Part 1 (2/2)
So in Romances and Ballads of later date, we find
The child was taught great nurterye; a Master had him vnder his care, & taught him _curtesie_.
_Tryamore_, in Bp. Percy's Folio MS. vol. ii. ed. 1867.
It was the worthy Lord of learen, he was a lord of hie degree; he had noe more children but one sonne, he sett him to schoole to learne _curtesie_.
_Lord of Learne_, Bp. Percy's Folio MS. vol. i. p. 182, ed. 1867.
Chaucer's Squire, as we know, at twenty years of age
hadde ben somtyme in chivachie, In Flaundres, in Artoys, and in Picardie, And born him wel, as in so litel s.p.a.ce, In hope to stonden in his lady grace ...
Syngynge he was, or flowtynge, al the day ...
Wel cowde he sitte on hors, and wel cowde ryde.
He cowde songes wel make and endite, Justne and eek daunce, and wel purtray and write ...
Curteys he was, lowly, and servysable, And carf beforn his fadur at the table.[10]
Which of these accomplishments would Cambridge or Oxford teach? Music alone.[[10a]] That, as Harrison says, was one of the Quadrivials, 'arithmetike, musike, geometrie, and astronomie.' The Trivium was grammar, rhetoric, and logic.
[Headnote: HOUSES OF n.o.bLES AND CHANCELLORS WERE SCHOOLS.]
1. The chief places of education for the sons of our n.o.bility and gentry were the houses of other n.o.bles, and specially those of the Chancellors of our Kings, men not only able to read and write, talk Latin and French themselves, but in whose hands the Court patronage lay. As early as Henry the Second's time (A.D. 1154-62), if not before[11], this system prevailed. A friend notes that Fitz-Stephen says of Becket:
”The n.o.bles of the realm of England and of neighbouring kingdoms used to send their sons to serve the Chancellor, whom he trained with honourable bringing-up and learning; and when they had received the knight's belt, sent them back with honour to their fathers and kindred: some he used to keep. The king himself, his master, entrusted to him his son, the heir of the realm, to be brought up; whom he had with him, with many sons of n.o.bles of the same age, and their proper retinue and masters and proper servants in the honour due.” --_Vita S. Thomae_, pp. 189, 190, ed. Giles.
Roger de Hoveden, a Yorks.h.i.+reman, who was a clerk or secretary to Henry the Second, says of Richard the Lionheart's unpopular chancellor, Longchamps the Bishop of Ely:
”All the sons of the n.o.bles acted as his servants, with downcast looks, nor dared they to look upward towards the heavens unless it so happened that they were addressing him; and if they attended to anything else they were p.r.i.c.ked with a goad, which their lord held in his hand, fully mindful of his grandfather of pious memory, who, being of servile condition in the district of Beauvais, had, for his occupation, to guide the plough and whip up the oxen; and who at length, to gain his liberty, fled to the Norman territory.”
(Riley's _Hoveden_, ii. 232, quoted in _The Cornhill Magazine_, vol. xv. p. 165.)[12]
All Chancellors were not brutes of this kind, but we must remember that young people were subjected to rough treatment in early days. Even so late as Henry VI.'s time, Agnes Paston sends to London on the 28th of January, 1457, to pray the master of her son of 15, that if the boy ”hath not done well, nor will not amend,” his master Greenfield ”will truly belash him till he will amend.” And of the same lady's treatment of her marriageable daughter, Elizabeth, Clere writes on the 29th of June, 1454,
”She (the daughter) was never in so great sorrow as she is now-a-days, for she may not speak with no man, whosoever come, ne not may see nor speak with my man, nor with servants of her mother's, but that she beareth her on hand otherwise than she meaneth; and she hath since Easter the most part been beaten once in the week or twice, and sometimes twice on a day, and her head broken in two or three places.” (v. i. p. 50, col. 1, ed. 1840.)
The treatment of Lady Jane Grey by her parents was also very severe, as she told Ascham, though she took it meekly, as her sweet nature was:
”One of the greatest benefites that G.o.d ever gave me, is, that he sent me so sharpe and severe Parentes, and so jentle a scholemaster. For when I am in presence either of father or mother, whether I speake, kepe silence, sit, stand, or go, eate, drinke, be merie or sad, be sewyng, plaiyng, dauncing, or doing anie thing els, I must do it, as it were, in soch weight, mesure, and number, even so perfitelie as G.o.d made the world, or els I am so sharplie taunted, so cruellie threatened; yea presentlie some tymes, with pinches, nippes, and bobbes, and other waies which I will not name for the honor I beare them, so without measure misordered, that I thinke my self in h.e.l.l till tyme c.u.m that I must go to _M. Elmer_, who teacheth me so jentlie, so pleasantlie, with soch faire allurementes to learning, that I thinke all the tyme nothing whiles I am with him. And when I am called from him, I fall on weeping.” --_The Scholemaster_, ed. Mayor.
The inordinate beating[13] of boys by schoolmasters--whom he calls in different places 'sharp, fond, & lewd'[14]--Ascham denounces strongly in the first book of his _Scholemaster_, and he contrasts their folly in beating into their scholars the hatred of learning with the practice of the wise riders who by gentle allurements breed them up in the love of riding. Indeed, the origin of his book was Sir Wm. Cecil's saying to him ”I have strange news brought me this morning, that divers scholars of Eton be run away from the school for fear of beating.”
Sir Peter Carew, says Mr Froude, being rather a troublesome boy, was chained in the Haccombe dog-kennel till he ran away from it.
[Headnote: BP. GROSSETETE TAUGHT n.o.bLES' SONS.]
But to return to the training of young men in n.o.bles' houses. I take the following from Fiddes's Appendix to his Life of Wolsey:
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