Cranmer received his early education from a parish-clerk. This may seem
singular, for he was of gentle blood, and was entered at Cambridge
amongst "the better sort of students." But probably such shifts were not
unusual before the Reformation. The monasteries indeed had schools
attached to them in many instances. In Elizabeth's time a complaint is
made by the Speaker of the Commons, that the number of such places of
education had been reduced by a hundred, in consequence of the
suppression of the religious houses. Still it must often have happened
(thickly scattered as the monasteries were) that the child lived at an
inconvenient distance from any one of them; mothers, too, might not have
liked to trust less robust children to the clumsy care of a fraternity;
and probably little was learned in these academies after all. Erasmus
makes himself merry with the studies pursued in them; and it is
remarkable that no sooner did the love of learning revive, than the
popularity of the monasteries declined. For thirty years before the
Reformation, there were few or no new religious foundations, whilst
schools, on the other hand, began to multiply in their stead; a fact
which sufficiently marks the state of public opinion with regard to the
monasteries as places of education--for education began now to be the
desire of the day. Schools, therefore, in the present acceptation of the
term, in Cranmer's boyhood there were scarcely any; and it was the
crying want of them in London that induced Dean Colet to establish that
of St. Paul's, which, under the fostering care of Lily, the first
master, not only became so distinguished in itself, but set the example,
and prepared the way, by its rules and its grammar, for so many others
which followed in its wake. Edward VI.; with the natural feeling of a
boy fond of knowledge, and himself a proficient for his years, was aware
of the evil, and projected the remedy. Colet might be his model--but he
was embarrassed in his means by courtiers, who were for ever uttering
the cry of the horse-leech's daughters; and, besides, his days were soon
numbered. Cranmer, who perhaps remembered the obstacles in his own way,
and who certainly foresaw the great calamity of an ignorant clergy,
pressed for the establishment of a school in connexion with every
cathedral--a school, as it were, of the prophets--where boys intended
for holy orders might be brought up suitably to the profession they were
about to adopt, and where the bishops might ever find persons duly
qualified to serve God in the church. But Cranmer was overruled, and a
measure, which might have helped to catch up the church before it fell
into that abyss of ignorance which seems to have immediately succeeded
the Reformation, (the natural consequence of a season of convulsion and
violence,) was unhappily lost. It was not till the reign of Elizabeth
that the evil was at all adequately met, nor fully indeed then, as the
deficiency of well-endowed schools at this day testifies. Still much was
at that time done. The dignitaries and more wealthy ecclesiastics of the
reformed Church bestirred themselves and founded some schools. Many
tradesmen, who had accumulated fortunes in London, (then the almost
exclusive province of commercial enterprise,) retired in their later
years to the country-town which had given them birth, and gratefully
provided for the better education of their neighbours, by furnishing it
with a grammar-school. And even the honest yeoman, a person who then
appears to have appreciated learning, and often to have brought up his
boy to the church, united in the same praiseworthy object. In such cases
application was usually made to the Queen for a charter, which was
granted with or without pecuniary assistance on her own part; and
whoever will examine the dates of our foundation schools, will find a
great proportion of them erected in that glorious reign.
Thus it came to pass (to revert to our text), that Cranmer was sent to
college in his fourteenth year, Oxford and Cambridge being at that time
the substitutes for the schools which have succeeded them, and being
considered the two great national receptacles for all the boys in the
country. There they were subjected to corporal punishment. The statutes
were framed with a reference to the habits of mere boys; it is
forbidden, for instance, in one of the Cambridge statutes, to play
marbles on the senate-house steps; and the number of the students was so
enormous (still for the same reason), that Latimer, in one of his
sermons, speaks of a decrease in those of his own time, to the amount of
no less than ten thousand.--_Quarterly Review_.
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