Heart Beats by Robson Catherine

Author:Robson, Catherine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

The roots of England’s scholarship culture reach back to the Middle Ages; arrangements that benefited students without means had an important place in the establishment of numerous forms of educational institutions. For instance, in return for praying for the dead, scholars with no worldly connections like Chaucer’s “thin clerk” could gain admission to the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, many of which received their endowments in exchange for the celebration of masses for donors’ departed souls; famous schools like Winchester and Eton that eventually became bastions of the elite also had at their inception provisions for free places for various categories of children, such as founder’s kin or local residents. The institutions of greatest importance to our inquiry here, though, are the grammar schools. Established over the centuries—some evolving from the schools attached to the great cathedrals or chantries; many others founded in the boom of sixteenth-century Anglicanism and mercantilism; variously strengthened with gifts and endowments, and often granted royal charters—these establishments were by definition schools “in which the learned languages are grammatically taught,” as Johnson’s Dictionary put it, and most of them held in their history some connection, for however long or short a period, with the provision of free education for at least a proportion of their pupils.

Our scrutiny begins in the era that saw the extension of basic education to the general populace. Before the government involved itself in the full-scale provision of compulsory education, relationships between existing grammar schools and the growing numbers of elementary schools run by the Church of England and the nonconformist denominations developed in piecemeal fashion. J. Campkin’s 1858 autobiography, The Struggles of a Village Lad, an uplifting tale issued by the Temperance Society that plots the progress of a Band of Hope supporter, provides an useful illustration of a single location’s range of educational establishments, and the possibility of movement between them, during the first third of the nineteenth century:

In our village there was no lack of schools. There was the Grammar School, where none were allowed to go but gentleman’s sons; then there was the National School, taught by Mr. Pepper, who used to cane the boys and girls so much that they all declared it was a shame. Besides these, there was the dame school, the mistress of which did not cane the children, but pulled their ears, and pinned them to her apron. (4)

Campkin (presented in the story as one “Frank West”) is the son of the village handyman, and makes his way first from the dame school to the national school (“a penny a week”), and then, because of a fortuitous meeting on the road with the new master of the grammar school, to that institution.19 Impressed that a local urchin is reading Simpson’s Euclid in the lane, the teacher tests West on a few problems, and then gives him the following information:

In October next there are to be three boys admitted into the school free of cost, and if you like you can try to get one of the scholarships.

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