Prof: Right.
Well, today I want to talk
about changes in education and the growth of popular literacy
in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,
one of the most important sets of changes which were going on
in the reign of Elizabeth and the--
under the early Stuarts. Okay.
To begin with a little context,
looking back at the late medieval period,
it's been said of late medieval England that at that time all
education was technical and vocational,
directed to some particular occupation or function.
And the formal schooling that
we tend to think of when we use the term "education"
was really only part of that. If one thinks of education more
broadly in terms of the transmission of a culture and
its skills and values and so on, then of course that was a much
larger thing than simply formal schooling and it involved not
only schools but the church, the household;
many ways in which people were instructed for their roles in
life. So, one can't say that medieval
England was in any way an uneducated society.
It was educated insofar as it
needed certain kinds of training, but it was a
relatively unschooled society. Very few children attended any
kind of formal school, probably less than 10% in the
late fifteenth century. Formal schooling was reserved,
then, for specific occupations at
that time: clergymen, those who were going to be
lawyers, some merchants who might need
skills of reading and writing or even foreign languages,
some craftsmen and so on. It was certainly not simply a
clerical monopoly as sometimes people think.
Nonetheless,
it was restricted in its scope and tailored to quite specific
occupational needs. Now at the turn of the
sixteenth century, that situation began to change,
and by the late sixteenth century it was changing very
rapidly. A new enthusiasm emerged in
this period for formal schooling at all levels.
Why should that be so?
Well, there seemed to have been
two main cultural influences on that development affecting
different parts of society. First of all,
there was the influence of renaissance humanism,
affecting mainly the social elite.
When we speak of humanism in
the sixteenth century we mean not the rationalist,
secular system of morality that one thinks of today when using
that term. Rather the term is used to
describe what people at the time referred to as the "new
learning," the new learning,
which had emerged in the fifteenth century and was
sweeping all before it in the early sixteenth century,
championed by scholars like Erasmus of Rotterdam or in
England John Colet, the Dean of St.
Paul's Cathedral,
or Sir Thomas More. In educational terms,
humanism essentially involved the study of ancient languages:
Latin certainly, increasingly Greek,
occasionally also Hebrew, and the philosophy,
the literature, and the history produced by the
writers of classical antiquity. So it's a process of recovering
more fully the works of classical antiquity and making
them more available to a larger audience,
and all of this was for a purpose.
It was believed by humanist
scholars that classical education,
combined with Christian morality, would be a way of
reviving virtue in public life and creating order and harmony
in the commonwealth; it would be a way of training
virtuous princes and dutiful subjects.
That was essentially the
humanist ideal. In a way they were trying to
get back to the notion of an educated aristocracy,
which had certainly been the case in the Roman Empire.
The aristocracy of late
medieval England, of course, was largely a
military one. But they wanted them to be
scholars too, just as the great figures of
classical antiquity had been. And this was to prove a
profoundly influential ideal. It was transmitted to the
English elite probably via the court and also by a number of
influential books which were widely read amongst them.
One of them was a translation
of an Italian work, Castiglione's book,
The Courtier, originally written in the
1520s and published in England in 1561.
Another--these titles are on
your handout--another was a book by Sir Thomas Elyot,
who was a member of Henry VIII's secretariat.
In 1537 he published a book
called The Governor, The Book Named The
Governor, which proved to be a great
popularizer of humanist educational ideals.
Elyot for example laid down a
model of the ideal education which suggested that children
should be taught Latin by the age of seven,
between seven and fourteen they would read Latin classics and
begin to learn Greek, between fourteen and seventeen
they would be trained in logic, in rhetoric,
in history, and in poetry, between seventeen and
twenty-one they would move on to philosophy and ethics,
particularly the works of Plato, which were particularly
valued by the humanists, and at the age of twenty-one
they would begin studying law. And meanwhile they would also
have physical training: horsemanship,
sports, the military arts and dancing.
Dancing was considered very
important. It taught grace and poise and
they considered that to be an important accomplishment.
Well, this is a demanding model
of education which seems quite ridiculously demanding;
at least I used to think so until I first read the Yale
distributional requirements. So in a sense we are in the
tradition. A third work which was very
influential was written by Roger Ascham, another man close to the
court, in 1570. It was in fact inspired by a
dinner table conversation about education which he had with
William Cecil, Elizabeth's principal
secretary, and Ascham put it down in writing in The
Schoolmaster, published in 1570.
He described it as being
"specially purposed for the private bringing up of youth in
gentlemen's and noblemen's houses,"
focusing on classical learning and sound religion.
Okay.
So renaissance humanism was one
model aimed in particular at the social elite.
A second cultural influence of
great importance was of course the Protestant Reformation.
The notion that learning and
sound religion should go together was present from the
beginning, of course, but the triumph of
Protestantism in the reformation gave an even greater edge to the
advocacy of education for two reasons.
First of all,
they wanted to educate the clergy better,
to provide a better educated clergy who would be not only
administrators of the sacraments but a teaching pastorate;
theologically aware preachers and catechizers,
educators of the people in the new church.
Secondly, they also believed
that education was a vital aid to the salvation of the common
people. Protestantism after all was
very much a religion of the book,
and in their view full appreciation of God's will
required the ability to read it in the scriptures;
or ideally. Hence, there was an emphasis on
schooling and on basic literacy for essentially religious
purposes, and that in a sense extends the
educational drive of the period beyond the social elite to the
population at large. This is an educational ideal of
much broader social relevance. So, the educational imperative
then involved two ideological,or cultural elements,
humanist ideals of virtuous rulers,
Protestant ideals of a godly pastorate and a godly people of
more universal relevance. Both promoted formal education
as a means of social and cultural change,
and that's an altogether new significance for the
institutions of schooling; they envisage social and
cultural change as a result. And meanwhile of course,
as background to all of this, there was the process of
economic expansion, which I've already described,
enhancing in various ways the desirability of basic schooling
for various commercial purposes. So what was the response?
One response was the gradual
transformation of the education of the social elite,
the upper gentry in particular and the aristocracy.
The sixteenth century
essentially saw the transition from a pattern of people being
educated in great noble households by tutors or
household chaplains to an ideal in which people first of all
attended schools, grammar schools in particular,
and then moved on to the universities of Oxford and
Cambridge, the ancient universities.
And then sometimes also to the
Inns of Court in London, which were very much like
Oxford or Cambridge colleges, but devoted to the study of the
law, sometimes referred to as
England's third university though they were essentially a
separate set of institutions. Well, the universities and the
Inns of Court got this role in elite education pretty much by
default. In the 1530s,
various humanist advisers on education still thought of the
universities as primarily a place for training clergymen.
They wanted the foundation of a
new academy for the social elite which should ideally be located
near the capital, but such schemes came to
nothing, and by the mid-sixteenth century members of
the social elite were beginning to follow earlier precedents of
some of their number by attending the universities and
sometimes going on to the Inns of Court.
By the late sixteenth century,
that trickle of gentlemen and noblemen into the universities
and the Inns had become a stream and soon it was something of a
flood. Many of the buildings in Oxford
and Cambridge colleges which survive to this day were
actually erected at this time to expand the provision for these
larger numbers of students, and indeed a number of new
colleges were founded in this period for the same reason.
There was a massive expansion
in the numbers of students at both the universities and the
Inns. In fact, by the early
seventeenth century the numbers of students in these
institutions was at the highest that it was to be again before
the nineteenth century. It faded a little in the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and then rose again
later on. All of this meant a very
significant change in the social composition of Oxford and
Cambridge colleges and, if you look at your handout,
the set of tables that are there,
you'll see in table one the social composition of a number
of Cambridge colleges. These are the undergraduates,
and you'll see that by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries, to which these figures refer,
the college of Emmanuel College had 63% of its students of
gentry birth. King's College had 58% of
gentry birth, and Jesus and St.
John's just less than 50%.
This was the general trend and
it was pretty much the same story at Oxford.
Well, the universities had to
adapt to educating these new types of students and a new
pattern soon emerged. Many of these gentry students
lived in their colleges as what were known as "fellow
commoners." They ate with the master and
fellows of the college on the high table rather than down in
the body of the hall with more 'plebian' students.
They were also very rarely
involved in actually taking a degree.
Most of them pursued their
studies privately with tutors who were appointed by their
parents within particular colleges to oversee their
education and to look after their moral welfare and they
were paid directly by the parents to do this.
It's the origins of the Oxford
and Cambridge tutorial system. At this time in fact many of
these students even slept in their tutors' rooms.
There would be a number of
little--"truckle beds" they were called--
that could be pushed in to the wall and pulled out at night,
where these students would sleep with their master,
their tutor, in his room next door.
Instead of the usual formal
course of the university, which included rhetoric and
logic and philosophy leading to the bachelor's degree,
tutors usually devised for their students more modern
courses. They included subjects like
history and literature, geography, modern divinity,
and modern philosophy. Some of them prepared special
reading lists for their students.
Some of them even prepared for
their students 'digests' of key quotations, sort of
sixteenth-century handouts you could say;
key quotes from the classics that you could drop in to your
conversation, and they would help their
students memorize them in that way.
We have an account of education
at Cambridge in the early seventeenth century from a
student called Simonds d'Ewes who kept a diary.
His name is there on your
handout. Between 1617 and 1619,
Simonds d'Ewes was a student at St.
John's College in Cambridge and
there, we learn, he studied logic and
ethics and moral philosophy and history with his tutor,
Richard Holdsworth, who was a well-known Puritan
divine. He also went to a few of the
university lectures though not terribly many.
He practiced his letter style
in English and in Latin. It was very important to learn
to write a letter well. He went to sermons in the
churches of the city, and he discussed modern
theology with his tutor, and he kept a theological
commonplace book. He was being trained in
Calvinist theology, and he rounded the whole thing
off with what he described as "my often conversing with
learned men of other colleges and the prime young students of
mine own." Now all of this was in
accordance with the desires of gentry parents to have an
education which was suitable for a learned and polished gentleman
of the renaissance ideal. Richard Holdsworth,
d'Ewes tutor, put it well in a letter
describing one of his students. He was recruiting someone else
to tutor the boy and he described the boy's father's
desires as follows: "His father means not to
have him a scholar by profession but only to be seasoned with the
varnish of learning and piety."
And that pretty much sums up
what they were aiming at. "His father means him not
to have him a scholar by profession"--
God forbid -- "but only to be seasoned with the varnish of
learning and piety." The Inns of Court,
down in London, adapted far less to the needs
of new students. Students got no special help.
There was no tutorial system.
They simply had to read law
books, to attend the courts to see how
it was done, to attend formal exercises in
the Inns where they would plead cases,
sort of mock hearings. English common law at this time
was considered quite appallingly difficult.
It hadn't really been
systematized at all. It's been described by one
legal historian as "a formless,
confused jumble of undigested particulars successfully
resisting all efforts at simplification or systematic
statement." You just had to learn it all.
Students who tried to do so
seriously found it quite awful. In fact, Simonds d'Ewes,
who went down for a further two years at the Inns of Court after
he finished at Cambridge, described his two years at the
Inns of Court as "amongst the unhappiest days of my
life." Those of you planning legal
careers, bear this in mind. The historian of the Inns of
Court, Wilfrid Prest,
reckons that the average gentleman attending the Inns
probably didn't learn all that much of the law.
Nevertheless,
the Inns were considered very important as sort of finishing
schools in a sense, centers for all kinds of
informal learning. After all, they were located in
London, just in between the city of
London and the royal capital of Westminster,
where the courts met, and they exposed students to
all the things which were available in the metropolis.
They attended plays.
They went to sermons at the
churches of the city. They hung out in the taverns
and so forth. One student who came from
Dorset, down in the southwest, a man with the wonderful name
William Freke, who attended the Inns of Court
in the early 1620s, has left behind a list of the
books he bought during his years in London at the Inns and it's
very interesting. He bought many religious works,
many devotional books, but he also bought books on
physiognomy, on arithmetic, on travel.
He bought history books,
he bought popular romances, and he was interested in drama.
He owned a copy--an early
copy--of Shakespeare's Othello.
But amongst all the books he
bought while he was in London he only bought one law book,
> and significantly it was a
classic, Littleton on tenures,
the classic outline of land tenure law,
which was very much the kind of thing a gentleman like William
Freke would need to know when he returned to his family's
estates. Now of course not all of the
gentry did all of this, but nonetheless many of them
did some of it, and it led to a significant
transformation of the educational experience of the
social elite. To give some figures on that:
in 1563, of the members of Parliament in
that year only 26% had attended university,
by 1642 50% had attended university.
Or, even better,
if one looks at the justices of the peace serving in six
counties, in 1562 only 5% of them had attended a university.
By 1636, in the same six
counties it was 62%. So a real transformation in the
educational experience of these vital members of the political
nation. Right.
Well a second consequence of
these changes was a transformation in the
educational level of the English clergy.
Don't forget that the
universities still remained the major centers for training
clergymen. Around 50% of university
students were still non-members of the gentry,
and most of them actually came from clerical families or
so-called 'plebian' families, i.e., non gentlemen,
and frequently they were intending clerical careers.
They tended to do the
full-scale traditional university course leading to a
bachelor's degree and perhaps to a master's degree.
And their numbers were rising
also, and the rising numbers of these
clerical recruits produced a general transformation in the
educational levels of the parish clergy.
By the 1630s,
after two generations of this, a largely graduate clergy was
established in much of England. There are some figures on your
handout from the diocese of Worcester, a large diocese in
the west Midlands. In the diocese of Worcester in
1580, only 23% of the clergy were
graduates, by 1640 it was 84%,
and that was pretty much the same story as could be found in
other dioceses at this time. So, a second effect is the
transformation of the educational level of the clergy.
A third response was the
general proliferation of schooling opportunities for the
common people. The sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries were a great age of school foundation.
There were many,
many new foundations. Notable amongst them were the
founding of endowed grammar schools.
Many of the principal schools
in English cities carry the name King Edward VI School,
or some other name linking them to this period of major
educational expansion and founding of grammar schools in
the mid-to- late sixteenth century.
They were often founded with
money donated by merchants, by leading members of the
clergy, by members of the gentry from particular areas,
and the motivation was often a mixture of religious zeal and
regional patriotism. For example,
in the county of Lancashire, up in the northwest here,
in 1480 there were only three endowed schools;
by 1540 there were twelve; by 1600 there were twenty-eight;
by 1640 there were fifty endowed grammar schools.
Indeed, by that date every
major town and some relatively insignificant ones in that
county had a grammar school. Two thirds of the money that
was donated for school foundation in Lancashire came
from London, came from merchants and lawyers
and others of Lancashire origin who,
usually at their death, left part of the money they'd
made to found a school back in their home county to help boys
like themselves to get a start. That's the regional patriotism
element in what was going on. Usually, the endowed grammar
schools offered a variety of types of schooling.
The education which they
offered was in part classical education as the 'grammar'
school name implies, preparing people for the
universities, but usually they also catered
for the needs of others also. They had what was described as
the 'vernacular side' where the teaching was mostly in English,
and they often had a 'petty section' as it was called,
a petty section which would focus on the 'three R's':
reading, writing, and 'rithmetic
or--well, four R's really-- reading, writing,
'rithmetic and religion. In addition to the endowed
grammar schools there were the schools which were known as
'petty schools'. These were not usually endowed
foundations. They sprang up and died away
according to whether or not there was a particular
schoolmaster who opened them and ran them for a while,
but they became increasingly common all over the kingdom.
Petty schools taught basic
literacy often accompanied by a little bit of arithmetic.
By the early seventeenth
century, most country towns in England had a grammar school and
several petty schools, and in addition petty schools
were increasingly common in many villages.
It's not unusual for them to be
kept by local clergymen, very often the teaching taking
place in the church porch, weather permitting.
All in all then we have a
transformation of elite education,
we have a transformation of clerical education,
and a vast increase in the schooling available to the
common people of town and country.
All of this was a very
considerable achievement. But at the same time it's
important to grasp that there were some limits to it.
Historians have spoken of an
"educational revolution"
taking place in this period and I think that is in many ways
justified, but it also inevitably had its
limits. And those limits were most
clear when one looks at the differences of social rank and
gender, as one might expect. If the period saw a real
expansion of educational opportunity, access to it was
almost inevitably socially circumscribed.
The Inns of Court were very
much elite institutions. 90% of the students were of
gentry origin. The universities,
as we've seen, were also dominated by the
gentry and the 50% or so of students who were of plebeian
birth were not drawn from the poor.
Plebeian just meant non-gentry.
They were usually the sons of
clergymen, of merchants, the urban elite,
professional people, and so forth.
And the reasons for this are
obvious enough. That kind of education was very
costly. Children from relatively humble
families could sometimes make it to the university if they had a
patron who would help them, pay some of the fees for them.
Sometimes talented children
were spotted by a local clergyman or a gentleman who
would help them on their way, find them a scholarship.
It was also possible to work
your way through by acting as a servant for the gentry students.
Students who did that were
known as servitors or sizars. Interestingly,
a study done of them shows that servitors and sizars working
their way through almost invariably graduated,
whereas the gentlemen they served of course very rarely
did. Nevertheless,
it's obviously the case that university education and
education at the Inns of Court was heavily monopolized by the
upper reaches of society. The same was true to a lesser
extent in the grammar schools. The sons of the gentry might
attend, most of the other students were
the children of the clergy and the professional and
craftspeople of the towns, with a few sons of yeoman
farmers from the countryside attending.
The problems inhibiting the
attendance of children at these schools was first of all the
costs, fees, boarding in the town
where the school was, but also, perhaps even more
importantly, perceived need.
This kind of grammar school
education was regarded as appropriate only for people who
would be going on to enter the professions or trade at a fairly
high level. It wasn't deemed appropriate
for farmers' sons to get that level of education.
When one gets to the petty
schools, they were much more open and the evidence suggests a
much wider intake in local society.
Nevertheless,
there were still inhibitions. Fees still needed to be paid,
even if they were small. You had to supply your own
books and paper and pens and some families couldn't afford
this kind of thing. There was also the problem of
conflict with the labor needs of farm families.
Children were often put to
school at the age of five or six but taken away at the age of
seven when they were able to play a more productive role in
the family economy. So sometimes their working
lives had begun before they'd had the opportunity to gain much
learning. One seventeenth-century
autobiographer described how his brothers attended school in some
of the winter months, but were busy on the farm for
most of the rest of the year and,
as he said, what they learned when they attended school they
soon forgot. He was kept at school by his
father constantly because his father intended to put him into
trade and so he gained a pretty sound education.
Well, the relative failure of
the mass of the population to participate beyond the level of
the petty school, if that, is fairly strikingly
brought out when we look at the available figures that
historians have put together on the subject of levels of
literacy. You might well ask,
how on earth can we measure literacy in such a distant
period of the past? Well, the usual way of doing
that is to get large samples of people putting their names to
documents and to distinguish between those who could write
their names, who could sign their names,
and those who simply made a mark.
If you look at the illustration
on your handout, that's a petition signed by a
lot of people whose names are there at the bottom,
and you'll see for example on the left-hand side a scribe has
written in the names followed by "his mark,"
and on the left of that you have the marks of the various
people concerned. On the other side of the sheet,
there a number of examples of people who had successfully
signed their names. So it's possible to get large
samples of evidence of whether people could or could not sign
their names. One might be skeptical about
how meaningful that is. After all, one could learn to
sign one's name even if one was in other ways scarcely literate.
But that was very unlikely in
this period. To be unable to sign your name
was not a great social embarrassment for most members
of the population. It wasn't something they would
need to try to avoid, and again the schooling
practice of the time was that children only began to learn to
write once they'd become proficient readers.
So if you got--if you had
proceeded with writing far along enough to be able to handle a
quill pen well enough to sign your name the likelihood is that
you were a proficient reader. Now this may leave out of the
count some people who perhaps could read reasonably,
but had not learned to write, and indeed if you look at the
bottom of that petition you'll notice one man's mark which is
clearly an initial letter; it's clearly an "R."
He was called Richard.
One wonders whether Richard
could in fact read and could handle a pen well enough to make
the initial letter of his name. But historians who do this kind
of work are very strict. Either you sign your name or
you don't. They know that these figures
are not perfect but it's a clear differentiation and we can
compare different areas and different social groups.
So that's how they do it.
What are the results?
Well, in the year 1642 massive
numbers of people were required to put their name to the
so-called Protestation Oath at the beginning of the English
civil wars. Studying the returns of the
Protestation Oath which survive, David Cressy found that
something like 70% of the adult men who signed that document
were unable to sign their names. 30% signed, 70% made their mark.
But he also found that it
varied enormously from place to place.
Some places were 90% literate,
some places were less than 50% literate, and he also found that
towns were very much more literate than villages.
That gives us the broad picture
of what had emerged by the mid-seventeenth century.
Other studies have looked at
the literacy of different social groups in particular areas of
the country, and some of the figures they've
produced are there in tables two and three on your handout.
They tend to bring out vividly
how there's a hierarchy of literacy and illiteracy.
These figures are giving the
percentages of people who made their mark, who couldn't sign
their name. Table two is a rural area of
Essex and Hertfordshire, to the east of London.
Table three is the city of
London and the county of Middlesex, which was urbanized,
so that's an urban sample. There's a hierarchy in both
countryside and town as you move down the social scale;
yeomen in the countryside, only 33% can't sign,
if one moves down to laborers in the countryside 100% can't
sign. But look at the differences
between town and country. Tradesmen and craftsmen in the
rural sample, 42% can't sign,
so more than half can; but if one moves to the city
only 28% can't sign, much higher levels of ability
to sign. Even laborers in the city were
only 78% illiterate, so some laboring men in the
city could sign their names. What this indicates in general,
studies of this kind, is that, in the course of the
later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
illiteracy amongst the social elite was completely wiped out;
it was just eradicated. Amongst the middling kind of
people, yeoman farmers, tradesmen and craftsmen,
illiteracy was drastically reduced.
Many of these people can read
and write by the early seventeenth century.
If you move further down the
social scale, amongst husbandmen and laborers
there's much less change. Nonetheless,
some of these people also were beginning to be able to read and
write. It's not surprising that
there's a hierarchy of illiteracy in a society
structured as this one was. One could say that the
hierarchy of illiteracy faithfully mirrors the social
order. Nonetheless,
significant inroads have been made even low in the social
scale. Let's turn now to another form
of differentiation, not between social rank but
between gender. The education of girls was of
course also influenced by their social rank,
but at all social levels there was a major problem of the
perceived need to educate women. Amongst the gentry,
by the late sixteenth century it was already widely accepted
that gentlewomen should be taught to read and write,
to sing, to play instruments, to dance,
to sew, perhaps even acquire a little knowledge of French.
And this education would be
conducted privately. They weren't usually sent to
school, which was considered too risky to their virtue.
They would be educated at home
by their mothers, by governesses,
by the lady of the household if they were in honorable service
in a great household, perhaps by the domestic
chaplain of such a household. In the early seventeenth
century, there was a little change with the founding of some
girls' boarding schools, usually in the London area,
but they were few and extremely expensive.
So the kind of education that
gentlewomen were getting was restricted in its scope though
there are a number of rare examples of individual girls who
got a much fuller education including classical learning.
One example is Lucy Hutchinson,
a young woman who tells us in the memoir she wrote--
of her husband's career--tells us that her father believed that
there was no reason why a young woman should not receive the
same education as young men. So there were people who had
views of that kind even at this time, though it was
comparatively rare. Girls of lower social rank got
most of their education for life either from their mothers or as
servants in the tasks of housewifery.
A few of them attended school,
though very few. They might attend a petty
school if their parents wished, but there was absolutely no
question of them going to a grammar school or acquiring
classical education. The universities,
of course, were closed to women.
The general lack of perceived
need for girls' schooling is shown in the invariably high
illiteracy figures for women. If you look at the figures on
the handout again, you'll see that in the rural
area women were 95% unable to sign and in the city 76%.
These figures may possibly
exaggerate female illiteracy, because it was women above all
who were most likely to be taught to read but not to write;
taught to read for religious reasons but it wasn't considered
necessary to teach them to write, so the figures for women
may be exaggerated. Nonetheless,
overall, girls of the 'middling sort' might stand a chance of
learning to read and possibly to write,
but below that level there was almost total exclusion.
Well, to draw towards a
conclusion, what was the overall significance of all of this
educational change? Well, with all reservations,
I think these developments are very significant indeed.
The transformation of the
education of the social elite was arguably a very significant
step towards the growth of a homogeneous national culture
amongst the ruling class, created by a highly
standardized pattern of education in which many of them,
if not most of them, participated.
These were people who were
still very much at home in their country, their province.
They frequently spoke still
with strong regional accents-- Sir Walter Raleigh was said to
have a particularly strong west country accent,
which was noted at the court--but also these people
were experiencing the assimilation and the capacity to
manipulate a generalized system of cultural standards and values
conveyed to them through the classical learning they were
acquiring. And when one reads their
letters, on paper they're remarkably homogeneous.
There's a common range of
reference that they allude to-- pointed out in one recent study
of a pamphlet written by a country magistrate on the
subject of witchcraft; the classical allusions which
he casually throws out and the biblical references which he
casually throws out in the course of the pamphlet.
He simply assumes that his
readers amongst fellow magistrates will know what he's
talking about. They belong to a common
cultural world based on the classics, the Bible,
certain forms of Protestant theology and law.
Again the transformation of the
education at the level of the clergy is surely very
significant. Most parishes by 1640 had what
you could reasonably call a kind of resident intellectual.
It's a development full of
potential implications for the penetration of the countryside
by the cultural values of the university,
through the contacts between these clergymen and those whom
they served in their parishes. Lower on the social scale the
achievement may seem much more limited, but I think one should
think about it positively. A certain threshold had been
crossed. In every parish there were at
least some of the common people, certainly those of middle rank
and some of those even below that,
who could read, who could write. Literacy was now something that
people would encounter much more frequently in many contexts of
life, something they would use for many purposes.
To give perhaps a silly
example, I once worked on a village in the north of England,
up near Newcastle on Tyne, where, in the late sixteenth
century, every will surviving for that
village was written by the local clergyman;
he was the only one who could do it.
The records of the village even
reveal that on one occasion a man who was dying,
who hadn't made his will, sent urgently for the clergyman
and they couldn't find him because he'd gone fishing.
A little girl was sent running
down the river to find him and bring him back.
He came back too late.
The man had died--with his
dying breath he had told what he wanted his goods--how he wanted
his goods--to be distributed; and we know this story because
those who heard his dying wishes had to go to the court and
declare on oath what his wishes were because there was no one to
write them down. In the same village,
by the early seventeenth century there are so many people
capable of writing a will that one loses track of the numbers
of people who are acting as scribes for their neighbors;
fifteen, twenty, in different decades,
who are capable of writing a will.
That's the change which is
taking place even in obscure country parishes.
Even in such places the
crossing of the literacy threshold had opened up new
possibilities which simply had not existed in the past.
If one thinks of late
fifteenth-century society as one of heavily restricted literacy--
restricted to certain social and occupational groups--
by the early seventeenth century we have fairly
widespread literacy; a partially literate society
which was well on the road to mass literacy.
And if you look at the final
chart on your handout, there is the long-term decline
of illiteracy right through to 1900,
and you can see that the period we're dealing with is a
significant step forward in that process.
Now of course it was a very
long road. Right through to the nineteenth
century, illiteracy remained closely
related to the social hierarchy, but there was continuous
advance from the sixteenth century onwards.
By the early eighteenth
century, England was already probably the most literate
nation in Europe and still slowly improving.
Outside Europe the most
literate society of the time was New England,
a colonial society which had a disproportionate number of
literate people amongst those who emigrated here.
And as a result the
opportunities for a more widespread participation in the
growing literate culture of the period was expanding.
Ideas and opinions which were
first voiced in elite circles could sometimes find their way
down to permeate many areas of the social structure,
like sherry seeping down through a trifle.
That's not to say that many
people of humble place were rushing to read the more
high-flown products of the English renaissance.
Some of them did.
Some people who began reading
simple things became conspicuously literate and
hungry for books and went on to read whatever they could get.
But there was also for
more--for those who didn't have such ambitions--a growing
popular print culture which catered directly for them.
This period sees the birth of
the chapbook literature; cheap, penny,
twopenny, sixpenny printed works aimed at a mass market.
By the 1660s,
the most popular form of such cheap books, almanacs,
were being produced on a vast scale.
In London 400,000 almanacs a
year were printed in the 1660s, aimed at the mass market,
and they contained all kinds of information as well as calendars
for people to use. Most readers of this stuff
would not have been members of elite society,
but they did have access to some of the issues and ideas of
their day. Such chapbooks enjoyed massive
sales and they formed also a kind of bridge between elite
society and the mass of the population.
One of the great collections of
them which survives was put together by Samuel Pepys,
Secretary to the Navy, a member of the highest-level
bureaucracy of his day, but he enjoyed the cheap
literature as well as the learned works that he had in his
library. And it could be read also of
course by members of the middling and lower orders.
It must have had its impact on
the common stock of images and symbols and understandings and
simple information of rich and poor alike,
and it fostered a popular literacy which could be turned
to other uses. If you take the chapbook
romances with their tales of knights and giants and so forth,
which were being published in the seventeenth century,
and you marry them together with the Bible,
what you end up with is John Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress. He was someone who was
steeped in this popular literature.
He wrote Pilgrim's Progress
in order to provide a religious adventure story which
turned out to be the second most important book ever published in
English. To conclude then,
whether or not we want to talk about an educational revolution
in this period, the educational changes did
constitute a very significant break with the past.
However limited,
however circumscribed by class or gender, they did open up new
areas of potential in society and culture.
Something momentous was
gradually happening across the late sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries; something which I think one can
reasonably say without exaggeration was one of the
great transforming processes of the early modern period.
Okay.
Right.
Well next time I'll take up the
political narrative again, turning to the religious
problems and political problems of the early seventeenth
century.
