“That no man or woman, of whatsoever estate or condition they be, shall put their son or their daughter to serve as an apprentice, except he or she have land or rent to the value of 20 shillings by the year, and no man or woman shall receive an apprentice contrary to this ordinance, provided ... always that every man or woman of what estate or condition that he be, shall be free to set their son or daughter to take learning at any manner school that pleaseth them within the Realm.” (Statutes of the Realm.)
But by a limitation of meaning, the word “children” lost its ambiguity of sex, and privileges became limited to boys which our ancestors intended for girls and boys. This took place all the more rapidly in the sixteenth century. Reforms and reformations have always a tendency to be to the disadvantage of women.
The intellectual developments of England during the sixteenth century were moulded by three main streams of influence—that of the Italian Renaissance, which partially passed to us through France; that of the German and Swiss Reformation; and that of the rapid improvements in the art of printing. Social and political changes stimulated the national intellect to high fervours, and the literary spirit predominated. How much women shared in the general advance of culture is too frequently only a matter of inference, just as we may learn that a sheep, which we have not seen, has passed through a hedge by a fleece of wool caught on the branches. That many women had learned to read we may infer from the religious history of the time. We hear of women as amid those who flocked to buy the testaments of Tyndale and the great Bibles of Rogers; of women who suffered as heretics during the first half, and as recusants during the second half, of the century, doomed by the discovery of their books. And we know, on the other side, that Dr. John Hall, of Maidstone, in his “Court of Virtue,” reproached the gayer maidens of the country with reading wicked songs and romances, when they should have been reading the Scriptures. When the decisions of the foreign universities against King Henry’s marriage “were publyshed, all wyse men in the realme moche abhorred that marriage; but women and such as wer more wylful than wyse or learneyd spake against the Determinacion and sayde that the Universities were corrupt, and enticed so to doo,”[106] an opinion that many wise men have held since. How were they educated? Probably all mothers who knew taught their daughters, if only for the sake of acquiring medical and cookery receipts. Doubtless, all who were rich enough had tutors, and there is every reason to believe that any number of unrecorded Dame Schools flourished throughout the length and breadth of the land, where children of both sexes were taught the elements of reading from the Hornbook. (One lady who was admitted to the Guild of Boston in the early part of the century was described as a schoolmistress.) I have been fortunate enough to find corroboration of my opinion in the pages of a notable book on the education of boys, by Richard Mulcaster, First Master of the Merchant Taylors’ School, 1581. He says: “Seeing that I begin so low as the first elementary, wherein we see that young maidens be also ordinarily trained,” etc. That seems to imply primary education for many, if not for the mass of the people.
A still thicker veil hides us from the true state of their secondary education. The destruction of the convents involved the destruction of many opportunities of feminine culture. Fuller says of them: “They were the schools where the girls and maids of the neighbourhood were taught to read and work, and sometimes a little Latin was taught them, music, and Church History.”
Among the numerous schools founded or refounded in the century, the Collegiate schools seem always to have been reserved for boys, but we have no means of knowing whether the schools founded by private laymen for children were not originally intended for both sexes in England, as they always were in Scotland, at the Reformation. We know that Christ Church Hospital was so, and it is quite probable that many others have since drifted into the one-sided channel of masculine privilege. Stow includes in his list of “charitable men” the names of many women. The number of grants to schools and colleges is remarkable, and suggests sympathy with education, that might have extended to that of girls. He concludes: “Thus much for the worthiness of citizens, both men and women, in this citie.” I have not yet met an instance of a private foundation of a school expressly for girls, or even of one in which they were stated to have been included, until the next century. Then Lucy, daughter of Sir Henry Goodyere, niece of Drayton’s Warwickshire “Idea,” prevailed on her husband, Sir Francis Nethersole of Kent, to found a school in her native town of Polesworth, with “a liberal maintenance of a schoolmaster and schoolmistress, to teach the children of the parish, the boys to read and write English, the girls to read and to work with the needle.” Whether the founders were following an old custom, or whether they found that unprotected foundations were apt to lapse, their intention was preserved by cutting in stone over the doorways, associated with their coats of arms, the words “puerorum, puellarum” (Dugdale’s “Warwickshire” under “Polesworth”).
Whatever may be proved of foundations, I have always been convinced of the existence of voluntary secondary schools (see “L.L.L.,” iv, 2), and here again Richard Mulcaster supports my opinion. As master of a boys’ school, and professing only to write for them, he might well have passed over girls, but he did not. He devotes a whole chapter to the subject of their education. Seeing that some still doubted the wisdom of teaching them further than the elementary, he gives, as four good reasons for doing so:
First. Because it is the custom of my country.
Second. Because it is a duty which we owe to them, wherein we are charged in conscience not to leave them lame in that which is for them.
Third. Because of their own towardness, which God would never have given them had He meant them to remain idle.
Fourth. Because of the excellent effects in that sex when they have had the help of good bringing up.