Who were the schoolmasters in seventeenth century England?

By Ken Clayton

Thomas Beard, Oliver Cromwell's schoolmaster at Huntingdon Grammar School

To be a master at a Grammar school in seventeenth century England might look like an enviable career. In fact, it seems that a high proportion of them were, in effect, clergymen in waiting. Helen Jewell maintained that, in many cases, taking a job as a schoolmaster represented little more than finding a way to earn an income between graduating as a BA and being able to gain an MA and a church living (1998, p64). Apart from that, the universities were producing more graduates than the Church needed. 
 

Francis Lenton was one who suggested that graduates would have to become schoolmasters because they could not find positions as Rectors (Lenton 1631). In other cases, such as that of William Lilly, becoming a schoolmaster provided an escape from poverty (Ashmole, 1822, p21) although the term ‘escape’ seems to have been relative: Robert Burton claimed that schoolmasters were paid no more than a falconer (1621, p173).

Although these authors painted a grim picture of the prospects of schoolmasters, others laid the blame on the schools themselves. In 1673 Christopher Wase set out to make a study of grammar schools in England and the Rector of Foots Cray in Kent wrote saying 'Free schools generally are a prey for greedy Feoffees, a Pretence for unthankful Parents, a Provision for the Rich [...] Were it not for so many free schools a Scholar might live plentifully with honour allmost every where but now they can scarce live any where but with very small means and less credit' (CC Library, Vol IV MSS CCC.C391 150).

While it is clear that a career as schoolmaster may not have been appealing, it had the advantage of being available to graduates because the founding statutes of free grammar schools usually stated that the master must have a degree. Clearly this rule excluded women since they were not allowed into the universities in the seventeenth century. In reality, however, such rules were not always applied: Beaumaris grammar school founding statutes demanded that the Master should have an MA from Oxford and the Usher (deputy master) a BA. The correspondent who provided this information added, however, that ‘these rules have been seldome observed, […] Bachelours of Arts have been placed Schoolemasters without regard to any Universitie & Undergraduates have been placed Ushers’ (Wase papers, Vol III MSS CCC.C390/3, 4, 5, 6 & 7).

One consequence of the requirement for a degree, however, was that Masters were often 23 or 24 years old when first appointed. On the other hand, teaching was by no means, the preserve of young men: records show that some at least were teaching into their sixties. Wase recorded a master at Mottram Grammar School in Cheshire working until he was 88 while another was 80 (Wase, Vol III MSS CCC.C390/57) and several masters were 60 when Wase was gathering his data in 1673.

In the main, however, the masters were young men and yet it was not unusual for the founding statutes to insist that the Master was not allowed to marry without the permission of the school governors, local JP or other specified individuals (Vincent, 1969, p113).

There was then the question of whether the master was to also have a role in the church. In some cases the master was definitely not to hold religious office but in others the statutes dictated that the master must be a practising clergyman. This overlap between clergymen and schoolmasters seems to have been very common: many of the letters sent to Wase included examples of masters who went on to positions in the church.

Masters and Ushers were sometimes appointed by the governors of each school although there were frequent variations on this procedure. According to one of Wase’s correspondents, the process for selecting a new master for Shrewsbury school was tightly drawn and involved the master and fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge finding a man born ‘in the town of Salop’, who had studied at the school and was the son of a Burgess and had a degree. If they could not find a suitably qualified individual, they could widen the search by steps but even when they had chosen a candidate the bailiffs of the town had the freedom to reject their choice and the whole process would start again (Wase papers Vol III MSS CCC.C390/156-7). Other schools were less demanding but most specified that the master must be a university man.

Apart from the educational standards expected of a master, some schools made additional demands: the statutes at Ashby-de-la-Zouch school were quite specific in the personal qualities expected of a master. He should not be 'a Papist Nor Heretick […] Adulterer, ffornicator, Drunkard, neither Game player, Noe swearer, or Blasphemer' and he must be able and apt to teach the Latin tongue' (Fox, 1967, p128).

Once appointed, masters were subject to discipline. At Tadcaster Grammar School a master who was absent for more than ten days at a time, or more than 30 days in a year without permission ‘should be warned by the guardians’. If the master received three warnings he could be removed from his post (Curtis, 1948, pps5-6). At Aldenham school, neither the master nor the usher were to 'give themselves to games not the hauntinge of Alehowses and Tavernes'. Minor misdemeanours would attract a warning for the first offence but a second could lead to dismissal. If, on the other hand, they were found guilty of fornication, adultery, blasphemy or were judged to be a 'common swearer, ryoter or com'on drunckarde' they were to be 'forthwith removed with as much speed as convenientlye may be' (Edwards and Wood, 1997, p3-4).

Overall, then, grammar school masters seem, in the main, to have been graduates who fell into the job for want of any other employment opportunity. Given the long hours, rates of pay that were, at best, average and the the fact that each could be teaching up to 140 boys with just one assistant, it does not seem surprising that so many of them preferred the Church.

References 

Ashmole, Elias (ed.) (1822) William Lilly's History of his Life and Times from the Year 1602 to 1681 London, Charles Baldwin.

Burton, Robert, (1621) The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is. Oxford, Henry Cripps.

Edwards, J and Wood, R. (1997) The History and Register of Aldenham School Old Aldenhamian Society.

Fox, L. (1967) A country Grammar School - a History of Ashby-de-la-Zouch Grammar School through four centuries 1567-1967 Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Jewell, Helen M. (1998) Education in Early Modern England, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

All the other educational places

We are pleased to announce that the re-scheduled Postgraduate Event All The Other Educational Places will take place on Thursday 26th November 12.30 - 5pm in Committee Room 2, UCL Institute of Education, Bedford Way, London. This event explores education outside of ‘school’ as it is conventionally defined. 

There are two keynote speakers: 

• John Field, Emeritus Professor of Lifelong Learning, (University of Stirling): ‘Researching life in Britain's work camps, 1920-1939: memory, texts and hindsight’
• Stephanie Spencer, Reader in the History of Women’s Education, (University of Winchester): 'Sites of learning: school stories for girls before the 1944 Education Act' 

And papers by three postgraduate students:  

• Emily Charkin, (UCL/IoE) 'The right setting for a child is the community itself': self-build and radical education in the 1970s' 
• Laura Newman (King's College, London) "The successes and failures of object lessons in health at a Kent sanatorium, c.1900-1930"
• Jane Shephard (University of Brighton) 'Training the eye in infancy, and preventing undesirable impressions of disorder': mediating education and decoration through friezes and stencil designs for the home nursery, 1920-1924" 

There is no charge for this event. It is organised by the History of Education Society in association with the International Centre for Historical Research on Education.
 
Please let Lottie Hoare chh11@cam.ac.uk know by Thursday 19th November if you plan to attend so we have an idea of numbers.

Tracing evidence of the notion of 'education through art' in Australia and New Zealand, February – March 2015

 by Catherine Burke

'Thinking about Alec Clegg in Australia and New Zealand,1950s-60s. So far to travel! Who did he meet? What did he do and which schools did he see?' [my diary entry 5^th February, 2015]

Education through art in Australia is a book published in 1958, edited by Bernard Smith with a foreword by Herbert Read. Smith was, alongside art educator John Dabron and artist Hal Missingham, a member of the Australian UNESCO Committee for the Visual Arts. I discovered the book on the open shelves of the Melbourne University Library when I recently spent time in Australia as a MacGeorge Fellow. 

The Fellowship required me to spend six weeks researching or engaging with the arts ‘in the widest sense of the word’: And so I did. Soon I was reading the reports of the 1937 New Education Fellowship conference that took place in Australia (Melbourne) and New Zealand and came to realise that the use of the term ‘education through art’ was evident well before Herbert Read’s 1943 book that used the same term in its title. I soon found myself tracing the various international influences that had pointed towards the notion of the arts at the centre of educational experience in the decades between the 1930s and 1970s.

The starting point for my journey during the late Australian summer of February and March 2015, had occurred a couple of years earlier. John Clegg, a son of Sir Alec Clegg, had contacted me shortly after his mother's death. Jessie Clegg had died in 2010 and the family was clearing the family house, the contents of which included her husband Alec's collection of books journals and pamphlets concerning education. My colleague Peter Cunningham and I agreed to take these as custodians until a suitable depositary was found. Picking through the boxes of items, I came across repeated references to Australian and New Zealand educational developments and these demonstrated that there had been regular and frequent visits and exchanges between the Cleggs and those parts of the Southern Hemisphere.

On arrival in Melbourne, I decided to embark on seeking out what evidence I could find of Alec Clegg's engagement with educational initiatives in Australia and New Zealand during the time as Chief Education Officer for the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1946-74. I soon discovered that Clegg's visits to Australia and New Zealand were part of a global exchange of progressive educationalists linking the Commonwealth and the USA over these years.

The axis upon which these exchanges occurred was the 'humane' and 'lively' education that was recognised to be flourishing in the English primary school. Any progressive educator worth their salt during the 1960s and 70s was planning a visit or recovering from the experience of visiting schools in Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire, London, Bristol, Leicestershire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. The English primary school was then considered to be the most advanced in shaking off the shackles of the nineteenth century mechanical model, developing an educational experience for the young child enjoyed in an atmosphere of freedom, humanity and openness.

Most interest among scholars in assessing the significance of such radical changes that did occur in primary education during these years has to date focussed on the nature and consequences of educational openness. However, I found that in the interpretation of openness, the concept of humanity and the recognition of what a humane educational experience looked like and felt like was an essential element in the various testimonies I encountered. 'Humanity in the classroom' was a phrase used by the only living person in Australia I was able to meet who had met Clegg and played host on Clegg's visit to Queensland in 1980. Phil Cullen had been director of primary education for Queensland over 17 years and had made a visit to England in 1970 to see for himself why there was so much excitement about what was occurring there. I contacted Cullen by email and received the following comments on his memory of that seminal visit.

'I paid a special visit to the West Riding because I had heard that the Authority, under the leadership of Sir Alec Clegg had some special things going for it in regard to children's capacity to learn at the primary school level by increasing the humanity of the classroom. I was not disappointed. It was a real educational experience. You could 'feel' an atmosphere of real learning in the schools.'

Retired Director of Primary Education for Queensland, Phil Cullen, relaxing at home in Banora Point NSW, reading a chapter he contributed to the book entitled The Modern Primary School in Australia (1982)

Cullen continues his interest in education today although he has been retired for 27 years. He keeps a lively blog and newsletter called “The Treehorn Express” named after a children’s book that wonderfully illustrated how adults ignore kids (https://treehornexpress.wordpress.com/).

The concept of humanity in the design of educational environments continued to arise throughout my time as I began to try to make sense of the impact of engaging aboriginal elders in decorating school walls with mural designs – a project led by Geoffrey Bardon in the early 1970s that led directly to the recognition of aboriginal art more generally. It emerged once again as I began to fathom the importance of the New Education Fellowship conferences in Australia and New Zealand in 1937 and the later UNESCO sponsored gatherings.

In the public lecture that I was required to present, I found myself reflecting on the connections not only between individuals across continents in pursuit of a more humane and meaningful educational experience but also between ideas about art education and the design of the curriculum and learning environment. In 1949, James Hemming, author of ‘The Child is Right’, unorthodox ex-teacher from England and campaigner against corporal punishment, caused a stir when he spoke at an Educational Conference in Melbourne, Australia. The conference was organized by the New Educational Fellowship (NEF) and Hemming, who later became a founding member of the British Humanist Association and from 1977-80, its president, had been especially invited as a speaker.

A year earlier, in 1948, the State of Victoria had commissioned Herbert Read to advise on its school syllabus as his recently published book Education Through Art was becoming well known in Australia and New Zealand. Hemming continued to advise on educational matters in Australia and New Zealand for many years and during his visit in 1949 was said to have charmed the audience with his warm humanist delivery.

Later, in Melbourne I visited several schools; some public schools and some independent. Once again, the notion of designing an environment that respected basic human needs and aspirations reemerged as a theme. At Preshil school, founded in 1931 in the suburb of Kew, I met with Marilyn Smith, an inspirational head teacher who had inherited this radical experiment in education from one of its founders, Margaret Lyttle. I was impressed not only by the physical environment that had resulted from a close collaboration between the architect Kevin Borland and school pupils in the early 1970s but also in the informal constantly changing remarkable architecture of the cubbies or treehouses evident in the grounds.

Preshill school, Melbourne

 

Preshill school, Melbourne

My interest in school decoration (see www.thedecoratedschool.org.uk) and the history of the idea that beauty and aesthetics of the environment mattered and exercised the imagination of pupils was stimulated by the mural art that I saw in the city of Melbourne and in some of the purposely designed schools. I met with the interior designer Mary Featherstone, whose work I had known about for many years and had the chance to visit her in her home designed by Robin Boyd. This particular research interest was further stimulated when I visited the north Island of New Zealand where I saw some splendid Maori art integrated into the built environment of many schools.

Public school in Hamilton, New Zealand

So, to return to Clegg, who accompanied me on this journey into the past exploring the relationship between the northern and southern hemispheres following the thread that united them; the significance of the arts in education. Clegg once declared 'the entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things but enjoy the right things’. That education should be a delight and a joy, Clegg believed, could only come about through a fundamental change in the way that children were viewed. Children might be regarded as first and foremost artists rather than technicians in their capacities and proclivities to learn, discover, experiment and invent. 

Clegg's call for 'a change of heart towards children' became the title of the lecture I presented and is, I think, a plea which is as relevant today as it was in the 1970s. The change of heart was to attempt to come close to realising the experience of being a child through an empathetic engagement with their material and social worlds and the engagement with the arts was central to this endeavour. Communicating a change of heart during Clegg's time of greatest influence relied on travel and serious degrees of exchange. Constellations of mutual interest formed around realising a humane educational plan. The notion that art and creativity were human entitlements and their practice and expression was universally provided for by nature but unequally accessed due to social inequalities generated the optimism of a generation of educators that fundamental change could be achieved.

 

When Education Escaped: Short–term Residential Education as ‘Transformation’

by Sharon Clancy

At the start of 2014, I began my research on the ShropshireAdult Education College (SAEC) after months waiting to start, combining my time between finishing off in my job of 6 years and contemplating, with a mix of excitement and trepidation, a brand new life as a researcher. In preparation, I had been reading about the College, a short-term residential establishment with an abundance of diverse and ground-breaking courses, and its charismatic Warden for 23 years, Sir George Trevelyan, who was a founding father of the New Age movement, winning the Right Livelihood Award in 1982. He remains important today for his work on ‘education for the spirit’ and his espousal of ‘a non-sectarian, holistic outlook, scientific as well as mystical, and a compassionate, global humanitarianism’ (Dawkins).

My initial research rapidly showed up the social and cultural complexities and the genuine educational challenge and innovation embodied in short-term residential adult education in the post-war period. The SAEC (1948 – 76) was one of some thirty such colleges in stately homes created between 1944 and 1950. It sat within the splendour of Attingham Hall and its surrounding parkland, built for the first Lord Berwick in 1785 and now in National Trust ownership. 

Most of the colleges have since been closed, many in the 1970s, like the SAEC, and others followed in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Some remain, though the emphasis, for most, appears now to be on leisure courses, rather than the rich debate, the post-war moral and philosophical urgency typified by the courses in their earlier years. The SAEC, for instance, offered subjects such as the Human Situation and Problems of the Adolescent in Modern Society—as well as courses in Music, the creative Arts and Drama. Other courses encompassed organic farming and environmental issues, emerging issues in Sociology and Psychology, such as child development and, atypically, a burgeoning New Age/spiritual education curriculum. 

Such colleges developed at a time when Local Education Authorities, in partnership with voluntary organizations such as the Workers Education Association and the Women’s Institute, Trusts and universities, were given particular powers, and the financial means, to establish imaginative responses to education for adults in every authority area, following on from the 1944 Education Act and the 1919 Report on Adult Education by the Ministry of Reconstruction. 

Students at Attingham in the 1950s

 The perceived success of previous efforts at short-term residential education, through Army education, the Summer Schools which had become part of the University Extension Movement and the Danish Folk High School model, indicated ‘the scope for and value in short courses as a permanent part of adult education if a sufficiently wide range of subjects—practical as well as theoretical—is made available’ (Ministry of Education, 1947, p.35), with the recognition that the residential nature helps ‘create an atmosphere and engender and enthusiasm for learning that is possible in no other way’(Ibid., p.60).  The emphasis was on the short-term college experience as a space for personal and social transformation and enrichment.

 Students folk dancing, 1948

Two particular questions have arisen as I have read through archive materials and press cuttings, sifted photographs and scrapbook materials and interviewed former staff, students and tutors from the SAEC. The first is who were the students who benefited from this idiosyncratic and wide ranging education and the second is was its impact ‘transformational’ or life changing for them?  

It is certainly clear that the SAEC aspired to make available education to people from all backgrounds, irrespective of their prior experience of learning. Trevelyan expressed the purpose thus:

‘Attingham was a cultural centre for everybody, for all classes’ and that ‘No one need be deterred by the feeling that he or she is not a scholar. . . why shouldn’t we use our country houses. . . as cultural centres, not for the upper classes, but for all classes?’ (Sir George Trevelyan’s Personal Notes, year unknown).

The emphasis is decidedly on culture. 

Trevelyan also outlines the importance of modern education working in a ‘manner fitting for our more or less classless society’ (Trevelyan, Adult Education and the Living Idea, year unknown, p.1), as a means for ‘living ideas to work down into our society, and adult education has here a special, and in some sense, a priestly, task’ (Ibid., p.3). So the purpose is one of stimulating debate, with distinct spiritual overtones, and of a small group cascading their learning out into wider society.

There is no doubt that Trevelyan believed passionately in education for ‘all comers’ (Trevelyan, ibid, p.1) and over the span of the College’s life, it is estimated that some 40,000 students crossed its threshold. However, examination of the Visitor’s books and the course attendees, where records exist, shows that demographically the students did not represent the spread of British society at the time but were broadly what is defined as ‘middle class’, with an emphasis on professionals such as teachers. Initially, many came from Shropshire or the West Midlands – true to the LEA’s aim of attracting local people – but the New Age-orientated courses, which grew in number from the mid ‘60s, drew people from all over the UK and even overseas.

Sir George (centre) with members of a young people’s course – 1960s

 None of this, however, invalidates the transformational experience for those who attended – and not primarily on the spiritual courses. One former student - who attended poetry and literature courses - said to me that it was an important break from ‘the ordinary workaday world’.... ‘the attraction was simply the refreshment of a complete change, of a complete break in a different environment, in a different kind of house and even a bygone age, and that was the great advantage’. (John Hassall, former student). John went on to comment on the importance, as a sixth former, of the social, relational, residential aspect of the courses – ‘you were rubbing up against people from all sorts of backgrounds and all parts of the country’.  This helped him in his decision to apply to university.

Jill Thomas, another former student, attended painting, Astronomy and public speaking courses, amongst others, and writes -  ‘it was a wonderful time, when I escaped for a brief while from looking after two children to leave my husband in charge and to be in the enthusiastic company of like minded people, returning home refreshed in spirit’. Others attributed their future choice of subject at university to the stimulus of a course at the SAEC; and some their career pathways. ‘It’s because of coming here [Attingham] so regularly that I worked in the Arts – no doubt about it’ (Sally Stote, former student). 

Arguably, Attingham catered for the enquiring mind of all types. The optimism of the times, encapsulated in the 1944 Education Act, is reflected in the range and diversity of courses and the limited levels of bureaucracy and scrutiny, which created a genuine freedom to innovate, even to challenge, as Trevelyan did. This, in turn, appears to have resulted in deep, immersive and life-changing experiences for many of the students who attended, as the oral history material I have collected testifies. The space, and the residential element of the learning, were vital to the transformational nature of the experience. This was a brief time in history when education genuinely escaped. 

Bibliography

 DAWKINS, P. Obituary -  http://www.sirgeorgetrevelyan.org.uk/home.html, accessed 22/6/15

GREAT BRITAIN, MINISTRY OF RECONSTRUCTION, ADULT EDUCATION COMMITTEE, (1980) The 1919 Report: The Final and Interim Reports of the Adult Education Committee of the Ministry of Reconstruction, 1918-1919, Reprinted with Introductory Essays by Harold Wiltshire, John Taylor, Bernard Jennings. Nottingham : Department of Adult Education, University of Nottingham

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION. (1947) Further Education: The Scope and Opportunities under the Education Act, Pamphlet number 8, H.M.S.O.

TREVELYAN, G. Adult Education and the Living Idea, year unknown