In an advertisement of an English bookseller of the year 1737, one James Marshal of the Bible and Sun at Stockton are named Slate Pocket Books, Slates, and Slate Pens. The first slates were frameless, and had a hole pierced at one side on which a pencil could be hung, or by which they could be suspended around the neck. An old gentleman told me that he distinctly recalled the first time he ever saw slates in school. The master brought in a score that had been ordered to supply his pupils. He asked if any scholar had a bit of string. My old gentleman thrust his hand in his pocket and confidingly brought out his best fishing-line. The master took it, calmly cut it into twenty lengths, each long enough to go around the neck of a child and permit the slate when hung on it to lie loosely in front of his chest. It was a bitter blow to the boy to witness the cruel and unexpected severing of his beloved treasure, and he never forgot it.
Nathan Hale Schoolhouse
In England for centuries existed the custom of sending young children to the houses of friends, relatives, or people of some condition and state to be educated. Young boys were placed in noblemen's households to learn carving, singing, and good manners. Young girls went to learn housewifery, needlework, and etiquette. The work of these children in what would to-day be deemed the duties of upper servants was given in payment for their board and tuition. The housemistress gained a large corps of orderly, intelligent servitors; and there was no disgrace in that day in being called a servant. In the time of Henry VII. these customs were universal. The Italian Relation of England, of that date, is most severe upon English parents, saying this putting away of young children, though under the guise of having them taught good manners, was done really through lack of affection, through greediness. The Paston Letters, the Verney Papers, give ample proof that children of good families were thus banished.
A remnant of this custom of the "putting-forth" of children lingered in the colonies. A good education could generally be obtained only in the schools in larger towns, or in the households of learned men. The New England ministers almost universally eked out their meagre incomes by taking young lads into their homes to educate.
When at school in Andover, Josiah Quincy boarded with the minister. The boys, eight in number, slept in a large chamber with four beds, two boys in each. The fare was ample but simple; of beef, pork, plentiful vegetables, badly baked rye and Indian bread. The minister had white bread as the brown bread gave him the heart-burn.
Children went, if possible, to the house of a kinsman. An old letter in the Mather Papers is from Mary Hoar. She writes "To her Esteemed Sister, Mistris Bridget Hoar at Cambridge." One sentence runs thus:—
"I presume our sonn John is left in the hands of a stranger; which may be of some evel consequence if not timely prevented and therefore I doe look upon myself as conserned (soe far as I am capable to diserne ye evel at such a distance) to make my request to you to prevail with my brother to receive him into your own family that he may be under your own ey. And to goe to school in the same town, where you cannot doubtless be destitute of a good schoolmaster, which might be of singular benefit to ye child."
Bridget Hoar was the daughter of Lady Alice Lisle, the martyr, and the wife of Leonard Hoar, president of Harvard College.