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for searching only. GRAMMAR SCHOOLS OF ENGLAND ABOUT 1330 163
This routine at Eton had not changed in its fundamentals when about 156o Malim recorded it, so that it might be adapted by Westminster-for the eventual use of Benjamin fonson, bricklayer. The routine provided at Peterborough in 1561 is also this same one,28 supplementing the Eton time table of about 156o very neatly on many details. These are the only definite instances I have found of sixteenth century routine, though we shall notice various other fragments and hints; but it is significant that they are uniform. Part of the reason for the uniformity is also readily apparent, for one school merely adopted or slightly adapted the routine of another. Nor was the borrowing confined to what we now think of as the greater schools. Cuckfield and Saffron Walden, apparently with only one master each, yet expected to follow the curriculum and routine of Winchester and Eton. Similarly, so late as 1563 it was provided that the grammar school of Wimborne Minster in Dorset, apparently with only a master, was to be taught according to the usages of Eton and Winchester;E4 and in 1574 Seven Oaks was to "be ordered as the School of Saint Paul's in London, for their teaching."25
While there are adaptations to circumstances, yet the same fundamental routine evidently continues in these schools and the others throughout the sixteenth century and beyond. The system was thus simple but inhumanly thorough-at least on paper. No wonder the masters had to flog the boys through it. One wonders how a human being, either teacher or boy, endured it. Not even Sunday was ordinarily free, and founders regularly attempted desperately to balk human nature by limiting holidays to a very narrow minimum. And the masters' ideas of how holidays should be spent did not at all coincide with those of the boys. I suspect the boys dreaded some of those holidays worse than school. No wonder that the records of the masters' most brilliant experiments are so likely to end, "This worthie yong Ientleman, to my greatest grief . . . departed within few dayes, out of this world." Education! Education! What crimes are committed in thy name!
't The Victoria History of the County of Northampton, Vol. II, pp. 2o8-2o9. 21 Carlisle, Grammar Schools, Vol. I, p. 385.
2' Ibid., Vol. I, p. 621.
~¬ Ascham, Scholemaster (1570), p. 32V.
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