The Growth of English Schooling, 1340-1548: Learning, Literacy, and Laicization in Pre-Reformation York Diocese

by Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran

Overview

In contrast to the prevailing view, this book reveals the educational revolution" of the 1500s to have grown from an earlier expansion of elementary and grammar education in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries.

Originally published in 1985.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691639857
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #751
Pages:	348
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

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The Growth of English Schooling 1340-1548

Learning, Literacy, and Laicization in Pre-Reformation York Diocese

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By Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05430-8

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CHAPTER 1

Medieval and Early Tudor Education and Literacy: The Debates

Throughout most of this century the history of medieval and early Tudor English education has been shaped by the views of one man, Arthur Francis Leach, who argued, often passionately, that medieval education was dynamic and growing, while the policies of the Reformation, especially under Edward VI, were educationally destructive. Leach's interpretations, particularly of the Reformation, were not always sufficiently supported by his sources, and the value of his work has remained an issue among scholars ever since.

In 1884 Leach was appointed an assistant charity commissioner under the Endowed Schools Act. His first assignments were to look into the history of two schools, one at Chichester Cathedral and the other at Southwell Minster in York diocese. Subsequently he expanded his inquiries into the early histories of other collegiate, cathedral, and chantry schools. In 1914, in a paper read before the British Academy, Leach described the results of his thirty-year investigations. "My researches have led me first to doubt, then to deny, and finally to disprove the authorized version, and to revise, recast, or perhaps rather to create de novo the history of English education, through that of the schools in which it was given."

In his revision of English educational history Leach engaged in a series of furious controversies — over the importance of medieval monastic schools (which he denied), the existence of girls' education (which he likewise denied), the availability of schools in the Middle Ages (greater in proportion to the population than the nineteenth-century schools), and the role of the government of Edward VI in the history of English education (destructive). His polemics were backed by an impressive amount of research. Leach was the first to explore systematically the evidence for medieval schools, and his two general studies (English Schools at the Reformation, 1896, and The Schools of Medieval England, 1915), in addition to various editions of documents and numerous articles on schools in the Victoria History of the Counties of England, formed the basis for all subsequent work on medieval and Reformation schooling until the publication of Nicholas Orme's English Schools in the Middle Ages in 1973. As a consequence of the importance of his publications and the ferocity of his arguments, Leach's work has continued to be a touchstone for historians of English educational history while at the same time remaining an object of ongoing, often bitter debate.

Leach was arguing against two entrenched views of nineteenth-century historians: first, that medieval education was mainly monastic, deteriorating with the decline of religious houses in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and second, that the origins of the modern English grammar school lay in the Tudor foundations of the sixteenth century. Leach disagreed strongly with both of these assumptions, neither of which had much, except tradition, to recommend it. In his pioneering contributions, Leach attempted to trace the evolution of grammar schools in the cathedral, collegiate, and parish churches from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries onward, and in several cases from pre-Norman times. But Leach was not a professional historian, and his work has an antiquarian cast to it. Although his knowledge of the educational sources was unrivalled, in some ways Leach was an enthusiastic amateur who, as F. W. Maitland noted with regard to Leach's edition of Beverley town documents, sometimes "gives the rashest judgment about the most disputable matters." Leach overstated his arguments, being unwilling to concede, for example, that monks or monasteries made any positive contribution to secular or even religious teaching. When evidence for the existence of a monastic school appeared incontrovertible, Leach downgraded the educational role of the monastery by stating that it held the school and lands endowed for the school in trust or maintained it out of appropriated rectories. He thereby proved, to his own satisfaction, that the monastic role was that of financial middleman and that the monasteries had no interest in education per se.

Leach's contemporaries were well aware of problems in his work. In a letter of 16 November 1916 to the Reverend A. T. Fryer, R. L. Poole stated that, "He [Leach] may generally be depended upon for what he says about the late middle ages and the sixteenth century; but for early times he is not only highly prejudiced but also ill informed." And in a subsequent letter to Fryer, Poole added:

Great as were Mr. Leach's merits as an explorer of a particular subject, he was apt to go astray when he went outside it. In particular, he had monks "on the brain" and would never believe that they contributed anything to the advance of letters and learning. Consequently if he found a monk doing anything which he approved, he at once attempted to prove that he was not a monk at all. ... When any evidence did not suit Mr. Leach's views, it was straightway condemned as a forgery. This prejudice vitiates a great deal of what he has written about early times.

In an oft-cited review of Leach's last book, A. G. Little noted that, "Mr. Leach is a pioneer, and, like most pioneers, is prone to exaggeration and prejudices." Little detailed Leach's anti-monachism, showing that Leach mistranslated and misunderstood several crucial Latin passages, and asserting that he was "reckless in disputing the authenticity of documents which did not suit his views." Although Leach was a safer guide from the twelfth century on, Little contended that he continued to underestimate the extent of monastic involvement in education and was overly enthusiastic with regard to the educational role of cathedral and collegiate churches. Arguing by analogy with the early schools found in some of the cathedral and collegiate churches, Leach went too far in concluding that "there can be no manner of doubt then that all the [eleventh and twelfth-century] cathedral and collegiate churches kept schools."

Little's review did not cover all the problems, and he might well have noted cases where, from one or two recorded instances of a school, Leach would argue for its continued existence over several centuries. Although Leach was acutely aware of the problem of continuity, he tended to err on the optimistic side. As for parish chantry schools, Leach often dated them from the foundation of the chantry rather than from the first recorded date of the school. And he was prone to affirming the existence of a grammar school when the documents refer only to a school or to the teaching of young children. The result is to render Leach's estimate of some three hundred grammar schools in England by the year 1535 useful only after careful confirmation and constant allowance for his biases.

Leach's second major assertion was the damaging, indeed disastrous, effect of the dissolution of the chantries (and, to a much lesser extent, the dissolution of the monasteries) upon the grammar schools. His sentiments on the roles of Henry VIII and Edward VI in the history of English education were strongly worded:

The "true truth" about the matter, is that so far from Henry VIII or Edward VI being benevolent founders of schools, they were their spoilers, and instead of being the munificent creators of a system of endowed secondary education, they were its destroyers. In the most favourable cases, the Tudors were reviving, or restoring under new management, an old foundation with the same revenues which it had previously enjoyed before the suppression. ... In these cases they can at the best only be said to have endowed schools in the sense that a police magistrate, who restores a stolen purse to a citizen who has had his pocket picked, endows the citizen.

Leach's main contention was that the 1547 Chantry Act, while well-intentioned, was very badly executed. It allowed the chantry commissioners to release the endowments of the schools and to put the schoolmasters on a pension from the state. These endowments, he argued, were then reinstated piecemeal, as inadequacies became apparent and voices were raised in protest. Leach propounded his thesis with insufficient evidence, citing the complaints of Thomas Lever, Master of St. John's, Cambridge, in sermons before Edward VI and at Paul's Cross in 1550, and providing a few examples of schools that were refounded only after great difficulties. Reasoned argument tended instead to give way to rhetoric. But Leach was launching a broadside attack on the received opinion of English historians which chiefly credited Edward VI with founding England's early grammar schools. This view, formulated by John Strype in his Ecclesiastical Memorials (1816), institutionalized by the Schools Inquiry Commission (1864-1868), and popularized by J. R. Green in his Short History of the English People (rev. ed., 1888), had been accepted by schoolmasters and schoolchildren throughout Great Britain. Leach therefore felt the need to express himself strongly, particularly in his earlier journal articles. Much of his zeal stemmed from the fact that he was convinced of the revolutionary importance of the new materials he was bringing to bear on the history of education. No one before Leach had taken the time to examine in detail the documentary basis for ascribing medieval education to monasteries and an effective schools policy to Edward VI. And for years no one followed up on Leach's work. His zeal, biased as it was, combined with his unrivalled but sometimes unreferenced command of the sources, meant that educational historians especially, while wary of the tone and many of the particulars of his books, were content to accept their general conclusions.

It was not until 1955 that Leach's views were substantively challenged. Joan Simon, in a two-part article in the British Journal of Educational Studies, set out to reexamine the role of Edward VI (or Protector Somerset) in the history of education. Her article attacked Leach for underrating the monastic contribution to medieval education, overestimating the numbers of medieval collegiate schools, and not taking adequate account of the Tudor refoundations. It was a long-delayed and necessary reassessment, but it was too sweeping in its rejection of Leach. Simon found Leach's arguments for medieval schooling unconvincing in part because

they rest on formal evidence and fail to take into account the decline of the church in the later Middle Ages. The fact that ecclesiastical legislators intended a grammar school to be kept is one thing; the fact that visitation records reveal neglect of obligations and statutory duties is another. Leach stressed the first, but ignored the second.

Aside from the arguable decline of the Church, it is inaccurate to state that Leach's conclusions rest on formal evidence alone. Although he quoted the injunctions of the fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and others that all parish priests should teach the local sons of the poor and that cathedral churches and others should organize schools, he did not automatically assume that these orders were fulfilled, and his evidence frequently derived from the substantive material of visitations, bishops' registers, wills, account rolls, and legal documents. Because of the nature of these sources, mention of schools sometimes arises in connection with dereliction of duty; nonetheless, the evidence confirms that the schools (however poorly maintained) existed, which was Leach's primary contention.

Joan Simon also argued that Leach had overestimated the number of ecclesiastical (as opposed to monastic or lay) schools for the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Although she pointed out effectively that many collegiate and chantry foundations did not hold schools (a conclusion Leach himself reached for the later medieval period), she did not thereby destroy Leach's basic contention that pre-Reformation grammar education was both substantial and ecclesiastically supported.

Simon's attack on Leach made way for a very different interpretation of education on the eve of the Reformation which stressed the growth of lay involvement and the decline of ecclesiastical initiatives. "From the early fifteenth century, lay initiative in the founding of schools had been increasing, and the interest of the Church in sponsoring education had progressively declined. ... The chantry certificates suggest that, whatever their earlier importance, ecclesiastical schools proper constituted an almost negligible proportion of the total provision for education at the Reformation." Where Leach had tried to wrest the primary role in late medieval education from the monasteries, Simon endeavored to do the same with regard to the secular ecclesiastical foundations. Neither view is convincing. Although significant changes did occur in the proportional relationship of these schools to one another, the changes were far too complex to be characterized generally as "the decline of monastic or secular ecclesiastical schools" or "the rise of lay education." In fact, the majority of schools continued to be under the auspices of the Church, even if they may not have been "ecclesiastical schools proper," a term that Simon uses without sufficient precision.

Simon's major criticism of Leach was well taken, however. "The claim that schooling suffered a severe setback after 1548 is ... difficult to reconcile with the evidence of educational expansion and change in the post-Reformation period." Although she admits Leach's argument that many of the schools were disendowed, she is nevertheless correct in saying that Leach overestimated the negative educational impact of the dissolution of the chantries. Her evidence that a substantial number of the ecclesiastical schools were reendowed, that new lay foundations helped fill the gap, and that there was a revitalization of the grammar school curriculum, has restored credibility to the educational pronouncements of Edward VI's government.

Subsequently, in a series of articles in the British Journal of Educational Studies from 1962 to 1964, W. N. Chaplin and Joan Simon debated the value of Leach's work in greater detail. Chaplin argued that the usefulness of Leach's work had been greatly underestimated and generally ignored by medievalists. This unfortunate circumstance, as he saw it, derived from A. G. Little's influential and cautionary review. Chaplin therefore took issue with the way Little's review was received, pointing out that Little did not mean to warn scholars away from all of Leach's work and in fact generally endorsed his conclusions for the later medieval period. Chaplin then took even stronger exception to Simon's attack on Leach, accusing her of misrepresenting Leach's arguments and of unjustifiably using Leach's own work against himself. Simon, in turn, defended herself, citing sundry supporters, and arguing that Leach's work had been too uncritically accepted (and not ignored, as Chaplin would have it), that its very serious problems could not be dismissed, and that Leach's work should no longer remain the basis for any acceptable evaluation of medieval or, especially, Reformation schooling. The effectiveness of her rebuttal, in which she scarcely acknowledged the more detailed points broached by Chaplin, makes one suspect that Chaplin's summing up of the debate was shaped by a spirit of conciliation and not out of regard for Simon's argument. "The problem," he noted, "of the use of the work of A. F. Leach has been clarified by Mrs. Simon's Reply. Her aim seems to be the same as mine, that it should be used for an accepted history of English medieval schools."

Simultaneous with Chaplin's enthusiastic reappraisal of Leach, additional assessments appeared which called for a reevaluation of the "Leach legend." W. E. Tate's 1963 monograph on "A. F. Leach as a Historian" detailed Leach's failings as a proofreader, topographer and historian of elementary education. Besides taking offense at Leach's often cavalier treatment of dates and place names, Tate was concerned with the gaps in Leach's compilation of Yorkshire schools and his "donnish approach to educational matters." These criticisms aside, however, it is clear that Tate had in mind using Leach's work as a steppingstone to a better, successor work, for he performed the useful service of indexing every reference to a Yorkshire school throughout Leach's works. A more positive appreciation of Leach by J. N. Miner in 1962 argued that Leach was substantially correct in his treatment of the monastic contribution to education for those outside their ranks, while his emphasis on the educational role of the secular clergy in cathedrals and colleges, justified in part, could be supplemented (as Leach himself made clear) with more attention to chantry, gild, and hospital educational foundations. The proof of Leach's main point (that late medieval England was well supplied with schools) would, however,

require a series of detailed regional studies in social history, involving, among other things, any significant changes in the proportion of the clerical to the non-clerical population. Moreover, a study of this nature would only be possible if evidence were forthcoming of the continuity of a number of these schools as distinct from their foundation or dissolution, an intricate problem of which Leach was well aware.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• CHARTS AND MAP, pg. ix
• TABLES, pg. xi
• PREFACE, pg. xiii
• ABBREVIATIONS, pg. xix
• CHAPTER 1. Medieval and Early Tudor Education and Literacy: The Debates, pg. 1
• CHAPTER 2. Elementary and Grammar Education in Late Medieval England, pg. 21
• CHAPTER 3. Scholars, Schoolmasters, and Schools, pg. 63
• CHAPTER 4. The Schools of York Diocese, pg. 92
• CHAPTER 5. The Church and Educational Change, pg. 123
• CHAPTER 6. Literacy and the Laicization of Education, pg. 150
• CHAPTER 7. Literary Interests and Educational Motivations in York Diocese, pg. 185
• Conclusion, pg. 221
• APPENDIX A. The Testamentary Sources Used in this Study, pg. 227
• APPENDIX B. Schools with in the Diocese of York, pg. 237
• Bibliography, pg. 281
• Index, pg. 313