School Records
History of Education and Schools
16TH CENTURY TO EARLY 19TH CENTURY
Education Before the Reformation
Before Henry VIII’s break from the Roman Catholic Church in 1534, efforts to provide learning had usually been associated in some way with the Church. Cathedrals, large churches, chantry chapels, Benedictine monasteries, colleges of priests, town burgesses, religious hospitals and religious guilds all supported grammar and song schools. Wealthy benefactors – for example, members of the Royal family, those linked to the Church, like Bishops and wealthy London-based merchants also founded schools. Two famous schools of this type which still survive today, but which were originally founded before the Reformation, are Winchester School at Winchester, Hampshire, founded by Bishop William of Wykeham (1394), and Eton, near Windsor, founded by Henry VI (1441).
In Devon, it is known that there were schools in some of the large towns. The ecclesiastical College founded in Ottery St Mary in 1337 included eight choir boys and a master of grammar, for whom accommodation was provided within the College. In Totnes, the vicar is known to have been keeping a grammar school and a song school in 1509. It is thought that Barnstaple had a grammar school kept either by a chantry priest in the parish church or in the ancient detached chapel of St Anne's which stands in the parish churchyard.
Among schools outside Devon founded before the Reformation were Kings School, Canterbury (founded in the 7th century); King’s School, Ely (c. 1100); Carlisle Grammar (1264); Southwell Grammar and Song School (c.1320); Hull Grammar (pre 1347); Durham School (1414); City of London School (1442); Loughborough Grammar (c. 1495); Crewkerne School, Somerset (1499), and Manchester Grammar (1515).
Many of these schools were designed to educate boys and young men employed by the various religious foundations themselves, but the sons of noblemen, gentry, merchants etc., could also often attend these schools as private, fee-paying pupils. Grammar schools taught Latin grammar, and song schools also taught boys how to sing and chant. On a smaller scale, some parish priests boarded boys and hired a teacher for them, and private schoolmasters in towns rented rooms and taught a group of boys. Noblemen and gentry sometimes hired a chaplain or tutor for their sons at home. Teaching was all in Latin , learned as a spoken and written language and used for most official and professional purposes. English became the vernacular language in place of French, by the end of the 14th century. Unlike today, students of all ages shared the same classroom.
Pupils had to pay fees and be supported when living away from home, so they could scarcely have been poor. They were sons of noblemen, gentlemen, officials, freeholders and well-off tradesmen. They were intended for the university, the priesthood, or for indentured apprenticeships which required a knowledge of Latin and of reading and writing – e.g. scriveners, stationers, copyists, apothecaries etc. Founders of schools sometimes also founded university colleges at Oxford or Cambridge, and pupils educated at the founders’ schools were sent on to his university college afterwards.
Sources:
Any surviving records of pre-Reformation monastic or chantry foundations are generally found in the Public Record Office (PRO). Deeds relating to these sorts of school were supposed to be enrolled in Chancery and if so, are recorded in the Close Rolls from 1204. Printed or typescript copies or translations may be available in published histories or in manuscript form. There is a topographical index to trust deeds in the PRO Reading Room.
If a school still survives as a public or private, fee-paying school for example, it is likely to have its own archive at the school, and often these schools have their own web-sites.
Education After the Reformation
After the break with the Roman Catholic Church, universities and schools were used to promote Protestant beliefs. The Church was subordinated to the sovereign, who was its head, and the power of the Church diminished. Education became more secular, and less oriented towards the needs of the church. There was an increase in the need for education due to the invention of printing and the rise of books on new topics; the increase in the number of families entering the gentry and the landed classes; the growth in population.
Changes in Schools
Abbeys, nunneries and monasteries were closed under Henry VIII. Under Henry VIII’s son Edward VI, suppression of the chantries, religious gilds and colleges of priests put the schools they supported in jeopardy. Thus, many chantry, nunnery, song and almonry grammar schools closed when the foundations supporting them were dissolved and their lands were confiscated. Under the Chantries Act of 1547, schools forming an obligatory (and not a voluntary) part of these foundations were supposed to be preserved. Unfortunately, the lands supporting them were often sold off by the near bankrupt government, and many chantry schools continued with a set allowance for a schoolmaster which was worth less and less over time due to inflation.
Some boys’ schools did manage to continue, supported by rents on former monastic lands, or by town authorities who took them over from the church bodies. Unfortunately girls’ educational institutions – which had been in nunneries - completely disappeared, and for a couple of centuries there was no provision for girls' education in schools outside the family home. There is some indication that private schoolmistresses taught girls from gentry families, and daughters of wealthy families were sometimes taught by a chaplain or tutor who lived.
Under the Church of England most of the cathedrals were compelled to maintain a grammar school with a master, usher and a specified number of "foundation scholars". Hence the schools once run at the monastic Cathedrals were re-founded, and became known as the King’s Schools, and grammar schools also had to be founded or continued at the new Cathedrals created under Henry VIII. Examples of the latter type include Bristol Grammar and Westminster School (which was the old almonry school of Westminster Abbey, re-founded by Queen Elizabeth I in 1560).
From 1552, towns which had lost their schools petitioned the government for a grant of some of the confiscated church property, to support their own grammar schools. They were often known as King Edward VI Grammar Schools and many were comparatively well off with their own lands.
In Devon, King Edward VI Grammar School was founded at Totnes.
Some towns were not granted land but were licensed to buy land to found a new school, or preserve an existing one, and these schools were founded and supported by the local burgesses of the Borough, by wealthy merchants or by aristocrats interested in education.
The foundation of these new schools was part of a large increase in private charity in response to the loss of religious charitable institutions. All social groups able to afford it - including local clergy - contributed, to increase educational opportunity, but the greatest benefactors were wealthy London merchants. They were involved partly for reasons of status and prestige, but were interested in giving local boys opportunities and also in providing better qualified apprentices. They founded many of the grammar schools for the better off boys in provincial towns – their native towns – by endowing the school with a gift of land or an annual rent charge on land, and sometimes a school building and a schoolmaster’s house. Grammar school pupils were awarded university scholarships linked to a specific college – these too were endowed by wealthy merchants and gentlemen.
In Devon, for example, Ashburton Grammar School was founded in 1606, during the reign of James I, by William Werring Esquire, and was endowed with land, which before the dissolution of the monasteries had belonged to the Charity of St Lawrence. In 1599, towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth I, Peter Blundell, a wealthy merchant clothier of Tiverton, left £2400 to found a grammar school there (Blundell’s School). He also left £2000 to establish 5 university scholarships at Oxford and Cambridge for pupils of his school. Bideford also had a grammar school founded at about this time.
Such benefactors also founded petty schools for the children of the poor (charity schools) and such schools were sometimes linked to charities which paid for apprenticeships for poor boys and girls.
Education Under the Puritans
Many of the school founders of the 16th century were fervent Protestants who leaned towards Puritan beliefs. Therefore they were concerned with spreading literacy and reading of the Bible, and promoted the puritan capitalistic ethic – thrift, hard work, self-improvement etc. During the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s when the monarchy, the House of Lords and the established church hierarchy was swept away, educational ideas were endlessly debated and ideas of radical reform circulated as never before. These ideas included a compulsory, free, (nearly) universal state-run system, with education extended to everybody via graded schools – elementary English schools in all villages, grammar schools in larger towns, and state-supported colleges or universities in greater towns and cities to break the monopoly of Oxford and Cambridge. New types of practical subject matter was to be taught, and Latin grammar was not to be the dominant subject. It was to be replaced with mathematical and scientific studies, and teaching was no longer to be by rote learning.
However under the Commonwealth, action lagged far behind reformers’ plans and ideas, and in the disruption of the Civil War and new government, education suffered. Socially and academically little changed in education at this time.
Education After the Restoration of 1660
Action fuelled by revenge and self-preservation followed the Restoration of 1660 and efforts were made to rid church, government and educational institutions of dissident puritans. The 1662 Act of Uniformity applied to all clergy, university dons, schoolmasters and tutors. The 1665 Five Mile Act made it illegal for non-conformist (dissenting) ministers from coming within 5 miles of a corporate town
Schoolmasters had to have a bishop’s licence, and there were penalties imposed for teaching without one. To obtain a licence, a schoolmaster needed testimonials and nomination papers. He had to subscribe to the Act of Uniformity, the Book of Common Prayer and the 39 Articles. Non-conformists were not allowed to teach in any public or private school. They were excluded from the universities and those occupations requiring a university education, and barred from public office and politics. 150 dons and schoolmasters are estimated to have been evicted as dissenters after 1660, and this persecution split communities. The resulting division of society into church and chapel deeply affected the history of education thereafter.
Education and Dissenters
Between 1660 and 1689 some dissenting preachers and schoolmasters defied the law and opened schools to train theological candidates and non-conformist schoolchildren. These non-conformist academies combined the roles of grammar school and university – see the sheet on Dissenting Academies. The Declaration of Indulgence in 1672, followed by the Act of Toleration in 1689 granted Protestant non-conformists greater freedom of worship, and the penalties against teaching became unworkable. The chief enemies of dissent remained the Anglican clergy and ‘squirearchy’, but non-licensed dissenting schools and academies operated more openly, and more of them were founded. Finally in 1779 the Dissenting Schoolmasters Relief Act legalised the existing situation. In this year the Quakers founded Ackworth School.
The chief sources of information about the spread and number of schools in Restoration England are the Bishops’ Subscription Books which were kept from 1662. They show schools of all kinds were widespread, though female teachers, and schoolmasters who did not subscribe, are missing from these records.
Educating the Poorer Classes
Large numbers of endowed parish schools to educate the poor opened in this period, under the supervision of the parish vestry or trustees/feoffees. The village schoolteacher was often also parish clerk, or a husbandman with a holding in the parish. Charity schools financed by subscription and managed by committees of Anglican or dissenting subscribers opened in London from 1685. After 1699 the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) took up this idea to spread charity schools throughout England. They started adult reading classes in 1700. From the 1690s the decline in apprenticeships in humbler trades led to the establishment in London and large towns of workhouses with industrial schools attached to them to train pauper children.
Private-venture schools ranged from ‘English’ schools and ‘common’ schools in towns - some of which were hardly different from middle-class academies - down to lowly dame schools. Dame schools were run by an old woman who looked after the village children in her parlour and taught them to read, knit and sew for whatever their parents could afford to pay each week. They were the precursors to nurseries or infant schools.
Education for the Middle and Upper Classes
Endowed grammar schools thrived for about a century after the Restoration. However, private schools or academies mainly in or around London started increasing in popularity, and many boys were sent to these schools instead. In the households of the nobility and gentry, private tutors were now commonly employed. They were often young men straight from university. Education in private academies and at home was influenced by the ideas of John Locke – Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1693.
The first naval academy was founded at Portsmouth in the early 18th century, followed by the first army academy at Woolwich.
Education in the Later 18th Century
The second half of the 18th century saw a depression in the public and endowed sectors of education, with falling numbers at universities, Inns of Court and grammar schools. Private academies offered alternative types of education – vocational and ‘useful’ - more suited to the employment of the time, as did dissenting academies. Universities which stuck with the classics became much more like finishing schools for gentlemen, who did not have to work for a living.
Changing Attitudes to Education
The propertied classes and the Established Church (Church of England) shared the view that a minimal education which instilled social obedience was preferable for the poor. Many rural parishes deep in the country had no regular school. Private enterprise schools were often short-lived.
The years between 1760 and 1830 were ones of great social change, and this meant they were also a turning point for educational views. The provision of education for the masses and the reform of old endowed schools were persistent public issues.
From the 1780s towns began to grow due to industrialization, especially in the Midlands, West Riding and Lancashire. The population grew from 6 million to nearly 9 million in the half century before 1800. In the countryside, the role of the farm labourer also changed in this period leading to rural rebellion and unrest.
New ideas about the right of all to an education emerged. The Sunday Schools movement started in the 1780s, and led the way for weekday schools using the 'monitorial system'.
