Schools
The earliest schools in England were held in the monasteries,
and were intended for boys and young men who were to be trained
as priests, missionaries, or monks. There were famous schools at
Canterbury, York, and Jarrow in the seventh and eighth centuries.
In King Alfred's time, at the end of the ninth century, great
attention was paid to the teaching of both boys and girls. Later
still, in the tenth century, we find the teaching of the young
attracting great attention.
Latin was taught in these schools, and many of the scholars
became famous students and deep thinkers. In the course of time
others, besides those intending to become monks and priests, were
also taught, and became clerks and found various employments, as
we have seen, in civil business.
Gradually other schools sprang up, outside the monasteries and
cathedrals, which were not meant for monks or priests, though
they were at first connected with monasteries, colleges, and
cathedrals. For instance, in Norman times, not very long after
the Conquest, there were grammar-schools at Derby, St. Alban's,
and Bury St. Edmund's.
When we think of these schools we must not picture to ourselves
great buildings to hold two or three hundred boys, such as
we see now; nor must we suppose that there was a great rush
of pupils to them. Boys did not go to school from nine till
twelve, and from two till four, with plenty of time for cricket,
football, and sports of all descriptions. School work was very
hard, and was regarded as a serious business. There was a great
deal of learning by heart to be done. You see, books were few
and costly, and a man's best reference library was his own
well-stored memory. No doubt this hard work helped to train the
memory, and was good discipline for the scholar.
In the monasteries and colleges, where boys were trained to sing
in the choir, they had to learn their services by heart; for
books were not provided for them--a book was much too valuable in
days when they were all written by hand, and when printing first
came into use they were still far too costly for ordinary monks
and choir-boys to have one apiece, or even enough for several
to "look over". In the ordinary services there were long psalms
and passages of Scripture attached to them which differed for
every day, and the boys had to know these perfectly in Latin. For
hours and hours every day the little fellows were drilled in the
services till they were word-perfect. There were something like
seven services to be learned for each of the three hundred and
sixty-five days of the year.
We talk of Latin nowadays as a dead language, but it was anything
but a dead language in the Middle Ages. School was held all day
long from quite early in the morning; and during school-hours woe
betide the lads if they talked in any other language but Latin.
Choir-boys had to be taught in the song-school as well, how to
sing their services, and the music was just as difficult as the
words and had also to be learned by heart.
In the parish churches the priest and the parish clerk had boys
whom they trained to help in the services. The services were much
simpler and shorter than those in the monasteries; but they were
in Latin, and had to be known by heart.
In the grammar and other schools the boys were drilled in the
works of old Latin scholars in much the same way, and in
some cases in Greek authors as well, with a certain amount of
arithmetic and science.
[Illustration: _A School, Fourteenth Century_
_From an illuminated manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford._]
There were no long weeks of holidays to look forward to at
Christmas, Easter, Whitsuntide, and in the summer; but during
the year there were many holy days kept, which were holidays, on
which neither schoolboys nor villeins did their ordinary work.
Thus, no doubt, schoolboys managed to get a fair amount of play,
and found time for getting into mischief.
For instance, at St. Alban's we read that in the year 1310 the
boys were forbidden to wander or run about the streets and roads
without reasonable cause. If a lad did so, he was to be sought
for and punished by the master "in the accustomed way"; and every
boy knows what that was. Then, too, the scholars must not bear
arms, either in school or out of school. That was to prevent them
from fighting with the townspeople. It is very curious to notice
that even nowadays there is often no love lost between "grammar
boys" and "town boys"; they can get up a quarrel almost as easily
in the twentieth century as they did in the thirteenth. It shows
itself whenever there happens to be a heavy fall of snow, and
sometimes tempers get "lost, or mislaid".
Boys took part in acting the earliest plays that were represented
in England. At first the plays dealt with religious subjects,
and were called "Mysteries" and "Miracles"; and these plays and
shows became very popular in England. Geoffrey de Gorham, in
early Norman days, taught a school at Dunstable, and wrote one of
these plays called St. Catherine. He borrowed vestments from St.
Alban's Abbey, in which to dress some of his characters; but on
the following night his house somehow caught fire, and his books
and the borrowed vestments were destroyed in the flames.
In the cloisters of some of our old cathedral churches and
colleges, such as Gloucester and Westminster, on some of the old
stone benches, there are holes and scratches still to be seen
where schoolboys of long ago played games with marbles and stones.
By the thirteenth century there seem to have been schools in
all the chief towns. Though they may not have held very many
scholars, they were not intended for the sons of well-to-do
people only; they were for poor scholars as well. Thus, at St.
Alban's, provision was made for sixteen poor scholars, and the
same kind of provision was quite common. There was some chance,
even in those days, for a lad with "brains" to get on in the
world. In fact, we know that in those Middle Ages a good many
men rose "from the ranks" to hold high office in the state.
There was, for instance, Thomas à Becket. He was born in London,
and not ashamed to be known as Thomas of London. Then there was
Thomas Scot, who rose to be Archbishop of York and Chancellor
of England in the fifteenth century, who was known as Thomas
of Rotherham, after the place where he was born. William of
Wykeham, that great founder of schools, is still known by the
name of the little out-of-the-way Hampshire village where he
was born--Wykeham. Winchester College, the first of our public
schools, was founded by him. His real surname was Longe, and the
motto he chose--"Manners Makyth Man"--is worth putting up in
every school in the land. We need to live up to that motto as
much in these days as ever.
But there were dunces in those days too, who made little or no
use of their opportunities, and others who turned them to bad
purposes, even as there are in this twentieth century.
[Illustration: _Part of Winchester College, built in 1692_]