Figure 1.--

We have some information on early individual grammar schools which still operate in England today.

Bristol Grammar School

The Bristol Grammar School is the only selective, co-educational independent school in the Bristol area The school has extensive facilities providing a wide choice of curriculum, sport and activities with an exceptional pastoral care system for primary school and secondary school pupils and sixth form students. The school was founded in 1532, one of several grammar schools founded in the 16th century that are still operating in Britain today. The school describes itself as one of the United Kingdom's great city schools aimed at children of above-average ability.

Cowbridge Grammar School

The Cowbridge Grammar School is one of the best known grammar schools in Wales and a good example of a country grammar school. We have include the school on our English list as we do not have a section on Welsh education yet. As far as we can tll, there is little difference between Wales and Ehgland in trms of educaion, although we would be interested in hearing from our Wlh reders on this issue. Cowbridge Grammar has a considrable history. We know that it was functioning as early as 1608. In 1860 it was functioning as both a day and boarding school. One of its more famous students was the actor Anthony Hopkins, although he was not a very successful scholar while at the school. A master published a memoir based on his experiences in a boarding house at Cowbridge at the same time Anthony was at the school.

Farnham Grammar School

The Farnham Grammar school was founded in 1585. There is some evidence that a chantry school operasted earlier and dated from the 14th century. Unfortunately we have no details about the operations of these early schools.

King's New School at Stratford

A good example of the early grammar schools is the King's New School of Stratford upon Avon (where Shakespeare was educated). Schoolmasters there made 20 Pounds a year and received a dwelling--slightly more than their counterparts at Eton. They generally had B.A.'s or M.A.'s from Oxford.

Younger children

There was no standard age for entering these schools. Boys (no girls) could enter at a wide range of ages. Some boys were quite young. A child entering at the age of 5 probably passed his first two or three years at a petty school attached to the Grammar School where he mastered the alphabet and learned the rudiments of reading and writing. Grammar school met daily except Sundays from 7:00 to 11:00 and from 1:00 to 5:00.

Lower grammar school

Boys in the first 3 years begam memorizing Lilie's Grammar. This grammar along with the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer were books every educated Englishman knew. Humanist education was not devoid of religion, but it was not totallybdominated by it which was the case in earlier schools. By the end of the third year, student had mastered syntaxis, figura, prosodia--i.e., could parse (=diagram) Latin sentences, recognized grammatical parts, knew how to vary sentences artfully by changing the diction or the order of words, and was able to scan Latin verse in various meters.

Curriculum: New Testament, Proverbs, Eclogues (1503) of Baptista Spagnuoli (Mantuan), Six Books of Sacred Dialogues for the Improvement of the Language and Morals of Children, Colloquies of Vives and Erasmus. All of these books were read in LATIN, not English.

Upper Grammar School

Boys in the 4th form studied rhetoric. Student learned to identify the numerous rhetorical figures (figures of words; sentences; figures of thought) and to distinguish figures from tropes. If Greek was offered, it was started in the fourth form. Composition of elegant letters began. Curriculum: Comedies of Terence; serious inquiry into Ovid's Metamorphosis.

Method: Each scholar had to memorize half a dozen verses, then construe the passage verbatim, parse it grammatically, list all the tropes and figures, give the derivations of words, show knowledge of Latin vocabulary by finding synonyms, and scan each verse for meter. Next, student translated the Latin passage into elegant English prose, closed the Latin book , and translated the English translation back into Latin. (This is the famous "double translation" advocated by Roger Ascham.) Finally, student translated Latin passage again, this time into English verse.

5th form

Comparative Latin and Greek grammar. Oratory, esp. Demosthenes, Isocrates, and Cicero. The schoolmasters felt that after working with the students on the Eclogues and Georgics of Vergil, the students could be left to themselves for the Aeneid. Curriculum: commonly taught from an anthology containing brief and pointedly moral histories out of Plutarch, Livy, and Pliny, fables, adages, emblems, proverbs, etc. This book was subdivided into sections: 1) collection of witty sayings, 2) record of rhetorical ornaments, and 3) list of descriptions of things "natural and artifical." Students also used "Flowers of rhetoric," collections of particularly apt poetry or lines on certain topics, as well as dictionaries, partly encyclopedic (containing a summary of allegory, myth, and facts about a given topic).

6th form

Homer ("father of poetry"), Pindar, Euripides, Sophocles, and Aristophanes in Greek. Students perfected their Latin with Horace, Lucan, Martial, Persius, and Seneca. For fun, they read Plautus. Imitation of Pliny's Panegyrics and speeches of Cicero and Quintilian. Finally, they practiced their poetic appreciation by composing epitaphs and eclogues in English, Latin, and Greek.

Sources

This summary is based on Rev. Charles Hoole, New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching Schools (1660), which discusses the pedagogic methods "commonly practiced in England and foreign countries.")

Merchant Taylors' School

The Merchant Taylors’ school, founded in 1561, was a no less conspicuous example of civic liberality and generosity of spirit than was St. Paul’s its statutes, indeed, being little more than a transcript of those given by Colet to the earlier foundation, and its scholars, in like manner, being admissible from all nations and countries. Within 5 years of the time when the school was first opened it had already acquired additional importance by the fact that Sir Thomas White, a member of the company’s court, having recently founded the college of St. John the Baptist at Oxford, proceeded, on drawing up certain additional statutes for the society, to enact that 43 scholarships on the foundation should be restricted to scholars from Merchant Taylors’, such scholars to be assigned and named by continual succession, while, at the same time, he retained the nominations in his own hands. This measure—suggested, obviously, by the example of the founders of Winchester and Eton was at once productive of a considerable increase in the numbers.

In certain additional statutes for his college, the founder had also directed that, in elections to scholarships, poverty should weigh in favour of a candidate, and Tobie Matthew, the president of St. John’s, had, consequently, sought to evade the obligation to elect 43 scholars entirely from a school in which a lower class element was, at first, undoubtedly large. He grounded his defence on the plea that the college itself was depressed by straitened resources. Fortunately, however, sundry bequests for the specified purpose of aiding poor students afterwards fell in, and served, to some extent, to alleviate the pressure while the institution of examinations, to be held three times in the course of the year, did much to raise the school in public estimation; and the company itself, assembled in court, was able to declare that Merchant Taylors’ was "a schoole for liberty most free, being open expressly for poore men’s children, as well of all nations as for the merchaunt tailors themselves." [Staunton, Great Schools of England (ed. 1869), p. 177.]

In 1607, a banquet, honoured by the presence of the king, when prince Charles was admitted a freeman of the company and Ben Jonson composed an interlude for the occasion, seems to have ushered in a period of growing prosperity, which lasted unbroken until the destruction of the school buildings in the great fire of 1666. It was not all parents, however, who could contemplate with equanimity the prospect of their offspring being educated along with those of the poor.

Within a few years after the above banquet, Thomas Farnaby, a former postmaster of Merton college, well acquainted with the educational system of the Jesuits, opened a school in Goldsmiths’ alley, it was soon sufficiently obvious that he had ministered to a genuine want. He had boarders as well as day scholars; his class-rooms formed an imposing structure and his whole premises were palatial; his ushers were well drilled in their special work. His numbers, consequently, soon rose to 300, of whom the great majority were the sons of titled families. [See Autobiography of Sir John Bramston, the younger (himself one of Farnaby’s pupils), Camden Soc. Pub. (1845), p. 101.] He was himself an excellent classical scholar with a European reputation. At the royal request, he compiled a new Latin grammar avowedly designed to supersede the labours of Lily, and also brought out, in 1612, an annotated text of Juvenal and Persius which went through numerous editions, and was followed by other classical authors. It was about the same time, that John Brinsley, at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, propounded, in his Ludus Literarius, a new mode of translation, and invested the teaching of grammar with unprecedented importance by his elaboration of method. [Foster Watson, English Grammar Schools (pp. 262-267), has supplied us with a detailed comparison of Brinsley’s method with that of Roger Ascham.] His austere, though not harsh, discipline inspired parents with more than usual confidence; but, unfortunately, his puritan sympathies brought his flourishing school under the episcopal ban, and he was had to retire to London.

St. Paul's

St. Paul’s school continued to prosper until it became the pride and admiration of London. Its catholicity--its doors being open "to the children of all nations and countries indifferently"--the discernment manifest in every detail alike of its curriculum and of its discipline, together with the sound sense and scientific insight which had guided the construction and arrangement of its new buildings, had won for the school an almost unrivalled reputation, which was further enhanced when Richard Mulcaster was appointed to the office of highmaster. His successor, Alexander Gill the elder, numbered John Milton among his pupils, and deserves mention here as one who, in his Logonomia Anglica, showed that he was well read in the poets of his day. Under the same auspices, and with the same governors, had been founded (1541) the Mercers’ school, which rose on the site of the ancient hospital of St. Thomas of Accon, one of the once famous order of the Knights Hospitallers. The house of that order had been closed in 1538; but, three years later, it was opened as a free grammar school, and already reckoned Colet, Sir Thomas Gresham and Davenant (afterwards bishop of Salisbury) among its alumni; while, to quote the language of Carlisle, it subsequently "vied, both in number and eminence with the greatest schools in London and in the disputations of scholars on festival days."

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Created: October 2, 1999
Last updated: 4:58 AM 5/18/2005