It is significant that, in both universities, the art of printing
ceased at some date between 1520—30, to be restored at
Cambridge, in 1582, when Thomas was recognised as printer to the
university, and at Oxford, in 1585, when Barnes set up a press.
ceased at some date between 1520—30, to be restored at
Cambridge, in 1582, when Thomas was recognised as printer to the
university, and at Oxford, in 1585, when Barnes set up a press.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v03
XVIIT.
27
## p. 418 (#440) ############################################
CHAPTER XIX
ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES, SCHOOLS AND SCHOLARSHIP
IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
THE history of the English universities to the end, approxi-
mately, of the Middle Ages has been dealt with in a previous
volume of this work. The period treated in the present chapter
falls into two unequal sections. The dividing line may be best
fixed at the visitation of 1559, when twelve years of perilous unrest
give place to an era of constructive growth, uncertain at first, but
keeping step uniformly with the increasing national stability.
It is not unreasonable to regard the foundation of Trinity
College, Cambridge, and of the new regius professorships, as
setting the seal to the transition from medieval to modern ideals
in the universities and in learning. Just as the 'college' hence-
forth dominates the university, so humanism, nationalism and the
reformation supersede the Catholic idea in theology, politics and
law. When Henry VIII died, the noteworthy group of Cambridge
humanists, headed by Smith and Cheke, gave promise of high dis-
tinction for English scholarship. The abortive Chantries Act of
1546, which included the universities, was of evil omen in days
of financial urgency, but it expired with the king, and Somerset
astutely omitted universities and colleges, including Eton and Win-
chester, from the purview of his new bill of 1547, to be dealt with
separately. The governing power, whether Somerset, Gardiner or
Elizabeth, realised that English universities, like Paris and
Wittenberg, were not merely seats of learning, but that from them
passed religious and political influences which profoundly affected
the national life. From them, as seminaries of the ministry and
nurseries of the civil service, the country drew increasingly its
leaders and administrators in church and state, and moulded
opinion through the parson, the schoolmaster and the justice of the
peace. Hence, Oxford and Cambridge became objects of high
policy in exact proportion as they intertwined themselves with the
several strands of English life and thought. It was not by way
## p. 419 (#441) ############################################
Universities under Edward VI and Mary 419
of compliment that Somerset, Gardiner and Cecil were elected
university chancellors.
The standing difficulty of the historian of the time confronts
the enquirer in this field also. The bitter temper of the age makes
it well nigh impossible to determine facts. To Ascham, the arch-
enemy of English learning was the Catholic restoration. At Oxford,
Anthony à Wood has no hesitation in ascribing the miserable
decay of letters to the Edwardian visitors. Yet, if Cheke, Ridley
and Smith formulated the eminently reasonable statutes and
injunctions of 1549, militant reformers like Latimer and Lever
agree in deploring the evil case of education—the devilish drowning
of youth in ignorance'-since protestant courtiers had the ear
of the crown. A whole library, we know, was to be had at Oxford
for forty shillings when visitors were about, so heavy was the
hand that was laid upon 'superstition. ' 'Purgings' of this college
and that were followed by the forced intrusion of new zealots.
To Oxford was sent, to teach divinity, Peter Martyr, the fighting
Zwinglian, a far less attractive spirit than the wide-minded Bucer,
disciple and friend of Melanchthon, who filled the corresponding
chair at Cambridge.
Thus, controversial theology overshadowed all else and both
universities were drawn into the whirlpool of politics. But
political divinity has rarely stimulated learning. If, at Cambridge,
for a year or two, undergraduates kept their numbers, in serious-
ness of temper they showed marked decline. At Oxford, in 1550,
there were “a bare thousand on the books, and most of these were
not in residence. The stream of benefactions dried up. Pluralism
.
and sinecures abounded. Far-seeing men abandoned university
life for service in church and state. Ascham, though public orator
at Cambridge, spent years at court or abroad. Sir Thomas Smith,
while professor of civil law, left the university for political life.
At best, it was the function of the university to supply the pro-
fessions; learning, as such, was ignored. The ‘university'declined,
the 'college' was not as yet systematised or disciplined. Disputa-
tions—the one test of proficiency-were neglected, the schools
deserted; few graduated even as bachelors; the higher degrees
were rarely sought. It is much that the old comity of learning
did not entirely die. As Thomas Smith taught at Padua, and
Caius at Montpellier, so German theologians, Dutch Hebraists, or
Italian lawyers could hold English posts. It is of more weight still,
that the Edwardian statutes mark a genuine advance in adminis-
tration and in the concept of learning. They breathe the renascence
27-2
## p. 420 (#442) ############################################
420
Universities, Schools and Scholarship
-
spirit, they evince sound judgment and first-hand knowledge of
the needs of the universities. Elizabeth's advisers found little to
alter in them, and they stood till the Laudian era. Philosophy-
in humanist fashion-was held specifically to include politics, ethics
and physica: Plato and Pliny were prescribed alongside of Aristotle.
Dialectic covered not merely the text of Aristotle, but, also, that
of Hermogenes and of Quintilian-implying that interrelation of
logic and rhetoric which was the very core of humanist doctrine.
Mathematics included cosmography; Euclid, Strabo, Pomponius
Mela and Cardan were the authorities. The Greek professor had
to interpret Homer, Euripides, Demosthenes and 'Socrates. ' To
civil law, to be read, like medicine, in the original texts, was
added a study of 'the Ecclesiastic Laws of this Kingdom. ' For
undergraduates, the first year course was mainly in mathe-
matics (Elizabethan statutes substituted rhetoric); the second
year in logic; the third in rhetoric and philosophy. The master's
degree required three years' residence, with reading in Greek,
philosophy, geometry and astronomy. To a doctor alone was
.
complete freedom allowed. But, gradually, the colleges imposed
their own courses. Thus, the first year man at Trinity began logic,
read Cicero and Demosthenes, wrote prose and verse. He was
probably, we remember, a boy of 12 to 15 years of age. Plato was
added in his second year; after graduation, he took up Hebrew.
Much, perhaps most, of all this was on paper only. Circumstances,
whether fiscal, political or religious, were equally adverse. Greed,
polemics, dynastic insecurity kept learning stagnant in schools
and universities alike.
Not that Mary herself was indifferent to learning, any more
than Northumberland had been. But it was inevitable that
Gardiner should revoke the new statutes, and turn adrift heads
and fellows 'to eat mice at Zurich. ' Peter Martyr promptly
crossed the seas. In Oxford, Magdalen was 'thoroughly purged,' but
Thomas Pope founded Trinity (1556), and White, St John's (1555).
Gardiner was hard on Trinity and St John's at Cambridge, but Caius
re-founded Gonville (1558). Reginald Pole was no obscurantist;
with Sadoleto, his ideal was a humanism suffused with the spirit of
a finely tempered Catholicism. The statutes of the two Marian
foundations at Oxford are such as the scholarly bishop of Carpen-
tras himself might have settled. “I remember,' says Sir Thomas
Pope, 'when I was a young scholar at Eton, the Greek tongue was
growing apace, the study of which is now much decayed. St John's
was built to serve 'sacred theology, philosophy, and good Arts,
## p. 421 (#443) ############################################
The Universities and the Church
421
Hem
including civil and canon law. At Cambridge, Caius, a devout
Catholic, was, none the less, a friend of Melanchthon; a student and
a teacher in many continental universities; a Grecian of distinction,
yet a pupil of Vesalius. Like Smith and Savile, he represents
the versatility and enthusiasm which marked the larger minds of
the revival in England. Yet, to judge from Ascham's lament-
and Caius confirms it—we must assume that Cambridge, already
predominantly protestant, reached its lowest depths under the
Catholic régime; that teachers and students alike forsook the
university; that degrees were seldom conferred, and, too often,
gained by dispensation: between 1555 and 1559, only 175 pro-
ceeded to the bachelor's standing at Cambridge, and 216 at
Oxford, less hostile to the dominant powers. Of all the causes
which reacted unfavourably upon the universities, none made so
deep an impression on the country as the Oxford and Smithfield
martyrdoms.
As in the field of religion and of affairs, so in that of
education, with the accession of Elizabeth the national unrest
began to abate. Recovery, however, was slow. In the last year
of Mary, only 28 degrees in arts had been conferred at Oxford.
In 1561, no senior proceeded to the degree of doctor in any of
the faculties. But Cecil, chancellor of Cambridge (1558—98)
guided the new queen's university policy. Leicester, a chancellor
(1564–88) of a different type, was, none the less, keen to secure
Oxford for protestantism, and to raise the standard of efficiency in
teaching and learning. Elizabeth herself was a lover of learning
and, perhaps, the best-read woman of her time, with a bias to
national continuity, and an aversion to the foreigner whether pope
or Calvin. The visitations of 1559 once more eliminated hostile
influences. Such heads of houses and fellows as clung to the old
faith either withdrew or were expelled. Dr Bill and Lawrence
Humfrey, with many others, were restored. Disaffected societies,
like St John's, Trinity, or New College at Oxford, were effectually
'purged. ' But, this done, and Edward's statutes reimposed, the
visitors held their hands. When the queen visited Cambridge in
1564, a new temper, hopeful and earnest, prevailed. The number
of residents at Oxford rose steadily from one thousand to two.
Benefactions were again freely offered. Two results of importance
gradually emerge: the restoration of the universities to their
function as safe seminaries of the clergy, and the final subordina-
tion of the university to the colleges and their heads. By the
Act of Incorporation of both the universities (1571), parliament,
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## p. 422 (#444) ############################################
422
Universities, Schools and Scholarship
for the first time, recognised and confirmed the franchises, privi-
leges and jurisdictions hitherto enjoyed by Oxford and Cambridge
under royal charters and by usage, and each attained the status
of a corporation under the style of 'The Chancellor, Masters and
Scholars. ' Although tests were not by statute reimposed, convo-
cation at Oxford, at Leicester's instance, passed decrees, requiring,
from all undergraduates over 12 years of age, subscription to the
articles of 1562, with special stress on the royal supremacy. Freedom
of teaching and even of study was jealously watched from court;
and, as Whitgift made plain, protestant orthodoxy and loyalty
rather than learning were approved marks of university efficiency.
By degrees, the concept of the church approved by Elizabeth and
expounded by Hooker became dominantin Oxford, whilst Cambridge
cultivated an enlightened puritanism. But, in both the universities
alike, the keenest interests were those of controversy. Cambridge,
however, sent out from St John's and Trinity not a few school-
masters of merit.
After 1590, Catholic influences were ruthlessly ousted from
English universities. Douay (1569), with its English college ruled
by Allen, had, by 1576, not less than two hundred students of
British origin, amongst them not a few notable ex-fellows and
lecturers from Oxford and Cambridge. And other English scholars
found refuge at St Omer, Valladolid, Seville and in the English
college at Rome. In 1581, Leicester still complained that Oxford
suffered 'secret lurking Papists,' and, though less freely, Catholic
houses continued to send their sons to Caius, Pembroke or
Trinity Hall, at Cambridge, in spite of the harder temper of the
university, or to Oriel, Trinity or St John's at Oxford. Puritan
families mainly affected Cambridge, especially St John's and the
new foundations of Emmanuel (1584), the avowed centre of militant
protestantism, and Sidney Sussex (1599). Robert Brown, John
Smith, the baptist John Cotton and Cartwright were all at
Cambridge. Lawrence Humfrey, president of Magdalen, Oxford,
'did so stock his college with such a generation of nonconformists
as could not be rooted out in many years after his decease. ' The
strongest minds (Whitaker, master of St John's, Cambridge, may be
taken as a conspicuous example) drifted to theology. The best
careers open to unaided talent lay in the church. Hebrew bad
more students than Greek. Tremellius, who taught it at Cam-
bridge, was a foreigner; so were most of his successors. Oxford
learnt Calvinian divinity from Huguenots and other refugees,
Spanish and Italian. It is not the least title to their place in the
## p. 423 (#445) ############################################
Civil Law at the
Universities
423
history of literature, that Oxford and Cambridge bred the men
to whom we owe the Bishops' Bible, the prayer-book and the
Authorised Version!
The place of civil law in the English universities needs brief
mention. Sir Thomas Smith claimed it as a branch of humanism.
In Elyot's vein, he will have it broadly based upon philosophy,
ethics and history. This, the doctrine of Cujas and Alciati, he had
imbibed at Padua and Bologna. For a short time, he succeeded
in winning minds of distinction to study in this spirit a juris-
prudence from which, in respect of precision and authority,
English lawyers might learn much. But the uncertain professional
demand for civilians, the academic temper of the Cambridge
school, the suspicion attaching to the subject as Italian and,
therefore, inevitably, papal, the growing sense of nationality
and the unassailable place of English law which accompanied it,
rendered Smith's hopes ultimately fruitless. Yet there was felt
in high places some need for civil lawyers to advise upon
international usages, to draft treaties and conduct diplomatic corre-
spondence. In 1549, visitors were instructed to set apart, at both
universities, colleges for the exclusive study of civil law, but the
proposal had no countenance. Fellowships, specifically allotted to
this subject, as at All Souls, were, in very many cases, held by
theologians.
Oxford possessed, in Albericus Gentilis (1552—1608) a civilian
of Perugia, elected regius professor of civil law in 1587, the most
learned lawyer of the Elizabethan time. In his hands grew up
a system of international law to serve the needs of a world in
which church and empire alike had ceased to be the dominant
powers. His chief works were De Legationibus (1584), in which
he defined the basis and limits of diplomatic privilege, and De
Jure Belli (1588–98). This standing monument of Oxford
civil studies exhibits a masterly examination of international
historical precedents of the sixteenth century, utilised to reconcile
the Bible, the protestant doctrine of natural law and the essential
principles of the imperial code. Grotius, a century later, was
deeply indebted to Gentilis, from whom, indeed, international law,
as a systematic body of doctrine, is, ultimately, derived. Gentilis, a
man of wide interests and of great learning, exercised profound
influence in the university and was highly regarded at court. His
method of teaching differed from that of Smith and his successor
Haddon, in that he concentrated attention upon the development
1 See ante, chap. u.
## p. 424 (#446) ############################################
424 Universities, Schools and Scholarship
of civil law in its direct application to modern use, with entire
indifference to it as a branch of humanist study; for so to regard law
could, in the England of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
only end in its relegation to 'polite learning. ' The supremacy
of English law was, indeed, already secured. The activity of the
Inns of Court and the genius of Coke did but serve to enforce
the inevitable trend of things. Trinity Hall, however (especially
under its master, Cowell, 1598), All Souls and Broadgates were, more
or less, frequented by civilians. But, to Stewart parliamentarians,
Roman law was identified with absolutism and high prelacy.
The lines of classical study were, nominally, determined by
requirements for degrees. But the colleges were already dominant
in teaching and in administration. The more strenuous exacted
entrance tests. Rhetoric, in the wider humanist sense, philosophy,
ethical and natural,' and logic were the accepted subjects for the
degree. Oxford logic was strictly Aristotelian. Elsewhere, as
at Cambridge and St Andrews, it began to be taught on lines
which Ramus elaborated from Agricola, and this, in turn, developed
into the logic of Port Royal Greek, as a university study,
steadily declined from the standard set up by Cheke. None of
his successors could arouse the old enthusiasm. Whitgift, the
strongest force in the university, knew no Greek. Under Mary, it
was reputed to have disappeared from Oxford. Sir Thomas Pope's
lament concerns this. Leicester, as chancellor, complained, in 1582,
that the Oxford professor read seldom or never. Indeed, it may
be affirmed that no work in classical scholarship was produced at
Oxford or Cambridge during the period under review which is
remotely worthy of comparison with that turned out by Scaliger,
Estienne, Nizolius, Casaubon, Turnebus, or a hundred industrious,
but now half forgotten, scholars in French and German lands. Nor
can English learning show a scholar, unless it were Henry Savile,
to rank with George Buchanan. In Greek, not one of the trans-
lators, Savile excepted, but works through a French version, like
North. There was, on the other hand, a large output of Latin
plays? -evidence, no doubt, of careful study in school and uni-
versity of classical or neo-Latin models. Trinity (Cambridge)
statutes (1560) contain clauses concerning the performance of
college plays. Acting was the accepted mode of training youth
in speaking Latin and in grace of gesture, wherever humanists
controlled education. Shrewsbury, in this matter, held the pre-
eminence amongst English schools ; but at none of any pretension
1 See vol. v of the present work.
6
i
## p. 425 (#447) ############################################
English Learning in the XVIth Century
Century 425
was the practice neglected, though in Westminster alone has the
tradition retained its vitality to our own day.
As the humanism of the sixteenth century became more
strictly literary in its range, so surely did mathematics and
natural philosophy sink to a lower place in English learning.
Their affinity was with navigation, architecture or military science,
not with the learned professions; a typical and very popular
hand-book was Blundeville His exercises . . . in Cosmographie. . . .
Methods of observation and experiment, working to practical
ends, superseded authoritative appeal to Aristotle or Ptolemy.
Recorde's The Castel of Knowledge (1553) had a vogue for half
a century as a manual of the new mathematic, harmonised to the
Copernican astronomy. The English Euclid (1570) would seem to
have had but a poor sale. Original work, like Gilbert's De Magnete
(1600) kept its Latin dress, and, apart from this, nothing of first
rate importance in the field of pure science was produced from
an English press during the period under discussion.
It is an interesting, though difficult, task to realise the actual
range and level of the work of a studious undergraduate coming
up from Westminster or Shrewsbury to Christ Church at Oxford or
St John's at Cambridge. Statutes, in effect, lend little or no help.
Colleges ordered and gave the instruction and, apparently, were
powerful enough to secure dispensation from the formal university
exercises. A large, though varying, number in every college never
graduated at all. Though the age at matriculation tended to rise,
Bacon (who, himself, entered at twelve years and three months)
complained, in the closing years of the century, that a prime cause
of the futility of university education lay in the immaturity of the
undergraduate. We may remember that Bentham, two centuries
later, went up at twelve. Magdalen (Oxford) wisely put raw first
year 'men' to the learning of rudiments in its own admirable
grammar school. Yet, there is ample evidence that ambitious and
well-prepared boys-precocious, perhaps, to our seeming-not only
found helpful teaching in classical letters, but developed broad and
abiding interests. Bodley, Wotton, Savile, Sidney and Hooker at
Oxford, Spenser, Downes, Fraunce and Harington at Cambridge,
are typical of different groups of men who owed much to the univer-
sities for the shaping of their bent. But that single-eyed devotion
to scholarship which marked the circle of Cheke, Smith and Ascham
at the outset of this period is far to seek as it draws to a close.
Theology attracted the strongest intelligence as it has done at
certain epochs since. The way to secular advance lay at court or
## p. 426 (#448) ############################################
426 Universities, Schools and Scholarship
>
in adventure. Wotton, indeed, wrote his Latin play like many
another.
But he found his enjoyment at Oxford in reading law
with Gentilis, in learning Italian and in working at optics. Donne
had read enough for graduation by the time he was thirteen : and
he then left to spend four desultory years at Cambridge. Henry
Savile, warden of Merton and, later, like Wotton, provost of Eton,
whose rightful repute for scholarship even Scaliger allowed, trans-
lated the Annals of Tacitus (1692) wrote on Roman warfare, edited
Xenophon (the Cyropaedia) and produced the first substantial
work of English patristic learning since the revival. He stands
for the courtier' as developed on English soil, a man of the
world, versatile and travelled, 'the scholar gentleman. ' Before
the queen died, the English universities Bad already begun to
realise their national function as the breeders of men of talent
for affairs, of divines and schoolmasters, with here and there, as
a ‘sport,' a' man of letters and, yet more rarely, a leader in
scholarship
Three other foundations call for mention : Edinburgh (1582)
Trinity College, Dublin (1591) and Gresham College (1596). The
reformation struggle had all but extinguished university teaching in
Scotland, which sent students to Padua or Douay, or to the Collège
de Guyenne, at Bordeaux, where we meet with many Scottish
names, that of George Buchanan, as a teacher, among them. It is
characteristic of the time that young Scotsmen very rarely found
their way to Oxford or Cambridge. Andrew Melville, though as
fanatic as Knox, was, however, a humanist and did something to
restore learning at Glasgow and St Andrews. Edinburgh was
too young to take effective part in building up the fabric of
Scottish protestant humanism. Trinity College, Dublin, an
outstanding product of the English reformation, was, as Fuller
describes it, a plantation settled from Cambridge. The first
suggestion for a foundation in Dublin had come from archbishop
Browne, some forty years before, and was repeated after Elizabeth's
accession. The temper of the founder was revealed in the two
men who filled the office of provost, the first, archbishop Loftus,
a fellow of Trinity, Cambridge--and admirer of Cartwright-and
the second, Travers, of Disciplina fame, puritan and arch-separatist.
The college was, of course, part and parcel of the English occu-
pation. Sir Thomas Gresham designed his college (1596), in
London, to be 'an epitome of a University. Oxford chose the
original seven professors, who included Henry Briggs, Napier's
collaborator. The professor of law was expressly directed to
## p. 427 (#449) ############################################
English Schools under Elizabeth
427
treat of contracts, monopolies, shipping and the like. "Medicine'
covered not only the study of Galen and Hippocrates, but, also,
modern theories of physiology, pathology and therapeutics. Geo-
metry was to be both theoretical and practical. In divinity,
she professor was charged specially to defend the Church of
England. It was a notable attempt to adapt the widening know-
ledge of the day to the needs of the spacious time.
It is significant that, in both universities, the art of printing
ceased at some date between 1520—30, to be restored at
Cambridge, in 1582, when Thomas was recognised as printer to the
university, and at Oxford, in 1585, when Barnes set up a press.
But the centre of English printing and publishing was London,
where fifty presses were at work under strict surveillance of court
and bishop. From 1586, licence to publish was granted by the
archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London, and the only
two presses authorised without the London area were those of
Oxford and Cambridge. Little of the first order was produced,
however, by the university printers. The mass of texts for school
and college were not of English origin, but bear the imprint of
Plantin, Aldus, or Gryphius and of the busy workshops of Basel
and Paris.
The influence of Edwardian legislation on English schools is
a subject for the general historian. It is, however, to be noted
how large was the supply of small schools, elementary, ‘song,'
or grammar schools in England, as revealed by the chantry com-
mission of 1548, particularly in the eastern half of the kingdom.
Some half dozen school foundations, such as Sedbergh and Bir-
mingham, are in debt to Northumberland. Mary could do as little
for schools as for universities. Elizabeth's counsellors took up
the task where Edward's death had left it. The queen's trained
intelligence was on the side of knowledge. In church and in
state, the men she trusted owed more to acquired gifts than to
birth. Classical education was in favour at court; money from
religious houses was though sparingly, as always--accorded to
school endowments on request. To restore the local grammar
school became a fashion. Merchants, servants of the crown,
country gentry, superior clergy, borough corporations, founded
free grammar schools. Westminster was reconstructed; Eton
and Winchester, which had the immunities of a college of the
universities, widened studies and enlarged their numbers. The
leaving age was advanced. A new type of scholar, sometimes, like
## p. 428 (#450) ############################################
428
Universities, Schools and Scholarship
a
Ashton of Shrewsbury, a man of versatile gifts and standing at
court, or a travelled historian like Camden, became headmaster.
Savile and Wotton dignified the office of provost of Eton. Purely
local schools, such as Peterborough or Colchester, made stringent
requirements of attainment in their headmasters. Fellows of the
best colleges took service in schools, and, though often incompetent
as teachers, were but rarely ill-educated men. The best houses
began to send boys to school. The tutor remained for the younger
brothers, or piloted the promising graduate through the perils of
the foreign tour. The burgher class adopted the new education.
Colet's reformed school of St Paul's was copied in fifty towns.
Borough councils were importunate to secure charters and grants.
In order to keep a high level of efficiency, here and there a founder
linked his school to one of the colleges of the university, after the
fashion of Eton or Winchester. The lay spirit became dominant.
Shrewsbury, indeed, was a civic school, but ecclesiastical founda-
tions also, like Westminster and Winchester, now and again had
lay heads. The licence to teach was granted by the bishop of the
diocese, and, nominally at least, royal sanction gave its imprimatur
to a Latin grammar or to a historical text-book like Ocland's
Anglorum Praelia. Yet, in reality, instruction was unfettered
within the limits of school statutes.
There were, in effect, two main types of school. The first was the
great public boarding school : Eton, Winchester and Westminster,
drawing pupils from the country at large, though Westminster was,
largely, a London school ; with these ranked Shrewsbury, which,
of local origin and a day school, yet served a province, and was
filled with sons of the gentry of north Wales, and the north-
west midlands. The second type was the town day school, of diverse
origin, such as St Paul's, Merchant Taylors', St Saviour's South-
wark, Manchester, Guildford, Tonbridge, or Magdalen College
school. Wolsey's school of Ipswich apart, there is no reason to
assume imitation of French or German models in organisation.
The statutes of Wykeham or of Colet were the standing guide.
Compared with the superior clergy, headmasters, like heads of
houses in the universities, were poorly paid. Ashton had £40
per annum at Shrewsbury. The Westminster headship was worth
£27. 11s. 8d. , but ‘presents' were expected from parents. Camden
said he earned enough. Guildford could pay £24 in 1596. Bucer's
stipend of £100, in Edward's reign, was magnificent, but unique.
The usual pay of the one master of a small grammar school, in
1548, was six or seven pounds. Rotherham and Southwell,
>
## p. 429 (#451) ############################################
The School Curriculum 429
collegiate schools, could afford £10 or a little more. Shrewsbury
was, about 1570, far the best paid headship in England, and the
school numbers exceeded those of Eton or Winchester. The
custom of taking 'private pupils,' however, grew rapidly towards
the end of the century. As a Cambridge fellow rarely received
so much as £6, including his allowance for commons, the new
schools tended to attract promising material to their staff.
The practice of the better schools was to require that boys,
on admission, should have had good grounding in accidence, know
the concords and read and write English intelligibly. The curricu-
lum was, almost exclusively, classical. A little mathematics, some
smattering of astronomy, may have been added here and there;
but neither logic nor English was taught, and history (Ocland,
indeed, is an interesting phenomenon) simply as a comment
on Livy or Plutarch. The four public schools followed a very
similar order. At Westminster, apparently, Greek was carried
further than elsewhere: for Xenophon, Isocrates, Demosthenes,
Homer and Hesiod are expressly prescribed in the Elizabethan
curriculum. Eton seems to have aimed no higher than the grammar.
Shrewsbury makes no mention of any author harder than Isocrates.
Thucydides and Euripides are never named. The grammar generally
used was Clenard's, until Grant, at Westminster, introduced his
Spicilegium and Eton adapted it to its own use as the Eton Greek
grammar. Efforts at Greek composition were exceptional. Chief
stress was laid in every school upon exercises in Latin prose and
verse. To lay the foundations of prose style was the object of every
master. To this end, he began with the Colloquies of Erasmus,
Cordier and Vives, and passed to Sturm's selection of Cicero's Letters.
As early as possible, the pupil was turned on to Terence, whose
pure Roman diction every humanist, Catholic or puritan alike,
upheld for imitation. Caesar, properly, was not regarded as an
elementary text. Sallust was commonly read, but Tacitus very
rarely. There was no reluctance to put Juvenal and Martial into
boys' hands. The Figurae of Mosellanus, the Epitome Troporum
of Susenbrotus, the grammars of Despauterius and Lily are
commonly alluded to. At Ipswich, Wolsey prescribed the Ele-
gantiae of Valla. Rhetoric, in the developed sense, was left to the
university. The school-play took the place of the mystery, and the
pageant competed with the play. Shrewsbury and Chester schools
were famous for dramatic exhibitions. Henry Sidney, lord of the
Welsh March, whose son Philip was a pupil of Ashton, was enter-
tained, after a visit to the town, with a noteworthy river-pageant
## p. 430 (#452) ############################################
430 Universities, Schools and Scholarship
performed by the boys as he was rowed down the Severn on his
journey home. In many schools, the performance of a scene
from Terence or Seneca was a weekly exercise, the example of
Melanchthon and John Sturm being herein followed. English writing
was, probably, more cared for than directly appears. For the
admirable training provided by exact construing, by essay-writing
and by declamations, though these were never vernacular exercises,
developed taste in words and some sense of the logical texture of
speech. What natural history was imparted was given by way of
notes to classical texts. Much attention was often given to sing-
ing. But the arts of writing and ciphering were relegated to
separate and inferior schools. There was, inevitably, much repe-
tition, and a harsh discipline enforced attention to uncongenial
task-work. In the Elizabethan school, the hard edge of circum-
stance was never softened to the weak. The 'big school,' in which
all classes were held together, carried with it the idea of corporate
life. Monitors were always employed for discipline and for aid in
teaching junior forms. As a rule, foundationers, and these alone,
received education free of all charges, except for 'birch broom and
candles. ' The age of leaving for the university is hard to estimate;
but the better taught schools tried to retain their promising pupils
till their sixteenth year. In time of plague, a large school, like
the colleges, had its retreat; Westminster had a house at
Chiswick, Eton at Chippenham, Magdalen College, Oxford, at
Brackley. Not a few schools began to acquire a library of merit,
which, in the case of such a school as Shrewsbury, has, by happy
neglect, survived intact to our own day.
The rapid growth of the revival in England may be illustrated
by contrasting the position and attainments of Grocyn at Oxford
(1491) and those of 'John Cheke who taught Cambridge Greek'as
regius professor, in 1540. Admitted at St John's when twelve years
of age, Cheke so proved his skill in the tongues as 'to have laid the
very foundations of learning in his College. ' The foundation of
the royal chair of Greek gave him the pre-eminence, both titular
and real, in Cambridge scholarship. His expositions of Euripides
and Sophocles, Herodotus and the Ethics of Aristotle, are specially
recorded. These, probably, were of far more importance in the
history of learning in England than the controversy as to the
right value of Greek vowel sounds, with which his name is usually
associated. Cheke became public orator in 1544, and was ap-
pointed tutor to prince Edward. At heart a reformer, he had no
## p. 431 (#453) ############################################
The Writers on Rhetoric
431
scruple in accepting conventual lands, whereby he became a man
of wealth and station. As provost of King's College, one of
Somerset's visitors, a knight and intimate at court, he was familiar
with the currents both of learning and of politics. For rashly
embracing the cause of lady Jane Grey, he went, in due course,
to the Tower; he was soon released, but, circumspectly, passed
to the continent, where we hear of him teaching Greek at Padua
and at Strassburg. He was arrested by order of Philip II, near
Brussels, as an 'unlicensed' traveller and conveyed, once more, to
the Tower. Under threat of torture, he abjured his convictions,
and died (1557) within a year, a broken man.
a
Cheke was un-
questionably a scholar of distinction. Of his criticism on Sallust
as quoted by Ascham, something has already been said? . He left
behind a copious body of Latin translation from the Greek,
patristic and classical. His bulky tracts of controversial divinity
are chiefly noteworthy as exhibiting the temper of the time,
especially as it affected Cambridge learning. He wrote nothing
but a pamphlet or two in the vernacular, though he endeavoured,
unsuccessfully, to reform English spelling on a phonetic method.
His outstanding merit lies in his stimulating force as a teacher,
and the respect which his learning won for English scholarship.
The contribution of Thomas Wilson, friend and disciple of
Cheke, to the classical renascence in England has, also, already
been mentioned. The first book of The Arte of Rhetorique (1553)
treats of the purpose of rhetoric, which is affirmed to be the art
which perfects the natural gifts of speech and reason. The distinc-
tions of several types of arguments,' and their constituent factors,
are set out by means of examples shaped, indeed, on classical and
Erasmian models, but with an added seriousness, born of the time,
which lifts them above the Petrarchian commonplaces of the
Italians. The second book treats, in the customary manner, of the
fundamental qualities of style as an instrument of persuasion. The
orator must be easily intelligible. He must secure the goodwill
of his audience, must wind his way into the subject by suitable
approaches, particularly if he be a preacher. Let the latter
diligently seek his pattern in Chrysostom. The conditions oí
right eloquence, such as logical order, emphasis, repetition, climax,
are as necessary in English speech as in Latin; nor can an
English speaker neglect the art of stirring the emotions by the
employment of humour, or pathos, by appeal to indignation or
passion. The third book, ranging over a wide field, deals with
1 See ante, p. 290.
6
3 See ante, p. 23.
1
## p. 432 (#454) ############################################
432 Universities, Schools and Scholarship
the choice of words and the use of figure and ornament; with the
functions of gesture; with the essential art of memory. It con-
tains some of the sanest Elizabethan criticism of classical writers.
The marks of The Arte of Rhetorique are its clearness, its
freedom from pedantry and its modern instances. It was several
times reprinted during the century and even now repays a reading.
Wilson's treatise should be read side by side with Guazzo's Civile
Conversation, translated by Pettie twenty years later, with a
preface in which he refers to Wilson and in which he urges the
need for a liberal expansion of English vocabulary. A work far
less attractive than either was Richard Sherry's Treatise of Schemes
and Tropes (1555). The author was headmaster of Magdalen
College school, at this time, perhaps, the best Latin school in
England. His writing is crabbed and technical, and had small vogue
outside lecture rooms. More popular were Richard Rainolde's
Foundation of Rhetorike (1563), Henry Peacham's Garden of
Eloquence (1577) and The Arcadian Rhetorike (1584) of Abraham
Fraunce, who works in modern examples from poetry and prose,
notably quoting Sidney and Tasso, and not overlooking the
Spaniards.
Roger Ascham was entered at St John's, Cambridge, a little
later than Cheke and, as he neared manhood, found himself drawn
into his circle, which embraced Redman and Pember, Thomas
Smith, Ridley and Wilson. Upon Cheke, Ascham looked back as
upon his great master, counting him worthy to rank with John
Sturm of Strassburg, the chief luminary of protestant scholarship
in the middle of the sixteenth century.
In 1548, Ascham, perhaps the ablest Greek scholar in England,
and public orator of the university, was called to court as
tutor to princess Elizabeth. But, while he enjoyed his task
of teaching a pupil of Elizabeth's acquisitive temper, his self-
respect ill brooked a court position. Two years later, he made
the tour of Germany, as secretary to a mission, touching Italy at
Venice. He was alert to meet scholars, observe institutions and
visit historic sites. Characteristically, the secretary taught his
chief Greek grammar during their intervals of leisure. The
Report and Discourse of the affairs of Germany, written in 1553,
shows him a keen student of French and German politics. He
has made Thucydides, Polybius and Livy his models. Commines
has his favour, but, though he would not have allowed it, we may
safely affirm that Macchiavelli's Relazioni had taught him more
than the ancients. Queen Mary made him Latin secretary at
## p. 433 (#455) ############################################
Roger Ascham
433
court, where his own caution, aided by Gardiner's personal feeling
for him, secured him from molestation on account of his opinions,
and Elizabeth was glad to keep him in her service as Greek
preceptor and courtier of the new style.
Much of Ascham's classical writing-translation from Sopho-
cles, studies in Herodotus, a tract de Imitatione-has disappeared.
Probably, the three works by which he is now known adequately
represent his powers. Toscophilus (1545), a treatise on the art
of shooting with the long-bow, treats, in the accepted dialogue form,
of the function of bodily training in education, with the urgent
prescription of practice with the bow as the national exercise.
There is not a little of Plato and the Italians in his concept of the
place of physical grace and vigour in personality. Plutarch and
Epicharmus, Domitian and Galen, are all called in to defend his
argument. This was inevitable, given the time and place; but,
in spite of the fanciful play made with Jupiter and Minos in this
connection, the skilled English archer for more than a hundred
years has made Toxophilus his text-book, and 'Ascham’s Five
Points' are part of the lore today.
Ascham’s nationalism, which inspires every paragraph of
Toxophilus, is but characteristic of English humanism of the finer
type. Elyot, Smith, Cheke and Hoby are Englishmen first and
men of scholarship next. Learning, indeed, they win from every
source; they are voracious readers, their interests are well-nigh
universal. But, whatever the flowers, native or foreign, whole-
some or poisonous, the sweetness drawn therefrom is the honey
of English hives. The Scholemaster (1570) is essentially the work
of a scholar who has no illusions on the subject of Erasmian
cosmopolitanism. Like Elyot, he wrote in his own tongue-
English matter, in English speech, for Englishmen, as he had said
in his Toxophilus. He made, indeed, of a technical treatise
a piece of literature, and that of no mean order. We may notice
that writings upon education which were written or found welcome
in this country had a note of reality which is often far to seek in
German or, still more, in Italian pieces of similar character. The
starting point of The Scholemaster is, essentially, that of Elyot's
Governour. This is, that England loses much fruitful capacity
through the ill-training of its youth of station. In the first book,
Ascham considers the chief reasons of the ineffectiveness of the
new education. From the text that news had reached court that
Eton boys had broken school to escape the birch, he inveighs,
in the vein of Erasmus, against the cruelty of school discipline,
E. L. IJI.
OH. XIX.
28
## p. 434 (#456) ############################################
434 Universities, Schools and Scholarship
not realising that, given the curriculum and the mode of teaching
it, harsh punishments were, in fact, inevitable. He next considers
the differing nature of wits. ' The schoolmaster is prone to hold
'
precocity the singular mental and moral virtue: Ascham pleads
for the slow but solid temper, and protests that, by contempt for
late developed minds, Pedantius drives away many a fine intelli-
gence from due opportunity of public service. He draws from
Plato seven true ‘notes of a good wit,' which 'he plainly declares
in English': in essence, these are industry, interest, curiosity, a
good will, but never premature gifts of acquisition. Now, these
are qualities which the 'lewd and ignorant teacher bars from
their natural growth by his impatient pedantry. The second hin-
drance is the decay of home discipline. The youth of seventeen sent
to court, left without a career, hanging idly about a great house,
falls to gambling, and all licence, swelling that clan of the gentle
unemployed for which relief was sought later in adventure and
plantation. Travel, in the third place, has made shipwreck of many,
not because I do contemn either the knowledge of strange and divers tongues,
and namely the Italian tongue, which next the Greek and Latin tongue I do
like and love above all others, or else because I do despise the learning that is
gotten or the experience that is gathered in strange countries,
but travel meant a sojourn in Italy, and, in well remembered words,
he proclaims his aversion to what he had seen in Venice, and the
deep seated distrust with which he views the morals, the politics,
the irreligion, the newer literature of the Italy of the Spaniard
and the inquisition. Study will provide all the worthy fruits of
travel, and manners can be learnt by all who care to read
Castiglione's Cortegiano, in its new English dress. Let a young
Englishman be proud of his England, and, if he will see other
manners, other minds, Strassburg or Frankfort will give him what
he seeks, with no danger to faith and morals. The second book is
largely concerned with the teaching of Latin. The method of
Ascham, according to which a classical language is taught by the
process of re-translation of construes, is, at least, as old as Cicero
and is of slight importance in the history of instruction. But this
section of The Scholemaster is of interest as evidence of the thorough-
ness and breadth of Ascham's reading. He avows Greek to be the
subject of his truest affection. He has a sound view of the
function of historical writing, which far transcends the superficial
aspect of it which confronts us in Italian humanists prior to the
later Patrizi. Much space is given to the art of teaching rhetoric.
Cicero is the accepted master; where Quintilian differs from him,
## p. 435 (#457) ############################################
a
-
Richard Mulcaster
435
he is to be disregarded. John Sturm he regards as unapproach-
able amongst neo-Latinists. Ascham pleads for style: 'ye know
not what hurt ye do to learning that are not for words but for
matter, and do make a divorce betwixt the tongue and the heart. '
The secret of true imitation is to read exactly and, at the same
time, to read widely. English will have its fruit of such right
imitation of classic models, for in them alone are the 'true pre-
cepts and perfect examples' of sound writing. Upon poetic imita-
tion only did Ascham lapse into pedantry! He will recognise no
English metres. Much as he admires Chaucer, he apologises for
his riming, an inheritance from the Goth and Hun.
It seems that The Scholemaster was, for a time, accepted as
the approved manual of method in instruction. The licence of
The Positions (1581) of Richard Mulcaster runs thus : 'provided
always that if this book contain anything prejudicial or hurtful
to the Book of Master Ascham . . . called The Scholemaster, that
then this licence shall be void. ' In passing from Ascham to
Mulcaster we step into a different world. For Mulcaster, though
an Eton boy and a student of Christ Church, spent his life as a
master of the two great day schools of the city of London-head-
master of Merchant Taylors' 1561–86 ; surmaster and, later,
highmaster (1596) of St Paul's. The fruit of his experience is
embodied in two books, The Positions (1581) and The Elementarie
(1582), the latter an instalment of a larger work. Whilst Ascham was
concerned with youth of station, destined to become landowners,
courtiers or diplomatists, Mulcaster's subject is the education of
the burgher class. Both, again, use English as their instrument;
Ascham wrote good Tudor prose, whilst it is no gibe to say that
Mulcaster's own example is enough to imperil his thesis that
English speech is as harmonious and as precise as Latinity itself.
27
## p. 418 (#440) ############################################
CHAPTER XIX
ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES, SCHOOLS AND SCHOLARSHIP
IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
THE history of the English universities to the end, approxi-
mately, of the Middle Ages has been dealt with in a previous
volume of this work. The period treated in the present chapter
falls into two unequal sections. The dividing line may be best
fixed at the visitation of 1559, when twelve years of perilous unrest
give place to an era of constructive growth, uncertain at first, but
keeping step uniformly with the increasing national stability.
It is not unreasonable to regard the foundation of Trinity
College, Cambridge, and of the new regius professorships, as
setting the seal to the transition from medieval to modern ideals
in the universities and in learning. Just as the 'college' hence-
forth dominates the university, so humanism, nationalism and the
reformation supersede the Catholic idea in theology, politics and
law. When Henry VIII died, the noteworthy group of Cambridge
humanists, headed by Smith and Cheke, gave promise of high dis-
tinction for English scholarship. The abortive Chantries Act of
1546, which included the universities, was of evil omen in days
of financial urgency, but it expired with the king, and Somerset
astutely omitted universities and colleges, including Eton and Win-
chester, from the purview of his new bill of 1547, to be dealt with
separately. The governing power, whether Somerset, Gardiner or
Elizabeth, realised that English universities, like Paris and
Wittenberg, were not merely seats of learning, but that from them
passed religious and political influences which profoundly affected
the national life. From them, as seminaries of the ministry and
nurseries of the civil service, the country drew increasingly its
leaders and administrators in church and state, and moulded
opinion through the parson, the schoolmaster and the justice of the
peace. Hence, Oxford and Cambridge became objects of high
policy in exact proportion as they intertwined themselves with the
several strands of English life and thought. It was not by way
## p. 419 (#441) ############################################
Universities under Edward VI and Mary 419
of compliment that Somerset, Gardiner and Cecil were elected
university chancellors.
The standing difficulty of the historian of the time confronts
the enquirer in this field also. The bitter temper of the age makes
it well nigh impossible to determine facts. To Ascham, the arch-
enemy of English learning was the Catholic restoration. At Oxford,
Anthony à Wood has no hesitation in ascribing the miserable
decay of letters to the Edwardian visitors. Yet, if Cheke, Ridley
and Smith formulated the eminently reasonable statutes and
injunctions of 1549, militant reformers like Latimer and Lever
agree in deploring the evil case of education—the devilish drowning
of youth in ignorance'-since protestant courtiers had the ear
of the crown. A whole library, we know, was to be had at Oxford
for forty shillings when visitors were about, so heavy was the
hand that was laid upon 'superstition. ' 'Purgings' of this college
and that were followed by the forced intrusion of new zealots.
To Oxford was sent, to teach divinity, Peter Martyr, the fighting
Zwinglian, a far less attractive spirit than the wide-minded Bucer,
disciple and friend of Melanchthon, who filled the corresponding
chair at Cambridge.
Thus, controversial theology overshadowed all else and both
universities were drawn into the whirlpool of politics. But
political divinity has rarely stimulated learning. If, at Cambridge,
for a year or two, undergraduates kept their numbers, in serious-
ness of temper they showed marked decline. At Oxford, in 1550,
there were “a bare thousand on the books, and most of these were
not in residence. The stream of benefactions dried up. Pluralism
.
and sinecures abounded. Far-seeing men abandoned university
life for service in church and state. Ascham, though public orator
at Cambridge, spent years at court or abroad. Sir Thomas Smith,
while professor of civil law, left the university for political life.
At best, it was the function of the university to supply the pro-
fessions; learning, as such, was ignored. The ‘university'declined,
the 'college' was not as yet systematised or disciplined. Disputa-
tions—the one test of proficiency-were neglected, the schools
deserted; few graduated even as bachelors; the higher degrees
were rarely sought. It is much that the old comity of learning
did not entirely die. As Thomas Smith taught at Padua, and
Caius at Montpellier, so German theologians, Dutch Hebraists, or
Italian lawyers could hold English posts. It is of more weight still,
that the Edwardian statutes mark a genuine advance in adminis-
tration and in the concept of learning. They breathe the renascence
27-2
## p. 420 (#442) ############################################
420
Universities, Schools and Scholarship
-
spirit, they evince sound judgment and first-hand knowledge of
the needs of the universities. Elizabeth's advisers found little to
alter in them, and they stood till the Laudian era. Philosophy-
in humanist fashion-was held specifically to include politics, ethics
and physica: Plato and Pliny were prescribed alongside of Aristotle.
Dialectic covered not merely the text of Aristotle, but, also, that
of Hermogenes and of Quintilian-implying that interrelation of
logic and rhetoric which was the very core of humanist doctrine.
Mathematics included cosmography; Euclid, Strabo, Pomponius
Mela and Cardan were the authorities. The Greek professor had
to interpret Homer, Euripides, Demosthenes and 'Socrates. ' To
civil law, to be read, like medicine, in the original texts, was
added a study of 'the Ecclesiastic Laws of this Kingdom. ' For
undergraduates, the first year course was mainly in mathe-
matics (Elizabethan statutes substituted rhetoric); the second
year in logic; the third in rhetoric and philosophy. The master's
degree required three years' residence, with reading in Greek,
philosophy, geometry and astronomy. To a doctor alone was
.
complete freedom allowed. But, gradually, the colleges imposed
their own courses. Thus, the first year man at Trinity began logic,
read Cicero and Demosthenes, wrote prose and verse. He was
probably, we remember, a boy of 12 to 15 years of age. Plato was
added in his second year; after graduation, he took up Hebrew.
Much, perhaps most, of all this was on paper only. Circumstances,
whether fiscal, political or religious, were equally adverse. Greed,
polemics, dynastic insecurity kept learning stagnant in schools
and universities alike.
Not that Mary herself was indifferent to learning, any more
than Northumberland had been. But it was inevitable that
Gardiner should revoke the new statutes, and turn adrift heads
and fellows 'to eat mice at Zurich. ' Peter Martyr promptly
crossed the seas. In Oxford, Magdalen was 'thoroughly purged,' but
Thomas Pope founded Trinity (1556), and White, St John's (1555).
Gardiner was hard on Trinity and St John's at Cambridge, but Caius
re-founded Gonville (1558). Reginald Pole was no obscurantist;
with Sadoleto, his ideal was a humanism suffused with the spirit of
a finely tempered Catholicism. The statutes of the two Marian
foundations at Oxford are such as the scholarly bishop of Carpen-
tras himself might have settled. “I remember,' says Sir Thomas
Pope, 'when I was a young scholar at Eton, the Greek tongue was
growing apace, the study of which is now much decayed. St John's
was built to serve 'sacred theology, philosophy, and good Arts,
## p. 421 (#443) ############################################
The Universities and the Church
421
Hem
including civil and canon law. At Cambridge, Caius, a devout
Catholic, was, none the less, a friend of Melanchthon; a student and
a teacher in many continental universities; a Grecian of distinction,
yet a pupil of Vesalius. Like Smith and Savile, he represents
the versatility and enthusiasm which marked the larger minds of
the revival in England. Yet, to judge from Ascham's lament-
and Caius confirms it—we must assume that Cambridge, already
predominantly protestant, reached its lowest depths under the
Catholic régime; that teachers and students alike forsook the
university; that degrees were seldom conferred, and, too often,
gained by dispensation: between 1555 and 1559, only 175 pro-
ceeded to the bachelor's standing at Cambridge, and 216 at
Oxford, less hostile to the dominant powers. Of all the causes
which reacted unfavourably upon the universities, none made so
deep an impression on the country as the Oxford and Smithfield
martyrdoms.
As in the field of religion and of affairs, so in that of
education, with the accession of Elizabeth the national unrest
began to abate. Recovery, however, was slow. In the last year
of Mary, only 28 degrees in arts had been conferred at Oxford.
In 1561, no senior proceeded to the degree of doctor in any of
the faculties. But Cecil, chancellor of Cambridge (1558—98)
guided the new queen's university policy. Leicester, a chancellor
(1564–88) of a different type, was, none the less, keen to secure
Oxford for protestantism, and to raise the standard of efficiency in
teaching and learning. Elizabeth herself was a lover of learning
and, perhaps, the best-read woman of her time, with a bias to
national continuity, and an aversion to the foreigner whether pope
or Calvin. The visitations of 1559 once more eliminated hostile
influences. Such heads of houses and fellows as clung to the old
faith either withdrew or were expelled. Dr Bill and Lawrence
Humfrey, with many others, were restored. Disaffected societies,
like St John's, Trinity, or New College at Oxford, were effectually
'purged. ' But, this done, and Edward's statutes reimposed, the
visitors held their hands. When the queen visited Cambridge in
1564, a new temper, hopeful and earnest, prevailed. The number
of residents at Oxford rose steadily from one thousand to two.
Benefactions were again freely offered. Two results of importance
gradually emerge: the restoration of the universities to their
function as safe seminaries of the clergy, and the final subordina-
tion of the university to the colleges and their heads. By the
Act of Incorporation of both the universities (1571), parliament,
Tele
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15
## p. 422 (#444) ############################################
422
Universities, Schools and Scholarship
for the first time, recognised and confirmed the franchises, privi-
leges and jurisdictions hitherto enjoyed by Oxford and Cambridge
under royal charters and by usage, and each attained the status
of a corporation under the style of 'The Chancellor, Masters and
Scholars. ' Although tests were not by statute reimposed, convo-
cation at Oxford, at Leicester's instance, passed decrees, requiring,
from all undergraduates over 12 years of age, subscription to the
articles of 1562, with special stress on the royal supremacy. Freedom
of teaching and even of study was jealously watched from court;
and, as Whitgift made plain, protestant orthodoxy and loyalty
rather than learning were approved marks of university efficiency.
By degrees, the concept of the church approved by Elizabeth and
expounded by Hooker became dominantin Oxford, whilst Cambridge
cultivated an enlightened puritanism. But, in both the universities
alike, the keenest interests were those of controversy. Cambridge,
however, sent out from St John's and Trinity not a few school-
masters of merit.
After 1590, Catholic influences were ruthlessly ousted from
English universities. Douay (1569), with its English college ruled
by Allen, had, by 1576, not less than two hundred students of
British origin, amongst them not a few notable ex-fellows and
lecturers from Oxford and Cambridge. And other English scholars
found refuge at St Omer, Valladolid, Seville and in the English
college at Rome. In 1581, Leicester still complained that Oxford
suffered 'secret lurking Papists,' and, though less freely, Catholic
houses continued to send their sons to Caius, Pembroke or
Trinity Hall, at Cambridge, in spite of the harder temper of the
university, or to Oriel, Trinity or St John's at Oxford. Puritan
families mainly affected Cambridge, especially St John's and the
new foundations of Emmanuel (1584), the avowed centre of militant
protestantism, and Sidney Sussex (1599). Robert Brown, John
Smith, the baptist John Cotton and Cartwright were all at
Cambridge. Lawrence Humfrey, president of Magdalen, Oxford,
'did so stock his college with such a generation of nonconformists
as could not be rooted out in many years after his decease. ' The
strongest minds (Whitaker, master of St John's, Cambridge, may be
taken as a conspicuous example) drifted to theology. The best
careers open to unaided talent lay in the church. Hebrew bad
more students than Greek. Tremellius, who taught it at Cam-
bridge, was a foreigner; so were most of his successors. Oxford
learnt Calvinian divinity from Huguenots and other refugees,
Spanish and Italian. It is not the least title to their place in the
## p. 423 (#445) ############################################
Civil Law at the
Universities
423
history of literature, that Oxford and Cambridge bred the men
to whom we owe the Bishops' Bible, the prayer-book and the
Authorised Version!
The place of civil law in the English universities needs brief
mention. Sir Thomas Smith claimed it as a branch of humanism.
In Elyot's vein, he will have it broadly based upon philosophy,
ethics and history. This, the doctrine of Cujas and Alciati, he had
imbibed at Padua and Bologna. For a short time, he succeeded
in winning minds of distinction to study in this spirit a juris-
prudence from which, in respect of precision and authority,
English lawyers might learn much. But the uncertain professional
demand for civilians, the academic temper of the Cambridge
school, the suspicion attaching to the subject as Italian and,
therefore, inevitably, papal, the growing sense of nationality
and the unassailable place of English law which accompanied it,
rendered Smith's hopes ultimately fruitless. Yet there was felt
in high places some need for civil lawyers to advise upon
international usages, to draft treaties and conduct diplomatic corre-
spondence. In 1549, visitors were instructed to set apart, at both
universities, colleges for the exclusive study of civil law, but the
proposal had no countenance. Fellowships, specifically allotted to
this subject, as at All Souls, were, in very many cases, held by
theologians.
Oxford possessed, in Albericus Gentilis (1552—1608) a civilian
of Perugia, elected regius professor of civil law in 1587, the most
learned lawyer of the Elizabethan time. In his hands grew up
a system of international law to serve the needs of a world in
which church and empire alike had ceased to be the dominant
powers. His chief works were De Legationibus (1584), in which
he defined the basis and limits of diplomatic privilege, and De
Jure Belli (1588–98). This standing monument of Oxford
civil studies exhibits a masterly examination of international
historical precedents of the sixteenth century, utilised to reconcile
the Bible, the protestant doctrine of natural law and the essential
principles of the imperial code. Grotius, a century later, was
deeply indebted to Gentilis, from whom, indeed, international law,
as a systematic body of doctrine, is, ultimately, derived. Gentilis, a
man of wide interests and of great learning, exercised profound
influence in the university and was highly regarded at court. His
method of teaching differed from that of Smith and his successor
Haddon, in that he concentrated attention upon the development
1 See ante, chap. u.
## p. 424 (#446) ############################################
424 Universities, Schools and Scholarship
of civil law in its direct application to modern use, with entire
indifference to it as a branch of humanist study; for so to regard law
could, in the England of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
only end in its relegation to 'polite learning. ' The supremacy
of English law was, indeed, already secured. The activity of the
Inns of Court and the genius of Coke did but serve to enforce
the inevitable trend of things. Trinity Hall, however (especially
under its master, Cowell, 1598), All Souls and Broadgates were, more
or less, frequented by civilians. But, to Stewart parliamentarians,
Roman law was identified with absolutism and high prelacy.
The lines of classical study were, nominally, determined by
requirements for degrees. But the colleges were already dominant
in teaching and in administration. The more strenuous exacted
entrance tests. Rhetoric, in the wider humanist sense, philosophy,
ethical and natural,' and logic were the accepted subjects for the
degree. Oxford logic was strictly Aristotelian. Elsewhere, as
at Cambridge and St Andrews, it began to be taught on lines
which Ramus elaborated from Agricola, and this, in turn, developed
into the logic of Port Royal Greek, as a university study,
steadily declined from the standard set up by Cheke. None of
his successors could arouse the old enthusiasm. Whitgift, the
strongest force in the university, knew no Greek. Under Mary, it
was reputed to have disappeared from Oxford. Sir Thomas Pope's
lament concerns this. Leicester, as chancellor, complained, in 1582,
that the Oxford professor read seldom or never. Indeed, it may
be affirmed that no work in classical scholarship was produced at
Oxford or Cambridge during the period under review which is
remotely worthy of comparison with that turned out by Scaliger,
Estienne, Nizolius, Casaubon, Turnebus, or a hundred industrious,
but now half forgotten, scholars in French and German lands. Nor
can English learning show a scholar, unless it were Henry Savile,
to rank with George Buchanan. In Greek, not one of the trans-
lators, Savile excepted, but works through a French version, like
North. There was, on the other hand, a large output of Latin
plays? -evidence, no doubt, of careful study in school and uni-
versity of classical or neo-Latin models. Trinity (Cambridge)
statutes (1560) contain clauses concerning the performance of
college plays. Acting was the accepted mode of training youth
in speaking Latin and in grace of gesture, wherever humanists
controlled education. Shrewsbury, in this matter, held the pre-
eminence amongst English schools ; but at none of any pretension
1 See vol. v of the present work.
6
i
## p. 425 (#447) ############################################
English Learning in the XVIth Century
Century 425
was the practice neglected, though in Westminster alone has the
tradition retained its vitality to our own day.
As the humanism of the sixteenth century became more
strictly literary in its range, so surely did mathematics and
natural philosophy sink to a lower place in English learning.
Their affinity was with navigation, architecture or military science,
not with the learned professions; a typical and very popular
hand-book was Blundeville His exercises . . . in Cosmographie. . . .
Methods of observation and experiment, working to practical
ends, superseded authoritative appeal to Aristotle or Ptolemy.
Recorde's The Castel of Knowledge (1553) had a vogue for half
a century as a manual of the new mathematic, harmonised to the
Copernican astronomy. The English Euclid (1570) would seem to
have had but a poor sale. Original work, like Gilbert's De Magnete
(1600) kept its Latin dress, and, apart from this, nothing of first
rate importance in the field of pure science was produced from
an English press during the period under discussion.
It is an interesting, though difficult, task to realise the actual
range and level of the work of a studious undergraduate coming
up from Westminster or Shrewsbury to Christ Church at Oxford or
St John's at Cambridge. Statutes, in effect, lend little or no help.
Colleges ordered and gave the instruction and, apparently, were
powerful enough to secure dispensation from the formal university
exercises. A large, though varying, number in every college never
graduated at all. Though the age at matriculation tended to rise,
Bacon (who, himself, entered at twelve years and three months)
complained, in the closing years of the century, that a prime cause
of the futility of university education lay in the immaturity of the
undergraduate. We may remember that Bentham, two centuries
later, went up at twelve. Magdalen (Oxford) wisely put raw first
year 'men' to the learning of rudiments in its own admirable
grammar school. Yet, there is ample evidence that ambitious and
well-prepared boys-precocious, perhaps, to our seeming-not only
found helpful teaching in classical letters, but developed broad and
abiding interests. Bodley, Wotton, Savile, Sidney and Hooker at
Oxford, Spenser, Downes, Fraunce and Harington at Cambridge,
are typical of different groups of men who owed much to the univer-
sities for the shaping of their bent. But that single-eyed devotion
to scholarship which marked the circle of Cheke, Smith and Ascham
at the outset of this period is far to seek as it draws to a close.
Theology attracted the strongest intelligence as it has done at
certain epochs since. The way to secular advance lay at court or
## p. 426 (#448) ############################################
426 Universities, Schools and Scholarship
>
in adventure. Wotton, indeed, wrote his Latin play like many
another.
But he found his enjoyment at Oxford in reading law
with Gentilis, in learning Italian and in working at optics. Donne
had read enough for graduation by the time he was thirteen : and
he then left to spend four desultory years at Cambridge. Henry
Savile, warden of Merton and, later, like Wotton, provost of Eton,
whose rightful repute for scholarship even Scaliger allowed, trans-
lated the Annals of Tacitus (1692) wrote on Roman warfare, edited
Xenophon (the Cyropaedia) and produced the first substantial
work of English patristic learning since the revival. He stands
for the courtier' as developed on English soil, a man of the
world, versatile and travelled, 'the scholar gentleman. ' Before
the queen died, the English universities Bad already begun to
realise their national function as the breeders of men of talent
for affairs, of divines and schoolmasters, with here and there, as
a ‘sport,' a' man of letters and, yet more rarely, a leader in
scholarship
Three other foundations call for mention : Edinburgh (1582)
Trinity College, Dublin (1591) and Gresham College (1596). The
reformation struggle had all but extinguished university teaching in
Scotland, which sent students to Padua or Douay, or to the Collège
de Guyenne, at Bordeaux, where we meet with many Scottish
names, that of George Buchanan, as a teacher, among them. It is
characteristic of the time that young Scotsmen very rarely found
their way to Oxford or Cambridge. Andrew Melville, though as
fanatic as Knox, was, however, a humanist and did something to
restore learning at Glasgow and St Andrews. Edinburgh was
too young to take effective part in building up the fabric of
Scottish protestant humanism. Trinity College, Dublin, an
outstanding product of the English reformation, was, as Fuller
describes it, a plantation settled from Cambridge. The first
suggestion for a foundation in Dublin had come from archbishop
Browne, some forty years before, and was repeated after Elizabeth's
accession. The temper of the founder was revealed in the two
men who filled the office of provost, the first, archbishop Loftus,
a fellow of Trinity, Cambridge--and admirer of Cartwright-and
the second, Travers, of Disciplina fame, puritan and arch-separatist.
The college was, of course, part and parcel of the English occu-
pation. Sir Thomas Gresham designed his college (1596), in
London, to be 'an epitome of a University. Oxford chose the
original seven professors, who included Henry Briggs, Napier's
collaborator. The professor of law was expressly directed to
## p. 427 (#449) ############################################
English Schools under Elizabeth
427
treat of contracts, monopolies, shipping and the like. "Medicine'
covered not only the study of Galen and Hippocrates, but, also,
modern theories of physiology, pathology and therapeutics. Geo-
metry was to be both theoretical and practical. In divinity,
she professor was charged specially to defend the Church of
England. It was a notable attempt to adapt the widening know-
ledge of the day to the needs of the spacious time.
It is significant that, in both universities, the art of printing
ceased at some date between 1520—30, to be restored at
Cambridge, in 1582, when Thomas was recognised as printer to the
university, and at Oxford, in 1585, when Barnes set up a press.
But the centre of English printing and publishing was London,
where fifty presses were at work under strict surveillance of court
and bishop. From 1586, licence to publish was granted by the
archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London, and the only
two presses authorised without the London area were those of
Oxford and Cambridge. Little of the first order was produced,
however, by the university printers. The mass of texts for school
and college were not of English origin, but bear the imprint of
Plantin, Aldus, or Gryphius and of the busy workshops of Basel
and Paris.
The influence of Edwardian legislation on English schools is
a subject for the general historian. It is, however, to be noted
how large was the supply of small schools, elementary, ‘song,'
or grammar schools in England, as revealed by the chantry com-
mission of 1548, particularly in the eastern half of the kingdom.
Some half dozen school foundations, such as Sedbergh and Bir-
mingham, are in debt to Northumberland. Mary could do as little
for schools as for universities. Elizabeth's counsellors took up
the task where Edward's death had left it. The queen's trained
intelligence was on the side of knowledge. In church and in
state, the men she trusted owed more to acquired gifts than to
birth. Classical education was in favour at court; money from
religious houses was though sparingly, as always--accorded to
school endowments on request. To restore the local grammar
school became a fashion. Merchants, servants of the crown,
country gentry, superior clergy, borough corporations, founded
free grammar schools. Westminster was reconstructed; Eton
and Winchester, which had the immunities of a college of the
universities, widened studies and enlarged their numbers. The
leaving age was advanced. A new type of scholar, sometimes, like
## p. 428 (#450) ############################################
428
Universities, Schools and Scholarship
a
Ashton of Shrewsbury, a man of versatile gifts and standing at
court, or a travelled historian like Camden, became headmaster.
Savile and Wotton dignified the office of provost of Eton. Purely
local schools, such as Peterborough or Colchester, made stringent
requirements of attainment in their headmasters. Fellows of the
best colleges took service in schools, and, though often incompetent
as teachers, were but rarely ill-educated men. The best houses
began to send boys to school. The tutor remained for the younger
brothers, or piloted the promising graduate through the perils of
the foreign tour. The burgher class adopted the new education.
Colet's reformed school of St Paul's was copied in fifty towns.
Borough councils were importunate to secure charters and grants.
In order to keep a high level of efficiency, here and there a founder
linked his school to one of the colleges of the university, after the
fashion of Eton or Winchester. The lay spirit became dominant.
Shrewsbury, indeed, was a civic school, but ecclesiastical founda-
tions also, like Westminster and Winchester, now and again had
lay heads. The licence to teach was granted by the bishop of the
diocese, and, nominally at least, royal sanction gave its imprimatur
to a Latin grammar or to a historical text-book like Ocland's
Anglorum Praelia. Yet, in reality, instruction was unfettered
within the limits of school statutes.
There were, in effect, two main types of school. The first was the
great public boarding school : Eton, Winchester and Westminster,
drawing pupils from the country at large, though Westminster was,
largely, a London school ; with these ranked Shrewsbury, which,
of local origin and a day school, yet served a province, and was
filled with sons of the gentry of north Wales, and the north-
west midlands. The second type was the town day school, of diverse
origin, such as St Paul's, Merchant Taylors', St Saviour's South-
wark, Manchester, Guildford, Tonbridge, or Magdalen College
school. Wolsey's school of Ipswich apart, there is no reason to
assume imitation of French or German models in organisation.
The statutes of Wykeham or of Colet were the standing guide.
Compared with the superior clergy, headmasters, like heads of
houses in the universities, were poorly paid. Ashton had £40
per annum at Shrewsbury. The Westminster headship was worth
£27. 11s. 8d. , but ‘presents' were expected from parents. Camden
said he earned enough. Guildford could pay £24 in 1596. Bucer's
stipend of £100, in Edward's reign, was magnificent, but unique.
The usual pay of the one master of a small grammar school, in
1548, was six or seven pounds. Rotherham and Southwell,
>
## p. 429 (#451) ############################################
The School Curriculum 429
collegiate schools, could afford £10 or a little more. Shrewsbury
was, about 1570, far the best paid headship in England, and the
school numbers exceeded those of Eton or Winchester. The
custom of taking 'private pupils,' however, grew rapidly towards
the end of the century. As a Cambridge fellow rarely received
so much as £6, including his allowance for commons, the new
schools tended to attract promising material to their staff.
The practice of the better schools was to require that boys,
on admission, should have had good grounding in accidence, know
the concords and read and write English intelligibly. The curricu-
lum was, almost exclusively, classical. A little mathematics, some
smattering of astronomy, may have been added here and there;
but neither logic nor English was taught, and history (Ocland,
indeed, is an interesting phenomenon) simply as a comment
on Livy or Plutarch. The four public schools followed a very
similar order. At Westminster, apparently, Greek was carried
further than elsewhere: for Xenophon, Isocrates, Demosthenes,
Homer and Hesiod are expressly prescribed in the Elizabethan
curriculum. Eton seems to have aimed no higher than the grammar.
Shrewsbury makes no mention of any author harder than Isocrates.
Thucydides and Euripides are never named. The grammar generally
used was Clenard's, until Grant, at Westminster, introduced his
Spicilegium and Eton adapted it to its own use as the Eton Greek
grammar. Efforts at Greek composition were exceptional. Chief
stress was laid in every school upon exercises in Latin prose and
verse. To lay the foundations of prose style was the object of every
master. To this end, he began with the Colloquies of Erasmus,
Cordier and Vives, and passed to Sturm's selection of Cicero's Letters.
As early as possible, the pupil was turned on to Terence, whose
pure Roman diction every humanist, Catholic or puritan alike,
upheld for imitation. Caesar, properly, was not regarded as an
elementary text. Sallust was commonly read, but Tacitus very
rarely. There was no reluctance to put Juvenal and Martial into
boys' hands. The Figurae of Mosellanus, the Epitome Troporum
of Susenbrotus, the grammars of Despauterius and Lily are
commonly alluded to. At Ipswich, Wolsey prescribed the Ele-
gantiae of Valla. Rhetoric, in the developed sense, was left to the
university. The school-play took the place of the mystery, and the
pageant competed with the play. Shrewsbury and Chester schools
were famous for dramatic exhibitions. Henry Sidney, lord of the
Welsh March, whose son Philip was a pupil of Ashton, was enter-
tained, after a visit to the town, with a noteworthy river-pageant
## p. 430 (#452) ############################################
430 Universities, Schools and Scholarship
performed by the boys as he was rowed down the Severn on his
journey home. In many schools, the performance of a scene
from Terence or Seneca was a weekly exercise, the example of
Melanchthon and John Sturm being herein followed. English writing
was, probably, more cared for than directly appears. For the
admirable training provided by exact construing, by essay-writing
and by declamations, though these were never vernacular exercises,
developed taste in words and some sense of the logical texture of
speech. What natural history was imparted was given by way of
notes to classical texts. Much attention was often given to sing-
ing. But the arts of writing and ciphering were relegated to
separate and inferior schools. There was, inevitably, much repe-
tition, and a harsh discipline enforced attention to uncongenial
task-work. In the Elizabethan school, the hard edge of circum-
stance was never softened to the weak. The 'big school,' in which
all classes were held together, carried with it the idea of corporate
life. Monitors were always employed for discipline and for aid in
teaching junior forms. As a rule, foundationers, and these alone,
received education free of all charges, except for 'birch broom and
candles. ' The age of leaving for the university is hard to estimate;
but the better taught schools tried to retain their promising pupils
till their sixteenth year. In time of plague, a large school, like
the colleges, had its retreat; Westminster had a house at
Chiswick, Eton at Chippenham, Magdalen College, Oxford, at
Brackley. Not a few schools began to acquire a library of merit,
which, in the case of such a school as Shrewsbury, has, by happy
neglect, survived intact to our own day.
The rapid growth of the revival in England may be illustrated
by contrasting the position and attainments of Grocyn at Oxford
(1491) and those of 'John Cheke who taught Cambridge Greek'as
regius professor, in 1540. Admitted at St John's when twelve years
of age, Cheke so proved his skill in the tongues as 'to have laid the
very foundations of learning in his College. ' The foundation of
the royal chair of Greek gave him the pre-eminence, both titular
and real, in Cambridge scholarship. His expositions of Euripides
and Sophocles, Herodotus and the Ethics of Aristotle, are specially
recorded. These, probably, were of far more importance in the
history of learning in England than the controversy as to the
right value of Greek vowel sounds, with which his name is usually
associated. Cheke became public orator in 1544, and was ap-
pointed tutor to prince Edward. At heart a reformer, he had no
## p. 431 (#453) ############################################
The Writers on Rhetoric
431
scruple in accepting conventual lands, whereby he became a man
of wealth and station. As provost of King's College, one of
Somerset's visitors, a knight and intimate at court, he was familiar
with the currents both of learning and of politics. For rashly
embracing the cause of lady Jane Grey, he went, in due course,
to the Tower; he was soon released, but, circumspectly, passed
to the continent, where we hear of him teaching Greek at Padua
and at Strassburg. He was arrested by order of Philip II, near
Brussels, as an 'unlicensed' traveller and conveyed, once more, to
the Tower. Under threat of torture, he abjured his convictions,
and died (1557) within a year, a broken man.
a
Cheke was un-
questionably a scholar of distinction. Of his criticism on Sallust
as quoted by Ascham, something has already been said? . He left
behind a copious body of Latin translation from the Greek,
patristic and classical. His bulky tracts of controversial divinity
are chiefly noteworthy as exhibiting the temper of the time,
especially as it affected Cambridge learning. He wrote nothing
but a pamphlet or two in the vernacular, though he endeavoured,
unsuccessfully, to reform English spelling on a phonetic method.
His outstanding merit lies in his stimulating force as a teacher,
and the respect which his learning won for English scholarship.
The contribution of Thomas Wilson, friend and disciple of
Cheke, to the classical renascence in England has, also, already
been mentioned. The first book of The Arte of Rhetorique (1553)
treats of the purpose of rhetoric, which is affirmed to be the art
which perfects the natural gifts of speech and reason. The distinc-
tions of several types of arguments,' and their constituent factors,
are set out by means of examples shaped, indeed, on classical and
Erasmian models, but with an added seriousness, born of the time,
which lifts them above the Petrarchian commonplaces of the
Italians. The second book treats, in the customary manner, of the
fundamental qualities of style as an instrument of persuasion. The
orator must be easily intelligible. He must secure the goodwill
of his audience, must wind his way into the subject by suitable
approaches, particularly if he be a preacher. Let the latter
diligently seek his pattern in Chrysostom. The conditions oí
right eloquence, such as logical order, emphasis, repetition, climax,
are as necessary in English speech as in Latin; nor can an
English speaker neglect the art of stirring the emotions by the
employment of humour, or pathos, by appeal to indignation or
passion. The third book, ranging over a wide field, deals with
1 See ante, p. 290.
6
3 See ante, p. 23.
1
## p. 432 (#454) ############################################
432 Universities, Schools and Scholarship
the choice of words and the use of figure and ornament; with the
functions of gesture; with the essential art of memory. It con-
tains some of the sanest Elizabethan criticism of classical writers.
The marks of The Arte of Rhetorique are its clearness, its
freedom from pedantry and its modern instances. It was several
times reprinted during the century and even now repays a reading.
Wilson's treatise should be read side by side with Guazzo's Civile
Conversation, translated by Pettie twenty years later, with a
preface in which he refers to Wilson and in which he urges the
need for a liberal expansion of English vocabulary. A work far
less attractive than either was Richard Sherry's Treatise of Schemes
and Tropes (1555). The author was headmaster of Magdalen
College school, at this time, perhaps, the best Latin school in
England. His writing is crabbed and technical, and had small vogue
outside lecture rooms. More popular were Richard Rainolde's
Foundation of Rhetorike (1563), Henry Peacham's Garden of
Eloquence (1577) and The Arcadian Rhetorike (1584) of Abraham
Fraunce, who works in modern examples from poetry and prose,
notably quoting Sidney and Tasso, and not overlooking the
Spaniards.
Roger Ascham was entered at St John's, Cambridge, a little
later than Cheke and, as he neared manhood, found himself drawn
into his circle, which embraced Redman and Pember, Thomas
Smith, Ridley and Wilson. Upon Cheke, Ascham looked back as
upon his great master, counting him worthy to rank with John
Sturm of Strassburg, the chief luminary of protestant scholarship
in the middle of the sixteenth century.
In 1548, Ascham, perhaps the ablest Greek scholar in England,
and public orator of the university, was called to court as
tutor to princess Elizabeth. But, while he enjoyed his task
of teaching a pupil of Elizabeth's acquisitive temper, his self-
respect ill brooked a court position. Two years later, he made
the tour of Germany, as secretary to a mission, touching Italy at
Venice. He was alert to meet scholars, observe institutions and
visit historic sites. Characteristically, the secretary taught his
chief Greek grammar during their intervals of leisure. The
Report and Discourse of the affairs of Germany, written in 1553,
shows him a keen student of French and German politics. He
has made Thucydides, Polybius and Livy his models. Commines
has his favour, but, though he would not have allowed it, we may
safely affirm that Macchiavelli's Relazioni had taught him more
than the ancients. Queen Mary made him Latin secretary at
## p. 433 (#455) ############################################
Roger Ascham
433
court, where his own caution, aided by Gardiner's personal feeling
for him, secured him from molestation on account of his opinions,
and Elizabeth was glad to keep him in her service as Greek
preceptor and courtier of the new style.
Much of Ascham's classical writing-translation from Sopho-
cles, studies in Herodotus, a tract de Imitatione-has disappeared.
Probably, the three works by which he is now known adequately
represent his powers. Toscophilus (1545), a treatise on the art
of shooting with the long-bow, treats, in the accepted dialogue form,
of the function of bodily training in education, with the urgent
prescription of practice with the bow as the national exercise.
There is not a little of Plato and the Italians in his concept of the
place of physical grace and vigour in personality. Plutarch and
Epicharmus, Domitian and Galen, are all called in to defend his
argument. This was inevitable, given the time and place; but,
in spite of the fanciful play made with Jupiter and Minos in this
connection, the skilled English archer for more than a hundred
years has made Toxophilus his text-book, and 'Ascham’s Five
Points' are part of the lore today.
Ascham’s nationalism, which inspires every paragraph of
Toxophilus, is but characteristic of English humanism of the finer
type. Elyot, Smith, Cheke and Hoby are Englishmen first and
men of scholarship next. Learning, indeed, they win from every
source; they are voracious readers, their interests are well-nigh
universal. But, whatever the flowers, native or foreign, whole-
some or poisonous, the sweetness drawn therefrom is the honey
of English hives. The Scholemaster (1570) is essentially the work
of a scholar who has no illusions on the subject of Erasmian
cosmopolitanism. Like Elyot, he wrote in his own tongue-
English matter, in English speech, for Englishmen, as he had said
in his Toxophilus. He made, indeed, of a technical treatise
a piece of literature, and that of no mean order. We may notice
that writings upon education which were written or found welcome
in this country had a note of reality which is often far to seek in
German or, still more, in Italian pieces of similar character. The
starting point of The Scholemaster is, essentially, that of Elyot's
Governour. This is, that England loses much fruitful capacity
through the ill-training of its youth of station. In the first book,
Ascham considers the chief reasons of the ineffectiveness of the
new education. From the text that news had reached court that
Eton boys had broken school to escape the birch, he inveighs,
in the vein of Erasmus, against the cruelty of school discipline,
E. L. IJI.
OH. XIX.
28
## p. 434 (#456) ############################################
434 Universities, Schools and Scholarship
not realising that, given the curriculum and the mode of teaching
it, harsh punishments were, in fact, inevitable. He next considers
the differing nature of wits. ' The schoolmaster is prone to hold
'
precocity the singular mental and moral virtue: Ascham pleads
for the slow but solid temper, and protests that, by contempt for
late developed minds, Pedantius drives away many a fine intelli-
gence from due opportunity of public service. He draws from
Plato seven true ‘notes of a good wit,' which 'he plainly declares
in English': in essence, these are industry, interest, curiosity, a
good will, but never premature gifts of acquisition. Now, these
are qualities which the 'lewd and ignorant teacher bars from
their natural growth by his impatient pedantry. The second hin-
drance is the decay of home discipline. The youth of seventeen sent
to court, left without a career, hanging idly about a great house,
falls to gambling, and all licence, swelling that clan of the gentle
unemployed for which relief was sought later in adventure and
plantation. Travel, in the third place, has made shipwreck of many,
not because I do contemn either the knowledge of strange and divers tongues,
and namely the Italian tongue, which next the Greek and Latin tongue I do
like and love above all others, or else because I do despise the learning that is
gotten or the experience that is gathered in strange countries,
but travel meant a sojourn in Italy, and, in well remembered words,
he proclaims his aversion to what he had seen in Venice, and the
deep seated distrust with which he views the morals, the politics,
the irreligion, the newer literature of the Italy of the Spaniard
and the inquisition. Study will provide all the worthy fruits of
travel, and manners can be learnt by all who care to read
Castiglione's Cortegiano, in its new English dress. Let a young
Englishman be proud of his England, and, if he will see other
manners, other minds, Strassburg or Frankfort will give him what
he seeks, with no danger to faith and morals. The second book is
largely concerned with the teaching of Latin. The method of
Ascham, according to which a classical language is taught by the
process of re-translation of construes, is, at least, as old as Cicero
and is of slight importance in the history of instruction. But this
section of The Scholemaster is of interest as evidence of the thorough-
ness and breadth of Ascham's reading. He avows Greek to be the
subject of his truest affection. He has a sound view of the
function of historical writing, which far transcends the superficial
aspect of it which confronts us in Italian humanists prior to the
later Patrizi. Much space is given to the art of teaching rhetoric.
Cicero is the accepted master; where Quintilian differs from him,
## p. 435 (#457) ############################################
a
-
Richard Mulcaster
435
he is to be disregarded. John Sturm he regards as unapproach-
able amongst neo-Latinists. Ascham pleads for style: 'ye know
not what hurt ye do to learning that are not for words but for
matter, and do make a divorce betwixt the tongue and the heart. '
The secret of true imitation is to read exactly and, at the same
time, to read widely. English will have its fruit of such right
imitation of classic models, for in them alone are the 'true pre-
cepts and perfect examples' of sound writing. Upon poetic imita-
tion only did Ascham lapse into pedantry! He will recognise no
English metres. Much as he admires Chaucer, he apologises for
his riming, an inheritance from the Goth and Hun.
It seems that The Scholemaster was, for a time, accepted as
the approved manual of method in instruction. The licence of
The Positions (1581) of Richard Mulcaster runs thus : 'provided
always that if this book contain anything prejudicial or hurtful
to the Book of Master Ascham . . . called The Scholemaster, that
then this licence shall be void. ' In passing from Ascham to
Mulcaster we step into a different world. For Mulcaster, though
an Eton boy and a student of Christ Church, spent his life as a
master of the two great day schools of the city of London-head-
master of Merchant Taylors' 1561–86 ; surmaster and, later,
highmaster (1596) of St Paul's. The fruit of his experience is
embodied in two books, The Positions (1581) and The Elementarie
(1582), the latter an instalment of a larger work. Whilst Ascham was
concerned with youth of station, destined to become landowners,
courtiers or diplomatists, Mulcaster's subject is the education of
the burgher class. Both, again, use English as their instrument;
Ascham wrote good Tudor prose, whilst it is no gibe to say that
Mulcaster's own example is enough to imperil his thesis that
English speech is as harmonious and as precise as Latinity itself.
