Sir Thomas Bodley, in the account of his life written by himself in 1609, acquaints us with the fact that when his father was living at Geneva, the great centre of the Protestant refugees, and he was a boy of twelve, he was sufficiently advanced in learning, through his father’s care, to attend the lectures delivered at that University in Hebrew, Greek, and divinity, in which last his teachers were Calvin and Beza; and besides these studies he had private tutors in the house of the gentleman with whom he boarded, including Robertus Constantinus, the lexicographer, who read Homer to him. On the return of the Bodleys to England upon the accession of Elizabeth, the member of the family who was destined to immortalise their name was sent to Oxford.
Bishop Waynflete appears to have been among the earliest men who perceived the necessity, at all events, of grounding boys more thoroughly in grammar, and he was the prime mover in the establishment of schools at Waynflete, Brackley, and Oxford, where the Accidence and Syntax were taught on an improved plan. The last-named seminary was within the precincts of Magdalen College, and became by far the most important and most famous of the three, in consequence of its good fortune in having among its masters men like Anniquil and Stanbridge, who took a real interest in their profession, and bred scholars capable of diffusing and developing the love of acquiring knowledge and the art of communicating it.
As Knight observes, grammar was the main object; but then the method was a great advance on the old monastic plan. Even Jesus College, Cambridge, was merely erected and endowed for a master and six fellows, and a certain number of scholars to be instructed in grammar.
At the time of the Civil War, John Allibone, a Buckinghamshire man, and author of that rather well-known Latin description of the University as reformed by the Republicans in 1648, was head-master of Magdalen School.
In the English Ship of Fools, 1509, which is a good deal more than a translation, Barclay ridicules the archaic system of teaching, and Skelton does the same in his poetical satires. It was by the indefatigable exposure of the inefficiency and unsoundness of the prevailing modes of instruction that reforms were gradually conceded and accomplished. In all political and social movements the caricaturist plays his part.
It is not surprising to find Ascham in his turn, fifty years later on, taking exception to the school-teaching and teachers which had educated, and more or less satisfied, so many anterior generations.
We naturally encounter in much of the literary work of the seventeenth century advice and information in matters relating to scholastic and academical culture wholly unhelpful to an inquiry into the training of the middle class. In the section of a well-known book, entitled The Gentleman’s Calling, 8vo, 1660, dedicated to our immediate subject, the anonymous author observes: “Scarce any that owns the name of a Gentleman, but will commit his Son to the care of some Tutor, either at home or abroad, who at first instils those Rudiments, proper to their tenderer years, and as Age matures their parts, so advances his Lectures, till he have led them into those spacious fields of learning, which will afford them both Exercise and Delight. This is that Tree of Knowledge upon which there is no interdict....”
The preceding extract points to a sphere of life which was wont to conclude its preparatory stage with the Grand Tour and an initiation into the profligacy of all the capitals of Europe; but we see that it deals with a case in which a tutor took a youth almost, as it were, from his nurse’s apron-strings, and does not merely indicate a finishing course. The volume from which the passage comes has a promising title, and might have been intensely interesting and truly important; but it was written by some dry and pedantic scribbler, and, like Osborne’s Advice to a Son, 1656, and many other treatises of a cognate character, is a tissue of dulness and inanity. It is characteristic of the whole that portraits of Jeremiah and Zedekiah are selected as appropriate graphic embellishments.
From a woodcut on the back of the title-page of a Grammatica Initialis, or Elementary Grammar, 1509, we form a conclusion as to the ancient Continental method of instruction. This engraving portrays the interior of a school, apparently situated in a crypt; the master is seated at his desk with a book open before him, and above it a double inkstand and a pen, both of primitive fabric. The teacher is evidently reading aloud to his four scholars, who sit in front of him, a passage from the volume, and they repeat after him, parson-and-clerk-wise. They learn by rote. They have no books before them. They represent a stage in the teaching process before the science of reading from print or MS. had been acquired by the scholar, and copies of school-books were multiplied by the press. There was no preparation of work. The quarter wage included no charge for books supplied. The teaching was purely oral. So it was probably throughout. It was thus that Stanbridge, Whittinton, Lily, and their followers conducted their schools, long after the cradle at Magdalen had been reinforced by other seminaries all over the country.
There is no written record of this fashion of communicating information from the master to the pupil, so diametrically opposed to modern ideas, but conformable to an era of general illiteracy; it is a sister-art, which lends us a helping hand in this case by admitting us to what may be viewed as an interior coeval with Erasmus and More.