"Towards the close of the year 1560, or early in the following spring, the
Merchant Taylors' Company conceived the laudable design of founding a
grammar school; and part of the manor of the Rose, in the parish of St.
Lawrence-Pountney (a mansion which had successively belonged to the Duke
of Buckingham, the Marquis of Exeter, and the Earls of Sussex), seeming
eligible for the purpose, Mr. Richard Hills, a leading member of the
court, generously contributed the sum of five hundred pounds towards the
purchase of it; but the institution was not thoroughly organised till the
24th September 1561, on which day the statutes were framed and a
schoolmaster chosen."
With the statutes I have no farther concern than with the clause which
directs that the two hundred and fifty scholars, to which the school was
limited, were "to be taught in manner & forme as is afore devised &
appointed. But first see that they can the catechisme in English or Latyn,
& that every of the said two hundred & fifty schollers can read perfectly
& write competently, or els lett them not be admitted in no wise."
It is rather curious that the hours of attendance were originally from
seven till eleven A.M. and from one till five P.M., and that in winter the
boys were to bring no candles of tallow, but candles of wax. This was
following the statutes of Dean Colet. Thrice in the day there were
prayers; but instead of one of the sixth form saying them for the rest, as
was subsequently customary, each boy seems at first to have prayed for
himself.
The printed form usually employed was brief enough, and not, like the
Manual prepared by Bishop Ken for Winchester, adapted for the use of "all
other devout Christians."
The staff consisted at the outset of a head-master and three ushers, whose
united emoluments were forty pounds a year, and the first chief teacher of
the school was Richard Mulcaster. It appears that the earliest
Probation-Day, as it was termed, was in November 1564, when Dean Nowell
and others examined the ushers and the boys with a very gratifying result.
These appositions were renewed in 1565, and probably still continue from
year to year. They commenced in 1564 at eight o'clock in the morning, and
so they did in my time. The practice of visitation by the Court on this
day seems to have ceased in 1606.
Alderman Sir Thomas White, some time subsequently to the foundation of the
school by the Company, augmented the endowment, so as to enable the
institution to develop itself, and enlarge its sphere of utility in
connection with Oxford University and in other ways. White was a member of
the Court when the scheme was adopted, but he was not, strictly speaking,
as he has been usually termed and considered, the founder of Merchant
Taylors'.
We do not arrive, meanwhile, at any clear or complete notion of the books
which were used at the school, but it is to be inferred that Lily's
Grammar was the Latin text-book. In the rules made for Probation-Day in
1606-7, I find Æsop's _Fables_ in Greek, Tully's _Epistles_, and the
_Dialogues_ of Corderius named as works in which the boys were to be
tested. The subjects taken on this day were Greek, Latin, and dictation,
writing being necessarily included. Neither Hebrew, nor arithmetic, nor
the mathematics are enumerated; there are the six forms, but no monitors
or prompters.
The _School's Probation_ presents itself for the first time as a printed
production, or at least as something compiled in book form, under the date
of 1608. It is printed entire by Wilson; but he does not state, nor do I
know, what original, whether printed or not, he employed.
II. Probation-Day still continued in my time to be an important event--a
sort of red-letter day in our calendar. The hour for assembling was eight
o'clock, instead of nine; it had been half-past six while the school was
exclusively composed of residents within a limited radius; but the
enlarged time was a sore trial in the winter where one had to travel from
a suburb, as I did from Old Brompton. They supplied breakfast at the
place, not gratuitously, but at a fixed tariff. It would not have been
much for a wealthy Company to provide an entertainment once or twice a
year for two or three hundred lads at a shilling or so a head; but the
Merchant Taylors, I think, have always been notorious for parsimony. Very
little was accomplished before the meal, and after its completion we had
to set to work, the old room upstairs being as ill-adapted for the purpose
of an examination as can well be imagined, the boys having to use the
forms as desks and to kneel in front of them. We were a very short
distance from the Middle Ages. Matters were not much changed since the
time of the original establishment of the charity. Indeed, it appears from
Dugard's _School's Probation_, 1652, that in the seventeenth century the
Company paid for some kind of collation:--
"There shall be paid unto the Master of the School, for beer, ale, and new
manchet-bread, with a dish of sweet butter, which hee shall have ready in
the morning, with two fine glasses set upon the Table, and covered with
two fair napkins, and two fine trenchers, with a knife laid upon each
trencher, to the end that such as please may take part, to staie their
stomachs until the end of the examination ... ijs."
The number of boys was in 1652 comparatively limited; but of course
without a revival of the ancient miracle two shillings' worth of victuals
would not have gone far in allaying the hunger of a far smaller gathering,
and this allowance must have simply been for such as had missed their meal
at home, or desired additional refreshment.
The old examination itself presents numerous points of curiosity, as we
look at it through the present medium. Considerable stress seems to have
been laid on dictation. The master opened, on the sudden, Cicero, the
Greek Testament, Æsop's _Fables_ in Greek, and read a passage, which the
boys of a particular form had to take down, and then turn into some other
language, or into verse, or make verses upon it--a pretty piece of
trifling, much like the nonsense-verses which we used to have to compose
in my day, and as profitable.
Some of the English sentences to be turned into Latin are odd enough:
"Bacchus and Apollo send for Homer;" "I went to Colchester to eat
oysters;" "My Uncle went to Oxford to buie gloves;" "The Atheist went to
Amsterdam to chuse his religion." Others might have been autobiographical:
"Marie was my sister, she dwelt at London;" "Elisabeth was my Aunt, she
dwelt at York;" "Anna was my Grandmother, she dwelt at Worcester."
In another place, under _Sententiæ Varietas_, there are five-and-twenty
ways of describing in a sentence the great qualities of Cicero.
Greek was certainly studied with a good deal of attention here in the
early time, judging from the space which is devoted to it in the scheme of
Dugard, in whose small volume the questions and theses in that language
occupy twenty pages. Erasmus had, doubtless, had a large share in
popularising among us the cultivation of Hellenic grammar and letters.
Even when the present writer was at the school, Hebrew was by no means
assiduously or scientifically followed, nor do I believe that on the staff
of masters there was any one who properly understood the language. But it
was part of the programme, and the late Sir Moses Montefiore, who usually
attended on Speech and Prize Day, was the annual donor of a Hebrew medal.
Speech-Day at Merchant Taylors' was the sole occasion on which the large
schoolroom in Suffolk Lane was ever honoured by the presence of the fair
sex. The lower end of the room was converted into an extempore stage, and
the monitors and prompters took part in some recitation, or select scene
from the Latin or Greek dramatists. At a later period French themes were
introduced.
As far back as the reign of Charles I., the large contribution which the
ladies and other friends of the scholars made to the audience, and their
imperfect acquaintance with the dead languages, rendered it a subject of
regret and complaint that the entertainment was not given in the
vernacular, and the writer of a small volume called _Ludus Ludi
Litterarii_, 1672, purporting to report a series of speeches delivered at
various breakings-up, states that the majority of them were in English on
this very account. As early as the time of Henry VIII., the practice of
exhibiting some dramatic performance at the close of the term, and usually
at Christmas, was in vogue; but these spectacles were, it is to be
suspected, almost uniformly in the original language of the classic
author, or in the scholastic Latin of the period.
A feeling in favour of a reform in these arrangements had, as has been
mentioned, arisen when Hawkins wrote for the free school at Hadleigh in
Suffolk his play entitled _Apollo Shroving_, 1627, where one of the
characters desires the Prologue to speak what he has to say in honest
English, for all their sakes, and describes the predilection for employing
Latin as more appropriate to the University.
Occasionally, instead of plays, there were musical entertainments; and the
custom of signalising the termination of the school-work seems to have
been followed by the private academies.
But the antipathy to change and the temptation to a display of erudition
have always proved too strong an obstacle to improvement; and when the
writer was last present at this anniversary, the ancient precedent was
still in force, and the Court of the Merchant Taylors and general company
listened in respectful silence to interlocutions or monologues as
mysterious to them as the Writing on the Wall.
III. William Dugard, head-master from 1646 to 1660, so far as his light
and information were capable of carrying him, did, no doubt, good service
to the Company and institution with which he was during so many years
associated. But, on the ground of misconduct and negligence, his employers
thought proper, on the 27th December 1660, to discharge him from the place
of chief schoolmaster, giving him, however, till the following Midsummer
to find another appointment.
Dugard states in _An humble Remonstrance Presented to the Right
Worshipfull Company of Merchant-Tailors, Maii 15, 1661_, that the Company
assigned no cause for their proceeding; but he says at the same time: "It
is alleged in your Order, _That many Complaints have been frequently from
time to time made to the Master and Wardens of the Company, and to the
Court, by the parents and friends of the young Scholars, of the neglect of
the chief-Master's dutie in that School, and of the breach of the
Companie's Orders and Ordinances thereof_."
To this Dugard replies that he had never heard of any complaints in all
the seventeen years he had filled the post, and he declared his readiness
to submit in silence if any parent could prove aught against him. He had
been in the profession, he said, thirty-three years, and "in all places
wherever I came, I have had ample testimonials of my faithfulness and
diligence, and my scholars' proficiency."
The writer attributes his fall to the presence among the members of the
Court of persons unjustly hostile to him, who had represented that the
school was suffering from his administration, and would go down unless
some timely remedy was adopted.
But Dugard averred that the decline of the school and the shrinkage of its
numbers were due to the Company's order of March 16, 1659, which forbad
him to admit any scholar who had not a warrant from the Master and
Wardens, and the consequence was that parents, not caring to go to the
Court, took their sons elsewhere. As many as sixty boys had been lost in
this way within a twelvemonth, he maintains. "True it is," he pleads,
"that an hundred years ago, when it was an hard matter to get a Scholar to
read Greek, there was such an Order made, that no Scholar should be taught
in the School, unless first admitted by the Company. But afterward there
was found a necessity to dispense with that Order, and so it was with my
Predecessors; which I can prove for above threescore years bygone. They
(and my self too from them, untill the last year) had such an indulgence
that did not limit or restrain them to admit quarterly-Scholars, who did
not immediately depend on the Charity of the Company: and the Motto
engraven on the School speaks as much; _Nulli præcludor, Tibi pateo_."
The _Remonstrance_ did not please the Merchant Taylors, and in a second
document, dated June 12, 1661, Dugard tried to soften what he had said;
for his language, it must be allowed, was rather energetic, considering
that he was in the hands of those who had the power to act as they judged
fit.
Whatever the precise result was, there are two or three curious points
brought out in the course of the head-master's vindication, and one can
hardly avoid a conclusion that the main cause of the discontent of the
Court was not even so much the application of a portion of his time to
literary pursuits, as the abuse of the permission to set up a
printing-press by employing the machinery, intended only for the
production of school text-books, for political publications of a
republican stamp. This fact does not transpire in the tract itself, but is
ascertained from the imprints to books; and moreover, in 1650, at the end
of a periodical publication, he had announced himself as _Printer to the
Council of State_; so that altogether the Merchant Taylors might be
naturally afraid of incurring the displeasure of the new masters of
England by retaining the holder of opinions hostile to the Stuarts.
He had sold the press at the desire of the Company for £300 less than the
cost; and this was by no means the full extent of his sacrifices and
misfortunes. For he gives his principals to understand that he had grown
lean by the observance of fast-days in accordance with their recent order;
and, moreover, that during his nineteen years' term of office he had lost
£800 by unpaid quarter wages, thus making it seem probable that he was
directly responsible for the fees.
Altogether, nothing worse than indiscretion, perhaps, was chargeable to
Dugard. "I bless God for it," he expressly says, "I know the Divel himself
cannot justly accuse me of any notorious or scandalous Crime."
Probably not; but there are seasons when indiscretion is criminal, and
besides his proclamation of his appointment at the time to the
Commonwealth as their official printer, in 1657 there came from his press
the reply of Milton to Salmasius, an anti-royalist manifesto not
calculated to be palatable to the restored dynasty or to the civic
feeling, and certainly, so far as one can form a judgment, an encroachment
on the special objects and _raison d'être_ of Dugard's collateral
occupation.