Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child: more on 16 and 17th century schooling

'My master peppered my arse with well good speed

it was worse than a fennel seed (hot)

he would not leave till it did bleed

much sorrow have he for this deed

what availeth it me though I say nay?

The birched schoolboy,c.1500  EETS original series vol. 32 ed. F.J. Furnival, 

Opinions differed on whether children were best sent to schools or kept at home with tutors.  While at school children might benefit from the society and competition of other children, they were also more exposed to bad examples.  Vives believed that boys were better off at school, but only when they were old enough to have formed good habits when, it was assumed, they would be safe from being corrupted.  Daughters, on the other hand, being 'frail things, and of weak discretion ' should rarely be allowed out of the house.  (Foster Watson,  Vives and the Renascence education of women, 1912)  Rabelais believed that children were best educated in a one-to-one relationship with a tutor, and he had considerable influence on French education.  After the restoration of the English monarchy French ideas were brought to England with the returning exiles.

In practise many parents seen to have combined the two systems, as Queen Elizabeth I's astrologer Dr. John Dee did.  In 1587 he 'covenanted with John Basset to teach the children the Latyn tong, and I do give him seven duckats by the quarter.'  His youngest son was then five.  In 1590 the children were at Mr. Lee's school in Mortlake where 'I gave him his house-rent and forty shillings yerely for my three sons and my daughter.'  (For comparison Shylock, in Merchant of Venice lends Antonio three thousand ducats for Bassanio to woo Portia so schooling must have been quite cheap)
  (The private diary of Dr. John Dee ed. J.O. Halliwell.  Camden Soc. ist series no. 19, 1842)
In 1596, however, John Dee engaged a governess for his younger daughters:  'Mary Goodwyn came to my servyce to govern and teach Medina and Margaret.'

Dame school. From Tuer, History of the Hornbook, 1896

If taught at home little children generally learned their first letters at the knee of some neighbour who taught a small group of children to read for a small sum; the traditional 'dame school', which continued to be common right into the 19th century.  William Stukeley, for example, says that:'  About 1690 I lernt the first Rudiments of Letters of Mrs. Collingwood, an old decay'd Gentlewoman at Holbeach who taught all the Children in the Parish.'
     (.Memorials of the Holles Family, 1493-1656, Camden Soc. 3rd series vol. 55, 1937)

Children were generally taught their letters with the hard-wearing hornbook.  These seem to have first appeared in the late 14th century (see Andrew Tuer, The history of the hornbook, 1897)

'Qan a chyld to scole shall set be

A bok hym is brout

Naylyd on a brede of tre,

That men callyt an abece'

   (Tuer, op.cit)

Miss Campion with her hornbook,. Tuer, History of the Hornbook

They were in use until the early 19th century.  Usually they were a rectangular piece of wood with a handle at the bottom on which was pasted a printed sheet of paper.  At the top this had the alphabet, then the numbers one to ten, followed by the Lord's Prayer, in English.  The paper was protected from wet and sticky little fingers by a thin transparent sheet of horn, then often used instead of expensive glass, and fastened down with strips of brass.  The backs were sometimes covered with leather, stamped with the figure of St. George, or carved.  Leather hornbooks are also known, while rich people's children sometimes had expensive and beautiful hornbooks of ivory with the letters painted on, or holders made of silver filigree.
There is a description of children learning to read with a hornbook in The Reading Lesson: a dialogue for children learning to read:
  'Tsake the table of the crosse-row in thy left hand, and festraw wherewith thou shalt touche the letters one by one.  Stand upright.  Hold thy cap under thy arme, attentively how I move my mouth.'
  ( M.St. Clare Byrne, The Elizabethan Home, discovered in two dialogues by Claudius Hollyband and Peter Erondell.  rev. ed. 1930 Hollyband and Erondell were French Huguenot refugees, arriving in England around 1564.)

Hornbooks (Wikipedia)

So after learning their basic letters children might be sent to school.  By the time of the English Civil War, 1642, and from then on into the 18th century, there were many small schools for the education of local children, run by groups of trustees. William Stukely went to one after his dame school, and this was probably common:
  'In 1692 I was put to the Free-School at the Church there, which was founded by the family of the Farmers...my Father being one of the trustees of that Charity.'
   (Stukely, op.cit)

These small schools were normally fee-paying with some free places provided for the poor, subsidised by charity and providing an elementary level of education.  They flourished until most of them were gradually incorporated into a state system in the 19th century.

The alternative was one of the small schools run by local clergymen to supplement their incomes, much as priest had done before the Reformation.  These inevitably varied in quality and probably did not provide as good a basic grounding as a proper school.  Sir John Bramstone remembers the Vicar of Blackmore, Andrew Walmsley, sending the pupils into the fields with their tasks  'to see that his catle trespassed noe bodie.' (Autobiography of Sir John Bramstone, K.B. Camden Soc. 1st series vol. 32)

The vicar was not all that a vicar should be as a moral guardian either: 'he suffered his boyes to rob ponds, and kill...the pidgons of his neighbours...He at first seemed angrie, but the pidgeons were baked and we eate them.'  Sir John contrasted this with the tuition he and his brother later received at Thomas Farnaby's school:' Oh Heuens! Where has thou binn bread?'  asked Farnaby on seeing their first Latin exercise.

Sir John Bramstone also described the Vicar as 'of a temper very unfitt for a schoolmaster, very passionate, and being ouer angrie with any one, he was like a furie to wife, children, seruants, scholars, all the house.'  Sir John's younger brother, having the ill luck to encounter the Vicar in one of his passions, 'he gave 50 blows with the great rod...he sayd to me, 'Your brother hath binn a very naughtie boy, and I was forct to correct him a little'  (Bramstone, op.cit)

The schoolmaster and his pupils, note the birch.  Informatio Puerorum, c.1500
(Percy Muir, Early Children's books and their illustration, 1975)

Another survivor of the clergy-schools was the Rev. Richard Baxter, Puritan divine:
'In the village where I was born there was four readers successively in six years tyme, ignorant men, and two of them immoral in their lives, who were all my schoolmasters...they taught school and tippled on weekdays, and whipped the boys when they were drunk.'
    (Autobiography of Richard Baxter...abridged from the Folio (1696)  ed. J.M. Lloyd, 1925.)

Educational theorists had only limited success in restricting the use of beating in schools.  Even the colloquies of Erasmus describes masters as 'ready and generous as possible with floggings'
  (Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Craig R. Thompson, 1965)
Some respected authorities such as Vives strongly recommended its use:  'Never have the rod off the boys' back; especially the daughters should be handled without any cherishing'
    (Vives, Instruction of Christian Women, op.cit)

The famous biographer John Aubrey(1626-1697), who was very interested in children's upbringing, disapproved of this, but perhaps it is fortunate that he never had the opportunity to put his own disciplinary methods into practise on children, for he recommended the use of thumb-screws rather than boxing the ears which, he thought, might injure the brain.  (John Aubrey, A Plan of Education, in  John Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson, 1949)

All too many schoolmasters used the rod as an educational aid, or quite indiscrinately Some like Dr. Gill were well known for their 'whipping fitts'  (Aubrey, op.cit)  Whipping schoolmasters and over severe parents gradually come to be mentioned with general disapproval, however.  Sir Robert Burton (1577-1640)criticised over severity on  the Anatomy of Melancholy:  Parents and such as have the tuition of and oversight of children offend many times in that they are too stern, always threatening, chiding, brawling, whipping or striking; by means of which their poor children are so disheartened and cowed that they never after have any courage.' (Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1st ed. 1621)

so Sir Thomas Raymond (b. c.1610) blamed his father and masters for 'nipping in the bud of a tender masculyne spiritte' by their harsh treatment 'I being not soe quick at repeating without books as my younger brother was...not only harshly used by the pedagugui (teacher) but to my great shame and discouragement, placed in the form belowe my younger brother...It being indeed greate pitty that no better care is taken for choyce of able men to have the care of instructing and educateing of youth.'
    (Autobiography of Thomas Redmond and memoirs of the family of Guise of Elmore, Gloucestershire, ed. G. Davies, Camden Soc. 3rd series, vol. 28)

A schoolboy learning his letters from a hornbook.
  (Tuer, History of the Hornbook, 1896)

Sir Roger North's brother Dudley, although his spirit was not ruined by harsh treatment, nevertheless remembered his master's severity all his adult life.  Although his other brothers got on well at Mr. Stephens' school, 'The master took a great aversion to him, and most brutally abused him; correcting him at all turns, with or without a fault, till he was driven within an ace of despair, and(as I have often heard him declare) making away with himself'
   ( Roger North (1651-1734) Lives of the Right Hon. Francis North, Baron Guildford...The Hon. Dudley North...And the Hon. and Rev. Dr. John North...1st pub. 1744)

However, severe discipline tempered with kindness does not seem to have done more robust children hamr.  Thomas Ellwood was quite unaffected by attempts to disciplin him:
  'I could not easily conform my self to the grave and sover Rules and (as I then thought) severe Orders of the School; but was often playing one waggish Prank or another among my Fellow Schollars, which, subjected me to correction, so that I have come under the Discipline of the Rod twice in a Forenoon.  which yet brake no Bones.'
   Life of Thomas Ellwood, written by his own hand,  1714.

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