Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T05:58:44.246Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

22 - Schools and school-books

from III - THE LAY READER

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

Get access

Summary

Between the introduction of literacy to England in 597 and the beginning of the fifteenth century, 800 years elapsed. During this period, a rich variety of schools grew up all over the kingdom. Religious houses were the earliest centres of education, and in 1400 there were still many schools in monasteries, friaries, cathedrals, collegiate churches and nunneries. Some were for adult novices, and others for children who lived in the communities as altar-boys, choristers, or wealthy pupils being brought up by an abbot or abbess. By the time of King Alfred, schooling had spread to the royal household, and in 1400 training was still provided there for noble wards and boy choristers, as it was in the great noble households which modelled themselves on the King’s. In the tenth century, Church legislators had urged the parish clergy to teach boys and, while this task was never universally observed, some clergy gave instruction to single pupils or small groups in the fifteenth century, to enhance their income or provide themselves with assistants. From a very early date, too, there must have been informal teaching by one literate person of another: parent to child, merchant to apprentice, senior clerk to junior learner.

Schools open to the public may also have originated in Saxon times and certainly existed by the late eleventh century. They were particularly to be found in towns, where a master could gather enough pupils to live off their fees, and from boarding them too if they came from a distance. At Þrst such schools were often personal ventures and easily came to grief, but by 1400 they had frequently gained stability through the emergence of a local patron (bishop, monastery or lord of the manor) who appointed new masters when necessary. They often acquired their own buildings, books and scholarships Ð resources which also promoted continuity.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Allen, P. S., Allen, H. M. and Garrod, H. W. (eds.), Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, 12 vols., Oxford 1906–58, , C. G. 1954The sources of Lily’s Latin grammar’, The Library. Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 5th ser., 9.Google Scholar
Aston, M. 1984 Lollards and reformers: images and literacy in late medieval religion, London.
Barclay, A. 1874 The Ship of fools, ed. Jamieson, T. H., 2 vols., Edinburgh and London.
Bonaventure, Brother 1961The teaching of Latin in later medieval England’, Medieval Stud., 23.Google Scholar
Breeze, A. and Glomski, J. 1991An early British treatise upon education: Leonard Cox’s De erudienda iuventute (1526)’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, 40.Google Scholar
Brewer, J. S. et al. (eds.), Letters and papers, foreign and domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII, 22 vols. in 38, London 1864–1932.
Brodie, A. R. 1974Anwykyll’s Vulgaria’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 75.Google Scholar
Bühler, C. F. (ed.) 1941 The Dicts and sayings of the philosophers. The translations made by Stephen Scrope, William Worcester and an anonymous translator, Early English Text Society Original Series 211, London.
Conway, W. M. 1884 The woodcutters of the Netherlands in the fifteenth century, Cambridge.
Emden, A. B., A biographical register of the University of Oxford to 1500, 3 vols., Oxford 1957–9.
Flynn, V. J. 1943The grammatical writings of William Lily, ?1468–?1523’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 37.Google Scholar
Garton, C. 1980A fifteenth-century headmaster’s library’, Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, 15.Google Scholar
Gwosdek, H. 1991 Early printed editions of the Long Accidence and Short Accidence grammars, Heidelberg.
Gwosdek, H. 1993Subject matter and its arrangement in the Accedence manuscripts and in the early printed Long Accidence and Short Accidence Grammars’, Leeds Stud. in English, n.s., 24.Google Scholar
Gwosdek, H. 1994A new fragment of the early printed Long Accidence grammar’, Bulletin of the John Rylands (University) Library, 76.Google Scholar
Hands, Rachel (ed.) 1975 English hunting and hawking in the Boke of St Albans, facsim., London.
Hatcher, J. 1977 Plague, population and the English economy 1348–1530, London.
Hellinga, L. 1982 Caxton in focus: the beginning of printing in England, London.
Hunt, T. 1991 Teaching and learning Latin in thirteenth-century England, 3 vols., Woodbridge.
Jackson, W. A. 1936A London bookseller’s ledger of 1535’, Colophon n.s., 1.Google Scholar
Law, V. 1982 The insular Latin grammarians, Woodbridge.
Leach, A.F. 1911 Educational charters and documents, 598–1909, Cambridge.
Leedham-Green, E. S., Rhodes, D. E. and Stubbings, F. H. (eds.) 1992 Garrett Godfrey’s accounts, c. 1527–1533, Cambridge Bibliographical Society Monograph 12, Cambridge.
Lloyd, A. H. 1934 The early history of Christ’s College Cambridge, Cambridge.
Lydgate, J. 1989–90 Table manners for children, ed. and trans. Orme, N., Salisbury and London.
(Madan, ); and ‘Notes on the former edition’, Oxford Historical Society 16 (= Collectanea, 2nd ser.), 1890 (Bradshaw, ).Google Scholar
Madan, F. and Bradshaw, H. (eds.) 1885–90The Day-Book of John Dorne, bookseller in Oxford A. D. 1520’, Oxford Historical Society 5 (= Collectanea, 1st ser.), 1885, and ‘Corrections and additions ….Google Scholar
Miner, J. N. T. 1990 The grammar schools of medieval England, Montreal and Kingston.
Moran, J. A. Hoeppner 1985 The growth of English schooling 1340–1548, Princeton NJ.
Nelson, W. (ed.) 1956 A fifteenth-century school book from a ms. in the British Museum (ms. Arundel 249), Oxford.
Nicholls, J. W. 1985 The matter of courtesy, Woodbridge.
Offord, M. Y. (ed.) 1971 The book of the Knight of the Tower, translated by Caxton, William, Early English Text Society Supplementary Series 2, London.
Orme, N. 1973 English schools in the Middle Ages, London.
Orme, N. 1984 From childhood to chivalry: the education of the English kings and aristocracy 1066–1530, London.
Orme, N. 1988Martin Coeffin, the first Exeter publisher’, The Library. Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 6th ser., 10.Google Scholar
Orme, N. 1989 Education and society in medieval and Renaissance England, London and Ronceverte WV.
Orme, N. 1993Education in the Cornish play Beunans meriasek’, Cambridge Med. Celtic Stud., 20.Google Scholar
Orme, N. 1996John Holt (d. 1504), Tudor grammarian’, The Library. Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 6th ser., 18.Google Scholar
Schreiber, W. L. and Heitz, P. 1908 Die deutschen ‘Accipies’ und Magister cum discipulis–Holzschnitte als Hilfsmittel zur Inkunabel-Bestimmung, Studien zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte 100, Strasbourg.
Stevenson, W. H. 1911Nottingham University Library, Middleton MS Mi LM2’, in Stevenson, W. H. (ed.), HMC, Report on the mss of Lord Middleton, London.Google Scholar
Thomson, D. 1979 A descriptive catalogue of Middle English grammatical texts, New York and London.
Thomson, D. 1984 An edition of the Middle English grammatical texts, New York and London.
,Victoria History of the Counties of England, Lancaster, II, 1908.
Weiss, R. 1967 Humanism in England during the fifteenth century, 3rd edn, Medium Aevum Monographs 4, Oxford.Google Scholar
Wilkins, D. (ed.) 1737 Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, 446–1717, 4 vols., London.
Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S. 1981 The population history of England 1541–1871, London.

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×