Influence of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More--Visits of the former to this
country--His friendship with Dean Colet--Establishment of various
schools in England--Foundation of St. Paul's by Colet--Statutes--Books
used in the school--Narrow lines--Notice of the old Cathedral School.
I. We must not attempt, in fact, to consider the educational question in
early England without studying very sedulously the Lives of Erasmus and
Colet by Samuel Knight. The influence of Erasmus on our scholastic
literature I believe to have been very great indeed. He came over to this
country, it appears, in 1497, and spent a good deal of time at Oxford,
where he acquired a knowledge of Greek. "While Erasmus remained at
Oxford," says his biographer, "he became very intimate with all those who
were of any Note for Learning; accounting them always his best friends,
by whom he was most profited in his studies. And as he owns M. Colet did
first engage him in the Study of Theology, so it is also well known that
he embraced the favourable Opportunity he now had of learning the Greek
Tongue, under the most Skilful Masters (viz.) William Grocyn, Thomas
Linacre, and William Latimer. Grocyn is said by one who lived about this
Time to have been the first Professor, or Publick Teacher of Greek in
Oxford to a full Assembly of Young Students."
Knight affords an interesting and tolerably copious account of Linacre, as
well as of Grocyn; and in connection with the former he relates an
anecdote, on the authority of Erasmus, about Bernard Andreas, tutor to
Prince Arthur, son of Henry VII. But I shall not enter into these matters,
as Linacre, though a great promoter of Greek authors, scarcely comes
within my plan. Yet I may mention that among the friends whom the learned
Hollander made here was Cuthbert Tunstall, afterwards Bishop of Durham,
and author of the first book on arithmetic published in this country, and
Richard Pace, who succeeded Colet in the Deanery of St. Paul's.
There is, however, a passage which I may be suffered to transcribe, where,
speaking of the time when Erasmus was contemplating a departure homeward,
Knight observes:--
"Before Erasmus left England, he laid the plan of his useful Tract _de
conscribendis epistolis_, for the Service, and at the Suggestion of his
noble Pupil the Lord William Montjoy, who had complained that there were
no good Rules, or Examples of that kind, to which he could conform
himself. Erasmus took the hint very kindly, and making his just
Reflections, upon the emptiness of Franciscus Niger, and Marius
Phalelfus,[2] whose Books upon that Argument were read in the common
Schools, he seems resolv'd at his first leisure, to give a New Essay of
that kind; and accordingly upon his first return to Paris he fell upon it,
and finished it within twenty Days."
So we see that, prior to the visit of Erasmus to us at the end of the
fifteenth century, there were already polite letter-writers current, and
current, too, as school-books. Erasmus came to the conclusion that he had
done his own work too hastily, and the appearance of an edition of it in
England about thirty years later, and likewise of a counterfeit, induced
him to revise the undertaking, which was finally published at Basle in
1545 in a volume with other analogous tracts by various writers.
A story which Knight relates about his author's literary enterprise in the
epistolary line is too amusing to be overlooked:--
"In that Essay of the way of writing Epistles, Erasmus had put in two
sorts of Declamations, one in the praise, the other in dispraise, of
Matrimony, and asking his young Pupil L{d.} Montjoy how he lik'd that of
the first sort. 'Oh sir,' says he, 'I like it so well, that you have made
me resolve to marry quickly.' 'Ay!' but says Erasmus, 'you have read only
one side, stay and read the other.' 'No,' replies L{d.} Montjoy, 'that
side pleases me; take you the other!'" The subject is an obvious one for
humorous controversy; but there is a similar idea in Rabelais, who makes
his two chief characters debate the advantages and drawbacks of wedlock.
Altogether, Erasmus must have done very much toward the advancement of a
taste for Hellenic culture in our country, and his biographer apprises us
that he exhorted the physicians of his time to study that language as more
necessary to their profession than to any other. Yet the knowledge of the
tongue was very sparingly diffused in England at and long after that time;
and Turner, in the dedication of his Herbal to Queen Elizabeth in 1568,
complains of the ignorance of the apothecaries of his day even of the
Latin names of the herbs which they employed in their pharmacopoeia. The
illustrious and erudite Dutchman did, doubtless, what he could, and made
several of the classics more familiar and intelligible by new editions,
with some of which he connected the names of English scholars and
prelates; but the time had not arrived for any general movement.
II. Knight, in his Life of Dean Colet, enumerates several of the schools
which were founded shortly before the Reformation. "This noble impulse of
Christian charity," says he, "in the founding of grammar schools, was one
of the providential ways and means for bringing about the blessed
reformation; and it is therefore observable, that, within thirty years
before it, there were more grammar schools erected and endowed in England
than had been in three hundred years preceding: one at Chichester by Dr.
Edward Scory, bishop of that see, who left a farther benefaction to it by
his last will, dated 8th December, 1502: another at Manchester by Hugh
Oldham, Bishop of Exeter, who died 1519: another at Binton in
Somersetshire, by Dr. Fitzjames, Bishop of London, and his brother, Sir
John Fitzjames, lord chief justice of England: a fourth at Cirencester in
Gloucestershire, by Thomas Ruthall, Bishop of Durham: a fifth at Roulston
in Staffordshire, by Dr. Robert Sherborne, bishop of St. David's,
predecessor to Dr. Colet in the deanery of St. Paul's: a sixth at
Kingston-upon-Hull, by John Alcock, Bishop of Ely: a seventh at Sutton
Colfield in Warwickshire, by Dr. Simon Harman (_alias_ Veysey), bishop of
Exeter: an eighth at Farnworth in Lancashire, by Dr. William Smith, Bishop
of Lincoln, born there: a ninth at Appleby in Westmoreland, by Stephen
Langton, bishop of Winchester: a tenth at Ipswich in Suffolk by cardinal
Wolsey: another at Wymbourn in Dorsetshire, by Margaret, countess of
Richmond: another at Wolverhampton in Staffordshire, by Sir Stephen
Jennings, mayor of London: another at Macclesfield, by Sir John Percival,
mayor of London: as also another by the lady Thomasine his wife at St.
Mary Wike in Devonshire, where she was born: and another at Walthamstow in
Essex by George Monnox, mayor of London, 1515: besides several other
schools in other parts of the kingdom."
Knight concludes by saying that "the piety and charity of Protestants ran
so fast in this channel, that in the next age there wanted rather a
regulation of grammar schools than an increase of them."
George Lily, son of the grammarian and schoolmaster, and canon of St.
Paul's, refers doubtless to these benefactions when, in his _Chronicle_,
he speaks of the encouragement of learning by the princes and nobility of
England, and goes on to say that their good example was followed by Dr.
John Colet, ... "who about this time (1510) erected a public school in
London of an elegant structure, and endowed it with a large estate, for
teaching gratis the sons of his fellow-citizens for ever."
The foundation was for one hundred and seventy-three scholars--a number
selected in remembrance of the miracle of the fishes.
III. Colet drew up, or had drawn up, for the regulation of his new school
the subjoined Rules and Orders, to be read to the parents before their
children were admitted, and to be accepted by them:--
"If youre chylde can rede and wryte Latyn and Englyshe suffycyently, so
that he be able to rede and wryte his own lessons, then he shal be
admitted into the schole for a scholar.
"If youre chylde, after reasonable reason proved, be founde here unapte
and unable to lernynge, than ye warned therof shal take hym awaye, that he
occupye not oure rowme in vayne.
"If he be apt to lerne, ye shal be contente that he continue here tyl he
have competent literature.
"If he absente vi dayes, and in that mean seeson ye shew not cause
reasonable, (resonable cause is only sekenes) than his rowme to be voyde,
without he be admitted agayne, and pay iiijd.
"Also after cause shewed, if he contenewe to absente tyl the weke of
admyssion in the next quarter, and then ye shew not the contenuance of the
sekenes, then his rowme to be voyde, and he none of the schole tyl he be
admytted agayne, and paye iiijd. for wryting his name.
"Also if he fall thryse into absence, he shal be admytted no more.
"Your chylde shal, on Chyldermas daye, wayte vpon the boy byshop at
Powles, and offer there.
"Also ye shal fynde him waxe in winter.
"Also ye shal fynde him convenyent bokes to his lernynge.
"If the offerer be content with these articles, than let his childe be
admytted."
The founder of St. Paul's, in his statutes, 1518, prescribed what Latin
authors he would have read in the school. He recites, in the first place,
the Latin version by Erasmus of his _Precepts_ and the _Copia Verborum_
of the same Dutch scholar. He then proceeds to enumerate some of the early
Christian writers, whose piety was superior to their Latinity, Lactantius,
Prudentius, and others. But while he does not say that Virgil, Cicero,
Sallust, and Terence are to be used, he utterly eschews and forbids such
classics as Juvenal and Persius, whom he evidently indicates when he
speaks of "Laten adulterate which ignorant, blinde foles brought into this
worlde, and with the same hath dystained and poysonyd the olde Laten
speche and the veray Romayne tongue which in the tyme of Tully and Salust,
and Virgill, and Terence, was usid,"--which is so far reasonable from his
standard; but he adds incongruously enough: "whiche also sainte Jerome,
and sainte Ambrose, and saint Austen, and many holy doctors lernid in
theyre tymes." Whereby we are left at liberty to infer that these holy
doctors were on a par with Virgil and Sallust, Cicero and Terence.
What sort of Latin would be current now if all the great writers had
perished, and we had had only the works of the Fathers as text-books? We
all have pretty similar beginnings, as the _prima stamina_ of a man and
any other vertebrate are said to be undistinguishable to a certain point;
and as St. Jerome learned his accidence of Donatus, so Virgil got his
rudiments. But much as we owe to St. Jerome, it was a mischievous error to
adopt him or such authors as Lactantius in a public school, where the real
object was to instil a knowledge of the Latin language in its integrity
and purity. It was a mischievous error, and it was, at the same time, a
perfectly natural one. We are not to blame Colet and his coadjutors for
having been so narrow and so biassed; but it must always be a matter of
regret and surprise that St. Paul's, and all our other training
institutions, public and proprietary, should, down to the present era,
have been under the sway and management of men whose intellectual vision
was as contracted and oblique as that of Colet, without the excuse which
it is so easy to find for him.
The rules for St. Paul's, which are set out at large by Knight, were
unquestionably of a very austere character, though in harmony with the
feeling of the time; and Knight, in his Life of the founder, ascribes the
apparent harshness of the discipline enforced under his direction to the
laudable motive of preparing boys for the troubles of the world, and
inuring them to hardship. But Erasmus was not on the side of the
martinets. For he explicitly condemns an undeserving strictness of
discipline, which made no allowance for the difference in the tempers of
boys; and another point with which he quarrelled was the horse-in-a-mill
system and the way of learning by rote, which had begun to find favour
both in his own country and with us.
It is vain, however, to expect that there should have been many converts
to such a man's opinions on educational questions at that period. Even in
the small circle of his English friends and correspondents there was a
wide diversity of sentiment. Sir Thomas More might agree with him mainly;
but, on the other hand, Colet was clerical in his leaning and Spartan in
his notions of scholastic life; and he deemed it good, as I have above
said, to work on the tenderness of youth before it acquired corruption or
prejudice, that "the new wine of Christ might be put into new bottles."
IV. There can be no desire to deprive Colet of any portion of the honour
which we owe to him for promoting the cause of education in London; but it
would at the same time be an error to conclude that the good Dean was the
first who established a school in the metropolis. The foundation which he
established about 1510 consolidated and centralised the system, which down
to that time had been weakly and loosely organised. Hear what Knight
says:--
"The state of schools in London before Dean Colet's foundation was to this
effect: the Chancellor of Paul's (as in all the ancient cathedral
churches) was master of the schools (_magister scholarum_), having the
direction and government of literature, not only within the church, but
within the whole city, so that all the masters and teachers of grammar
depended on him, and were subject to him; particularly he was to find a
fit master for the school of St. Paul, and present him to the Dean and
Chapter, and then to give him possession, and at his own cost and charges
to repair the houses and buildings belonging to the school. This master of
the grammar school was to be a sober, honest man, of good and laudable
learning.... He was in all intents the true vice-chancellor of the church,
and was sometimes so called; and this was the original meaning of
chancellors and vice-chancellors in the two universities or great schools
of the kingdom."
The same writer traces back St. Paul's school to Henry the First's reign,
when the Bishop of London granted the schoolmaster for the time being a
residence in the bell-tower, and bestowed on him the custody of the
library of the church. A successor of this person had the monopoly of
teaching school in London conferred on him by the Bishop of Winchester,
saving the rights only of the schoolmasters of St. Mary-le-Bow and St.
Martin-le-Grand.
The old cathedral school, which that of Colet doubtless gradually
extinguished, lay to the south of his, and appears curiously enough not to
have occupied the basement, but to have been, as we should say, on the
first floor, four shops being beneath it. It was close to Watling Street.
A passage in the _Monumenta Franciscana_ shews that the site of Colet's
original school, which perished in the Great Fire, had been in the
possession of bookbinders, and in the immediate neighbourhood was the sign
of the Black Eagle, which, as we learn from documentary testimony, was
still there in 1550.
At the epoch to which I am referring, the vocation of a bookbinder was, I
think, invariably joined with that of a printer, and I apprehend that
these shops formed part of a printing establishment.
The _Black Eagle_ was an emporium for the sale of books, and it is to be
recollected that in early days, where the typographical part was done in
some more or less unfrequented quarter of the city, it was a common
practice to have the volume on sale in a more public thoroughfare.
St. Paul's Churchyard, in the days of Colet and in the infancy of his
valuable endowment, was beyond question not only a place of great resort,
but a favourite seat of the booksellers. For in the imprint to an edition
of the _Hours of the Virgin_, printed at Paris, the copies are said to be
on sale at London "apud bibliopolas in cimiterio sancti Pauli 1514;" and
of this fact I could readily bring forward numerous other evidences.
Besides the vendors of literature, however, the site soon became one of
the places of settlement of the teachers of languages, to whom the
immediate proximity of St. Paul's served as an useful introduction and
advertisement; and in the time of Elizabeth a French school was
established here, for the benefit of the general public, of course, but
more especially, doubtless, with a view to such Paulines as might desire
an extension of their studies.