Schools, School-Books and Schoolmasters Part 7

VII.

Influence of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More--Visits of the former to this country--His friends.h.i.+p with Dean Colet--Establishment of various schools in England--Foundation of St. Paul's by Colet--Statutes--Books used in the school--Narrow lines--Notice of the old Cathedral School.

I. We must not attempt, in fact, to consider the educational question in early England without studying very sedulously the Lives of Erasmus and Colet by Samuel Knight. The influence of Erasmus on our scholastic literature I believe to have been very great indeed. He came over to this country, it appears, in 1497, and spent a good deal of time at Oxford, where he acquired a knowledge of Greek. "While Erasmus remained at Oxford," says his biographer, "he became very intimate with all those who were of any Note for Learning; accounting them always his best friends, by whom he was most profited in his studies. And as he owns M. Colet did first engage him in the Study of Theology, so it is also well known that he embraced the favourable Opportunity he now had of learning the Greek Tongue, under the most Skilful Masters (viz.) William Grocyn, Thomas Linacre, and William Latimer. Grocyn is said by one who lived about this Time to have been the first Professor, or Publick Teacher of Greek in Oxford to a full a.s.sembly of Young Students."

Knight affords an interesting and tolerably copious account of Linacre, as well as of Grocyn; and in connection with the former he relates an anecdote, on the authority of Erasmus, about Bernard Andreas, tutor to Prince Arthur, son of Henry VII. But I shall not enter into these matters, as Linacre, though a great promoter of Greek authors, scarcely comes within my plan. Yet I may mention that among the friends whom the learned Hollander made here was Cuthbert Tunstall, afterwards Bishop of Durham, and author of the first book on arithmetic published in this country, and Richard Pace, who succeeded Colet in the Deanery of St. Paul's.

There is, however, a pa.s.sage which I may be suffered to transcribe, where, speaking of the time when Erasmus was contemplating a departure homeward, Knight observes:--

"Before Erasmus left England, he laid the plan of his useful Tract _de conscribendis epistolis_, for the Service, and at the Suggestion of his n.o.ble Pupil the Lord William Montjoy, who had complained that there were no good Rules, or Examples of that kind, to which he could conform himself. Erasmus took the hint very kindly, and making his just Reflections, upon the emptiness of Franciscus Niger, and Marius Phalelfus,[2] whose Books upon that Argument were read in the common Schools, he seems resolv'd at his first leisure, to give a New Essay of that kind; and accordingly upon his first return to Paris he fell upon it, and finished it within twenty Days."

So we see that, prior to the visit of Erasmus to us at the end of the fifteenth century, there were already polite letter-writers current, and current, too, as school-books. Erasmus came to the conclusion that he had done his own work too hastily, and the appearance of an edition of it in England about thirty years later, and likewise of a counterfeit, induced him to revise the undertaking, which was finally published at Basle in 1545 in a volume with other a.n.a.logous tracts by various writers.

A story which Knight relates about his author's literary enterprise in the epistolary line is too amusing to be overlooked:--

"In that Essay of the way of writing Epistles, Erasmus had put in two sorts of Declamations, one in the praise, the other in dispraise, of Matrimony, and asking his young Pupil L{d.} Montjoy how he lik'd that of the first sort. 'Oh sir,' says he, 'I like it so well, that you have made me resolve to marry quickly.' 'Ay!' but says Erasmus, 'you have read only one side, stay and read the other.' 'No,' replies L{d.} Montjoy, 'that side pleases me; take you the other!'" The subject is an obvious one for humorous controversy; but there is a similar idea in Rabelais, who makes his two chief characters debate the advantages and drawbacks of wedlock.

Altogether, Erasmus must have done very much toward the advancement of a taste for h.e.l.lenic culture in our country, and his biographer apprises us that he exhorted the physicians of his time to study that language as more necessary to their profession than to any other. Yet the knowledge of the tongue was very sparingly diffused in England at and long after that time; and Turner, in the dedication of his Herbal to Queen Elizabeth in 1568, complains of the ignorance of the apothecaries of his day even of the Latin names of the herbs which they employed in their pharmacopia. The ill.u.s.trious and erudite Dutchman did, doubtless, what he could, and made several of the cla.s.sics more familiar and intelligible by new editions, with some of which he connected the names of English scholars and prelates; but the time had not arrived for any general movement.

II. Knight, in his Life of Dean Colet, enumerates several of the schools which were founded shortly before the Reformation. "This n.o.ble impulse of Christian charity," says he, "in the founding of grammar schools, was one of the providential ways and means for bringing about the blessed reformation; and it is therefore observable, that, within thirty years before it, there were more grammar schools erected and endowed in England than had been in three hundred years preceding: one at Chichester by Dr.

Edward Scory, bishop of that see, who left a farther benefaction to it by his last will, dated 8th December, 1502: another at Manchester by Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exeter, who died 1519: another at Binton in Somersets.h.i.+re, by Dr. Fitzjames, Bishop of London, and his brother, Sir John Fitzjames, lord chief justice of England: a fourth at Cirencester in Gloucesters.h.i.+re, by Thomas Ruthall, Bishop of Durham: a fifth at Roulston in Staffords.h.i.+re, by Dr. Robert Sherborne, bishop of St. David's, predecessor to Dr. Colet in the deanery of St. Paul's: a sixth at Kingston-upon-Hull, by John Alc.o.c.k, Bishop of Ely: a seventh at Sutton Colfield in Warwicks.h.i.+re, by Dr. Simon Harman (_alias_ Veysey), bishop of Exeter: an eighth at Farnworth in Lancas.h.i.+re, by Dr. William Smith, Bishop of Lincoln, born there: a ninth at Appleby in Westmoreland, by Stephen Langton, bishop of Winchester: a tenth at Ipswich in Suffolk by cardinal Wolsey: another at Wymbourn in Dorsets.h.i.+re, by Margaret, countess of Richmond: another at Wolverhampton in Staffords.h.i.+re, by Sir Stephen Jennings, mayor of London: another at Macclesfield, by Sir John Percival, mayor of London: as also another by the lady Thomasine his wife at St.

Mary Wike in Devons.h.i.+re, where she was born: and another at Walthamstow in Ess.e.x by George Monnox, mayor of London, 1515: besides several other schools in other parts of the kingdom."

Knight concludes by saying that "the piety and charity of Protestants ran so fast in this channel, that in the next age there wanted rather a regulation of grammar schools than an increase of them."

George Lily, son of the grammarian and schoolmaster, and canon of St.

Paul's, refers doubtless to these benefactions when, in his _Chronicle_, he speaks of the encouragement of learning by the princes and n.o.bility of England, and goes on to say that their good example was followed by Dr.

John Colet, ... "who about this time (1510) erected a public school in London of an elegant structure, and endowed it with a large estate, for teaching gratis the sons of his fellow-citizens for ever."

The foundation was for one hundred and seventy-three scholars--a number selected in remembrance of the miracle of the fishes.

III. Colet drew up, or had drawn up, for the regulation of his new school the subjoined Rules and Orders, to be read to the parents before their children were admitted, and to be accepted by them:--

"If youre chylde can rede and wryte Latyn and Englyshe suffycyently, so that he be able to rede and wryte his own lessons, then he shal be admitted into the schole for a scholar.

"If youre chylde, after reasonable reason proved, be founde here unapte and unable to lernynge, than ye warned therof shal take hym awaye, that he occupye not oure rowme in vayne.

"If he be apt to lerne, ye shal be contente that he continue here tyl he have competent literature.

"If he absente vi dayes, and in that mean seeson ye shew not cause reasonable, (resonable cause is only sekenes) than his rowme to be voyde, without he be admitted agayne, and pay iiijd.

"Also after cause shewed, if he contenewe to absente tyl the weke of admyssion in the next quarter, and then ye shew not the contenuance of the sekenes, then his rowme to be voyde, and he none of the schole tyl he be admytted agayne, and paye iiijd. for wryting his name.

"Also if he fall thryse into absence, he shal be admytted no more.

"Your chylde shal, on Chyldermas daye, wayte vpon the boy byshop at Powles, and offer there.

"Also ye shal fynde him waxe in winter.

"Also ye shal fynde him convenyent bokes to his lernynge.

"If the offerer be content with these articles, than let his childe be admytted."

The founder of St. Paul's, in his statutes, 1518, prescribed what Latin authors he would have read in the school. He recites, in the first place, the Latin version by Erasmus of his _Precepts_ and the _Copia Verborum_ of the same Dutch scholar. He then proceeds to enumerate some of the early Christian writers, whose piety was superior to their Latinity, Lactantius, Prudentius, and others. But while he does not say that Virgil, Cicero, Sall.u.s.t, and Terence are to be used, he utterly eschews and forbids such cla.s.sics as Juvenal and Persius, whom he evidently indicates when he speaks of "Laten adulterate which ignorant, blinde foles brought into this worlde, and with the same hath dystained and poysonyd the olde Laten speche and the veray Romayne tongue which in the tyme of Tully and Sal.u.s.t, and Virgill, and Terence, was usid,"--which is so far reasonable from his standard; but he adds incongruously enough: "whiche also sainte Jerome, and sainte Ambrose, and saint Austen, and many holy doctors lernid in theyre tymes." Whereby we are left at liberty to infer that these holy doctors were on a par with Virgil and Sall.u.s.t, Cicero and Terence.

What sort of Latin would be current now if all the great writers had perished, and we had had only the works of the Fathers as text-books? We all have pretty similar beginnings, as the _prima stamina_ of a man and any other vertebrate are said to be undistinguishable to a certain point; and as St. Jerome learned his accidence of Donatus, so Virgil got his rudiments. But much as we owe to St. Jerome, it was a mischievous error to adopt him or such authors as Lactantius in a public school, where the real object was to instil a knowledge of the Latin language in its integrity and purity. It was a mischievous error, and it was, at the same time, a perfectly natural one. We are not to blame Colet and his coadjutors for having been so narrow and so bia.s.sed; but it must always be a matter of regret and surprise that St. Paul's, and all our other training inst.i.tutions, public and proprietary, should, down to the present era, have been under the sway and management of men whose intellectual vision was as contracted and oblique as that of Colet, without the excuse which it is so easy to find for him.

The rules for St. Paul's, which are set out at large by Knight, were unquestionably of a very austere character, though in harmony with the feeling of the time; and Knight, in his Life of the founder, ascribes the apparent harshness of the discipline enforced under his direction to the laudable motive of preparing boys for the troubles of the world, and inuring them to hards.h.i.+p. But Erasmus was not on the side of the martinets. For he explicitly condemns an undeserving strictness of discipline, which made no allowance for the difference in the tempers of boys; and another point with which he quarrelled was the horse-in-a-mill system and the way of learning by rote, which had begun to find favour both in his own country and with us.

It is vain, however, to expect that there should have been many converts to such a man's opinions on educational questions at that period. Even in the small circle of his English friends and correspondents there was a wide diversity of sentiment. Sir Thomas More might agree with him mainly; but, on the other hand, Colet was clerical in his leaning and Spartan in his notions of scholastic life; and he deemed it good, as I have above said, to work on the tenderness of youth before it acquired corruption or prejudice, that "the new wine of Christ might be put into new bottles."

IV. There can be no desire to deprive Colet of any portion of the honour which we owe to him for promoting the cause of education in London; but it would at the same time be an error to conclude that the good Dean was the first who established a school in the metropolis. The foundation which he established about 1510 consolidated and centralised the system, which down to that time had been weakly and loosely organised. Hear what Knight says:--

"The state of schools in London before Dean Colet's foundation was to this effect: the Chancellor of Paul's (as in all the ancient cathedral churches) was master of the schools (_magister scholarum_), having the direction and government of literature, not only within the church, but within the whole city, so that all the masters and teachers of grammar depended on him, and were subject to him; particularly he was to find a fit master for the school of St. Paul, and present him to the Dean and Chapter, and then to give him possession, and at his own cost and charges to repair the houses and buildings belonging to the school. This master of the grammar school was to be a sober, honest man, of good and laudable learning.... He was in all intents the true vice-chancellor of the church, and was sometimes so called; and this was the original meaning of chancellors and vice-chancellors in the two universities or great schools of the kingdom."

The same writer traces back St. Paul's school to Henry the First's reign, when the Bishop of London granted the schoolmaster for the time being a residence in the bell-tower, and bestowed on him the custody of the library of the church. A successor of this person had the monopoly of teaching school in London conferred on him by the Bishop of Winchester, saving the rights only of the schoolmasters of St. Mary-le-Bow and St.

Martin-le-Grand.

The old cathedral school, which that of Colet doubtless gradually extinguished, lay to the south of his, and appears curiously enough not to have occupied the bas.e.m.e.nt, but to have been, as we should say, on the first floor, four shops being beneath it. It was close to Watling Street.

A pa.s.sage in the _Monumenta Franciscana_ shews that the site of Colet's original school, which perished in the Great Fire, had been in the possession of bookbinders, and in the immediate neighbourhood was the sign of the Black Eagle, which, as we learn from doc.u.mentary testimony, was still there in 1550.

At the epoch to which I am referring, the vocation of a bookbinder was, I think, invariably joined with that of a printer, and I apprehend that these shops formed part of a printing establishment.

The _Black Eagle_ was an emporium for the sale of books, and it is to be recollected that in early days, where the typographical part was done in some more or less unfrequented quarter of the city, it was a common practice to have the volume on sale in a more public thoroughfare.

St. Paul's Churchyard, in the days of Colet and in the infancy of his valuable endowment, was beyond question not only a place of great resort, but a favourite seat of the booksellers. For in the imprint to an edition of the _Hours of the Virgin_, printed at Paris, the copies are said to be on sale at London "apud bibliopolas in cimiterio sancti Pauli 1514;" and of this fact I could readily bring forward numerous other evidences.

Besides the vendors of literature, however, the site soon became one of the places of settlement of the teachers of languages, to whom the immediate proximity of St. Paul's served as an useful introduction and advertis.e.m.e.nt; and in the time of Elizabeth a French school was established here, for the benefit of the general public, of course, but more especially, doubtless, with a view to such Paulines as might desire an extension of their studies.

VIII.

Thomas Linacre prepares his Rudiments of Latin Grammar for the use of the Princess Mary (1522)--Probably the earliest digest of the kind--Cardinal Wolsey's edition of Lily's Grammar for the use of Ipswich School (1529)--Inquiry into the priority of the Ipswich and St. Paul's Grammars--First National Primer (1540)--Lily's _Short Introduction of Grammar_ (1548)--Its re-issue by Queen Elizabeth (1566-7)--Some account of its contents--Its failure.

I. Thomas Linacre, physician to four successive sovereigns and tutor to the Princess Mary, is understood to have prepared for the service of his august pupil certain Rudiments of Grammar, doubtless in Latin, at the same time that Giles Du Wes or Dewes wrote for her his _Introductory_ to the French language. The biographer of Dean Colet informs his readers that the production of Linacre was translated into Latin by George Buchanan for Gilbert, Earl of Ca.s.silis, whose studies he directed; but the book as printed is in that language, and bears no indication of a second hand in it. The undertaking, however, was deemed by Queen Catherine too obscure, and Ludovicus Vives was accordingly engaged to draw up something more simple and intelligible, which was the origin of his little book _De ratione studii puerilis_, where, from delicacy, he made a point of commending the labours of Linacre and the abridgment of the _Rudiments_ by Erasmus.

The volume, edited by Linacre about 1522, appears, anyhow, to be ent.i.tled to rank as the earliest effort in the way of a grammatical digest; and, apart from its special destination, it was calculated to supply a want, and to find patrons beyond the range of the court.

Except its utilisation by Buchanan for Lord Ca.s.silis, we hear little or nothing of it, nevertheless, after its original publication by the royal printer. Perhaps it did not compete successfully with the editions of Lily, as they received from time to time improvements at the hands of professional experts, and united within certain limits the advantages of consolidation and completeness. The prestige of Lily had grown considerable, and in the case of a technical book it has always been difficult or impossible for an amateur to hold his ground against a specialist.