4

MEDIEVAL SCHOOL-BOOKS.

weigh little or nothing against the aggregated labours of the Church seems unanswerable. In so far as they weigh anything they may be regarded as the inevitable results of a sociological development without parallel in the history of religions.

Education in Saxon times.

2. The history of English education can scarcely be said to begin before the Black Death in the fourteenth century had swept the land'. It was not until the Plague had done its work that English was used and taught in the schools of this country. At least as late as the Norman Conquest Anglo-Saxon was the medium of education in most of the schools2. From the time

1 It is of course true that education in England existed, and existed in a highly organized form, before 1350. Mr A. F. Leach, in the chronological list of schools attached to his English Schools at the Reformation 1546-8, names eleven secondary schools that existed before 1066, two more schools belonging to the eleventh century, two schools of the twelfth century or earlier, four schools of the thirteenth century, and twelve or thirteen schools of the fourteenth century in existence before 1350. This list is admittedly not an exhaustive list of schools of this early date but it includes the Beverley School referred to in this chapter.

2 Elfric the Grammarian, Abbot of Evesham, who flourished at the beginning of the eleventh century, produced a Latin-Anglo-Saxon grammar (founded on the grammars of Donatus and Priscian) and glossary and reading-book or colloquy. These books were designed by the author for the use of the youth of England (see Preface by Elfric to his Grammar edited by W. Somner with the Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum, Oxford, 1659). This grammar, glossary and colloquy seem to have been the original sources of the Latin-English dialogue-grammars which were in use in the century succeeding the introduction of English into the grammar schools. A Latin-English elementary grammar with examples in English and Latin, belonging, apparently, to the reign of Edward IV. (1461-1483), was found among old papers at Losely House, Surrey (The Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 19, N.S. p. 473). This is probably a fair example of a fifteenth century school-book. The period between Elfric's glossary and this grammar can be filled up. A supplement to Elfric's glossary and another Anglo-Saxon-Latin vocabulary belonging to the eleventh century are extant. We have a semi-Saxon-Latin vocabulary of the twelfth century, and this was followed, as we might expect, by an Anglo-Norman school-book. The treatise de Utensilibus of Alexander Neckam, who died in 1217, is a school-book or vocabulary in Latin with a gloss in Anglo-Norman with English words occasionally occurring. The book deals fully with the details of everyday life. To the mid-thirteenth century may be referred a short vocabulary

THE INFLUENCE OF THEODORE AND ADRIAN. 5

of the Conquest to the middle of the fourteenth century the Anglo-Norman dialect was used as a medium of education in the grammar schools of England. This fact was in accordance with the policy of our Norman conquerors and of the Latin ecclesiastics who played so important a part in moulding the laws and modifying the territorial and feudal system of the country.

Yet the dim beginnings of State intervention in English education are to be found far back in Saxon times. So far away as the dark and restless days of King Alfred the Great we find that that remarkable man had seen that in education lay the chief cure for the ills of his people. Alfred found that the unrest and desolation produced by the incursions of the Danes had destroyed all scholarship in England The island had already lived through and forgotten its first period of learning. Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, came to England in 596, and seventy-two years later (668) the Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus and the Abbot Adrian brought the means and methods of education. "Through their influence all the larger and better monasteries were converted into schools of learning'." The schools founded

of the names of plants, where the explanation of the Latin names are given both in Anglo-Norman and English. The decline of the AngloNorman dialect seems now to have begun. At the end of the thirteenth century appeared a remarkable little work written by Walter de Bibelesworth at the request of the Lady Dionysia de Monchensy of Swanscombe in Kent. The object of the book was to teach French to children of noble birth. It was written in Anglo-Norman with an interlinear gloss in Latin. At this date, therefore, Anglo-Norman had ceased to be a form of native speech. A metrical Latin-English vocabulary may almost certainly be referred to the fourteenth century, while in the fifteenth century we get a nominale and a pictorial Latin-English vocabulary. By that date AngloNorman as a tongue was dead. The text of these vocabularies is given in Mayer's Library of National Antiquities (volume of vocabularies), edited by Thomas Wright, 1857. According to M. J. Vising (Étude sur le dialecte Anglo-Normand du xiie siècle: Upsala, 1882), neither AngloNorman nor any of its sub-dialects ever became a really popular tongue, though a considerable and interesting literature survives.

1 Hook's Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, vol. 1. p. 163.

6

Education before the reign of Alfred.

mean order

BEDE AND ALCUIN.

at Canterbury in connexion with the monastery of St Peter were particularly notable. Here Aldhelm and John of Beverley, the instructor of the Venerable Bede, were educated. The learning introduced by Theodore and Adrian was of no Bede tells us that in 732 there were still living disciples of those 'teachers who knew the Latin and Greek tongues as well as their native language'. Bede not only taught in the monastery school at Jarrow, but wrote also little treatises on the seven liberal arts for use in schools, including a Latin Grammar or glossary. The use of Latin had become, comparatively speaking, common. Bede calls it the vernacular.' "The Creed and the Our Father I have myself translated into English for the benefit of those priests who are not familiar with the vernacular2."

For a period England seems to have been the centre of European learning. Alcuin (735-800) could boast of the learned men and the noble libraries of England3. Charlemagne could seek to introduce into his empire the scholarship of England. But this sudden burst of culture died away almost as swiftly as it arose. The sloth of the priesthood, the unrest of the land, the red ruin of the Dane, killed it South to North, and when Alfred came all that was left were some stray vestiges of scholarship in far Northumbria. There was a time," says Alfred in the introduction to his translation of Gregory's Cura Pastoralis, "when people came to this island for instruction, now we must get it from abroad if we want it....There were very few on this side Humber who could so much as translate the Church Service or an ordinary Latin letter into English, and not many on the other

1 Hist. Eccles. Lib. IV. c. ii. "Iudicio est quod usque hodie supersunt de eorum discipulis, qui Latinam Graecamque linguam aeque ut propriam, in qua nati sunt, norunt."

2 See Dean Stubbs's article on 'Bede' in God's Englishmen, pp. 31-57 (published by the S.P.C.K.: London, 1887).

3 Alc. op. I. pp. 52, 53.

ALFRED THE FIRST GREAT NATIONAL EDUCATIONALIST.

Policy of Alfred.

7

side'." Alfred saw the necessity of initiating a policy of education. Mr J. R. Green quotes for us Alfred's desire "that every youth now in England that is free-born and has wealth enough, be set to learn, as long as he is not fit for any other occupation, till they know well how to read English writing; and let them be afterwards taught in the Latin tongue, who are to continue learning, and to be promoted to a higher rank"." Here was a definite State policy. Education was not to be restricted to the priesthood. It was to be almost a national concern: not quite national, for the freeman only was to benefit. The claim of the serf to education had to wait another four centuries for a hearing. That Alfred was the first great national educationalist cannot be doubted. The education of Englishmen at home and abroad was in his judgment a matter of the first importance. In the year 884 he induced Pope Marinus to free the Saxon school in Rome from tribute. He founded and endowed with an eighth of his revenues an important school for children of his nobility. Certain various readings of Asser's Life of Alfred assert that this school was intended for the children of the noble and the ignoble alike—a fact of importance that clashes with the statement in the Preface to the Pastoral.' We are also told by an eighteenth century historian on the authority of an 'Abbas Rievallensis' that Alfred "made a law, obliging all freeholders who possessed two hides of land, or upwards, to send their sons to school, and give them a liberal education." The abbot referred to is clearly Ethelred of Rievaulx (1109-1166), the historical writer. The life of Alfred in his De genealogia regum Anglorum does not seem to confirm the passage, but in any event the abbot is no authority on the times of King Alfred.

5

6

1 See Saintsbury's Short History of English Literature, pp. 24-5. 2 Conquest of England, p. 160. Pref. to 'Pastoral' (ed. Sweet). 3 "Asserius de rebus gestis Ælfredi; " printed in Monumenta Historica Britannica, 1848, see p. 484. 4 loc. cit., p. 496.

5 See Henry's History of Great Britain (1774), vol. II. p. 356.

6 Printed in Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores X., ed. by Twysden, 1652.

8

LAWS AND CANONS OF ETHELSTAN AND EDGAR.

Saxon Educational

3. The first reference to education after this apocryphal law is a passage in the laws of King Ethelstan which appears to be the keynote of the whole subsequent doctrine of Benefit of Clergy. The date of these laws is circa 926 A.D. "And if a

Canons and
Laws.

scholar made such proficiency in learning, as that he obtained orders, and ministered to Christ, he was thought worthy of that dignity and protection that belonged thereto, unless he incurred a forfeiture of his function, and might not exercise it'." It will be noticed that in this passage the acquisition of letters qualified a man for the priesthood and for the status which afterwards became the privilegium clericale. The historical evolution of the idea of Benefit of Clergy will be dealt with later. It is important here to note the early date at which the conception was incorporated in our laws. In the year 960 A.D. we find, by canons made in the reign of King Edgar that the education of the people, as a means chiefly for strengthening the Church, was regarded both in its primary and in its technical aspect as a desirable thing. Canon LI. of that year is as follows: "And that the priest diligently instruct the youth, and dispose them to trades, that they may have a support to the Church." In this passage we seem to see a tentative effort by the Church to secure its position. The canon is not the voice of one speaking from an assured position but is the voice of one seeking such a position and determined to obtain it.

Education

fees.

In the same year (960 A.D.) we find that a question destined to become somewhat acute under the educational administration of Mr Robert Lowe nine hundred years later was sufficiently important to call for special legislation. By Canon x. of the reign of King Edgar 960 A.D. it is enacted: "that no priest receive a scholar without the leave of the other by whom

1 Johnson's Laws and Canons, vol. 1. p. 355.

2 lbid., p. 422.