TECHNICAL EDUCATION OF THE MASSES.
Some of my friends courteously but firmly have insisted with me that I have greatly exaggerated the technical abilities of the village workmen of the Middle Ages. That every town of less than ten thousand inhabitants in England was able to supply such workmen as we can scarcely obtain in our cities of a million inhabitants, and in that scanty population supply them in greater numbers than we can now secure them from our teeming populations, seems to many simply impossible.
What I have been trying to say, however, in the chapters on the Arts and Crafts and on Popular Education, has been much better said by an authority that will scarcely be questioned by my critics. The Rev. Augustus Jessopp, D. D., who has been for twenty years the Rector of Searning in England, who is an Honorary Fellow of St. John's College and of Worcester College, Oxford, besides being an Honorary Canon in the Cathedral of Norwich, has devoted much time and study to this question of how the cathedrals were built and finished. Twenty years of his life have been spent in the study of the old English parish and of parish life. He has studied the old parish registers, and talks, therefore, not from distant impressions, but from the actual facts as they are recorded. If to his position as an antiquarian authority I add the fact that he is not a member of the Roman Catholic Church, to the credit of which so much of this popular education and accomplishment in the arts and crafts of the century accrues, the value of his evidence is placed entirely above suspicion of partisan partiality. In his chapter on Parish Life in England, in his book "Before the Great Pillage" (Before the Great Pillage with other Miscellanies, by Augustus Jessopp, D. D., London. T. Fisher Unwin, Paternoster Square, 1901), he says:
"The evidence is abundant and positive, and is increasing upon us year by year, that the work done upon the fabrics of our churches, and the other work done in the beautifying of the interior of our churches, such as the woodcarving of our screens, the painting of the lovely [{470}] figures in the panels of those screens, the embroidery of the banners and vestments, the frescoes on the walls, the engraving of the monumental brasses, the stained glass in the windows, and all that vast aggregate of artistic achievements which existed in immense profusion in our village churches till the sixteenth century stripped them bare—all this was executed by local craftsmen. The evidence for this is accumulating upon us every year, as one antiquary after another succeeds in unearthing fragments of pre-Reformation church-wardens' accounts.
"We have actual contracts for church building and church repairing undertaken by village contractors. We have the cost of a rood screen paid to a village carpenter, of painting executed by local artists. We find the name of an artificer, described as aurifaber, or worker in gold and silver, living in a parish which could never have had five hundred inhabitants; we find the people in another place casting a new bell and making the mould for it themselves; we find the blacksmith of another place forging the iron work for the church door, or we get a payment entered for the carving of the bench ends in a little church five hundred years ago, which bench ends are to be seen in that church at the present moment. And we get fairly bewildered by the astonishing wealth of skill and artistic taste and aesthetic feeling which there must have been in this England of ours, in times which till lately we had assumed to be barbaric times. Bewildered, I say, because we cannot understand how it all came to a dead-stop in a single generation, not knowing that the frightful spoliation of our churches and other parish buildings, and the outrageous plunder of the parish gilds in the reign of Edward the Sixth by the horrible band of robbers that carried on their detestable work, effected such a hideous obliteration, such a clean sweep of the precious treasures that were dispersed in rich profusion over the whole land, that a dull despair of ever replacing what had been ruthlessly pillaged crushed the spirit of the whole nation, and art died out in rural England, and King Whitewash and Queen Ugliness ruled supreme for centuries."
My argument is that a century which produced such artist-artisans everywhere, had technical schools in great profusion, though they may not have been called by any such ambitious name.