to the same writing: 3. Composition, which teacheth how to
write one word made of mo: 4. Deriuation, which examineth
the ofspring of euerie originall: 5. Distinction which
bewraieth the difference of sound and force in letters by som writen
figure or accent: 6. Enfranchisment, which directeth the
right writing of all incorporat foren words: 7. Prerogatiue,
which declareth a reseruation, wherein common vse will continew hir
precèdence in our En[g]lish writing, as she hath don euerie where else,
both for the form of the letter, in som places, which likes the pen
better: and for the difference in writing, where som particular caueat
will chek a common rule. In all these seuen I will so examin the
particularities of our tung, as either nothing shall
lx


seme strange at all, or if anie thing do seme, yet it shall not seme so
strange, but that either the self same, or the verie like vnto it, or
the more strange then it is, shal appear to be in, those things, which
ar more familiar vnto vs for extraordinarie learning, then required of
vs for our ordinarie vse. And forasmuch as the eie will help manie to
write right by a sene president, which either cannot vnderstand, or
cannot entend to vnderstand the reason of a rule, therefor in the end of
this treatis for right writing, I purpos to set down a generall
table of most English words, by waie of president, to help such plane
peple, as cannot entend the vnderstanding of a rule, which requireth
both time and conceit in perceiuing, but can easilie run to a generall
table, which is readier to their hand. By the which table I shall also
confirm the right of my rules, that theie hold thoroughout, & by
multitude of examples help som maim (so) in precepts. Thus
much for the right writing of our English tung, which maie seme
(so) for a preface to the principle of Reading, as the
matter of the one is the maker of the other.—1582.
Rich^d. Mulcaster. The First Part of the Elementarie,
pp. 53-4.

Brinsley follows Mulcaster in exhorting to the study of English:

“there seemes vnto mee, to bee a verie maine want in all our Grammar
schooles generally, or in the most of them; whereof I haue heard som
great learned men to complain; That there is no care had in respect, to
traine vp schollars so as they may be able to expresse their minds
purely and readily in our owne tongue, and to increase in the practice
of it, as well as in the Latine or Greeke; whereas our chiefe indeuour
should bee for it, and that for these reasons. 1. Because that
language which all sorts and conditions of men amongst vs are to haue
most vse of, both in speech & writing, is our owne natiue tongue.
2. The purity and elegancie of our owne language is to be esteemed
a chiefe part of the honour of our nation: which we all ought to aduance
as much as in vs lieth. As when Greece and Rome and other nations haue
most florished, their languages also haue beene most pure: and from
those times of Greece & Rome, wee fetch our chiefest patterns, for
the learning of their tongues. 3. Because of those which are for a
time trained vp in schooles, there are very fewe which proceede in
learning, in comparison of them that follow other callings.

John Brinsley, The Grammar Schoole, p. 21, 22.

His “Meanes to obtaine this benefit of increasing in our English
tong, as in the Latin,” are

1. Daily vse of Lillies rules construed.

2. Continuall practice of English Grammaticall translations.

3. Translating and writing English, with some other Schoole
exercises.

Ibid., side-notes, p. 22, 23.

On this question of English boys studying English, let it be
remembered that in this year of grace 1867, in all England there is
lxi


just one public school at which English is studied
historically—the City of London School—and that in this
school it was begun only last year by the new Head-Master, the Rev.
Edwin A. Abbot, all honour to him. In every class an English textbook is
read, Piers Plowman being that for the highest class. This
neglect of English as a subject of study is due no doubt to tutors’ and
parents’ ignorance. None of them know the language historically; the
former can’t teach it, the latter don’t care about it; why should their
boys learn it? Oh tutors and parents, there are such things as asses in
the world.

A GRAMMAR-SCHOOL BOY’S DAY IN A.D. 1612.

Of the school-life of a Grammar-school boy in 1612 we may get a
notion from Brinsley’s p. 296, “chap. xxx. Of Schoole times,
intermissions and recreations,” which is full of interest. ‘1. The
Schoole-time should beginne at sixe: all who write Latine to make their
exercises which were giuen ouernight, in that houre before
seuen’.—To make boys punctual, ‘so many of them as are there at
sixe, to haue their places as they had them by election80 or the day before: all who come after six,
euery one to sit as he commeth, and so to continue that day, and vntill
he recouer his place againe by the election of the fourme or
otherwise…. If any cannot be brought by this, them to be noted in the
blacke Bill by a speciall marke, and feele the punishment thereof: and
sometimes present correction to be vsed for terrour…. Thus they are to
continue vntill nine [at work in class], signified by Monitours,
Subdoctour or otherwise. Then at nine … to let them to haue a quarter
of an houre at least, or more, for intermission, eyther for breakefast
… or else for the necessitie of euery one, or their honest recreation,
or to prepare their exercises against the Masters comming in. [2.]
After, each of them to be in his place in an instant, vpon the knocking
of the dore or some other sign … so to continue vntill eleuen of the
clocke, or somwhat after, to counteruaile the time of the intermission
at nine.

(3.) To be againe all ready, and in their places at one, in an
instant; to continue vntill three, or halfe an houre after: then to haue
another quarter of an houre or more, as at nine for drinking and
necessities; so to continue till halfe an houre after fiue: thereby in
lxii


that halfe houre to counteruaile the time at three; then to end so as
was shewed, with reading a peece of a Chapter, and with singing two
staues of a Psalme: lastly with prayer to be vsed by the Master.’

To the objectors to these intermissions at nine and three, who may
reproach the schoole, thinking that they do nothing but play, Brinsley
answers,— ‘2. By this meanes also the Schollars may bee kept euer
in their places, and hard to their labours, without that running out to
the Campo (as the[y] tearme it) at school times, and the manifolde
disorders thereof; as watching and striuing for the clubbe,81 and loytering then in the fields; some
hindred that they cannot go forth at all. (5.) it is very requisite
also, that they should have weekly one part of an afternoone for
recreation, as a reward of their diligence, obedience and profiting; and
that to be appointed at the Masters discretion, eyther the Thursday,
after the vsuall custom; or according to the best opportunity of the
place…. All recreations and sports of schollars, would be meet for
Gentlemen. Clownish sports, or perilous, or yet playing for money, are
no way to be admitted.’

On the age at which boys went to school, Brinsley says, p. 9,

“For the time of their entrance with vs, in our countrey schooles, it is
commonly about 7. or 8. yeares olde: six is very soone. If any begin so
early, they are rather sent to the schoole to keepe them from troubling
the house at home, and from danger, and shrewd turnes, then for any
great hope and desire their friends haue that they should learne
anything in effect.”

THE GOOD OLD TIMES OF SMOKE AND FILTH.

To return from this
digression on Education. Enough has been said to show that the
progress of Education, in our sense of the word, was rather from below
upwards, than from above downwards; and I conclude that the young people
to whom the Babees Boke, &c., were addressed, were the
children of our nobility, knights, and squires, and that the state of
their manners, as left by their home training, was such as to need the
inculcation on them of the precepts contained in the Poems. If so,
dirty, ill-mannered, awkward young gawks, must most of these
hopes-of-England have been, to modern notions. The directions for
personal cleanliness must have been much needed when one considers the
small stock of linen and clothes that men not
lxiii


rich must have had; and if we may judge from a passage in Edward the Fourth’s
Liber Niger, even the King himself did not use his footpan every
Saturday night, and would not have been the worse for an occasional
tubbing:—

“This barbour shall have, every satyrday at nyght, if it please
the Kinge to cleanse his head, legges, or feet, and for his shaving, two
loves, one picher wyne. And the ussher of chambre ought to testyfye if
this is necessaryly dispended or not.”

So far as appears from Edward the Fourth’s Liber Niger Domus,
soap was used only for washing clothes. The yeoman lavender, or
washerman, was to take from the Great Spicery ‘as muche whyte soape,
greye, and blacke, as can be thought resonable by proufe of the
Countrollers,’ and therewith ‘tenderly to waysshe … the stuffe for the
Kinges propyr persone’ (H. Ord. p. 85); but whether that
cleansing material ever touched His Majesty’s sacred person (except
doubtless when and if the barber shaved him), does not appear. The
Ordinances are considerate as to sex, and provide for “weomen
lavendryes” for a Queen, and further that “these officers oughte to bee
sworne to keepe the chambre counsaylle.” But it is not for one of a
nation that has not yet taken generally to tubbing and baths, or left
off shaving, to reproach his forefathers with want of cleanliness, or
adherence to customs that involve contradiction of the teachings of
physiologists, and the evident intent of Nature or the Creator.
Moreover, reflections on the good deeds done, and the high thoughts
thought, by men of old dirtier than some now, may prevent us concluding
that because other people now talk through their noses, and have manners
different from our own, they and their institutions must be wholly
abominable; that because others smell when heated, they ought to be
slaves; or that eating peas with a knife renders men unworthy of the
franchise. The temptation to value manners above morals, and
pleasantness above honesty, is one that all of us have to guard against.
And when we have held to a custom merely because it is old, have refused
to consider fairly the reasons for its change, and are inclined to
grumble when the change is carried out, we shall be none the worse for
thinking of the people, young and old, who, in the time of Harrison and
Shakspere, the “Forgotten Worthies”82
lxiv


and Raleigh, no doubt ‘hated those nasty new oak houses and chimnies,’
and sighed for the good old times:

“And yet see the change, for when our houses were builded of willow,
then had we oken men; but now that our houses are come to be made of
oke, our men are not onlie become willow, but a great manie through
Persian delicacie crept in among vs, altogither of straw, which is a
sore alteration…. Now haue we manie chimnies, and yet our tenderlings
complaine of rheumes, catarhs and poses. Then had we none but
reredosses, and our heads did neuer ake.83 For as the smoke in those daies was supposed
to be a sufficient hardning for the timber of the house; so it was
reputed a far better medicine to keepe the goodman and his familie from
the quack or pose, wherewith as then verie few were oft acquainted.”
Harrison, i. 212, col. 1, quoted by Ellis.

If rich men and masters were dirty, poor men and servants must have
been dirtier still. William Langlande’s description of Hawkyn’s one
metaphorical dress in which he slept o’ nightes as well as worked by
day, beslobbered (or by-moled, bemauled) by children, was true of
the real smock; flesh-moths must have been plentiful, and the sketch of
Coveitise, as regards many men, hardly an exaggeration:

(Vision, Passus V. vol. 1, l. 2859-70, ed. Wright.)

In the Kinge and Miller, Percy Folio MS., p. 236 (in vol. ii.
of the print), when the Miller proposes that the stranger should sleep
with their son, Richard the son says to the King,

The colour of washerwomen’s legs was due partly to dirt, I suppose.
The princess or queen Clarionas, when escaping with the laundress as her
assistant, is obliged to have her white legs reduced to the customary
shade of grey:

ab. 1440 A.D., Syr Generides,
p. 218, ll. 7060-8.

NAKED SCULLIONS AND DIRTY STREETS.

If in Henry the Eighth’s kitchen, scullions lay about naked, or
tattered and filthy, what would they do elsewhere? Here is the King’s
Ordinance against them in 1526:

lxvi

“And for the better avoydyng of corruption and all uncleannesse out of
the Kings house, which doth ingender danger of infection, and is very
noisome and displeasant unto all the noblemen and others repaireing unto
the same; it is ordeyned by the Kings Highnesse, that the three master
cookes of the kitchen shall have everie of them by way of reward yearly
twenty marks, to the intent they shall prouide and sufficiently furnish
the said kitchens of such scolyons as shall not goe naked or in
garments of such vilenesse as they now doe, and have been acustomed to
doe, nor lie in the nights and dayes in the kitchens or ground by the
fireside; but that they of the said money may be found with honest
and whole course garments, without such uncleannesse as may be the
annoyance of those by whom they shall passe”…

That our commonalty, at least, in Henry VIII.’s time did stink (as is
the nature of man to do) may be concluded from Wolsey’s custom, when
going to Westminster Hall, of

“holding in his hand a very fair orange, whereof the meat or substance
within was taken out, and filled up again with the part of a sponge,
wherein was vinegar, and other confections against the pestilent airs;
the which he most commonly smelt unto, passing among the press, or else
when he was pestered with many suitors.” (Cavendish,
p. 43.)

On the dirt in English houses and streets we may take the testimony
of a witness who liked England, and lived in it, and who was not likely
to misrepresent its condition,—Erasmus. In a letter to Francis,
the physician of Cardinal Wolsey, says Jortin,

“Erasmus ascribes the plague (from which England was hardly ever free)
and the sweating-sickness, partly to the incommodious form and bad
exposition of the houses, to the filthiness of the streets, and to the
sluttishness within doors. The floors, says he, are commonly of clay,
strewed with rushes, under which lies unmolested an ancient collection
of beer, grease (?), fragments, bones, spittle, excrements [t.i. urine]
of dogs and cats [t.i. men,] and every thing that is nasty, &c.”
(Life of Erasmus, i. 69, ed. 1808, referred to in Ellis, i. 328,
note.)

The great scholar’s own words are,

Tum sola fere sunt argilla, tum scirpis palustribus, qui subinde sic
renovantur, ut fundamentum maneat aliquoties annos viginti, sub se
fovens sputa, vomitus, mictum canum et hominum, projectam cervisiam, et
piscium reliquias, aliasque sordes non nominandas. Hinc mutato cœlo
vapor quidam exhalatur, mea sententia minime salubris humano
corpori.

After speaking also De salsamentis (rendered ‘salt
meat, beef,
lxvii


pork, &c.,’ by Jortin, but which Liber Cure Cocorum
authorises us in translating ‘Sauces’85), quibus vulgus mirum in modum
delectatur, he says the English would be more healthy if their
windows were made so as to shut out noxious winds, and then
continues,

“Conferret huc, si vulgo parcior victus persuaderi posset, ac
salsamentorum moderatior usus. Tum si publica cura demandaretur
Ædilibus, ut viæ mundiores essent a cœno, mictuque: Curarentur et ea quæ
civitati vicina sint. Jortin’s Life of Erasmus, ed. 1808, iii. 44
(Ep. 432, C. 1815), No. VIII. Erasmus Rot. Francisco. Cardinalis
Eboracencis Medico, S.

If it be objected that I have in the foregoing extracts shown the
dark side of the picture, and not the bright one, my answer is that the
bright one—of the riches and luxury in England—must be
familiar to all our members, students (as I assume) of our early books,
that the Treatises in this Volume sufficiently show this bright side,
and that to me, as foolometer of the Society, this dark side seemed to
need showing. But as The Chronicle of May 11, 1867, in its review
of Mr Fox Bourne’s English Merchants, seems to think otherwise,
I quote its words, p. 155, col. 2.

“All the nations of the world, says Matthew of Westminster, were kept
warm by the wool of England, made into cloth by the men of Flanders. And
while we gave useful clothing to other countries, we received festive
garments from them in return. For most of our information on these
subjects we are indebted to Matthew Paris, who tells us that when
Alexander III. of Scotland was married to Margaret, daughter of Henry
III., one thousand English knights appeared at the wedding in
cointises of silk, and the next day each knight donned a new robe
of another kind. This grand entertainment was fatal to sixty oxen, and
cost the then Archbishop of York no less a sum than 4000 marks.
Macpherson remarks on this great display of silk as a proof of the
wealth of England under the Norman kings, a point which has not
been sufficiently elaborated. In 1242 the streets of London were covered
or shaded with silk, for the reception of Richard, the King’s brother,
on his return from the Holy Land. Few Englishmen
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are aware of the existence of such magnificence at that early period;
while every story-book of history gives us the reverse of the picture,
telling us of straw-covered floors, scarcity of body linen, and the
like. Long after this, in 1367, it is recorded, as a special instance of
splendour of costume, that 1000 citizens of Genoa were clothed in silk;
and this tale has been repeated from age to age, while the similar
display, at an earlier date, in England, has passed unnoticed.”

For a notice of the
several pieces in the present volume, I refer the reader to the
Preface to Russell’s Boke of Nurture, which follows here.

It only remains for me to say that the freshness of my first interest
in the poems which I once hoped to re-produce in these Forewords, has
become dulled by circumstances and the length of time that the volume
has been in the press—it having been set aside (by my desire) for
the Ayenbite, &c.;—and that the intervention of other
work has prevented my making the collection as complete as I had desired
it to be. It is, however, the fullest verse one that has yet appeared on
its subject, and will serve as the beginning of the Society’s store of
this kind of material.86 If we can do all the
English part of the work, and the Master of the Rolls will commission
one of his Editors to do the Latin part, we shall then get a fairly
complete picture of that Early English Home which, with all its
shortcomings, should be dear to every Englishman now.

3, St George’s Square, N.W.,
5th June, 1867.

General Preface: Footnotes

lxix

PREFACE TO
RUSSELL.

Though this Boke of Nurture by John Russell is the most
complete and elaborate of its kind, I have never seen it mentioned
by name in any of the many books and essays on early manners and
customs, food and dress, that have issued from the press. My own
introduction to it was due to a chance turning over, for another
purpose, of the leaves of the MS. containing it. Mr Wheatley then told
me of Ritson’s reference to it in his Bibliographica Poetica,
p. 96; and when the text was all printed, a reference in
The Glossary of Domestic Architecture (v. III. Pt. I. p. 76,
note, col. 2) sent me to MS. Sloane 13151—in the Glossary stated to have been
written in 1452—which proved to be a different and unnamed version
of Russell. Then the Sloane Catalogue disclosed a third MS., No. 20272, and the earliest of the three, differing
rather less than No. 1315 from Russell’s text, but still anonymous.
I have therefore to thank for knowledge of the MSS. that special
Providence which watches over editors as well as children and drunkards,
and have not on this occasion to express gratitude to Ritson and Warton,
to whom every lover of Early English Manuscripts is under such deep
obligations, and whose guiding hands (however faltering) in Poetry have
made us long so often for the like in Prose. Would that one of our many
Historians of English Literature had but conceived the idea of
cataloguing the materials for his History before sitting down to write
it! Would that a wise Government would commission another Hardy to do
for English Literature what the Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records is
now doing for English History—
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give us a list of the MSS. and early printed books of it! What time and
trouble such a Catalogue would save!

But to return to John Russell and his Boke. He describes himself at
the beginning and end of his treatise as Usher and Marshal to Humphrey,
Duke of Gloucester, delighting in his work in youth, quitting it only
when compelled by crooked age, and then anxious to train up worthy
successors in the art and mystery of managing a well-appointed
household. A man evidently who knew his work in every detail, and
did it all with pride; not boastful, though upholding his office against
rebellious cooks3, putting them down
with imperial dignity, “we may allow and disallow; our office is the
chief!” A simple-minded religious man too,—as the close of
his Treatise shows,—and one able to appreciate the master he
served, the “prynce fulle royalle,” the learned and munificent Humphrey
Duke of Gloucester, the patron of Lydgate, Occleve, Capgrave,
Withamstede, Leonard Aretine, Petrus Candidus, Petrus de Monte, Tito
Livio, Antoyne de Beccara, &c. &c., the lover of Manuscripts,
the first great donor to the Oxford University Library which Bodley
revived4, “that prince peerless,” as Russell
calls him, a man who, with all his faults, loved books and authors,
and shall be respected by us as he was by Lydgate. But our business is
with the Marshal, not the Master, and we will hear what John Russell
says of himself in his own verse,

At the end of his Boke he gives us a few more details about himself
and his work in life:

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