CHAPTER VI. THE DAWN OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION IN PræReformation Elementary Education. ENGLAND. 45. THE obscurity that surrounds the early history of our national system of State-aided and State elementary education renders the subject one of considerable fascination, though its importance has to some extent been neglected amidst the larger educational issues of modern times. In this chapter it is necessary to indicate the beginnings of that vast system of education which has sprung from voluntary effort. In the case of England we do not appear to possess the same amount of definite information regarding elementary education in præ-Reformation times as is available with respect to Scotland. Side by side with Scottish grammar schools and schools for Latin there existed, as early as the twelfth century, lecture schools-elementary schools where English was taught. These schools were under the jurisdiction of the Church, and, as was decided in the case of a school in Glasgow in the year 1494', no one was allowed, without the express licence of the chancellor of the diocese, to instruct children in elementary subjects. These lecture schools were not in themselves of much value, but they formed a distinct and recognised class of schools; and this fact is in 1 See p. 115, supra. MEDIEVAL ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS. 185 itself important, despite the poor state of education in Scotland before the Reformation. In England elementary education from the earliest times was in the mind of the Church. As we have seen, canons made in the reign of King Edgar (960 A.D.), enjoined the priest that he should "diligently instruct the youth, and dispose them to trades'," and canons at the end of the twelfth century ordained the free licensing of schoolmasters. Obscure as the subject of elementary education before the Reformation appears to be, yet it is clear that there were four classes of elementary schools in England in the Middle Ages— namely, ABC schools, reading schools, reading and writing schools, and song schools of a "higher elementary type?." But, with the exception of the "song schools," it is difficult to trace any clearly defined type of elementary schools such as existed in Scotland. That there was such a class we need not doubt. The Digest for Schools and Charities for Education of 1842 names 168 endowed non-classical schools of unknown date; and, unreliable as that Digest is with respect to all endowments of early date, it may be suggested with some show of reason that these undated elementary endowed schools were in the bulk the residue of the "English" schools that survived the Reformation. We get a clear picture of a fourteenth-century elementary school in Geoffrey Chaucer's Prioresses Tale. The Prioress tells us of a "litel scole" where the children learned To this school "a litel clergeon, seven yeer of age❞—a chorister boy-went day by day and sat in the scole at his prymer,' learning his "litel book." As he conned his task he heard 1 See p. 8, supra. 2 See Mr A. F. Leach's English Grammar Schools at the Reformation, 3 See lines 36-105. p. 92. 186 GEOFFREY CHAUCER'S CLERGEON. the children singing the Alma Redemptoris Mater, but he understood not the Latin. He learnt part of Chaucer's schoolboys. the chant by rote, and then asked an elder scholar its meaning. His elder told him what he himself had been told as to the meaning, and added : "I can no more expounde in this matere; I lerne song, I can but smal grammere." So the little chorister determined to learn it all for himself before Christmas. "Though that I for my prymer shal be shent He soon sang it 'wel and boldely,' and "Twyes a day it passed thurgh his throte, To scoleward and homward whan he wente." The great poet's pen has made us almost see and hear it all. The story illuminates with a clear light the ages that we have been taught by eighteenth-century writers to regard as dark and barbarous. The little man of seven years toddling to school in the morning and home in the evening singing to himself the Alma Redemptoris Mater is a picture that shines through the mist of time with no uncertain message. The eighteenth century certainly has nothing as living and as hopeful to show us. The little clergeon's school was a school of the days of John de Trevisa, when England was awaking to independent thought and action. It was no mean dame school or pitifully farmed-out grammar school. It had its three grades the ABC school, or reading school; the song school, with its higher elementary teaching; the grammar school, where the boys were fitted for the Universities. It was the Reformation residue of these schools that carried both primary and secondary education into modern times. It must be remembered that the large majority of the grammar schools popularly attributed to the educational THE CONTINUITY OF ENGLISH EDUCATION. 187 activity of King Edward VI. were in fact schools that had existed before the suppression of the Chantries in 1547, and were continued by his Commissioners under new regulations and under new names. Consequently the educational system of the Reformation possesses true continuity with the educational system that existed before the Reformation; and it is not an exaggeration to suggest that many of the undated and some of the dated non-classical schools were really also revivals of non-classical elementary schools that existed before the suppression of religious houses in England. Among the Records of 1546 and 1548, with which Mr Leach deals in his English Schools at the Reformation, he finds1 23 song schools of the higher elementary type and 22 purely elementary schools. These 45 elementary schools certainly did not exhaust the number that existed at the Reformation; and the legislation of Richard II. in favour of elementary education for the villein, following his refusal to entertain a petition against such education, shows how widespread were elementary schools in medieval times. Early It will be useful to mention a few of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century elementary non-classical schools, taken from the Digest of Schools and Charities for Education, issued by the Commissioners for enquiring into charities in 1842. We have Sutton St Mary, Lincolnshire, 1492; Irby, Lincolnshire, 1503; Mickleton, Gloucestershire, 1513; Aymestry, Herefordshire, 1515; Kippax, Yorkshire, West Riding, 1549; Stevenage, Hertfordshire, 1552; Little Waltham, Essex, 1558; Cranbrook, Kent, 1573; Brailes, Warwickshire, 1581; Onibury, Salop, 1593; Gillingham, Dorsetshire (date unknown), regulated by the Commissioners for Charitable Uses in 1599; Littlebury, Essex, 1595; Marden, Herefordshire, 1609; Sherbourne, Dorsetshire, 1640; Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, 1643; Weobley, Herefordshire, 1653; Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, 1657. In the case 1 See pp. 91, 92. 188 MEDIEVAL FOUNDATIONS AND THE MODERN SYSTEM. of the Aymestry School the founder directed "the Sexton of the Parish to teach the School." The Clerk's School at Skipton (West Riding of Yorkshire), founded in 1556-7, supplied instruction in "spelling and reading the A B C, the Primer and Psalter in Latin." The Gillingham School may well have belonged to the præ-Reformation period. The names of many schools of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may be gleaned from this Digest or from the valuable digest of returns to the circular letter from the Select Committee on the education of the poor in 1818. The equation of unreliability in these reports will give an earlier date for most early schools, and is in favour of the contention that elementary education was widespread before the Reformation. It is of course quite possible that these endowed elementary schools did more harm than good to national education in the first sixty years of the nineteenth century, but they nevertheless represent an element that formed part of the basis of a national system, and they must be regarded as the English counterpart of the Scottish lecture schools. The number of early foundations compels the belief, indeed, that there was a widespread system of endowed elementary education in England before the Reformation. To these undoubted elementary schools must be added the large number of secondary schools that were perverted to primary uses-a practice that Lord Eldon, with a finer regard to law than equity, did his best to abolish. It must be remembered that all these endowed schools-primary and secondary alike-were under the control of the Church in practice if not in theory; for it is impossible to regard the position adopted by King Edward III. in 1344' with regard to the patronage of grammar schools as an effective protest against the allenveloping power of the Church in matters of education. In the year 1700 it was held by the Courts that a licence from the Bishop to keep school was necessary in the case of every 1 See pp. 16, 31, supra. |