The modern school-holidays appear to have been formerly unknown. In the rules for the management of St. Paul’s and Merchant Taylors’, for instance, where a vacation is called a remedy, no such indulgence was permitted save in cases of illness; and it is curious that in the account which Fitzstephen gives of the three seminaries already established in London in the reign of Henry II. the boys are represented as spending the holy days (rather than holidays) in logical or rhetorical exercises and disputations.
In all the public schools, indeed, holidays were at first intimately associated with the recurrence of saints’ anniversaries and with festivals of the Church, and were restricted to them. The modern vacation was not understood; and the first step toward it, and the earliest symptom of a revolt against the absence of any such intervals for diversion from studies and attendance at special services, was an appeal made in 1644 to the Court of the Company by the scholars of Merchant Taylors “for play-days instead of holy-days.”
The object of this petition was to procure a truce with work and an opportunity for exercise and sport, in lieu of a system under which the boys, from their point of view, merely substituted one kind of task for another; but the time had not yet arrived for reform in this matter; our elders clang tenaciously to the stern and monotonous routine which they found established, and in which they had been bred; and the feeling in favour of relaxing the tension by regular intervals of complete repose is an incidence of modern thought, which betrays a tendency at the present moment to gravitate too far to the opposite extreme.
A quite recent report of one of the great schools in the United States—the West Point School—manifests a survival of the old-fashioned ideas upon this subject, carried out by the Pilgrim Fathers to the American Plantations; and whereas in the mother country the original release from work in order to attend religious services has resolved itself into the latter-day vacation or holiday, the modern educational system beyond the Atlantic seems to withdraw the boys from the church, not in favour of the playground or the country, but as a means of lengthening the hours of study.
IV. Ingulphus, who lived in the reign of Edward the Confessor (A.D. 1041-66), furnishes us with the earliest actual testimony of a schoolboy’s experiences. “I was born,” he tells us, “in the beautiful city of London; educated in my tender years at Westminster: from whence I was afterwards sent to the Study of Oxford, where I made greater progress in the Aristotelian philosophy than many of my contemporaries, and became very well acquainted with the Rhetoric of Cicero.” It is very interesting to learn further that, when he was at school at Westminster, and used to visit his father at the Court of Edward, he was often examined, both on the Latin language and on logic, by the Queen herself.
Insights of this kind at so early a period are naturally rare, and indeed we have to cross over to the Tudor time and the infancy of Eton before we meet with another such personal trait on English ground.
Thomas Tusser, author of the Points of Good Husbandry, admits us in his metrical autobiography to an acquaintance with the severity of treatment which awaited pupils in his time at public schools, and which, in fact, lingered, as part of the gross and ignorant system, down to within the last generation. We have all heard of the renowned Dr. Busby; but that celebrated character was merely a type which has happened from special circumstances to be selected for commemoration. Tusser, describing his course of training, says:—
“From Paul’s I went, to Eton sent,
To learn straightways the Latin phrase;
Where fifty-three stripes given to me
At once I had.
For fault but small, or none at all,
It came to pass that beat I was:
See, Udall, see the mercy of thee
To me, poor lad!”
But this kind of experience was too common; and it had its advocates even outside the professional pale: for Lord Burleigh, as we learn from Ascham, was on the side of the disciplinarians.
Sir Richard Sackville, Ascham’s particular friend, on the contrary, bitterly deplored the hindrance and injury which he had suffered as a boy from the harshness of his teacher; and Udall himself carried his oppression so far as to offend his employers and procure his dismissal.