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“False fonde bookes, ballades and rimes”: An Aspect of Informal Education in Early Modern England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Kenneth Charlton
Kenneth Charlton*
Affiliation:
University of London, King's College
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Extract

At the Reformation the possibilities of the printed book as a means of educating members of the laity, young and adult alike, in their religious and political obligations, were quickly recognized by those in authority. But the state church soon found itself faced with the problem that perennially faces every educator who teaches his pupil a prescribed skill only to find it used for a purpose that is not approved. In this case authority faced a threefold problem. Armed with the skill of reading for itself, a literate laity would first of all be able to interpret what it read—and especially a vernacular Bible—in a possibly heterodox fashion. Secondly, it would now be able to read nonapproved productions of the printing press—and there were plenty of these. Thirdly and more importantly, it would be able to read such books and pass on such interpretations to the illiterate laity, the mass of the people, who hitherto had heard only the received word handed down by the clergy. The printing press had become, to some at least, a doubtful ally, even a political enemy. Margaret Spufford has already clearly demonstrated that there was a ready market for the wide range of “small books”—whether “godly” or “merry”—which printers were producing for a wide social spectrum of readers. Our concern here is with the negative nature of the response of those in authority to one part of that literature, “false fonde bookes, ballades and rimes,” a response which was to be found in all denominations of the Christian church, and put forward on both moral and political grounds, for layman and cleric alike saw such books as attacking the roots of social stability within a divinely ordained, hierarchical social structure.

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History of Education Quarterly , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , Winter 1987 , pp. 449 - 471
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 by the History of Education Society 

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