The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (19 page)

England does not enjoy a free press. Henry VIII introduces censorship in the 1530s. In 1557 Queen Mary brings in the system whereby every publication in England must be registered with the Stationers’ Company in London. This is confirmed by Elizabeth in 1559. At the same time it is decreed that all new books must be vetted by six members of the privy council. We have already seen how severe the recriminations could be, in the case of John Stubbs and his publisher, both of whom have their right hands cut off for publishing a book contrary to the queen’s dignity. Censorship severely delays publication too. Philip Stubbes remarks that sometimes authors have to wait months or even years before getting permission for a written work to be registered and published.
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Plays are similarly checked before they can be performed, by the queen’s Master of the Revels.

In 1586 a Star Chamber decree forbids the operation of printing presses outside London, except one each for the universities of Cambridge and Oxford. Despite these obstacles, the number of publications continues to grow rapidly. The number of books produced annually over Elizabeth’s reign increases from 113 titles in 1558 (of which ninety-four are in English) to 456 in 1603 (of which 406 are in English).
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Education

So how do you set about getting a good education for your children in Elizabethan England? The first way is to employ a personal tutor to teach them in the home. In this way the renowned daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke learn their many languages. The same can be said for the unfortunate Lady Jane Grey, who is proficient in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French and Italian before her studies are cut short. However, wealth and social privilege do not automatically create scholars out of noble children. Mary, queen of Scots, understands Latin but cannot speak it, and she has no knowledge of English except for the few words she picks up in captivity after 1567 (her first language being French).
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As for young men, there are many whose educational achievements fall short of their fathers’ hopes. Part of the problem lies in tutors being so low in status compared to their noble charges that they rarely dare to rebuke them. In a great household, for example, the sons will sit at the high table on the dais while the tutor sits with the servants. If a noble youth doesn’t want to sit and study, his tutor is going to have a hard time teaching him.

Tutors are only expected to perform a portion of a young person’s education. Ladies will be expected to learn to dance, do needlework and play an instrument, normally the lute or the virginals, as well as learn Latin and French or Italian. These things they are taught by other ladies and specialist music masters. Young men are expected to master a whole range of skills. Lord Herbert of Cherbury states that gentlemen should learn to dance, fence, ride warhorses and swim. Some people are in two minds about the swimming: they argue that more people have drowned trying to learn how to swim than have been saved through practising the art. And Puritans are firmly against dancing, as you would expect. Philip Stubbes writes in a characteristically forthright passage:

If you would have your son soft, womanish, unclean, smooth-mouthed, affected to bawdry, scurrility, filthy rhymes and unseemly talking; briefly if you would have him as it were transnatured into a woman or worse, and inclined to all kinds of whoredom and abomination, set him to dancing school and to learn music.

Not every schoolmaster agrees. In fact Roger Ascham, Queen Elizabeth’s old tutor, is in favour of teaching young men both swimming and dancing:

To ride comely, to run fair at the tilt or ring, to play at all weapons, to shoot fair in bow or surely in gun, to vault lustily, to run, to leap, to wrestle, to swim, to dance comely, to sing and play instruments cunningly, to hawk, to hunt, to play at tennis and all pastimes containing either some fit exercise for war or some pleasant pastime for peace; these not only be comely and decent but also very necessary for a courtly gentleman to use.
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Certainly a tutor is expensive but his services are undoubtedly worth the investment. In the case of girls it is definitely preferable to having your daughters educated at court. Mary Fitton is the most famous maid of honour who receives an education in prenuptial love, courtesy of one of Elizabeth’s lustful courtiers.

The other form of education is schooling. The process begins at a petty school, under the guidance of a local schoolmaster, who will teach your sons to read and write using a horn book – a page inscribed with the alphabet preserved under a sheet of transparent horn and encased in a wooden frame. Schoolmasters have to obtain licences from the local bishop to practise in villages and towns. Some run small schools in their homes; others have taken over the teaching roles previously performed by chantry priests. Some clergymen and their wives see teaching as an act of charity, and give free lessons to boys. A primary education is thus not hard to obtain, if you are keen for your son to be taught. Schools that take girls are much rarer; clergymen might allow a girl to sit in on classes, but most girls who learn to read are taught in the home.

At the age of seven or eight, most farmers’ sons will either start work on their father’s farm or, if their father is poor, be apprenticed to another householder, to prepare for a career in service. Those who are lucky enough to go to school full-time will be sent to one of the many grammar schools that are to be found in towns all over the country. Many of England’s most famous schools are established in this period, including Shrewsbury (1552), Repton (1557), Westminster (1560), Merchant Taylors’ (1561), Rugby (1567), Harrow (1572) and Uppingham (1584). The reign as a whole sees about one hundred
schools start up. These add to the medieval foundations of Winchester School (1394), Eton College (1440), St Paul’s School (1509) and the many old church schools, such as those associated with the cathedrals of Canterbury, York, Ely and Hereford. William Harrison is able to declare proudly that every town in England has a grammar school.

Pupils can expect a studying day of at least ten hours, starting at 6 or 7 a.m. At Eton boys are woken at 5 a.m.; lessons begin at 6 a.m. and go on to 8 p.m. Teaching is generally in Latin and is a matter of learning by rote, the main textbook being William Lily’s
Short Introduction of Grammar
(1540). A private school run by Claudius Hollyband in St Paul’s Churchyard teaches Latin until 11 a.m., then breaks for dinner, and teaches French in the afternoon.
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Roger Ascham will tell you that a classical education is the best for the mind; expect to read works by Terence, Virgil, Horace, Cato, Livy, Julius Caesar, Plutarch, Aristotle, Cicero (normally referred to as ‘Tully’), Quintilian, Ovid and Seneca. For moral behaviour he advises young gentlemen to read Castiglione’s
Book of the Courtier
. At Stratford grammar school in the 1560s the master, John Brownsword, uses the works of the great Christian humanist Erasmus as well as Ovid, Terence, Tully, Horace, Sallust and Virgil. He also advocates the teaching of Greek. This shows what a high standard of education is available at Stratford: Greek is taught at only a handful of schools in England. When Ben Jonson later writes that Shakespeare has ‘small Latin and less Greek’, he might be trying to belittle his learning, but think how remarkable it is that a boy educated at a provincial grammar school can have even a smattering of Greek.
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Educating boys who would rather be out hunting, swimming or riding tends to be a confrontational process. Some masters pride themselves on their strictness and attribute their educational achievements to their wielding of the rod. William Horman, sometime headmaster of Eton, has a number of lines in his
Vulgaria
that suggest boys can expect tough tuition, perhaps reflecting his own philosophy of education: ‘Some children be well-ruled for love, some for fear, some not without beating or correction’; ‘he made a sore complaint and showed openly his naked body all to be beaten’; or ‘some be so shrewd to their guiders that they needs be beaten’. Needless to say, most people tend not to look back on school as the happiest days of their lives.

When it comes to higher education, Elizabethans are proud of their two fine old establishments – Oxford and Cambridge. But to these William Harrison adds a third ‘university’, London, treating the Inns of
Court as university colleges. He also invents half a dozen defunct universities from past centuries – such as Northampton, a university from 1261 to 1265 – to make up the numbers. You can understand the sense of inadequacy: Spain has nine universities by 1500, France has thirteen and Italy twenty; even Scotland has three (St Andrew’s, Aberdeen and Glasgow) and adds a fourth, Edinburgh, in 1583. England’s total of two looks poor by comparison. Unfortunately there is not enough demand to warrant a third proper university in England. Oxford and Cambridge between them have only about 3,000 students – although the queen establishes Jesus College, Oxford, for Welsh students in 1571 and founds a third university, Trinity College Dublin, in 1592. But what England lacks in numbers it makes up for in quality, with Oxford and Cambridge between them having ten Regius professorships (five at each university) in Greek, Hebrew, divinity, civil law and medicine.

If you are on a scholarly path in Elizabethan times, you will go up to Oxford or Cambridge at about the age of fourteen. The syllabus is still based on the medieval
Trivium
(logic, rhetoric and philosophy). After acquiring sufficient skill in these subjects, young men advance to the liberal sciences, or
Quadrivium:
arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Elizabethans call these subjects the ‘trivials’ and ‘quadrivials’ (hence our use of the word ‘trivial’ for something of minor importance). Only after this programme of study, which normally takes four years, will you receive your Bachelor of Arts degree. After three or four more years of study in one of the liberal arts, you may become a Master of Arts. Most people stop at that point. If you decide to read for a third degree, you can choose between a doctorate in Civil Law or medicine, or the degree of Bachelor of Divinity. The last is the hardest option: you must study for a minimum of seven years after receiving your Master of Arts degree. The doctorate in Divinity then takes another three years. The whole process of gaining a doctorate thus can can take up to eighteen years, so think carefully before embarking upon this path. Given the high mortality in towns, there is a 40 per cent chance you will die before you graduate.

Knowledge of the Nation’s Geography

The idea that English people do not travel much before the Industrial Revolution is one of the biggest myths of English history. It seems to
have developed from the observation that people normally marry someone from the same parish or an adjacent one. Yes, people do tend to find their spouses locally but that is because they know them and their families well, and can take advantage of having kin nearby. It is not because they do not travel further afield.

People have good reasons to travel. The first and most obvious is to go to market. You might not have anything to sell but if you live in the countryside you most certainly will need to buy things, whether salt, sugar or iron nails. Almost everyone lives within six miles of a market town, and most people live within four, so the regular shopping can be done with just an hour or two walking each way. At market you will hear news from a wider hinterland – not just from people who live six miles in the other direction but also from traders who have come from much further away.

There are many other reasons why people travel. Constables have to transport suspected criminals to their place of trial. Those who are entitled to vote (i.e. those with 40s of annual income from freehold land) need to travel to the county town to take part in elections – and those elected have to make their way to Westminster to take their seat in parliament. The government sends messengers with instructions for the sheriffs and Lords Lieutenant throughout the country. Clergymen making visitations travel between parishes, and the bishop’s officials have to travel the length and breadth of the diocese – in the case of Exeter, this includes all of Cornwall, that is a distance of over a hundred miles by road, and some more by sail to the Scilly Isles. Executors of an estate of £5 or more have to travel to the archdeaconry court to prove the will; and a deceased man leaving £5 of goods in two diocses automatically entails upon his executors a journey to the relevant higher court in York or London. If you are indicted of a moral crime you will be expected to travel to court with those prepared to swear to your innocence (discussed in
chapter 11
). Others have to travel for their work. Fishermen and seamen sail thousands of miles every year. Soldiers engaged to fight in Scotland in 1560, in France in 1562–3 or in the Netherlands in 1572 all have to travel long distances. A rich man who falls ill will summon ‘his’ physician to him wherever he is in the country, trusting that man’s advice above all others. William Shakespeare’s son-in-law, who is a physician in Stratford, regularly treats patients up to fifteen miles away and occasionally much further afield, such as Ombersley (thirty miles) and
Ludlow (fifty miles).
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Stage actors, minstrels and morris dancers travel the same routes each year and play an important role in the lives of the people they entertain, bringing news and stories from the places they have visited.
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While all these men are travelling the highways and parishes of England, they may also meet some early tourists: the gentlemen and their wives who reside in or near London and who take a coach down to a spa town for their health or to see the ancient ruins of some part of the country.
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If travelling in Kent, you will no doubt come across the international tourists on the main road to Dover. Once in a while you may even run into the greatest ‘tourist’ of the age: the queen, on one of her progresses around the country, travelling with hundreds of servants, accompanied by dozens of courtiers and their households.