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CHAPTER THE FIFTH.

THE TRADITION OF EDUCATION.

I.

Continuity of education.

The history of human life and institutions is inwrought of two principles running crisscross to one another. Athwart the warp of traditional continuity there is woven the woof of variation; the pattern changes by degrees, but the web is without break or seam. Our system of education is sometimes supposed to come from some fountain head in America, or at most to be a Protestant device dating from the Reformation. But the schools that sprang up after the change of religion in England marked the persistence of an ancient tradition that even such an upheaval could not destroy. To find a logical point of beginning we must ascend to the early Christian centuries, when the work of religious teaching and proselytism marched abreast. Education was carried on in primitive monasteries and in cathedral chapters of a monastic type.[1] These far-back monastic schools for teaching religion only are connected by an unbroken pedigree with our complicated modern systems of child training. We may account the ancient missionary schools a place of beginning because it would tax patience to little purpose to

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grope uncertainly in the gray dawn of tradition for a connection with sources yet higher up.

II.

Early Christian schools.

The instruction given in places of resort for the study of early Christian doctrine and observance seems to be whole millenniums away from the modern conception of education. There were schools or at least throngs of scholars about popular Christian teachers in England in the fifth century. Later than that the English youth even of the nobility were crossing the channel to the renowned monasteries of Ireland “for the sake of divine studies and a more continent life, . . . going about from one master’s cell to another,” as Bede tells us.[1] By this voyage to a foreign land these young Englishmen learned the Latin of the service book and church song, and they acquired also the elements of the wisdom of that age, such as the excellence of celibacy and the purifying effect of self-imposed hunger, which was efficient even to the sanctifying of the polluted ground on which crimes had been committed.[2] They learned the keeping of three Lents a year, and they were taught that it was an act of superior devotion in seasons of fasting to eat daily only a little bread and milk after sunset, the milk being carefully skimmed. The proper order of singing the psalter and a method of fixing the true date of Easter were also taught, along with the doctrine of the damnation of infants unbaptized,[3]

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and much other lore now at last happily obsolete. These early schools with their skimmed-milk asceticism at least show the human soul in insurrection against the sordidness of barbarism, but they interest us here because from them is plainly traceable across the ages for nearly fifteen hundred years the long line of a tradition and habit of education. There have been variation and evolution, but there has been no break. The monastery school became a cathedral school in some cases, and the semi-monastic free school grew up alongside them both. The rudimentary school in the house of the detached priest got its impulse and direction from the higher schools in the cathedrals, and by slow changes the local priest’s school became the parish school, and in prosaic modern times, by a series of transformations, the American district school, which last retains few traces of its remote ecclesiastical ancestry.[1]

III.

Founding of Latin schools.

Before the Reformation the main reliance for education was on the convent schools. Young women were sent to the nunneries to learn to “work and reade.” Sometimes girls were given a little Latin also. Boys learned Latin in their hornbooks and other “abcees.” English in black-letter characters came after. The barbarous mediæval Latin, often grotesquely macaronied with the vulgar speech, was widely used in records and account books of the time. When the monasteries were

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suppressed by Henry VIII most of the higher schools went down into the abyss with the religious houses, and the English nation was faced by the ugly fact that it had pretty nearly abolished the education of the times, such as it was.[1] For remedy the old cathedral schools were supplied with lay teachers, and new cathedral trusts with provisions for educating choristers and other boys for holy orders were established. Now that all the religious houses with their schools had been ingulfed, efforts were made to found free grammar schools in addition to those that had survived. Sixteen such schools were established in the time of Edward VI in as many months. But the reign of the boy king was brief; the hungry courtiers had tasted the savory spoils of the monasteries, and they grudged every morsel of it that was given to the new free schools. The reactionary rule of Mary followed, and soon after the accession of Elizabeth the Speaker of the Commons reminded the young queen of the disastrous decay of learning in her kingdom. A general zeal was aroused, not for the primary and popular education so much in favor in later times, but for the founding of free Latin schools.[2] Mulcaster, a schoolmaster of the time, relates that the schools established in Elizabeth’s reign were more “than all the rest be that were before her time in the whole Realme.” Another writer of 1577 says that “there are not manie corporat townes now vnder the queens dominion that hain not one Grammar Schoole at the least.”[3] The tide wave of zeal

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for founding new Latin schools reached its flood about the time that emigration to America began, and the impulse was felt in all the early colonies.

IV.

Rudimentary teaching.

Much of the primary teaching was done at home. There was a great temptation to put this burden on the grammar schools, and one finds many complaints in England and America regarding the disposition of parents to be rid of their little children, “whereby the usher is overburdened.” Efforts were made from time to time to repel from the Latin school children who were stumbling through “the Horne Booke, the A. B. C., and the Primer.”[1] In New Haven the children who “bothered the master by spelling in English” were to be forthwith sent home.[2] To supply the place of home instruction in the rudiments the dame school had grown up. This gatehouse of learning was kept sometimes by a busy housewife, sometimes by a young woman a little better taught than other women. Schoolmasters’ daughters were purposely fitted to keep such schools in which the alphabet, spelling, and primary reading were taught along with the catechism, and in which girls learned to sew. “Mary goes to Mrs. Thair’s to learn to Read and Knit” is a significant entry in a Boston diary.[3] In Holland at this period there were dame schools in the care of women who were themselves unable to read,[4] but who taught the children the catechism

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only, and that orally. Nothing so bad as this is recorded of English schools of the sort, but the dame was, no doubt, sometimes poorly qualified even to give instruction as far as the primer.

V.

First books.

In the middle ages education was begun with the rudiments written probably on parchment, which was for security nailed to a wooden board, or, as an old poem puts it, “Naylyd on a brede of tre.”[1] Perhaps when paper, a much more perishable substance than parchment, came into use, the sheet thus attached to “a board of tree” was thought to require an overlay of a thin bit of horn to protect it from the destructive fumbling of the child.[2] Such hornbooks seem to have become more common in the seventeenth century than before, and there was a disposition to make them pleasing to the eye. Both plain hornbooks and gilt ones were imported into the colonies in the seventeenth century.[3] The hornbook contained the alphabet in capitals and in lower-case letters, with those easy syllables in two letters known at least in later days as the “a b abs.” The alphabet had been from remote times preceded by a cross, from which the first line had come to be called the crisscross (or Christ’s cross) row. The advent of Protestantism did not drive out all Catholic usages; some English children still commended their beds to “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and

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John,” and in country places as late as 1618 alphabetical studies were begun at the crisscross row with the ancient prayer, or perhaps one might say charm, “Christ’s cross be my spede and the Holy Ghost,” “For feare the Dived should be in the letters of the Alphabet,” adds the chronicler.[1] But the first hornbooks taken to the new Puritan settlement in New England are said to have had the cross obliterated. After the hornbook came the “abce” or the “abcie,” spelled also in several other ways. It comprised a series of little verses turning each on some word, which key words began with the several letters of the alphabet in succession. The device is well known in our later times. There were of old “latten abeesees” as well as English ones; the Latin were no doubt the more ancient.[2] The primer, notwithstanding its name, was the third implement for learning put into the hands of a child. It contained at the Reformation prayers and religious meditations, but in some of its later forms it was much like a modern catechism. The primer came at last to include the contents of the hornbook and the “abcie”; such was the famous New England Primer which had its rise at the close of the seventeenth and passed through innumerable editions in the eighteenth century.[3] The usual course was to pass the child out of the primer into the psalter—that is, to set him to reading Sternhold and Hopkins’s version of the Psalms in meter.[4] The rugged Bay Psalm Book was used as a reader in the days when

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approximate rhymes and a rough rhythm were the only alleviations of the child’s task. But reading was also taught from little books “full of precepts of ciuilitie” done into verse “such as children will soone learne and take delight in thorow the roundnesse of the meter,” as Schoolmaster Brinsley assures us. Rules of politeness in verse were centuries old in Latin, and were by this time common in English; one of these books was “The Schoole of Vertue,” and there was a “Newe Schoole of Vertue” of French origin.[1] To be polite, to “make his manners” by bow or courtesy to superiors, to stand reverently and modestly aside in the street when elders or people of dignity passed by, was one of the first and most important steps in early American education—it was the virtue of childhood, as it had been from the middle ages.[2] But when the lad could read in the psalter without spelling the words, he bade adieu to school dame and English and was ready to be “entered” in Latin, as the phrase went.

VI.

The grammar school.

By the term grammar school was meant in that day a school for beginners in Latin. One might learn some paradigms, and even more than this of Greek, in the higher grammar schools, and there were masters who added some driblets of preliminary Hebrew, the school thus including all the three learned tongues. But virtually its whole

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force was spent on Latin, which was still the sacred language of religion and learning. Many of the pupils in the grammar schools had to be taught their English rudiments; beyond this the instruction was almost wholly in Latin.[1] Lilly’s grammar, with a ponderous and forbidding title, was in that language. The difficulty of this had at length brought forth some recognized English helps for beginners, such as posing books, or, as we should say nowadays, question books, on the accidence, and there were ponies intended for surreptitious use, in the shape of helps to construe Lilly’s rules; but English was ostensibly left behind.[2] The lad must understand when the master taught him in Latin, and he was supposed to converse only in Latin during school hours.[3] Yet in spite of “ferula” and birch switches, and the risk of being distinguished as the “asinus” or donkey of his form, the pupil still contrived to speak much to his fellows in his mother tongue. The attempt to compel conversation in Latin was not wholly successful in England,[4] and it always failed in America, even in Harvard College.[5] Disputation had been for centuries the favorite means of rendering scholars expert in Latin and of vitiating their general education.[6] The taste for polemics had pervaded the universities, and even the grammar schools, from the earliest times.[7] Lads under fifteen were set to dispute in school Latin, often “thieving” their arguments on grave questions of philosophy or intricate points of grammar,[8] and

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mingling their disputations with boyish sarcasms and rude ridicule, in the spirit of the gamecocks, in which masters and pupils took delight.[1]

VII.

In the grammar school.

After seven or eight years in what Milton styles “the grammatical flats and shallows,” the boy left the grammar school for deeper waters. Unless he had had an unusually good master the chances were that he could read his mother tongue but stammeringly—there were pupils who at some stage of their early Latin studies lost the art of reading English entirely. The lad of fifteen or more, on leaving the grammar school, was ignorant of numbers; some boys advanced in Latin did not know the numerals, Roman or Arabic, and could not find the chapter in the Bible, “much less the verse.” The boy from the grammar school had learned to write and to make his own quill pens with the point next the middle finger slightly thinner and shorter than the other, and to make a ruling pen as well, “with a nock like that of an arrow.” With this he could make two parallel lines, and he ruled his own paper thus and wrote between the two lines. “Penne, inke, paper, rular, plummet, ruling pen, pen-knife,” were all included in the outfit for learning to write, and there was “a blotting paper” to keep the book clean.[2] For doing his exercises the pupil used a piece of lead thrust into a quill, and he kept a piece of new

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wheat bread at hand for use in erasing pencil marks. The grammar-school boy rarely had occasion to write English, and many scholars from early neglect in the grammar schools were “too backwards to their dying day” in the art of writing the vernacular.[1] The master and his usher were often inexpert in writing; in such cases a scrivener was sometimes engaged to teach the “Roman hand” and the beautiful “secretary hand” so puzzling nowadays to unpracticed eyes.[2] There were also traveling scriveners who taught penmanship. The lad might be weak in his English when he left school, but he made amends for it by knowing how to write themes and even verses in Latin. The producing of Latin verses was a rather wooden handicraft; the grammar scholar used his Flores Poetarum for models, and he could borrow elegant ready-made locutions from a thesaurus of poetical phrases by Bucklerius. The Sylva Synonimorum was also very handy for “schollars of iudgement.” When the word in mind would not scan properly, the verse carpenter could select another with the same meaning from this Forest of Synonyms. The ambitious young poet rummaged in Textor’s Epitheta after decorative adjectives; for epithets, “if they be choyse, are a singular ornament,” as Master Brinsley assures us.[3] “Descriptions by periphrases” were to be had in Holyoke’s Dictionary, and there was “Master Draxe his Phrases” and other books “to see how many wages they can vtter anything in good

phrase.” One Latin verse was admired because its nine words could be arranged in a hundred and four ways, perhaps all equally prosaic.

VIII.

Writing schools.

A boy from the grammar school unable to write his mother tongue with any fluency and ignorant of the multiplication table was not fitted for the counting house, where his dexterity in cobbling Latin verses would avail nothing. For lads destined to these employments there were English schools of various sorts, including many old-fashioned “common schools” for all classes, which debarbarized their rudimentary English by teaching youths also to “congrue Latine.” When appearing alongside the free schools such were sometimes called “inferior schools” or “trivial schools.” With the rising importance of trade in the seventeenth century, “writing schools,” so called, came into prominence. Lads, even of good families, who showed more aptitude for money-making than for learning Latin were sent to the writing school to learn “good hands and accounts.” In these schools were taught an elaborate penmanship, arithmetic in forms somewhat fantastic, and the scicnce of bookkeeping, complicated and intricated in that day by the multitude of varying monetary and metrical systems. Writing schools were private ventures, and in contrast to the severity practiced in the grammar school the writing school enforced

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no discipline whatever. Until the close of the seventeenth century such homely and useful schools were rarely if ever endowed.[1] It was only by founding a Latin school that one could hope to gain the blessedness of a saint or the glory of a patriot.[2] Such was the faith of Englishmen and of the founders of the early colonies in America. The vulgar utilities of English reading and writing and multiplying and dividing were much more suited to pioneers in America than Lilly’s Latin grammar or even than what was esteemed the “rare and almost divine matter” of “Tullies Offices.”[3] But necessary and mercenary arts could not be made objects of sentiment by enthusiastic benefactors who wrote long letters to the Virginia Company ostentatiously subscribing them “Dust and Ashes,” or laid their money when they were done with it at last on the altar of the venerated dead languages for the benefit of “poor scholars” who had been traditional objects of benevolence for centuries.

IX.

Grammar school the universal remedy.

Valued at first as a means of producing clergymen, we find the grammar school in the fifteenth century esteemed in Scotland as a training place for public officials “for the king’s use.” After the Reformation it came to be regarded in England, Scotland, and Holland as a means for propagating Protestant doctrines and eradicating heresy. But , as potable gold was the universal medicine and

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Venice treacle the antidote to innumerable poisons, so the grammar school in that age of idealism became a cure for all heresy, heathenism, and barbarism. The greatest schoolmaster of James’s reign, John Brinsley, laid at the feet of the Virginia Company the manuscript of his “Consolations for Ovr Grammar Schooles,”[1] intended especially for “all ruder places, namely for Ireland, Wales, Virginia,” etc., “God having ordained schooles of learning,” he declares, “to be a principall meanes to reduce a barbarous people to ciuilities.” It was in this spirit that the Virginia Company allotted land for a college at Henrico to bring Indian children to a saving knowledge of Christianity and Latin grammar. For barbarous places “so nuzled vp in rudeness and superstition” it was thought there could be no help but in a Latin school.[2] Benefactors seeking the conversion of the “infidell’s children” sent books and maps and money for the new Indian college in Virginia. This was done dramatically after the manner of the time. A mysterious well-dressed stranger appeared in the open court of the Virginia Company, depositing there a box in which were found bags of “new gold” for the education of the Indians.[3] Passengers on a returning East Indiaman, hearing news of religious destitution in Virginia, forthwith collected money;[4] this, with other sums, was devoted to the founding of a collegiate school at Charles City.[5] The students were to pass out of this “East India School,” as it was called, to the college at Henrico, from the

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privileges of which baptized youth were not to be quite shut out.[1] To the endowment of the Charles City school the Virginia Company added a thousand acres of land and five apprenticed servants.[2] The overthrow of the Company in 1624 involved the destruction of these schemes for transplanting the education then in vogue to America. Of all these benevolent projects there was a few years later not a bit of flotsam anywhere to be seen.

X.

Symmes’s and other free schools in Virginia.

Benjamin Symmes, a settler in Virginia, was the first of emigrant Englishmen to bequeath an educational endowment after the pattern set by English philanthropists in the ages before him. To found a free school in Elizabeth County, Symmes, who died in 1634, gave by will two hundred and fifty acres of land with an adjacent hay marsh and a herd of eight milch cows, which by 1649 had increased to forty. Interest-bearing and profit-sharing investments were not to be had.[3] The usufruct of land and cattle, and sometimes the income from cattle alone, had been for centuries the commonest form of bequest for benevolent, religious, or superstitious purposes. One Henry Peasley founded a Virginia free school in 1675 with a gift of six hundred acres of land, ten cows, and a brood mare.[4] Other public-spirited people gave to Peasley’s school negro slaves in place of the obsolete tenants of old English endowments and the bond servants

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given by the Virginia Company for educational uses.[1] In the remaining parish records the existence of yet other free-school endowments in colonial Virginia can be traced.[2] But the free Latin school of England was an exotic in Virginia. There was no town life, and there was small need of dispensing gratuitous Latin to thriving tobacco planters in a new country, whose clergy, such as they were, were imported ready made, and whose laymen at least did their talking and reading in mother English. The College of William and Mary did not get under way until the last years of the seventeenth ccntury; there was no bishop on this side of the sea to induct men into holy orders; the primitive statecraft of the colony needed no other tongue than the vernacular, aided occasionally by Indian interpreters, so that the free Latin school of early Virginia was a short ladder with nothing but empty space at the top of it. Latin was studied merely as a gentleman’s accomplishment. The abundant wild land, the cheap bondservant labor, and yet cheaper stave labor, which became common in the last quarter of the century, tempted the young provincial of the Chesapeake colonies to land ownership and that culture of the soil by the hands of others that had been for ages the pursuit of the gentry of the mother country. Of the character of the teaching in the few early Virginia grammar schools we know nothing. Little private schools early began to spring up at convenient points in the growing settlements[3] which

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were stretched in a narrow, sinuous line along the margins of the watercourses and estuaries of the Chesapeake region. One may infer from the record that there were such schools before 1644, and it appears that the cost of a year’s “scoleing” at that time was equal to that of two pairs of shoes.[1] Forty years later, in 1684, there were so many of these little country schools that the mercenary governor, Lord Howard of Effingham, thought it worth while to exact a license fee from every schoolmaster.[2] These schools had no relation to the parish authorities, but were established and conducted by the people spontaneously. “The children’s fathers hire those schools and pay you out of their own pocket” is the quaint statement of a clergyman in a report to the Bishop of London in 1724.[3] “To read, write, and cipher” was usually the whole course. “Care is generally taken by parents that their children be taught to read” certifies Parson Brunskill.[4]

XI.

Other devices for education.

The schools in Virginia being thus the offspring of the law of demand and supply, some of the endowed schools seem to have taught arithmetic instead of the dead languages, and one excellent private school in 1724 combined numbers with Latin and Greek.[5] Virginia life in the first century after the settlement was extremely rural, not to say rustic; most of the planters had never seen a

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town, and even members of the House of Burgesses could not conceive of life as tolerable to people cooped up in a village where neighbors were so near that there was no range for a herd of cattle.[1] The development of large landholdings began to produce a class of pretty rich planters in the last half of the seventeenth century who naturally wished to give their sons better advantages than they could get in the rough old field schools or the struggling free schools. Imitating the landed proprietors of England, these men brought their sons up under private tutors. The natural way to accomplish this in Virginia at that time was to buy a man trained in an English Latin school from among the redemptioners who were sold off the ship’s deck for a term of years to pay their passage. This method of hiring a private tutor was in use in 1669 and probably earlier, and it seems to have prevailed in the Chesapeake region throughout the colonial period. No doubt some of the teachers who emigrated in considerable numbers in the prevalent fashion at the cost of a temporary loss of liberty were better instructed than many of the ordinary country teachers of the time.[2] Before 1683 the brilliant William Byrd, who was perhaps the first man born in any of the colonies with a natural gift for felicitous literary expression, had been sent to England for education. As time went on, this recurrence to the sources of learning in the Old World was frequent among the rich in the Southern colonies.[3]

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XII.

Latin schools in New England.

In New England the Latin school found an environment distinctly more friendly than was that of the colonies to the southward. The settlers were in the first freshness of their Utopian enthusiasm, and their church establishment was the very heart of their enterprise. In the Puritan mind preaching was really a sacrament above sacraments, though it was called “an ordinance.” God was held to be present “in his holy ordinances” when they had “binn setled in a way of gospel order.”[1] It became therefore a matter of primary importance to educate preachers. For ages preparation for the ministry had consisted mainly in acquiring a knowledge of Latin, the sacred tongue of Western Christendom. Though the Latin service was no longer used by Protestants, and the Vulgate Bible had been dethroned by the original text, and though the main stream of English theology was by this time flowing in the channel of the mother tongue, the notion that all ministers should know Latin had still some centuries of tough life in it. The first professed aim of university and secondary education in that time was to raise up ministers; to fit men for the service of the state followed close after. In all early projects for schools and colleges in America these two were somewhat grotesquely intertwined, with a notion that a first step toward converting the heathen tribes was to make some of them bachelors of art. For this purpose the endowment

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of the abortive Henrico College was undertaken in Virginia, and in 1666, after no little travail, Harvard succeeded in graduating an Indian.

XIII.

Mode of sustaining grammar schools in New England.

The English liking for free grammar schools, re-enforced by the Puritan passion for securing “teaching elders,” caused Latin schools to be set up in many places “for the better trayning vpp of youth, . . . and that through God’s blessing they may be fitted for publique service hereafter either in church or commonweale.” The ancient English cow-and-calf endowment of education, which had been already introduced into Virginia, reappears in the Northern colonies. Of the many plans traceable in early New England, it is probable that nearly all had English precedents. In New Haven, Boston, Newport, and elsewhere one finds early proposals to sustain schools by the rental or usufruct of town lands, a method used in England and incorporated in grants to early Virginia plantations. John Eliot, the apostle to the Indians, had been a grammar-school usher in England, and his parish in Roxbury appears to have contemplated a free school as early as 1642, in which year ten shillings of rental was bequeathed toward its support. In 1645 all the householders in Roxbury made a perpetual annual subscription, amounting in all to twenty pounds a year, to sustain a free school for their children, “to fitt them for publike service

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both in churche and Commonwealthe.” These rentals were made a lien on “not only their houses, but also their yardes, orchards, gardenings, outhouses, and homesteads.”[1] The few resources of a new country for a fixed income were probably all tried in turn by founders of New England schools.[2] One finds among other things the rent of a ferry, of a wharf, of a shop, of a house, and of a gristmill devoted to education.[3] The early Virginia tenant and servant endowment finds something like a parallel in the contribution to Harvard College of a hundred and fifty pounds, apparently out of a fund produced by the sale of indigent children sent out of England as apprentices.[4] After trying other means, deficiencies were made up in some towns by a tax rate, and this method of sustaining town schools proved the most practicable and developed after generations into the modern system. In some New England communities the school tax was levied at first on schoolable children in the several families; often the rate was shared between property and progeny. In all these expedients there appears to be a resort to methods known in England.

XIV.

The religious motive.

The zeal for schools was somewhat more effective in New England than in the colonies farther south, because the communities were more compact and the local governments more vigorous. But it was also probably more effective, because

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the main body of the people was religious, and schools in the seventeenth century were a part of the religious establishment. This trait education had inherited from the ages preceding. In some way even rough and rudimentary education took on a religious color in the eyes of the people of that day. Massachusetts ordained in 1642 that every child should be taught enough “to read and understand the principles of religion & the capitall lawes of the country.” The preamble of the Massachusetts school law of 1647 makes it the motive of the act to thwart “the ould deluder Satan” by keeping the Scriptures accessible in the original tongues, that “the true Sence and meaning” might not “be clouded by false glosses of saint seeming deceivers.” This law passed into the Connecticut code of 1650, preceded by this preamble with its uncouth rhetoric; the old deluder Satan still marches at the front, followed by the Papists, the saint-seeming deceivers walking softly in the rear, “false glosses” in hand. The broad and secular uses of education were not recognized as yet.

XV.

Motive of the school law.

By this curious law of 1647 the Puritan government of Massachusetts rendered probably its greatest service to the future. The act was not modern in aim, and for a long time it was inefficient, but from that quaint act there has been slowly evolved the school system that now obtains

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in the United States. The rush of Puritan immigration had virtually ceased about 1640, and the attention of the New England leaders was turned toward the thronging children in the prolific families of the settlers. The religious Utopia, such as the founders had imagined when they heard the voice of the Lord calling upon them to arise and depart out of the land of their fathers, was to be realized by the children born in “these ends of the earth.” As early as 1642 there was alarm at the educational decline. Before 1645 there were agitations in favor of free schools in New Haven, Dedham, Roxbury, and other towns. In 1644 the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England bestirred themselves to collect a peck of corn from each family for Harvard College, that the supply of preachers might not fail. But the graduates of Harvard were now finding benefices in England, where, since the rise of the Puritans to power, ministers with Puritan antecedents were much sought after. In 1646 the Massachusetts General Court sadly confesses “the fewness of persons accomplished to such imployments” as required education, and looks to the future with something like consternation. Six years later the records testify that Harvard students “as soone as they are growne vpp, ready for public vse . . . leave the country.” Meantime “the first founders weare away apace.”[1] It was in the face of this disheartening exigency that the school law of 1647 was adopted.

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XVI.

The school law of 1647.

This law, which has produced such far-reaching and unforeseen results, was confessedly a dam against the rising tide of ignorance. It was passed “that learning may not be buried in the grave of our fathers in the church and commonwealth.” It ordained “that every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall then forthwith appointe one within their towne to teach to write and to reade.” This ungrammatical sentence is the vital part of the law. Towns having a hundred householders were to establish grammar schools to teach Latin, or to pay a fine to the nearest towns having such a school. This provision for grammar schools, as the preamble implies, was intended to be the capital feature of the law, but it could not be enforced.[1] On the other hand, the rude little schools for mere reading and writing, to be taught usually by some resident farmer, were possible in a new country, and they were realized in many townships during the next half century. Those country schools that pretended to the dignity of grammar schools were most of them shams or makeshifts to satisfy the law by such devices as covenanting that an incompetent master should teach Latin “as far as he was able,” or that he should “teach English and carry them on in Latin as far as he could.” Even where the teacher was fairly competent those desiring Latin came to be

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distressingly few. In the matter of rudimentary schools a law could not achieve much. Townships might have something less than fifty householders with perhaps a hundred and fifty children, and yet have no school. One school in a territory of six or eight miles square was but a lean provision. Considering the number of voluntary schools already in existence the first effect of the law must have been slight indeed. Popular education under its provisions was rough and scant, as the surviving documents of the succeeding age testify all unconsciously. No new kind of school was introduced by the act, and the question of support was still left with each township, “as the maior part of those that order the prudentials of the towne shall appoint.” Its importance lay in the requirement by a central authority that each local community of a certain population should sustain a school in some way, and its historical value consists in the principle thus established. The outcome of this law adopted, in what was the most religious as it was the most intolerant period of New England history, has been the development of a national system of secular education for many millions of children professing nearly every creed known in the wide world.[1]

XVII.

Origin of the Massachusetts school system.

In human history nothing is educed from nothing; that which is exists by virtue of far-reaching roots struck deep into the mold of that which was.

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Pioneers especially have no time to invent; necessity rarely brings forth anything better than imitation and adaptation. What makes the school act of 1647 of consequence is the legal obligation imposed on local communities to provide opportunity for education. For this England afforded no example. But New England was quite as likely to fetch a precedent from some Presbyterian country as to follow the tradition of England. She did not need to go farther than to Scotland. At the Reformation Knox desired “to purge the Churche of God from all superstition” and to disseminate the new doctrines in the remotest corners of Scotland. In his Buke of Discipline[1] he demanded “That everie severall churche have a schoolmaister appointed, such a one as is able at least to teach Grammar and the Latin tung, yf the Town be of any reputation. If it be upaland . . . then must either the Reider or the Minister take cayre over the children . . . to instruct them in their first rudimentie and especially in the catechisme.” Knox proposed this system sixty-seven years before the law of 1647; in both we have the same Latin schools in larger towns and rudimentary teaching in obscurer places. The Synod of Dort repeated the attempt in Holland in 1615. Knox’s scheme and the Dutch imitation of it were but an expansion of the parish and cathedral schools existing for centuries before.[2]

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XVIII.

The decline in education.

The educational decline in all the colonies was inevitable and it was universal as we may see by the extant letters, wills, and records painfully written by men of the second and third generations. The violent aberrations of orthography from even the rather free standards of the time, the vagrant capital letters, the halting and confused march of sentences, suggest that brains, as well as hands, were numbed by the rude toil from which pioneers may not escape. The trees of the forest were a hostile phalanx to be broken, fields beset with stumps that defied the plow were to be subdued to culture; there were savages to fight and to flee from, towns and ships to build, with tasks of Hercules beside that left small room for learning. Frontiersmen find the Latin accidence dispensable. The generations of bad spellers and clumsy writers born to a new-world battle were much better trained for their environment than the most accomplished of the first corners. They had learned from boyhood to take bearings and lay a true course through labyrinthine woods, to handle with steady sureness the heavy firelock musket or the newer snaphance, and the long-barreled fowling piece, to swing true the felling axe, and to wield the heavy beetle, to hew a puncheon floor, to build a cabin of rough logs. They could balance and paddle on salt water and fresh in wind and wild weather the tottling canoe. Patience, courage, enterprise, and

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a nimble mental shiftiness could not but result from such a curriculum. But these men hardly knew more of literature than did the Greek heroes or the Hebrew patriarchs. In the rather well-written manuscript records of Virginia parishes of that time “the clarkes” record that the vestry “has made choyse on” one R. M. for a church warden; that the parson has “affeciated”; that A. B. has been “opoynted overseyear” of the highways; processioning of bounds is spelled “persestioning,” sufficient is “sofitiant,” and so on.[1] It is entered that a certain person has been “making his redress to this vestry for helpe.” A Maryland vestry clerk had no notion of mental reservation; he records that the vestrymen took the oath of abjuration “without equivocation or governmentall reservation.” In New England it is amusingly pathetic to read the records of covenants with teachers written by town clerks who doubled the n in English or stipulated that the pupils should learn to “rite” or “wright.” The awkward pronunciation of the pioneer scribe shows through his phonetic spelling when those to be taught appear as “childeringe,” and one of the three is in a contract with a teacher is sometimes “refmetick,” sometimes “retmitick.” Even the Boston clerk of 1652 bewrays his speech when he writes of the “pore scollers of Hervert College.” Local government has its petty side; the New England towns had “tricks and shifts to evade the school laws.”[2] Few towns escaped fine for neglect of

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school laws in those days. In some of the towns there were children that traveled long roads to school; in one case it was eight miles. In New England, as in Virginia, many children learned to read in the old English way by home instruction.[1] In Virginia the ability to read was perhaps about as common as in England at the same period, but there are cases of a man holding local office who was obliged to make his “signum” or mark in subscribing to a document;[2] in Andover, Mass., in 1664, five out of eleven on a coroner’s jury made marks.[3] In other colonies than Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia there was yet greater illiteracy.[4] In Maryland half the adult males were probably unable to write their names during the whole seventeenth century. Harvard College ran down in the general decline. “The greater part of the people were devoted to the Plow,” as a writer of the time explains, and “learning was forced to plod out a way to live.”[5] In the last quarter of the seventeenth century Harvard was a Latin and divinity school, slim in attendance, and inefficient in teaching, while it was kicked about as a political football in the strife between the factions of the Mathers and their rivals.[6]

XIX.

Decline of the Latin school.

Through all this period of darkness and decline the colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and in a less degree the other New England

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governments, except Rhode Island, preserved in form and something more that which has proved an invaluable legacy for the future—a system of schools sustained in part by enforced local taxation. The school that survived “the dark ages” of New England was no longer that brought from England. Supported partly by town rates the so-called Latin school was less able even than the English school to resist the intrusion of younger children. Such pupils gave trouble at Harvard, and at New Haven they “bothered the master of the grammar school by learning to spell English.”[1] Yielding to the demand of supporters, grammar schools came to give more attention to writing and arithmetic. But this innovation was admitted grudgingly at first. “It is scarce known in any place to have a free school for English and writing”[1] was the objection raised in New Haven, but even New Haven only grumbled in yielding, and so by slow degrees it came to pass that the English studies at last drove the sacred Latin from the free school founded at first for it alone. In vain did the town meeting exhort the master to “bring his boys on to latting as fast as they were capable.” Latin teaching barely survived at all by the aid of such hortation and of repeated legislation, local and general. Other important changes came by the irresistible pressure of circumstances. The remoter townsmen were taxpayers also, and they tired of sending their children over weary miles of snowdrifts to the township

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schools or of teaching them at home. Thus as time went on “outskirt schools” grew up. In many cases, over the whole region covered by township communities the schools were rotated so as to be kept first in one neighborhood and then in another.[1] In the eighteenth century we find New Jersey appointing men to look after the schools, and see that they rotated properly, so that all the inhabitants might have a fair chance. By such processes the town school gradually became the modern district school.[2] An obligation to establish and to support schools, in part at least, from the public fund having once become traditional, one finds in the eighteenth century even dame schools and many writing schools maintained in part or wholly at public expense.[3] Taking our stand at the point where the half-mediæval seventeenth gives place to the far more modern eighteenth century, we can see that the thousand-year-old exclusive instruction of the few was in process of slow transformation into a scheme of popular and universal education. As usual in such a metamorphosis, the change was made by insensible gradations; the continuity was without apparent seam.

XX.

Maryland and Rhode Island.

No such thing as public education not dominated by religion was known in the seventeenth century. From dame school to university all was ostensibly, perhaps ostentatiously, religious.[4] In

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such a state of society, governments freely tolerating more than one form of religious belief could do little or nothing by state initiative for education; and in communities where there was a division of sentiment voluntary co-operation in schools was almost impossible. In Maryland the poor little arts of reading and writing were hardly known in some parts of the province, and it has been estimated that in the seventeenth century half of the adult males were unable to write their names.[1] There were efforts to establish schools in the lifetime of the first generation; these were kept by one Ralphe Crouch, who was in some way connected with the Jesuits. Thirty-seven years after the first settlement the Catholic upper House of the Legislature proposed to found a government school, but the Protestant lower House promptly barricaded the way by proposing as a condition that all the teachers should be Protestant or that there should be at least one Protestant master in the school. The notion of a wholly secular and impartial rudimentary instruction had not entered the minds of men in any part of Christendom. One of those “schools for humanities” for which the Jesuit order was famous was begun “in the center of the country” in 1677, but without aid from the Maryland government. Rhode Island was similarly embarrassed, and there is no mention of schools in the early colony records. There were schools nevertheless. The early New England system of town schools came into Rhode

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Island by induction. Bristol, in 1682, established a school by dividing the expense between the parents of the pupils and the taxpayers, a method common in the adjacent colonies.[1] But a retardation of educational development was the natural penalty of religious impartiality. One of the results of the English Revolution of 1688 was to make Maryland for a while a crown colony and rather intensely Protestant. In 1692 and in years following laws were passed for the promotion of “free schools” of the old Latin school kind,[2] intended to produce candidates for holy orders who were to complete their training at the new College of William and Mary in Virginia.[3]

XXI.

School and breakfast.

By comparison of such notices as we have of American schools with the English schools of the period, we can form a fairly clear conception of the outward traits of school life in the age of American settlement. We may dimly see the unwilling boy “with shining morning face” and a lambskin satchel setting out for school, breakfastless, in the dark winter mornings in time to begin his studies at the unchristian hour of six o’clock. Some schools postponed the hour of beginning until seven. The session ended at eleven, when the famished pupils went home to their first meal, though in a few schools there was a recess of fifteen minutes at nine o’clock, in order that those

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who lived near the school might snatch a hurried breakfast, a meal not generally reckoned with at that time.[1] There was a custom in earlier times of allowing the fasting pupils to take some light food in school with bottles of drink,[2] but if the custom survived into the seventeenth century it left no trace in educational literature. The session was resumed for the afternoon when the master rapped on the doorpost at one o’clock, and it continued until “well-nigh six at night,” when the scholars, who must have been stupefied by an all-day confinement, heard the welcome word of dismission, “Exeatis.”[3] In a new country the rough roads and long distances must have made it next to impossible to begin in the dark at six in the winter. By 1719 the hour had fallen away in one place to “three quarters past seven.”[4] One finds the pupils of Christopher Dock, the Pennsylvania Dutch teacher, munching their “breakfast bread” along the road as they hurried to school at some unearthly time,[5] and back-country schools in America retained cruelly long hours, with other cherished and venerable abuses brought from Europe, until the middle of the nineteenth century. In the early years of Harvard an hour was allowed at some time in the middle of the forenoon for morning bever, a light snack preceded by no breakfast. Half an hour was given to the afternoon bever, and an hour and a half each to dinner and supper.[6] Small allowance was made for the activity of youth. There were no regular recesses for play

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in any of the schools. On occasion a great man would lend his countenance to the school by a formal visit; at such a time he might crave a little grace for the prisoners of learning; a half holiday was granted at his request and in honor of his advent.[1] Such playtimes were of old called “remedyes,” but austere Dean Colet would not allow to the pupils of his new foundation of St. Paul’s a playday at the request of anybody less than a king or a prelate.[2] It was thought best to cut off this ancient privilege wholly at the little Virginia college; there were probably too many visitors of distinction; but one afternoon a month was set apart for play, and whenever a new student was enrolled “an afternoon extraordinary” was granted, “and no more.”[3]

XXII.

Ascham and reform.

On a certain day in 1563, during the prevalence of “the fever pestilence” in London, there sat at dinner in Secretary Cecil’s chamber at Windsor Castle a group of distinguished men. Cecil turned the table talk to the recent flight of some lads from the neighboring school of Eton “for fear of beating,” and condemned the harshness of schoolmasters. There were in the company of course some of those conservatives who rise up to defend any old-fashioned practice. But, as good luck would have it, there sat among the dignitaries of state Roger Ascham, the archery-loving, cockfighting, learned and gifted schoolmaster, who

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had come to Windsor that day to read in Greek with the young Queen Elizabeth one of the orations of Demosthenes. Without title or political position it is fair to suppose that he sat far down near the foot of the table; but Cecil encouraged him to speak to the question, and Ascham gave his opinion strongly and no doubt eloquently against the barbarity of schoolmasters. Dinner ended, Sir Richard Sackville, who had held his peace while the debate went on, led Ascham away to a window for private speech with him. Sackville confessed to Ascham that the beatings of a “lewde Schoolmaster” had brought him to hate learning before he was fourteen years old. He entreated the queen’s schoolmaster to write out what he had just spoken at the table. By this conversation Ascham was set on writing his famous work The Scholemaster. But neither the authority of Ascham nor of any other could at once abate the unsparing severity of school discipline which was popularly believed to be eminently beneficial to boys and of scriptural authority. Thomas Becon, the reformer, had complained that schoolmasters beat their pupils “like stockfishes.” Mulcaster, the successor of Ascham, had no hesitation about flogging: he speaks somewhat gayly of “my lady birchely.”[1] Brinsley, the able and zealous advocate of school reform in the reign of James I, suggests several practical ways of avoiding brutal punishments, such as the use of rewards, and the keeping of a “black bill,” or,

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as we should now say, a black list: the unlucky scholars set down in this list were to be deprived of their rare playtimes. But even the humane Brinsley did not once dream of sparing the rod for serious offenders; he thought “ferula” a necessary remedy for bad Latin, and he used what he calls “little ierkes” with a small switch of “red willow.”[1] When little jerks with little switches would not serve, he recommends more serious flogging; the young rebel to be held over a form or up against a post “by three or four of his fellows,” making sure “to hold him fast as they are enforced to do who are to shove or tame an vnbroken colt.” This was the method of a conscientious and humane master; the brutalities of the unfeeling are not pleasant to imagine. There were others than Sir Richard Sackville who cursed some “lewde schoolmaster” for a failure to get learning, and some who attributed deafness to blows received in school.[2] “It’s a general plague and complaint of the whole land,” writes Peacham, “that for one discreet and able teacher you shall find twenty ignorant and carelesse.”[3] The first master at Harvard went too far even for that age; it is not certain that he would have been dismissed for his barbarous punishment of students and the exceedingly short commons on which he fed them, but when he ferociously drubbed even his usher, beating him mercilessly with a hickory stick while two of his servants held the man fast, he lost his place, and set on

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foot a reform in college discipline. A law was made limiting the punishment of students. If a student were not yet “adultus” he might get ten stripes for each offense.[1] This was very mild; at Eton fifty-three stripes are recorded as given for a trivial fault at an earlier period, and the young John Milton had to suffer a beating from his tutor at Cambridge not very long before this.[2] At Harvard an older student was not to be beaten at all.

XXIII.

Education of girls.

Sometimes, though rarely, such a phrase as “male childeringe” appears in a contract with a teacher, but it was always understood that children were boys only, girls did not count. There were no girls in the schools sustained by towns or by endowment at the period of American settlement.[3] To read her Bible and psalm-book devoutly and to use her needle deftly were the only necessary accomplishments for a woman, and these could be got in a dame school or at home. The illiterate “her mark” is signed to papers in the probate office by many women whose fathers were men of education.[4] “Probably not one woman in a dozen could write,” says a well-informed New England antiquary.[5] In England only “the first elementarie” was taught to a girl, and Governor Winthrop was convinced that much learning was dangerous to a woman’s wits. The education of the most favored girl ceased at thirteen or fourteen,

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at which age she began to assume the responsibilities of a young woman and to blossom into a waiting candidate for wifehood.

XXIV.

Traits of schools.

An English writer recommends the middle of the day for teaching writing, because the fingers would then be warmer and nimbler, which suggests schoolrooms with no fire. In New England one finds the summer school sometimes kept in “the unfinished room” of a house which is spoken of as though a room unfinished was a normal part of a new-country house. The kitchen of a dwelling, with its great fireplace, was sometimes made a schoolroom in winter, or in its stead the “parlor”; the best room reserved for weddings and funerals; on which occasions the bare floor would be neatly strewn with sand. Even where there was a schoolhouse, as at Dedham in 1658, the schoolmaster was allowed to assemble the school in his own house “if the weather be extreme and unfit to travaill.” In that climate there early grew up a custom of exacting a half cord or a “wayne load of wood for fewell” for each pupil. This was to be delivered at the schoolhouse in November, for no man of English origin in the first two or three generations after settlement knew that wood could be drawn much more easily on sleds over the snow.

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XXV.

College ideals.

The direct influence in America of the advanced education of the seventeenth century was not great. No one with any sense of historic perspective will believe that the university men who lived or sojourned in Virginia in the early seventeenth century had any traceable relation to the group of Virginia statesmen that grew as from a congenial soil in the later eighteenth; it is equally fanciful to suppose that the existence of a considerable body of Cambridge men in early New England had anything to do with producing the literary forwardness of that region two hundred years later. But the university ideals of the time influenced directly the course of thought in the new provinces. Logic was the main study in all higher institutions, and the logic bequeathed by the schoolmen meant merely incessant practice of the art of dialectical disputation as a means of acquiring universal truth. In sermons and in conversation this verbal sword play was much affected and it rendered the wits nimble. But this highly valued “Aristotelian method” had for ages retarded the advance toward larger learning and broader views. Milton’s disappointment in the university was great, and his contempt for its studies is delightfully Miltonic if not always discriminating. In his vehement complaint he ransacks “lofts of piléd thunder” for missiles with which to assail the curriculum of his time. It is “a pure trifling at grammar and sophistry,” “an

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asinine feast of sow thistles and brambles”; the students are “mocked and deluded” “with ragged notions and babblements while they expect worthy and delightful knowledge.” The universities in his opinion were “not yet well recovered from the scholastic grossness of the barbaric ages.” There were university students of sound intellectual appetite, like Milton himself, who contrived to find fruit in fields set thick with the sow thistles of scholastic logic and the brambles of mediæval metaphysics.[1] Others, on being abruptly thrust at fifteen years of age into these studies, took “such a distaste of what seemed to them a mere rattle of words, that they were very slowly, if ever, reconciled.”[2]

XXVI.

Harvard College.

In 1636 the Massachusetts General Court voted two hundred pounds toward “a schoole or colledge,” and the next year selected Newton, the present Cambridge, as the place for it. This proposition might have proved as futile as the early proposals for a college in Virginia had it not been that John Harvard, a minister, dying in 1638, left a legacy for the proposed institution which thus had the breath of life breathed into it and became Harvard College. It was established on the most religious plan possible. The study of divinity was made the chief end of a student, prayer and religious consecration were prescribed academic duties;[3] Bible reading twice a day and the faithful reporting of

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sermons were enjoined. The test for the first degree was a student’s ability to render the Old and New Testaments out of Hebrew and Greek into Latin “and to resolve them logically.” For the second degree a summary knowledge of logic, natural and moral philosophy, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy were added. There was here a slender recognition of mathematics in advance of the English universities. The modes of study seem to have been mechanical after the manner of the time. In the earlier years of the college each student was accustomed to transcribe for himself certain treatises in manuscript on logic and other studies made by Alexander Richardson of Oxford.[1] In examining the list of subjects for graduating theses we are now and then refreshed by the intrusion of a question that has to do with human progress; the question of the circulation of the blood was discussed in 1660, and was again mooted in 1699, more than seventy years after Harvey had announced his discovery. For the most part the themes with which college graduates in that day busied themselves are grotesquely futile as, “whether privation is the cause of anything in Nature,” “whether genus exists outside of intellect,” and “whether a shadow moves.” Behold philosophy! It was proved at Harvard commencements by reasoners with youth and courage on their side that the starry heaven is made of fire; that there is a stone which produces gold; and that the quadrature of the circle is possible.

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The lawfulness and the possibility of curing wounds by sympathetic powder excited attention just before and after 1700, and the existence of a universal remedy was a question equally belated in agitating scholastic minds in America.[1] We have in these questions the everlasting mark-time of mediæval philosophy, marching ostentatiously, but never moving out of its tracks.

XXVII.

William and Mary College.

After the Restoration Virginia began to feel an alarm like that which had startled Massachusetts earlier. It is probable that the deprived churchmen who occupied Virginia parishes during the Commonwealth were now returning to England to reap the reward of their fidelity to the king. It was feared that the “want of able & faithful Ministers” would deprive the colonists of “those great Blessings and Mercies that allwaies attend upon the Service of God,” and the Assembly passed an act in 1661, and again in 1662, to found “a colledge and free schoole.”[2] But Sir William Berkeley, the governor, did not want either a college or a free school, and Berkeley, with a salary independent of the good will of the people, was more absolute in Virginia than his master Charles was in England. This pinchbeck Stuart detested ministers who were able to preach, and he abhorred printing presses. But the Virginia educational movement at the time of the Restoration was not

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wholly without result. If the proposed subscription for the college was ever taken, it probably was not collected, and the “houseing” ordered to be erected for the college is not again heard of.[1] But at least two bequests to found new free schools were made in Berkeley’s depressing reign. After the disorders and despotisms which followed the failure of Nathaniel Bacon’s bold stroke for freedom in 1676 had passed away, a college subscription was set on foot in 1688 and 1689, and sums amounting to twenty-five hundred pounds were promised by wealthy Virginians and a few English merchants. The confusion resulting from the English Revolution of 1688 probably caused delay. Two years more elapsed[2] before the Assembly took action by ordaining an institution in three departments—a grammar school, a school of philosophy, and a school of Oriental languages and divinity. A charter was secured from the sovereigns.[3] William and Mary, whose names the college took, gave freely out of the wild lands of the province, out of the royal revenues from tobacco, and gave outright the income from the fees for surveying land.[4] The Virginia Assembly added an import duty on furs. In 1700, while the building designed by Sir Christopher Wren was yet unfinished, the college at the close of its first year held a commencement. The novelty of such an exercise attracted a large concourse of people to the new town of Williamsburg. Some of the great planters came in coaches, which vehicles were yet rare enough

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in America to be noticeable. Other visitors arrived in their own sloops, sailing in some instances from the upper waters of the Chesapeake, and in other cases on the open ocean from Pennsylvania and New York.[1] Some even of the Indians gathered their blankets round them and strolled into the little capital to lend picturesqueness to this powwow of white men. The opening of an infant college was a notable break in the rather eventless monotony of a half-settled coast, remote from the great world.

The so-called college, thus hopefully launched, drifted inevitably into the whirlpools and eddies of petty provincial politics; its revenues were a tempting bait to the ring of predatory colonial magnates and ambitious sycophants that surrounded a royal governor in that day. William and Mary College was but a grammar school for years after its start, and its development was tediously slow. But most of its resources were saved from plunder and waste, and at the outbreak of the Revolution it was said to be the richest institution of learning in America—for all of which it was primarily indebted to a single man.[1]-

XXVIII.

Dr. Blair.

While Scottish example, as we have conjectured, had its influence in the founding of Harvard, the influence was more direct in Virginia, where the final success of the college was due to a Scotch.

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man. Behind the measures taken to advance the project by the Assembly and governor in Virginia, by the king and queen, by the Primate and the Bishop of London, by Locke the philosopher, and by the executors of Robert Boyle, there is the moving hand of James Blair, one of the most pertinacious men ever born in a land of obstinate pertinacity. Having seen the subscription well made up in Virginia, Blair went to England in 1691 with a commission from the Assembly to procure the best charter possible and a royal endowment. The traditions of the court were dead against him.[1] The government of Charles II had made a point of discouraging in Virginia printing presses, education, and other influences that unfit people for docile submission to tyranny. The colony was to buy English wares, to swell the customs revenues by producing the heavily taxed tobacco, and to buy negroes from the Royal African Company, in which not only great courtiers but royalty itself had held shares. When Blair argued the need of a college for the sake of the souls of the people, Seymour, the attorney general, replied contemptuously, “Damn your souls, make tobacco!” A less contentious man than Blair would have given up and gone home, a man less canny and persistent must have failed. He contrived to secure William’s attention in the midst of the exigent affairs of a critical time, and he managed to gain the support of both the sovereigns. His manœuvres were worthy of an expert courtier; he played Archbishop Tennison

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and the Bishop of London and Queen Mary herself with skill, and won his suit handsomely. He carried back a charter for a studium generale, a place of universal study. After his return he fought triumphantly with petty courtiers and successive governors, breaking Sir Edmund Andros himself, who had contrived to survive for many years the infamy of a great variety of disgraceful conduct in his various governments. Dr. Blair was a man of versatile ability; his printed sermons passed through several editions, and he held his place as bishop’s commissary at the head of the Virginia clergy for half a century. His discipline was mild, and he fought the battles of his order against encroachments, but his clergy disliked and opposed him. He resisted the oppressions of the royal governors, but the people were never attracted to him. He had no arts of conciliation, and he had no lubricating humor. He delighted to carry a measure by mere push of pike, and to his contemporaries he was a bundle of pugnacities. Every man born north of the Tweed was an object of prejudice, and Blair was accused, moreover, of having received nothing better than a Presbyterian ordination. Though no one seems to have questioned his honesty, it was complained that he “had large worldly concerns.” He lived to an advanced age, and died rich in a land where many thriftless and often dissipated parsons got on but meanly. He was one of the chief benefactors of a colony that never showed him, young or old, living or

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dead, the slightest gratitude of which there is any record. A single noble legacy made the obscure John Harvard immortal, but fifty years of resolute service and a liberal legacy to the college brought no honors to the founder of William and Mary. A good and public-spirited man, he was personally unlikable. But had Blair been less rugged, there might have been no “College Royal of William and Mary.”

XXIX.

Colonies without colleges.

At the end of the seventeenth century there were efficient beginnings of higher education only in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia. New York was too much divided by the various nationalities of its people and too deeply interested in a trade reaching from Lake Ontario to the pirate settlements of Madagascar to have advanced beyond rudimentary schools. Pennsylvania and the Carolinas were too new, Maryland and Rhode Island too much subdivided in religion, and the eastward settlements of New England were too backward in development. Massachusetts had firmly established a college destined to an illustrious career, Connecticut was about to start into the new century with her Yale College, and Virginia was flushed with hope of a time when the grammar school at Williamsburg should grow into “a certaine place of universall study,” as its charter proposed. These small beginnings were enough to mark the persistence in the Western world of the

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English tradition in favor of higher education. In communities like the expanding English-American colonies of that time, necessarily materialistic in ideals and schemes of life, the mere existence of schools whose principal studies had no value that could be balanced against tobacco and codfish, pipe staves and beaver skins—studies whose value could not be reckoned in pine-tree shillings and pieces of eight—was of high import.

Elucidations

.

Note 1, page 208.

Schools before the Reformation.

“In the same year of our Lord’s incarnation, 664,” says Bede, “a sudden pestilence . . . ravaged the country far and near. . . . This pestilence did no less harm in the island of Ireland. Many of the nobility and of the lower ranks of the English nation were there at that time, . . . either for the sake of Divine studies or of a more continent life; and some of them presently devoted themselves to a monastic life, others chose rather to apply themselves to study, going about from one master’s cell to another” Egbert, one of the Englishmen among the Culdees in Ireland, succeeded in escaping from the plague by vowing that he would say the whole psalter daily to the praise of God, and that he would every week fast one whole day and night. The account of his austerities in Bede, book iii, chap. xxvii, throws light on the ideals of life taught in the monasteries of the seventh century. In Tanner’s Notitia Monastica he says of the Culdees: “The ancient British, Irish, and Saxon Monasteries, we find, were Schools and Universities of those times; they were not only Cells of Devotion, but also Nurseries of Learned Men for the use of the Church.” To imagine anything like modern school or university instruction or learning in the monasteries of that early age would be misleading. In the Catholic monasteries and cathedral establishments organization was perhaps more perfect than among the Culdees. We get a view of higher and lower instruction as already established in a canon of a. d. 747, number 7, in Johnson’s Ecclesiastical Laws. Some curious traits of the schools in the houses of the priests may be deduced from the canons in the

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same work under a. d. 960, numbers 10, 11, 51, and a. d. 994, numbers 19 and 20. “When the Monks were rooted out by the Danish wars,” says Tanner, “an universal ignorance overspread the land, insomuch that there was scarce any one in England that could read or write Latin. But when, by the care of King Edgar and Archbishop Dunstan, Monasteries were restored, Learning found its former encouragement.” Preface to Notitia Monastica. Fitzstephen relates that there were famous schools in three principal churches of London in the twelfth century. Furnivall cites a saying of Roger Bacon that there were schools in every city, town, burgh, and castle in the thirteenth century. Compare also Wright’s Domestic Manners and Sentiments in the Middle Ages, 338 and ff. There is evidence of the survival of the teaching of children by the mass priest in the action of the corporation of Bridgenorth. When a more modern “Comyn Scole” was substituted at the beginning of the sixteenth century, a by-law was adopted which ordained that “there schall no priste kepe no scole save oonly oon child to helpe hym to sey masse.” MSS. Commission, x, part iv, 425. There is an instance as late as Mary’s reign of the restoration of an ancient endowment by town lands for the support of a priest “Habil to teache Grammar.” Ibid,, 533. In Collier’s Ecclesiastical History, part ii, book iii, 165 (Lathbury’s edition, vol. v, 29), we read: “The abbeys were very serviceable places for the education of young people; every convent had one person or more assigned for this business. Thus the children of the neighborhood were taught [Latin] grammar and music without any charge to their parents; and in the nunneries those of the other sex learned to work and read English, with some advances into Latin.” Stow, in his Survey of London, notes that the Lateran Council in 1176 recognized cathedral schools, but in the Capitularies of Theodolf they are carried back to the end of the eighth century, and were, beyond doubt, still older. Johnson’s Ecclesiastical Laws, 994, 19. Down to the end of the tenth century almost the only seminaries in Charlemagne’s dominions appear to have been in cathedrals and convents. First Report of Cathedral Commission, xxv. It is to be noted that many of the English cathedrals were monastic institutions; in eight out of seventeen in the twelfth century the chapters were composed entirely of monks. Collier’s Ecclesiastical History, book iv, cent. xii, 341 (vol. ii, 232, of Lathbury). On the origin of cathedrals and the colleges in the early Episcopia, see Report of Cathedral Commission, p. iv,

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Schotel, in his Oud Hollandsch Huisgezin der Zeventiende Eeuw, p. 75, says of education in Holland: “In the earliest time most of the parish churches had their schools. . . . The school of the cathedral church [hoofdkerk] took the name of the great school. . . . In these last were taught not only Greek and Latin, but Dutch—that is, reading, writing, and ciphering, and not alone to the children of the well-to-do, but to the poor as well. They were all comrades in the school as in the street.” Roger’s Work and Wages, 165, 166, remarks on the widely diffused knowledge of Latin in the middle ages. Until the fourteenth century English was not even suffered to play tender to Latin in the schools, but in 1363 “it was ordeined that schoolemasters should teach their scholers to construe their lessons in English & not in French, as before they had beene vsed.” Holinshed, ii, 678. Down to the Reformation Latin was taught before the reading of English, as we learn from Mulcaster, an Elizabethan schoolmaster. “Now,” he adds, “we are returned home to our English abce.” Positions, chap. v.

Note 2, page 209.

A definite number of scholars were to be sustained in each cathedral while living in commons. Whiston’s Cathedral Trusts and Harrison’s Description of Britaine, i, 235. The First Cathedral Report, p. xxiv, cites Cranmers Reformatio Legum that every cathedral should maintain a school for the mature education of youth. Chantry priests, whose support came from endowments for prayers for the dead, found their occupation gone when the government had forbidden all praying for the dead, and had indeed abolished purgatory. It was therefore ordained that such priests should “exercise themselves in teaching youth to read and write and bring them up in good manners and vertuous exercises.” Bills were brought into Parliament in Edward VI’s reign “for incouraging men to give lands for the maintenance of schools.” Tanner’s Notitia Monastica, preface, citing MS, authority.

Note 3, page 210.

By suppressing the alien priories, which were but offshoots of foreign monasteries, Henry V made a tempting precedent for Henry VIII, but Henry VI supplied the place of the schools lost with the suppressed priories in the preceding reign by founding various free schools in 1393 and 1394. See the section on Schooles and Houses of Learning in Stow’s Survey of London, and Collier’s treatment of this period in his Ecclesiastical History, Dean Colet’s foundation of St. Pauls School in 1512 was “in place of an old ruined house,” says Stow, and Christ’s Hospital, in 1553,

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was planted in the “late dissolved house of the Grey Friars,” and “a school was ordained there.” Many of the new free schools of the Reformation period were endowed out of the spoils of the monasteries. “For the most part the endowments were out of the tithes formerly belonging to the religious houses or out of chantry lands given to the king in the first of his reign, according to the intent of parliament therein, which was to convert them from superstitious uses into more godly, as in erecting great schools for the education of youth in virtue and godliness.” Strype’s Memorials (1822), vii, part ii, pp. 50, 51. Thomas Williams, Speaker of the House of Commons, in 1562 “took notice of the Want of Schools; that at least an Hundred were wanting in England which before his time had been.” In giving this passage Strype adds, “being destroyed (I suppose he meant) by the Dissolution of Monasteries and Religious Houses.” Annals of the Reformation, i, 292. The demand for Latin schools was no doubt increased by the growing ambition of the people in the new social conditions. No means were so convenient “to make Jack a gentleman” as to send him to the university to win the coveted title of “Mr.” Even cobblers sought education for their sons. Hall’s Satires, iv, II; Howell’s Letters, 405, 406. Mulcaster thought that every child should learn to read English and also to write for his “necessary dealings.” Positions, chap. 36. He refuses Latin to the common people because of the prevailing ambition to rise in England, but he adds significantly that “both clownes in the countrie and artificers in townes be allowed lattine in well gouerned states, who yet rest in their callings.” “Factors or Marchants and the like, going beyond seas find it necessary and convenient to speak Latin,” says Brinsley, Ludus Literarius, 211.

Note 4, page 213.

There was published in 1538 an A B C book, and it has been reprinted. The editor writes a preface wherein he says the Ten Commandments are not included. But they are included in rhyme—rhyme was the only amelioration of reading in that day. This is the authorized primer of 1538, though the editor says it is not. It has the A B C and the “a b abs,” the Lord’s Prayer in Latin and English, the Hail Mary in both tongues, and the Creed in both. Then there are parts of songs in Latin, “to help a priest to sing”—that is, for the child to help him to sing. This is followed, wholly in English, by an extended grace before and grace after “dyner.” Then there is a grace for “fysshe dayes” and grace after dinner, and a short grace to be said before

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dinner and another to be said before “dyner” or “souper,” a short grace after dinner and another after dinner or supper, then two graces after supper, then an Easter grace before and after dinner, then a prayer, then the Ten Commandments in rhyme, and then a series of rhyming precepts. The great number of graces before and after meat came from the habit of having children say grace. There were no breakfasts in Henry VIII’s time, and no graces for such a meal.

Note 5, page 215.

One may be permitted to doubt the unbroken continuity of the master’s Latin in many cases. The language in which the celebrated Harvey lectured to medical students on the circulation of the blood was probably better Latin than an ordinary schoolmaster’s, but it is intentionally mottled throughout with English. Take this phrase for one example of a thousand: “Exempt corde frogg scipp eele crawle dogg ambulat.” Prelectiones, 7. But Bacon says that pupils are to make paper books and to note the best sentences of the Roman tongue, and practice them in speaking and writing.

Note 6, page 215.

I have referred in the margin to Wigglesworth’s complaint of the “boldness to transgress the college law in speaking English.” Brinsley laments the remissness of his time in teaching English. Some colleges in the English universities made the constant use of Latin obligatory (Brinsley’s Ludus, 211), but in all lectures and exercises were in Latin, Harvard students were quite unable to speak Latin when Bankers met them in 1689. It may safely be said that the colloquial use of Latin never found a lodgment in America.

Note 7, page 215.

Brinsley had “laboured and striven by Ferula and all meanes of severity” to improve the Latin of his boys, but he says, “have not been able to make Schollers to vtter their mindes in any tollerable manner of ordinary things,” etc., “;without great severity.’’ He confesses “they will not be brought to give overspeaking English.” Ludus Literarius, 215. Theoretically, students admitted to Harvard could all speak Latin, but the requirements for admission were probably not strictly exacted. “When any scholar is able to read Tully or such like classical Latin author extempore, and to make and speak true Latin in verse and prose Suo (ut aiunt) Marte, and decline perfectly the paradigms of nouns and verbs in the Greek tongue, then may he be admitted into the college.” Laws, etc., of Harvard, 1642-1646. Quincy’s Harvard College, i, 515.

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Note 8, page 215.

The rage for disputation in the schools had been even greater in earlier times before logic had been mainly relegated to the universities- Fitzstephen says in the twelfth century that upon holy days assemblies gather in the churches to hear these disputaitons of scholars, in which all the technical forms of reasoning and rhetoric taught by the schoolmen are practiced for display, and boys of the different schools “wrangle together in the art of versifying, and canvase the principles of Grammar,” Stow’s Survey, 705, with his quaint translation, 710, 799, edition 1633. In the sixteenth century this had been done away with, but Stow himself had seen assemblies of boys from various schools gathered in a churchyard to dispute on an improvised platform about the principles of grammar for the fun of the thing, As above, 64. When these gatherings ceased the boys from the rival schools of St. Pauls and St. Anthonys would provoke one another in the open street with the challenge to debate “Salve tu quoque, placet tibi mecum disputare?” To which the reply “placet” being given, they fell to wrangling over tenses and constructions until often there ensued a general scrimmage of the two parties laden with satchels of books and piling themselves on one another in heaps to the obstruction of the streets.

Note 9, page 217.

The usher who was ultimately to be master of the free school at Charles City, Va., was apparently incompetent to teach writing and arithmetic. The Company gave him permission to take with him “an expert writer,” who should be able to teach “the grounds of arithmetic, whereby to instruct the children in matters of account.” But no other provision was made for such a man than to give him his passage free, leaving him to be paid by the parents. Abstract of Records, ii, 167. The form proposed for the organization of the school at Charles City, Va., was identical with that carried out in the grammar school of William and Mary College, nearly a hundred years later. There was in both a master, an usher, and a writing master. Compare Ingle’s Letter, 1705, in Historical Collections relating to the Colonial Church, Virginia, 140. See the statute regulating the mendicancy of scholars of the university in 1388. Statutes at Large, ii, 302. Students appear to have continued to beg until forbidden by the statute of 1572 in the reign of Elizabeth. Compare also Jusseraud’s English Wayfaring Life, 232, 233, and Wright’s Domestic Manners, 339. The “poor scholars” were still made prominent in early appeals for Harvard College, and one is tempted to suspect, from the prominence given to Indian education at Harvard

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and in the early Virginia projects, that the “infidel” was substituted in part for the poor scholar as a means of stimulating liberality. A kind of mixed school, in which plebeian arithmetic jostled Latin grammar, existed in England and appeared early in America. For example, Dedham Records for 1663, 1670, iv, 67, 133. Bailey’s Andover, 517. Compare p. 520 of Bailey, where there is a sort of confession that English studies are intruders in a Latin school, for a schoolmaster in 1723 is specifically bound as an additional duty “that he, wold Teach boys to Read, Rite, and Cypher.” Comp. MSS. Commission X, part iv, 138-140, where in 1695 a so-called writing school endowed by Sir John Moore is expected to fit boys for the university.

Note 10, page 219.

The old conception of education is struggling with the new. Of old higher education was the property of the few. In 1559 one of the measures suggested to Parliament was that the study of the laws, temporal or civil, be restricted to the sons of noble-men or gentlemen. Seven years later Knox sought to teach everybody their “first rudimentic” in order to render them Protestant. In 1616 the Synod of Dort tried to teach the catechism to all for purposes of religious indoctrination. In 1622 we find Brinsley struggling blindly with the principles of education, “God having ordained schooles of learning to be a principall meanes to reduce a barbarous people to ciuilities.” It was just twenty-five years later that Massachusetts proposed to confound “the ould deluder Satan” by schools especially in Latin and Greek and Hebrew, but English schools were finally almost the only outcome of the act, the practical sense of the people gradually doing away with the superannuated Latin school. Of course, the clergy were educated in Latin. Justus Forward, of Belchertown, Mass., so late as 1763, writes D. D. (dies dominica) for Sunday, and several other days appear in their Latin dress. He says “studiebam “ and “occupatus studiendo,” “occupatus de iisdem,” and “Daniel dragged ibidem,” in his English diary. MS. in my possession.

Note 11, page 221.

The first Virginia Assembly, in 1619, petitioned in favor of the erection of a proposed “university and college.” New York Historical Collections, iii, i, 342. The Company, with wise forethought, reserved liberal tracts of land for the support of churches and a local school in each plantation. Smith of Nibley MSS., New York Public Library. In Fuller’s Worthies, i, 566, 567, it is said that Edward Palmer (whom Camden, in his Britannia, 1610,

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folio 366, calls “a curious and diligent antiquarie,” and who died in 1625) purchased an island in Virginia, called “Palmer’s Island unto this day,” and that he spent several thousand pounds m a fruitless endeavor to plant an academy upon it. Neill, in his Virginia Vetusta, says that the island in question was at the mouth of the Susquehanna, and gives for authority the Hermans-Faithorne map. I had the unique copy of this map in the British Museum examined, and received this report: “There is no island marked Palmer’s Island on the map indicated at the embouchure of the Susquehanna or at any other point. There are marks of islands, but no name attached.” That the island at the mouth of the Susquehanna was called Palmer’s Island is to be deduced from the Proceedings of the Council in Maryland Archives, where an observation of its longitude is recorded in 1683. It was a wild and solitary place for a school.

Note 12, page 221.

In 1467 a testator left a cow to keep wax candles burning before the image of the Virgin in Felsham Church. In 1530 two cows were bequeathed “to the sepulchre light in Ampton Church to continew for evyr.” In such cases the increase of the kine went to make the bequest perpetual. Bury wills, Camden Society, pp. 44 and 249. Dr. Fuller, the physician of the Pilgrims, gave “the first cow calf that my brown cow shall have to the church of God at Plymouth,” and a ewe lamb was a common bequest to that church. Brigham, in Lowell Institute Lectures, 174, 175.

Note 13, page 222.

In the manuscript records of Christ Church parish, Middlesex County, Va., I find allusion to a free school already existing, for the benefit of which two cows have been bequeathed in 1691. As early as 1655 four cows were left in Isle of Wight County for maintaining and schooling orphans. In 1669 King Free School, in the same county, was established by bequest, and some other endowments can be traced, while there were those probably of which no record has been found. See two papers on this subject in the William and Mary Quarterly for 1897.

Note 14, page 222.

The boast of Sir William Berkeley, in 1671, that there were no free schools in Virginia—Hening, ii, 511 and ff., and Virginia Historical Register, iii, 12—has been repeated by superficial writers on the period. Berkeley adds, “Learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world.” The passage is but a vivacious revelation of the state of mind of a willful and avaricious dotard, in whom contempt for the popular rights and the

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wishes of the people was hardening into that brutality which made his last years so terrible for Virginia, and brought about his own ignominious downfall. In 1671, when Berkeley wrote, the Symmes free school was in existence, the Eaton school was founded before 1646 probably, the King Free School endowment was made two years before, and four years later Peasley’s liberal bequest was given for another free school. Both the Symmes and Eaton schools were in existence more than a century after their planting. An act had been passed in 1661 for the founding of a college which involved a free school. Berkeley probably knew better than any other person why the project slumbered. See section xxv of the present chapter. But the English system of free schools did not and could not obtain to any considerable extent in Virginia in 1671 or even later; physical and social conditions were against it. Compare Foote’s Virginia, i, 11. In colony times the only Virginia school that rose to the dignity of the English free schools was the one attached to William and Mary College. Compare the inhibitions of printing in Virginia in 1682, Virginia Historical Register, iii, 13, and the utter prohibition of printing presses in Effingham’s instructions of 1685. The allusions to schools in the seventeenth century that can be picked up from the remaining local records of Virginia are not many, but by comparing them with Beverley’s statement of Effingham’s course in licensing teachers about 1684, and then examining the replies of the Virginia clergy in 1724 to the Queries of the Bishop of London, we can form some notion of the voluntary education by means of “old field schools” that early grew up among the Virginians. As the bishop’s query asks only about parish schools, some of the replies give negative information; but wherever the clergyman mentions the rustic schools they seem to be fairly numerous for a new country, to be taught by men and not women, and not to be above the level of the rough country school of the period elsewhere. “In most parishes,” says Hugh Jones, “are schools in Little Houses built on purpose, where are taught English and writing.” One private school for Latin and Greek flourishes in the same parish with two endowed schools of a lower grade. In one case a plantation was given to the incumbent of the parish on condition that he should sustain “a sufficient person” to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. In Maryland, the ideal of Bray was a free school in every county, and one or two in the province for Indians. This does not account for the little schools. General View of the Colonies, prefixed to sermon of 1697, p. 7,

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Note 15, Page 223.

In Ciuile and Vnciuile Life, 1579, 1586, Roxburghe edition, p. 21, the country gentleman is made to say, “Wee gentlemen in the Country, vnlesse our sonnes proceed in the study of the common lawes, Diunitie, or Phisicke, doo hold them learned ynough if they can write and read English, and congrue Latine.” Note that he must “congrue Latine”—that is, after a fashion put it together. This probably represents the education thought fit for his son by the Virginia planter a hundred years later. Even so much Latin probably could not always be had.

Note 16, page 224.

There were some convicts who were capable of teaching, but the convicts were not usually of the kind to supply teachers, and in Virginia in the seventeenth century there were fewer of these than of indentured servants known as “free-willers” who had embarked of their own accord, and the “kids” who had been “trapanned” aboard ship by craft or force. The schoolmasters no doubt usually belonged to the class of voluntary or involuntary redemptioners, and not among the petty criminals who were sold for seven years. The will of Colonel John Carter, in 1669, specifically provides for the purchase of a bond servant who had been “brought up in the Latin school,” to teach his son Robert, afterward the famous King Carter of Virginia. See quotations from the records at Lancaster Court House in a letter from Mr. Wilson Miles Cary in The Nation of April 22, 1897. Boucher long afterward says that two thirds of the schools in Maryland were taught either by indentured servants or by convicts. Causes, 184, 189. I think the convicts much the smaller of the two classes, Boucher would have mentioned the fact had it been the other way.

Note 17, page 226.

The general responsibility of a corporate town as such for the support of its school, where there was one, was a trait of English life, carried over to the rustic municipalities or “towns” of New England, and gradually changed to our more local system. Compare, for example, what Brinsley says in 1622 in speaking of badly managed schools: “That it were better to turne the maintenance given to the schoole to bear the charges of the towne for other duties and seruices then so vnprofitably to employ it.” Consolations for Our Grammar Schooles, 43.

Note 18, page 228.

The rough life of the frontier has always been dangerous to morals and manners. The remedy proposed in Massachusetts was rather traditional than practical. It was ordained in 1642 that children when tending cattle were to employ their time at spinning on the rock or distaff and knitting tape, and boys and

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girls were forbidden to converse together. Such an order was doubtless without any result. In 1645, after the news of the great Virginia massacre had startled New England, boys were ordered to learn the use of small guns, half pikes, and bows and arrows, thus reviving old English customs and customs as old as the Roman law, no longer of any value. Compare Ridley’s View of the Law, 1634, p. 48.

Note 19, page 230.

In President Chauncy’s Commencement Sermon of 1655, p. 38, what may be called the unattainable ideal of the time is thus expressed: “In cittyes and greater towns schools should teach the Latin and Greek tongues, and Hebrew also, which ought to be had in great account with us for the Old Testament sake.”

Note 20, page 231.

In the platform of Church Discipline adopted in 1648, vi, 6, the school is regarded as “lawful, profitable, & necessary for training of such in good Literature or Learning as may afterward be called forth unto office of Pastor or Teacher in the Church.” This hesitating indorsement of the school is backed up by half a dozen texts of Scripture. In re-enacting the school law the Connecticut General Court of 1673 omitted the epithet “old deluder” before Satan, whose character was well enough known by this time, and in 1692 the diabolical preamble disappeared entirely from the laws of Massachusetts. Compare also the New Hampshire law of 1715. In 1673 Connecticut made it obligatory on county towns to have a grammar school, “for the use of the county,” under penalty (after 1677) of ten pounds. In 1678 Connecticut took the lead of Massachusetts by making it obligatory on every town of thirty families to have an English school. In 1684 the surplus money of the treasury was to go to the grammar schools. All this legislation testifies to the increasing difficulty of maintaining the so-called Latin school. Massachusetts in 1671 increased the fine for neglecting schools to ten pounds, and ordered it paid to the nearest town having a grammar school. To cite no other evidence of the struggle to keep alive grammar schools, the New Hampshire law of 1721, in something like desperation, makes the failure for a single month on the part of a town of one hundred families to provide a Latin school punishable by a fine of twenty pounds, to be collected from the personal estate of the selectmen. This was no doubt in depreciated currency. See Weeden’s Economic History of New England on the decline, and in some cases the extinction, of New England Schools,

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Note 21, page 232.

From the Third Report for the Commissioners on Education in Scotland for 1867-’68 we learn that schools for Latin, to which were subsequently added “Lecture” schools for English, existed in the chief towns from a very early period. Several of these schools are known to date from the twelfth century. All the chief towns had schools before the beginning of the sixteenth century. “The statute of James IV (1496), which ordains that barons and freeholders who were of substance should put their eldest sons and heirs to the ‘scholes fra they be six or nine year of age, and to remain at the Grammar Schools quill they be competentlie founded and have perfite Latine,’ is conclusive on this point.” These schools were closely connected with the cathedrals, monasteries, and religious establishments; the teachers were ecclesiastics “or in some way connected with the cathedrals and monasteries,” and they were sometimes sustained by altarages. “The scholars . . . were no doubt originally those destined for the church. Gradually, however, sons of gentry and of barons . . . were sent . . . to these schools, and from the beginning of the second or more flourishing period of the history all the higher middle classes took advantage of them.” It is interesting to find that not only the grammar but the elementary schools existed in Scotland in 1494. In that year the chancellor of the diocese of Glasgow orders that no one without his license should teach “scholares in grammatica aut juvenes in puerilibus.” Light is thrown on the condition of Scottish schools just before the Reformation by Andrew Melville’s account in McCrie’s Life of Knox, 475, 476. The repeated legislation in 1616, 1633, 1646, and finally in 1696, shows how slowly the plan was put in force. Report of Commissioners, p. 8. It is worth remarking as illustrating the force of historic continuity, even in time of revolution, that Knox’s reader or minister teaching the rudiments in an “upaland” town is only a Protestant reproduction of the older priest in small parishes combining teaching with “praying for t