young as 12. The universities provided a broad-based education in the
classics, logic and rhetoric, history, theology, and modern languages
for gentlemen and gave a homogenous national culture to the ruling
class. There was a humanist ideal of a gentleman scholar. The method of
study was based largely on lectures and disputations. Each fellow had
about five students to tutor. In many cases, he took charge of the
finances of his students, paying his bills to tradesmen and the college.
His reimbursement by the students' fathers put them into friendly
contact with the family. The students slept in trundle beds around his
bed and had an adjacent room for study. Aristotle, whose authority was
paramount, remained the lynch pin of university studies, especially for
logic and dialectic. The study of rhetoric was based on Quintilian, the
Latin writer, and the Greek treatise of Hermogenes of Tarsus. Also
studied was Cicero's orations as models of style. Examination for
degrees was by disputation over a thesis of the student. The B.A. degree
was given after four years of study, and the M.A. after three more.
There were advanced degrees in civil law, which required seven more
years of study, medicine, seven years, divinity, more than seven years,
and music. Many of the men who continued for advanced degrees became
fellows and took part in the teaching. Most fellowships were restricted
to clerics. Oxford and Cambridge Universities operated under a tutorial
system. Access to grammar schools and universities was closed to girls
of whatever class. Oxford University now had the Bodleian Library. In
the universities, there were three types of students: poor scholars, who
received scholarships and also performed various kinds of service such
as kitchen work and did errands for fellows such as carrying water and
waiting on tables; commoners, who paid low fees and were often the sons
of economical gentlemen or businessmen; and the Fellow Commoners, a
privileged and well-to-do minority, usually sons of noblemen or great
country gentlemen. The Fellow Commoners paid high fees, had large rooms,
sometimes had a personal tutor or servant, and had the right to eat with
the Fellows at High Table. Here, gentlemen made friends with their
social equals from all over the country. Students wore new- fashioned
gowns of many colors and colored stockings. They put on stage plays in
Latin and English. The students played at running, jumping, and pitching
the bar, and at the forbidden swimming and football. They were not to
have irreligious books or dogs. Cards and dice could be played only at
Christmas time. Students still drank, swore, and rioted, but they were
disallowed from going into town without special permission. Those below
a B.A. had to be accompanied by a tutor or an M.A. They were forbidden
from taverns, boxing matches, dances, cock fights, and loitering in the
street or market. Sometimes a disputation between two colleges turned
into a street brawl. Punishment was by flogging. Each university had a
chancellor, usually a great nobleman or statesman, who represented the
university in dealings with the government and initiated policies. The
vice-chancellor was appointed for a year from the group of heads of
college. He looked out for the government of halls, enforced the rules
of the university, kept its courts, licensed wine shops, and shared
control of the town with the mayor.
Tutors were common. They resided at the boy's house or took boys to
board with them at their houses in England or on the continent. The
tutor sometimes accompanied his student to grammar school or university.
Puritans frequently sent their sons to board in the house of some
Frenchman or Swiss Protestant to learn the Calvinist doctrines or on
tour with a tutor. Certain halls in the universities were predominately
Puritan. Catholics were required to have their children taught in a home
of a Protestant, a relative if possible.
The Inns of Court were known as "the third university". It served the
profession of law, and was a training ground for the sons of nobility
and the gentry and for those entering the service of the commonwealth.
The Inns were self-governing and ruled by custom. Students were to live
within the Inn, two to a room, but often there were not enough rooms, so
some students lived outside the quadrangles. Every student was supposed
to partake of Commons or meals for a certain fraction of the year - from
eight weeks to three months and there to argue issues in cases brought
up by their seniors. In hall the students were not allowed to wear hats,
though caps were permitted, nor were they to appear booted or spurred or
carrying swords. For the first two years, they would read and talk much
of the law, and were called Clerks Commoners. After two years they
became Mootmen or Inner Barristers. In five or six years they might be
selected to be called to the bar as Utter Barristers, whose number was
fixed. There was no formal examination. The Utter Barrister spent at
least three more years performing exercises and assisting in directing
the studies of the younger men. After this time, he could plead in the
general courts at Westminster, but usually carried on law work in the
offices of other men and prepared cases for them. Participating in moots
(practice courts) was an important part of their education. Lectures on
statutes and their histories were given by Readers.
Physicians were licensed by universities, by the local bishop, or in
London, by the College of Physicians and Surgeons. Most were university
graduates, and because of the expense of the education, from well-to-do
families. For the B.A., they emphasized Greek. For the M.A., they
studied the works of Greek physicians Galen and Hippocrates, Roman
physician Claudius, and perhaps some medieval authorities. After the
M.A., they listened to lectures by the Regius Professor of Medicine and
saw a few dissections. Three years of study gave them a M.B., and four
more years beyond this the M.D. degree. A physician's examination of a
patient cost 10s. The physician asked about his symptoms and feelings of
pain, looked at his eyes, looked at his body for spots indicative of
certain diseases, guessed whether he had a fever, felt his pulse, and
examined his urine and stool. There were no laboratory tests. Smallpox
was quickly recognized. Wrapping red cloth around the person and
covering the windows with red cloth being promoted healing without
scarring. Gout was frequent. Syphilis was common in London and other
large centers, especially in Court circles. It was ameliorated by
mercury. An imbalance of the four humors: blood, phlegm, choler, bile
was redressed by bloodletting, searing, draining, and/or purging. Heart
trouble was not easily diagnosed and cancer was not recognized as a
life-threatening disease. Childbirth was attended by physicians if the
patient was well-to-do or the case was serious. Otherwise women were
attended only by midwives. They often died in childbirth, many in their
twenties.
A visit by a physician cost 13s.4d. Melancholia, which made one always
fearful and full of dread, and mania, which made one think he could do
supernatural things, were considered to be types of madness different
from infirmities of the body. Despite a belief held by some that
anatomical investigation of the human body was a sin against the holy
ghost, physicians were allowed to dissect corpses. So there were anatomy
textbooks and anatomy was related to surgery. Barber-surgeons extracted
teeth and performed surgery. The white and red striped barber pole
initially indicated a place of surgery; The red represented blood and
the white bandages.
The theory of nutrition was still based on the four humors and
deficiency diseases were not understood as such. Physician William
Harvey, son of a yeoman, discovered the circulation of the blood from
heart to lungs to heart to body about 1617. He had studied anatomy at
Padua on the continent and received an M.D. there and later at
Cambridge. Then he accepted a position at the hospital of St.
Bartholomew to treat the poor who came there at least once a week for a
year. He agreed to give the poor full benefit of his knowledge, to
prescribe only such medicines as should do the poor good without regard
to the pecuniary interest of the apothecary accompanying him, to take no
reward from patients, and to render account for any negligence on his
part. He also dissected animals. One day he noted when stroking downward
on the back of one hand with the finger of the other, that a vein seemed
to disappear, but that it reappeared when he released his finger. He
surmised that there was a valve preventing the blood's immediate
return to the vein. Then he ascertained that the heart was a pump that
caused pulses, which had been thought to be caused by throbbing of the
veins. He tied the arteries and found that the arterial blood flowed
away from the heart. He tied the veins and found that venal blood flowed
into the heart. He found that the blood flowed from the lungs to the
left side of the heart, and from thence was pumped out to the body.
Blood also flowed from the body to the right side of the heart, from
which it was pumped to the lungs. The two contractions closely followed
one another, rather than occurring at the same time. The valves in the
veins prevented backflow. It was now clear why all the blood could be
drained away by a single opening in a vein. It was also clear why a
tight ligature, which blocked the arteries, made a limb bloodless and
pale and why a looser ligature, which pressed only on the veins, made a
limb swell turgid with blood. Multiplying an estimate of the amount of
blood per beat with the number of beats, he concluded that the amount of
blood did not change as it circulated. He concluded that the only
purpose of the heart was to circulate the blood. This diminished the
religious concept that the heart was the seat of the soul and that blood
had a spiritual significance and was sacred.
The physicians turned surgery over to the surgeons, who received a
charter in 1605 by which barbers were excluded from all surgical work
except bloodletting and the drawing of teeth. Surgeons dealt with skin
disease, ulcers, hernia, bladder stones, and broken bones, which they
had some skill in setting. They performed amputations, which were
without antiseptics or anesthesia. Internal operations usually resulted
in death. Caesarian section was attempted, but did not save the life of
the mother. Apprenticeship was the route to becoming a surgeon. A
College of Surgeons was founded. Students learned anatomy, for which
they received the corpses of four executed felons a year.
The apothecaries and grocers received a charter in 1607, but in 1618,
the apothecaries were given the sole right to purchase and sell potions,
and to search the shops of grocers and stop the sale by them of any
potions. In London, the apothecaries were looked over by the College of
Physicians to see that they were not selling evil potions or poisons. In
1618 was the first pharmacy book.
There were three hospitals in London, two for the poor, and Bedlam
[Bethlehem] Hospital for the insane. Others were treated at home or in
the physician's home.
Theaters were shut down in times of plague to prevent spread of disease
there. Towndwellers who could afford it left to live in the country.
Shakespeare wrote most of his plays in this period. Most popular
reading was still Bibles, prayer books, psalm books, and devotional
works. Also popular were almanacs, which started with a single sheet of
paper. An almanac usually had a calendar; information on fairs, roads,
and posts; farming hints; popularized scientific knowledge; historical
information; sensational news; astrological predictions; and later,
social, political, and religious comment. Many households had an
almanac. Books tried to reconcile religion and science as well as
religion and passion or sensuality. Walter Ralegh's "History of the
World", written while he was in prison, was popular. Ben Johnson wrote
poetry and satiric comedies. Gentlemen read books of manners such as
James Cleland's "Institution of a Young Noble Man" (1607). In 1622, the
first regular weekly newspaper was started.
Although there was a large advance in the quality of boys' education
and in literacy, the great majority of the people were unable to read
fluently. Since writing was taught after one could read fluently,
literacy was indicated by the ability to sign one's name. Almost all
gentlemen and professional men were literate. About half the yeomen and
tradesmen and craftsmen were. Only about 15% of husbandmen, laborers,
servants, and women were literate.
The Elizabethan love of madrigal playing gradually gave way to a taste
for instrumental music, including organs and flutes. The violin was
introduced and popular with all classes. Ballads were sung, such as
"Barbary Allen", about a young man who died for love of her, after which
she died of sorrow. When they were buried next to each other, a rose
from his grave grew around a briar from her grave. The ballad "Geordie"
relates a story of a man hanged for stealing and selling sixteen of the
king's royal deer. The ballad "Matty Groves" is about a great Lord's
fair young bride seducing a lad, who was then killed by the Lord. In the
ballad "Henry Martin", the youngest man of three brothers is chosen by
lot to turn pirate to support his brothers. When his pirate ship tries
to take a merchant ship, there is sea fight in which the merchant ship
sinks and her men drown. The ballad "The Trees They Do Grow High" tells
of an arranged marriage between a 24 year old woman and the 14 year old
son of a great lord. She tied blue ribbons on his head when he went to
college to let the maidens know that he was married. But he died at age
16, after having sired a son.
May Day was a holiday with dancing around a Maypole and people dressed
up as characters such as Queen of the May, Robin Hood, Little John,
Friar Tuck, Maid Marion, the fool, and the piper. New Year's Day was
changed to January 1st.
Golf was played in Scotland, and James introduced it into England.
James I was the last monarch to engage in falconry.
Francis Bacon wrote the "Advancement of Learning" and "Novum Organum"
(New Learning) in which he encouraged the use of the inductive method to
find out scientific truths and also truths in general, that is reasoning
from a sample to the whole. According to him, the only way to arrive at
the truth was to observe and determine the correlations of facts. He
advocated a process of elimination of hypothesized ideas. First,
experiments were made, then general conclusions were drawn from them,
and then these generalizations were tested in further experiments. His
"New Learning" showed the way out of the scholastic method and reverence
for dogma into the experimental method. He wrote "Natural and
Experimental History". He studied the effect of cold in preventing
animal putrefaction.
By this time, what was known about mathematics included fractional
exponents, trigonometry in terms of arcs of angles, long division,
square root symbol, decimal fractions, methods for solving cubic
equations, trigonometry in terms of ratios of sides of a right triangle,
equal sign, plus and minus signs, and a consistent theory of imaginary
numbers.
John Napier, a large Calvinist landholder in Scotland who had built his
own castle, did mathematics in his older years. He explored imaginary
numbers, which involve square roots of negative numbers. By 1614, he had
started and developed the theory of logarithms: the relationships among
positive and negative exponents of numbers. This simplified calculations
because the multiplication and division of numbers with a common base
could be done by addition and subtraction of their exponents. His table
of logarithms, which took him twenty years to compile, was used in
trigonometry, navigation, and astronomy. It reduced the enormous labor
involved in trigonometric calculations. In 1622, Willliam Oughtred
invented the slide rule for calculations.
Galileo Galilei was a professor of mathematics at the University of
Padua in Italy and was later a protege of the powerful Medici family. He
conducted experiments, e.g. throwing objects off the tower of Pisa in
1590 to show that all, whether light or heavy, fall at the same rate.
This disproved the widely held belief that heavier objects fall faster
than light objects. He reasoned by induction from experiments that the
force of gravity has the same effect on all objects regardless of their
size or weight. His law stated that the speed of their descent increases
uniformly with the time of the fall, i.e. speed [velocity] = gravity's
acceleration multiplied by time. This was a pioneering mathematization
of a physical phenomenon.
From his observation that an object sliding along a plane travels
increasingly farther and slows down at a decreasing rate as the surfaces
become smoother and more lubricated, he opined that the natural state of
a body in motion is to stay in motion, and that it is slowed down by a
resistant force, which he called "friction". He conceived of the air
giving a frictional force to an object moving through the air. From his
experiments showing that a rolling ball rolls up a plane farther the
lesser the slope of the plane, he intuited that if the plane were
horizontal, the ball would never stop rolling except for friction. He
opined that bodies that are at rest stay at rest and bodies that are in
motion stay in uniform motion ("inertia"), unless and until acted
upon by some force. This was a radical departure from Aristotle's theory
that any horizontal motion requires a prime mover. Galileo drew a graph
of distance versus time for the rolling ball, which indicated that the
distance traveled was proportional to the square of the time elapsed.
He put his ideas of vertical and horizontal motion together to explain
the movement of projectiles, which travel horizontally, but also fall
downward vertically. He realized that the movement of a projectile
involved a horizontal impetus of projection and a vertical force of
gravity, each being independent of the other, but acting simultaneously,
instead of sequentially. He demonstrated that a projectile follows the
path of a parabola, instead of a straight line, and that it descends a
vertical distance which is proportional to the square of the time taken
to fall. That is, a thrown object will strike the ground in the same
amount of time as an object simply dropped from the same height. This
suggested that gravity was a constant force.
Galilieo described mathematically the motion of a lever such as a
seesaw in which the weight on one side multiplied by its distance from
the fulcrum is equal to the weight on the other side multiplied by its
distance from the fulcrum.
Galileo determined that a pendulum, such as a hanging lamp, swings back
and forth in equal intervals of time. He measured this time with water
running through a tube; the weight of the water was proportional to the
time elapsed. Also, pendulums with equal cord length swing at the same
rate, regardless of the substance, weight, or shape of the material at
the end. So a pendulum could be a mechanical clock. Galileo knew that
ice floated on water because ice is less dense and therefore lighter
than water. It had formerly been thought that ice was heavier than
water, but floated on water because of its shape, especially broad,
flat-bottomed pieces of ice.
The telescope was invented in 1608. The next year, Galileo built a
greatly improved telescope to observe bodies in the skies. He observed
that the spots on the moon had shifting illumination and that the moon's
perimeter had a jagged outline. From this he deduced that the surface of
the moon had mountains, valleys, and craters much like the earth, and
was illuminated by reflected light. He noticed that the planet Jupiter
had moons orbiting it in a manner similar to the orbit of the Earth's
moon. He observed that when the planet Venus was very small it had a
round shape and when it was very large, and therefore nearer the earth,
it had a crescent shape. Also, Venus progressed through periodic phases
of increasingly wide crescent shapes in a manner similar to the phases
of crescent shapes of the Earth's moon. He realized that these features
of Venus could be explained only if Venus revolved around the sun,
rather than around the earth. This finding added credence to the
Copernican theory that the earth and all planets revolve around the sun.
But church doctrine that the sun revolved around the earth was supported
by the Biblical story of God making the sun stand still to give
additional sunlight on a certain day so a certain task could be
completed that day. Galileo argued against a literal interpretation of
the Bible, so he was denounced by the church. His finding of sunspots on
the sun conflicted with church doctrine that the celestial bodies such
as the sun were perfect and unblemished. His observation that certain
sun spots were on certain locations of the sun, but changed location
over time, suggested that the sun might be rotating. He observed that
when air was withdrawn by a suction pump from the top of a long glass
tube whose lower open end was submerged in a pan of water, the water
rose to a height of 34 feet and no higher. This result indicated that
the evacuated space above the water was a vacuum: an empty space. The
notion of a vacuum, a space where there is nothing or void, was
difficult for philosophers to accept. They believed that nature abhored
a vacuum and would prevent it. About 1600, Galileo invented the first
thermometer by heating air at the top of a tube whose open end was in a
bowl of water; as the top end cooled, the air contracted and water rose
part way up the tube; the column of water rose or fell with every change
of temperature. Galileo invented the compound refracting microscope,
which used more than one lens, about 1612.
Galileo's book on the arguments for and against the Copernican theory
was unexpectedly popular when published in 1632. The general public was
so persuaded by the arguments that the earth revolved around the sun
that Papal authority felt threatened. So Galileo was tried and convicted
of heresy and sentenced to house arrest as an example to others who
might question church doctrine, even though the seventy year old Galileo
recanted and some of the inquisition judges who convicted him believed
the Copernican theory and their decision did not assert the contrary.
Johannes Kepler was a mathematician from Germany who made his living as
an astrologer. He was in contact with Galileo by letter, as most
scientists of Europe were with each other. Kepler was fascinated with
perfect geometric shapes, which he tried to relate to celestial
phenomenon. He discerned that the orbit of Mars was not perfectly
circular. He knew that the apparent path of the sun with respect to the
constellation of fixed stars differed in speed at different times of the
year. He opined that this showed that the speed of the earth revolving
around the sun varied according to the time of year. Then he measured
the angles between the earth and the sun and the earth and Mars as they
changed through the Martian year. He noted when the earth, Mars, and the
Sun were on the same straight line. Then he deduced the earth's true
orbit, and from this the true orbits of the other planets. Then by trial
and error, he attempted to match this empirical data with regular
mathematically defined shapes, until he discovered in 1609 that these
paths were elliptical. Also, the planets each move faster when they are
nearer the sun and more slowly when they are farther from the sun so
that in equal time intervals, a line from the planet to the sun will
sweep out equal areas. This observation led him to opine that there is a
force between the sun and each planet, and that this force is the same
as that which keeps the moon in its orbit around the earth. Thirdly, in
1619, he found that the square of the time for each planet's orbit about
the sun is proportional to the cube of that planet's mean distance from
the sun, so that the farther planets orbit at a slower speed. He
connected the earth's tides with the gravitational pull of the moon.
Kepler also confirmed that the paths of comets were governed by a law
and were farther from the earth than the moon. This contradicted the
church's explanation that what lies within the moon's orbit pertains to
the earth and is essentially transitory and evil, while what lies beyond
belongs to the heavens and is permanent and pure.