The treatment of Lady Jane Grey by her parents was also very severe, as she told Ascham, though she took it meekly, as her sweet nature was:
“One of the greatest benefites that God ever gave me, is, that he sent me so sharpe and severe Parentes, and so jentle a scholemaster. For when I am in presence either of father or mother, whether I speake, kepe silence, sit, stand, or go, eate, drinke, be merie or sad, be sewyng, plaiyng, dauncing, or doing anie thing els, I must do it, as it were, in soch weight, mesure, and number, even so perfitelie as God made the world, or els I am so sharplie taunted, so cruellie threatened; yea presentlie some tymes, with pinches, nippes, and bobbes, and other waies which I will not name for the honor I beare them, so without measure misordered, that I thinke my self in hell till tyme cum that I must go to M. Elmer, who teacheth me so jentlie, so pleasantlie, with soch faire allurementes to learning, that I thinke all the tyme nothing whiles I am with him. And when I am called from him, I fall on weeping.” —The Scholemaster, ed. Mayor.
The inordinate beating[13] of boys by schoolmasters—whom he
calls in different places ‘sharp, fond, & lewd’[14]—Ascham denounces strongly in the first book of his Scholemaster, and he contrasts their folly in beating into their scholars the hatred of learning with the practice of the wise riders who by gentle allurements breed them up in the love of riding. Indeed, the origin of his book was Sir Wm. Cecil’s saying to him “I have strange news brought me this morning, that divers scholars of Eton be run away from the school for fear of beating.”
Sir Peter Carew, says Mr Froude, being rather a troublesome boy, was chained in the Haccombe dog-kennel till he ran away from it.
But to return to the training of young men in nobles’ houses. I take the following from Fiddes’s Appendix to his Life of Wolsey:
John de Athon, upon the Constitutions of Othobon, tit. 23, in respect to the Goods of such who dyed intestate, and upon the Word Barones, has the following Passage concerning Grodsted Bishop of Lincoln[15] (who died 9th Oct., 1253),—
BP. GROSSETETE TAUGHT NOBLES’ SONS.
“Robert surnamed Grodsted of holy memory, late Bishop of Lincoln, when King Henry asked him, as if in wonder, where he learnt the Nurture in which he had instructed the sons of nobles (&) peers of the Realm, whom he kept about him as pages (domisellos[16]),—since he was not descended from a noble lineage, but from humble (parents)—is said to have answered fearlessly, ‘In the house or guest-chambers
of greater kings than the King of England’; because he had learnt from understanding the scriptures the manner of life of David, Solomon, & other Kings[15].”