1406,-' of what state or condition that he be, shall be free to set their son or daughter to take learning at any school that pleaseth them within the realm." The text of this, the first Statute of Education, may fittingly here be given in the original Anglo-Norman: "Purveux toutesfoitz

The first Statute of Education, 1406.

q chun hōme ou feme de quele estate ou condicion qil soit, soit faunc de mettre son fitz ou file dapp'ndre lettereure a quelconq, escole q leur plest deinz le Roialme." This enactment is immediately followed by a provision as to the necessary value of lands of any person who would make his son or daughter apprentice to any craft within a city or borough.

Before passing on to the residue of the scanty material that is available for the history of general education in preReformation times we must glance once again at the form of the petition of 1391. To whom does it refer? It asks that education should be forbidden to the children of 'neif ou vileyn.' The word 'neif' is used by Sir William Blackstone in the sense of a female villein. One manuscript of Littleton's Tenures, however, uses the word 'neif' in the masculine with its feminine 'neife,' though commentators on Littleton of the eighteenth century defined the word 'neif' as the feminine of 'villein,' and Blount's Law Dictionary published in 1670 assumes the feminine meaning to be beyond doubt. If this meaning can be attached to the word, and the use of the phrase 'home ou feme' in the statute of 1406 is in favour of this meaning, it is probable that the expression 'neif ou vileyn' would refer to male and female villeins in gross in other words the Commons petition that all children of slaves should be forbidden education. This is the natural meaning of the petition, as by

Slaves and education.

the end of the fourteenth century the villeins regardant had

1 Stubbs's Constitutional History, vol. III. p. 607.

2 7 Hen. IV. c. 17.

3 Cf. Blount's Antient Tenures of Land, p. 143.

30

EDUCATION AND SOCIAL ECONOMY.

become copyholders and were not materially lower in the social scale than their freeholding neighbours, and since there existed specific manorial customs restricting the education of servile tenants; moreover a female villein regardant would have been an anomaly. If the word 'neif' is masculine, it would seem that the phrase 'neif ou vileyn' was intended to cover the whole unfree class the 'neif' representing the personal slave and the 'vileyn' the land slave.

National fear

of education.

The phrase 'de cy en avant' certainly suggests that the class aimed at had been receiving a measure of education. That education was 'Clergie'-a sufficient education to enable a villein to qualify for orders and to obtain without taking orders the Benefit of Clergy. Doubtless one inducement to the lower classes to obtain education immediately after the Black Death was the number of vacancies in parishes made by the pestilence, and another was the greater ease with which education could be acquired when English was substituted for French in the grammar schools. On the other hand the Commons at the end of the century, apart of the results altogether from the question of education, were anxious to check the further increase in the number of unbeneficed clergy and in the number of those whom the Bishops could claim as subject to ecclesiastical as opposed to common law jurisdiction. The Commons would naturally have felt that the rapid spread of education might have three effects, any one of which threatened the existing social order. The feudal system had been shattered by the centralisation of authority, and the education of the masses meant the dissolution of the existing system of land tenure. That was one consideration. Another consideration was the spread of Lollardy. A movement of such intense spiritual significance offered every attraction to the newly educated, and the Legislature must have realized the revolutionary possibilities of the first and nobler Reformation. But a third and even greater danger loomed before jealous English

CUSTOMS IN RESTRAINT OF EDUCATION.

31

patriots who hated beyond all other things the possibility of foreign intervention in English affairs. The fact that ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and therefore the jurisdiction of Rome, increased with the increase of popular education was a serious matter for the consideration of the patriotic baronage and knightage of England. The fear had been, indeed, felt by the Crown before the coming of the Black Death. In 1344 (17 Edward III.) a Prohibition, signed or issued by Sir Robert Parning, the Chancellor, was addressed to the officials of the See of Canterbury. This document prohibited the reference of any plea as to the presentation of masters to grammar schools to the Courts Christian or to anyone but the King'. The fear of Church control clearly lies behind this prohibition.

But there was a yet further reason for the general dread of education. Many manors, it would seem, had customs that restricted the education of servile tenants. Thus we find in the register, dated 1325, of the tenants' rents and services within the manor of Burcester in the county of Oxford a record of such a restriction. White Kennett, with respect to this custom, says: "Ad literaturam ponere, to put out children to school. Which liberty was denied to some parents who were servile tenants, without consent of the lord. So in the lands at Burcester, which were held in villanage from the prioress of Merkyate: Quilibet custumarius non debet filium suum ad literaturam ponere, neque filiam suam maritare sine licentia et voluntate priorissae....This Julian-like prohibition of educating sons to learning, was owing to this reason; for fear, the son being bred to letters might enter into religion, or sacred orders, and so stop or divert the services which he might otherwise do as heir or successor to his father2." Another custom of a similar nature is referred to in Blount's Law

1 Registrum Brevium, 4th ed. 1687, folio 35. See p. 16 supra.

2 Parochial Antiquities (1695), vol. 1. p. 575, vol. II. Glossary under the word 'literatura.' There was a similar custom in the manor of Clymeslond in Cornwall. See Blount's Antient Tenures, p. 108.

32

UNIVERSAL RIGHT TO EDUCATION.

Dictionary: "Coronare Filium. To make one's Son a Priest. Anciently Lords of Manors, whose Tenants held by Villenage, did prohibit them Coronare Filios, lest he should lose a Villain by their entring into Holy Orders. Inq. per H. Nott. tit. Brayles'." These customs are a strong additional explanation of the petition of 1391. They were not inconsistent with the law of the land or of the Church. By article.xvI. of the Articles of Clarendon (1164) it had been provided that "the sons of tenants in villainage, ought not to be ordained without consent of the lord on whose lands they were born." The various manorial customs merely gave to this law local em

Education

for bond and free.

phasis. The Crown swept them all away as unreasonable and dangerous, and the Act of 1406 placed the universal right of all, bond or free, to education on a firm and unalterable basis. Whatever might be the opinion of Pope or King, Parliament or feudal lord, men had attained the right to be educated. That fact, at least, was recognised in England five hundred years ago.

1 Custom in the manor of Brayles in the county of Warwick in the time of Edward I. See Blount's Antient Tenures, p. 20.

2 Johnson's Laws and Canons, vol. ii. p. 55.

CHAPTER II.

THE COMMON LAW OF EDUCATION.

The Lollards and Church Ccntrol.

10. THE education of the people was well in hand at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and the longer the question is studied the more clearly we see that the development synchronises with the break-down of the Norman monopoly of rights in the fourteenth century. In 1341' the infamous system of the presentment of Englishry, by which the murder of an Englishman was placed on a different legal basis to the murder of a Norman, was abolished. English and Norman were made equal in the eyes of the law. In 13622 pleas were directed to be pleaded in the courts of law in the English tongue, defended, answered, debated and judged in English and enrolled in Latin3: while, as we have seen, by 1385 English was universally used in the schools. Meanwhile the education which Parliament feared would increase the priesthood to the detriment of the nation was having far other effects. "The new damnable brand of Lollardy," to use Lord Thomas Arundel's polite phrase in his tenth Constitution of 1408, was making vast strides, and had infected England. So wide-spread had the Reformation

1 14 Edw. III. Stat. 1, c. 4.

2 36 Edw. III. c. 15.

3 The use of bastard French in legal proceedings lingered on till the time of the Commonwealth. By Act 37 of 1650 all Report books and other law books were ordered to be printed in the English tongue, and all writs, pleadings, patents, etc., and the records of all proceedings in all courts were ordered to be in English only. This Act and Act 4 of the following year provided for the translation into English of all law books and official legal documents. See Scobell's Acts of Parliament, 16401656, published 1658.