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him at Edward's court was no doubt that of drawing, for we find that 'He was buried with much pomp at Thetford Abbey under a tomb designed by himself and master Clarke, master of the works at King's College, Cambridge, & Wassel a freemason of Bury S. Edmund's.' Cooper's Ath. Cant., i. p. 29, col. 2.

The question of the social rank of these Bele Babees, children, and Pueri who stood at tables, opens up the whole subject of upper-class education in early times in England. It is a subject that, so far as I can find, has never yet been separately treated', and I therefore throw together such few notices as the kindness of friends and my own chance grubbings have collected; these as a sort of stopgap till the appearance of Mr Anstey's volume of early Oxford Statutes in the Chronicles and Memorials, a volume which will, I trust, give us a complete account of early education in our land. If it should not, I hope that Mr Quick will carry his pedagogic researches past Henry VIII.'s time, or that one of our own members will take the subject up. It is worthy of being thoroughly worked out. For convenience' sake, the notices I have mentioned are arranged under six heads:

1. Education in Nobles' houses. 2. At Home and at Private Tutors', p. xvii.

3. At English Universities, p. xxvi.

4. At Foreign Universities, p. xl. 5. At Monastic and Cathedral

Schools, p. xli.

6. At Grammar Schools, p. lii.

One consideration should be premised, that manly exercises, manners and courtesy, music and singing, knowledge of the order of precedency of ranks, and ability to carve, were in early times more important than Latin and Philosophy. 'Aylmar þe kyng' gives these directions to Athelbrus, his steward, as to Horn's education:

1 When writing this I had forgotten Warton's section on the Revival of Learning in England before and at the Reformation, Hist. English Poetry, v. iii. ed. 1840. It should be read by all who take an interest in the subject. Mr Bruce also refers to Kynaston's Museum Minervæ. P.S.—Mr Bullein and Mr Watts have since referred me to Henry, who has in each volume of his History of England a regular account of learning in England, the Colleges and Schools founded, and the learned men who flourished, in the period of which each volume treats. Had I seen these earlier I should not have got the following extracts together; but as they are for the most part not in Henry, they will serve as a supplement to him.

2 First of these is Mr Charles H. Pearson, then the Rev. Prof. Brewer, and Mr William Chappell,

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þat þu eure of wiste;

236

[And] his feiren pou wise (mates thou teach)

Into opere seruise.

Horn pu underuonge,

240

And tech him of harpe and songe.

King Horn, E. E. T. Soc., 1866, ed. Lumby, p. 7.1

So in Romances and Ballads of later date, we find

The child was taught great nurterye;

a Master had him vnder his care,

& taught him curtesie.

Tryamore, in Bp. Percy's Folio MS. vol. ii. ed. 1867.

It was the worthy Lord of learen,

he was a lord of hie degree;

he had noe more children but one sonne,

he sett him to schoole to learne curtesie.

Lord of Learne, Bp. Percy's Folio MS. vol. i. p. 182, ed. 1867. Chaucer's Squire, as we know, at twenty years of age

hadde ben somtyme in chivachie,

In Flaundres, in Artoys, and in Picardie,
And born him wel, as in so litel space,

In hope to stonden in his lady grace.

Syngynge he was, or flowtynge, al the day..

Wel cowde he sitte on hors, and wel cowde ryde.

He cowde songes wel make and endite,

Justne and eek daunce, and wel purtray and write . . .

Curteys he was, lowly, and servysable,

And carf beforn his fadur at the table.2

Which of these accomplishments would Cambridge or Oxford teach? Music alone. That, as Harrison says, was one of the Quadrivials,

1 Mr Wm. Chappell gave me the reference.

2 In the Romance of Blonde of Oxford, Jean of Dammartin is taken into the service of the Earl of Oxford as escuier, esquire. He waits at table on knights, squires, valets, boys and messengers. After table, the ladies keep him to talk French with them.

arithmetike, musike, geometrie, and astronomie.' The Trivium was grammar, rhetoric and logic.

1. The chief places of education for the sons of our nobility and gentry were the houses of other nobles, and specially those of the Chancellors of our Kings, men not only able to read and write, talk Latin and French themselves, but in whose hands the Court patronage lay. As early as Henry the Second's time (A.D. 1154-62), if not before', this system prevailed. A friend notes that Fitz

Stephen says of Becket:

"The nobles of the realm of England and of neighbouring kingdoms used to send their sons to serve the Chancellor, whom he trained with honourable bringing-up and learning; and when they had received the knight's belt, sent them back with honour to their fathers and kindred: some he used to keep. The king himself, his master, entrusted to him his son, the heir of the realm, to be brought up; whom he had with him, with many sons of nobles of the same age, and their proper retinue and masters and proper servants in the honour due."-Vita S. Thomæ, pp. 189, 190, ed. Giles.

Roger de Hoveden, a Yorkshireman, who was a clerk or secretary to Henry the Second, says of Richard the Lionheart's unpopular chancellor, Longchamps the Bishop of Ely:

"All the sons of the nobles acted as his servants, with downcast looks, nor dared they to look upward towards the heavens unless it so happened that they were addressing him; and if they attended to anything else they were pricked with a goad, which their lord held in his hand, fully mindful of his grandfather of pious memory, who, being of servile condition in the district of Beauvais, had, for his occupation, to guide the plough and whip up the oxen; and who at length, to gain his liberty, fled to the Norman territory." (Riley's Hoveden, ii. 232, quoted in The Cornhill Magazine, vol. xv. p. 165.)

1 It was in part a principle of Anglo-Saxon society at the earliest period, and attaches itself to that other universal principle of fosterage. A Teuton chieftain always gathered round him a troop of young retainers in his hall who were voluntary servants, and they were, in fact, almost the only servants he would allow to touch his person. T. Wright.

2 Compare Skelton's account of Wolsey's treatment of the Nobles, in Why come ye not to Courte (quoted in Ellis's Letters, v. ii. p. 3).

"Our barons be so bolde,

Into a mouse hole they wold
Runne away and creep
Like a mainy of sheep:
Dare not look out a dur

For drede of the maystife cur,
For drede of the boucher's dog

"For and this curre do gnarl,
They must stande all afar

All Chancellors were not brutes of this kind, but we must remember that young people were subjected to rough treatment in early days. Even so late as Henry VI.'s time, Agnes Paston sends to London on the 28th of January, 1457, to pray the master of her son of 15, that if the boy "hath not done well, nor will not amend," his master Greenfield "will truly belash him till he will amend." And of the same lady's treatment of her marriageable daughter, Elizabeth, Clere writes on the 29th of June, 1454,

"She (the daughter) was never in so great sorrow as she is nowa-days, for she may not speak with no man, whosoever come, ne not may see nor speak with my man, nor with servants of her mother's, but that she beareth her on hand otherwise than she meaneth; and she hath since Easter the most part been beaten once in the week or twice, and sometimes twice on a day, and her head broken in two or three places." (v. i. p. 50, col. 1, ed. 1840.)

The treatment of Lady Jane Grey by her parents was also very severe, as she told Ascham, though she took it meekly, as her sweet nature was:

"One of the greatest benefites that God ever gave me, is, that he sent me so sharpe and severe Parentes, and so jentle a scholemaster. For when I am in presence either of father or mother, whether I speake, kepe silence, sit, stand, or go, eate, drinke, be merie or sad, be sewyng, plaiyng, dauncing, or doing anie thing els, I must do it, as it were, in soch weight, mesure, and number, even so perfitelie as God made the world, or els I am so sharplie taunted, so cruellie threatened, yea presentlie some tymes, with pinches, nippes, and bobbes, and other waies which I will not name for the honor I beare them, so without measure misordered, that I thinke my self in hell till tyme cum that I must go to M. Elmer, who teacheth me so jentlie, so pleasantlie, with soch faire allurementes to learning, that I thinke all the tyme nothing whiles I am with him. And when I am called from him, I fall on weeping."-The Scholemaster, ed. Mayor. The inordinate beating' of boys by schoolmasters-whom he

To holde up their hand at the bar.
For all their noble bloude,
He pluckes them by the hood
And shakes them by the eare,
And bryngs them in such feare;
He bayteth them lyke a beare,

Like an Ox or a Bul.

Their wittes, he sayth, are dul;
He sayth they have no brayne
Their estate to maintaine :
And make to bowe the knee
Before his Majestie."

1 Compare also the quotation from Piers Plowman's Crede, under No 5, p. xlv, and Palsgrave, 1530 A.D., 'I mase, I stonysshe, Je bestourne. You mased the boye so sore with beatyng that he coulde not speake a worde.' See a gross instance of

calls in different places sharp, fond, & lewd '-Ascham denounces strongly in the first book of his Scholemaster, and he contrasts their folly in beating into their scholars the hatred of learning with the practice of the wise riders who by gentle allurements breed them up in the love of riding. Indeed, the origin of his book was Sir Wm. Cecil's saying to him "I have strange news brought me this morning, that divers scholars of Eton be run away from the school for fear of beating."

Sir Peter Carew, says Mr Froude, being rather a troublesome boy, was chained in the Haccombe dog-kennel till he ran away from it.

But to return to the training of young men in nobles' houses. I take the following from Fiddes's Appendix to his Life of Wolsey: John de Athon, upon the Constitutions of Othobon, tit. 23, in respect to the Goods of such who dyed intestate, and upon the Word Barones, has the following Passage concerning Grodsted Bishop of Lincoln' (who died 9th Oct., 1253),—

"Robert surnamed Grodsted of holy memory, late Bishop of Lincoln, when King Henry asked him, as if in wonder, where he learnt the Nurture in which he had instructed the sons of nobles (&) peers of the Realm, whom he kept about him as pages (domisellos3),

since he was not descended from a noble lineage, but from humble (parents) is said to have answered fearlessly, 'In the house or guestcruelty cited from Erasmus's Letters, by Staunton, in his Great Schools of England, p. 179-80.

"And therfore do I the more lament that soch [hard] wittes commonlie be either kepte from learning by fond fathers, or bet from learning by lewde scholemasters," ed. Mayor, p. 19. But Ascham reproves parents for paying their masters so badly: "it is pitie, that commonlie more care is had, yea and that emonges verie wise men, to finde out rather a cunnynge man for their horse than a cunnyng man for their children. They say nay in worde, but they do so in decde. For, to the one they will gladlie give a stipend of 200. Crounes by yeare, and loth to offer to the other, 200. shillinges. God, that sitteth in heauen, laugheth their choice to skorne, and rewardeth their liberalitie as it should: for he suffereth them to have tame and well ordered horse, but wilde and unfortunate Children." Ib. p. 20.

2-2 Sanctæ memorie Robertum Cognominatum Grodsted dudum Lincolniendem Episcopum, Regi Henrico quasi admirando, cum interrogavit, ubi Noraturam didicit, quà Filios Nobilium Procerum Regni, quos secum habuit Domisellos, instruxerat, cum non de nobili prosapia, sed de simplicibus traxisset Originem, fertur intrepide respondisse, In Domo seu Hospitio Majorum Regum quam sit Rex Angliæ; Quia Regum, David, Salomonis, & aliorum, vivendi morem didicerat ex Intelligentia scripturarum. 3 DOMICELLUS, Domnicellus, diminutivum a Domnus. Gloss. antiquæ MSS. : Heriles, Domini minores, quod possumus aliter dicere Domnicelli, Ugutio: Domicelli et Domicellæ dicuntur, quando pulchri juvenes magnatum sunt sicut servientes. Sic porro primitus appellabant magnatum, atque adco Regum filios. Du Cange.

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