The Schools of Medieval England
Early in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, as Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte float down the dappled lanes on their way to Brideshead Castle from Oxford, the former says, “‘It’s a pity neither of us can sing.’” While this remark ought in itself to be read as the efflorescence of youth in the joys of a first great friendship, those viewing the matter historically might also find in it a lament for that merry old England which preceded Henry VIII and his branch of the Reformation. Indeed, if the book as a whole is a paean to grace and the possibilities it affords of the soul’s being made virginal again before the Trinitarian font of all being, it is by the same token a cry of anguish occasioned by the divorce between England and Rome and the human divorces which followed.
Where education is concerned, one concrete effect of Henry’s break with the papacy was the dissolution of the monasteries, the seizure of church holdings, and, subsequently, the closure of a great many of the medieval schools of England. Such schools took several forms, but a pattern of demonstrable prevalence is that of the establishment of song or chantry schools alongside grammar schools. Arthur Leach informs us that these “twin schools of Grammar and Song . . . are found side by side in connexion with all the great churches, that is in all the great centres of population, from the age of Augustine and Ethelbert to the age of Cranmer and Edward VI.”
The mechanism whereby many such schools were established lay largely in the endowments of the nobles. The establishment of chantries for singing the spiritual preservation of their patrons necessitated the formation of liturgical choirs, and, in consequence, the priests under such benefices were required, as part of their duties, to educate the children of the parish. In the pungent parlance of Sir John Percival,
And I woll that the said Preest shall alwey kepe and contynew in the said Town of Maxfeld a Fre Gramer Scole techyng there Gentilmens Sonnes and other gode mennes children of the Towne and contre theareabouts, wherby they shall more grow in conyng and vertue to the laude and praise of Almyghtie God and to their owne confort and profett.
Percival insists, crucially, that the school be “Fre.” Such freedom evinces the entwining of economic and educational realities. Schooling was free to those who enjoyed sufficient prosperity to take advantage thereof, but the schooling itself would also serve to form children not just for scholarly, clerical, or professional life but also for the freedom of eternity. While enthusiasm for the classical education movement in our time has expanded to allow for the possibility that many institutions can now offer their services at no cost to students and their families, the relative leisure afforded children of today likewise creates an opportunity for a great many young people to be classically educated on a scale which much of the past could perhaps little have admitted.
If the goal of the Christian life is eternal joyful participation in the feast of the Lamb, then participation in the earthly liturgy allows for the formation of the self for heavenly culture.
If the song schools offered primary education, they did so because liturgical singing requires students to become both literate and numerate, such that the education supplied by the song schools provided a sound foundation for those students who might go on to the grammar schools or, later, to professional studies. So prevalent were the schools of this period that their absolute numbers would not be equaled in England until the early part of the twentieth century.
This most basic education, then, if limited to those who could afford the luxury of leisure, speaks powerfully to the possibilities of such an age as ours by offering a glimpse of what could well be called an education for eternity. If the goal of the Christian life is eternal joyful participation in the feast of the Lamb, then participation in the earthly liturgy allows for the formation of the self for heavenly culture. The song schools of England thus highlight a tension at the heart of all earthly educational labor. Experience suggests and St. Thomas Aquinas confirms that what is first in the order of being is last in the order of cognition. Thus the actual study of theology must await the student’s long and arduous formation in letters and philosophy. Yet to be taught to sing the liturgy is to be led at once into a share in the heavenly liturgy and so to be rooted in hope, that anchor above, which gives shape and savor to the sometimes dry toils of earthly education.
The classical education movement at present might well join in Charles Ryder’s complaint. If education is the “collective technique which a society employs to instruct its youth in the values and accomplishments of the civilization within which it exists” or the “process by which a community preserves and transmits its physical and intellectual character,” (to borrow from such seminal figures in the history of education as Marrou and Jaeger) a technique and process by which the songs that express the character of a society, as for instance an Iliad, a Comedy, or a Faerie Queen, are handed down, then the would-be inheritors of that singing school we call the West stand gravely in need of song masters, ones who can both re-seed the knowledge of the texts that form the tradition and re-animate the tongues which gave them their texture. Then, too, they require a reclamation of such liturgical engagement as allows the study of the Western tradition to be placed at the service of eternal life.
If deep acquaintance with the classical tradition can produce a Shakespeare, weaving myth, history, and scripture in his rich renderings of the mystery of man created and redeemed, it can also admit of a Mengele, threading a tapestry of eugenics and the whistled strains of Wagner. To know about good products of culture is not necessarily to be good in oneself; the cultured man need not be a man of any authentic cultus. The man of “cunning and virtue” can only be truly cunning and virtuous if his activity be directed to the “laud of Almighty God.” The inter-penetration of the classical and the Christian in such a system as that enjoyed by merry old England suggests a means whereby wisdom and virtue, the powers of the man of philosophic thought and of practical action, might be harmonized by direction to an eternal end. The possibilities of such an education might best be grasped by looking to one of its finest products, St. Thomas More.
Morus, or the Marriage of Wit and Wisdom
William Roper tells us that his father-in-law, Thomas More, was “brought up in the Latin tongue at St. Anthony’s in London,” a school whose august lineage is also noted by Leach. St. Anthony’s, after various changes of fortune, was endowed “to teach, instruct and inform gratis all boys and others whatsoever wishing to learn and become scholars.” For More, the study of Latin was not merely a mechanical necessity incumbent upon the would-be professional. It afforded a deep acquaintance with the classical and patristic traditions as well as no small measure of literary delight, as seen in the taut humor of his epigrams and the endless wordplay of such works as Utopia. Further still, it formed the heart of the educational program he set out for his own children, under which each was required, among other duties, to write him a letter in Latin each day—letters to which the good father promptly responded.
For those engaged with Catholic-inflected classical education at present, More’s example is particularly instructive. In him we find perhaps the preeminent example of the wedding of that “cunning and virtue” which Sir John Percival hoped the grammar school he endowed might inculcate in its students. Indeed, in Sir Thomas More, a collaborative effort on the part of Shakespeare and four other London playwrights, More demonstrates a perfect marriage of wit and wisdom, a phrase which supplies both the title of that drama’s “play within the play” and characterizes More’s own brand of cunning and virtue.
Where cunning is concerned, few can take a higher place than More’s. While the finest example of this is to be found in his prosecution of his last years, wherein he somehow managed to balance the demands of loyalty to crown as well as to Christ in the scales of his own conscience, it also makes itself felt in his writings which, from his Life of Pico to his Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation to his Sadness of Christ, become in themselves exercises in virtue for the reader.
United to such cunning, More’s wisdom was that associated not with the pursuit of knowledge in the abstract but rather with the virtue of prudence, whereby the conscience becomes the locus of interaction between the universal and the particular, allowing the individual man to pursue the good and the true not as abstract principles but as inhering in the created order itself and in the particular actions demanded of the good man at particular times and in particular places. More thus embodies that finest product of classical education, vir bonus dicendi peritus, the “good man skilled in persuasion.”
A further feature of More’s education which bears emphasis lies in the apparent tension between its universality and its practical applicability. That is, More engaged in that educational tradition which, over some 1500 years in that part of the world we call western, formed students by deep study of a particular set of texts, handed down mainly from antiquity and mainly in Latin. This model of education was not always the joyous immersion in tradition we latter-day students might find it to be, if the testimonies of great learners from Augustine down to Shakespeare and on are to be believed. But its allowance for a shared conversation across places and times inspires no small degree of awe, and its capacity for weaving together the classical and the Christian, as by memorization of the Distica Catonis and the Psalms, allowed for the flourishing of a medieval art which produced Dante’s Comedy, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and, at some remove, the works of Shakespeare. While this grand conversation does not guarantee goodness in those it forms, it offered More, in the lonely particularity of his trial and death, a sense that he was of one mind with a great tradition and could therefore choose the good with confidence. That example demands emulation in the present classical education movement, which finds itself operating under the dual weights of nearly two centuries’ tradition of nationalistic and secular education and a current technological expansion which stands to establish its own universal imperium.
Places, Non-Places, and Paideia
More wrote, perhaps most famously, of the most perfect republic to be found on the island of Utopia. Though homophonic with Eutopia, the good place, Utopia is, per the Greek, no place, an invented island described in the words of Raphael Hythlodaeus, a man of dubious relation to the tricky archangel and a nonsense peddler to boot. There is no perfect place in the fallen world, More invited us to see for ourselves, nor will there be till “God make men of some other metal than earth.” Nonetheless, the good man, the man of true culture in an ultimate sense, is the one who, if he cannot make all things perfect, will at least make them as little bad as possible. In the lands of the long defeat, in Narnia and Middle-Earth as much as in our own world, the good man is the one who does the good the present moment of providence demands. Such a man was More, who went merrily to the scaffold, hoping earnestly that he and the hangman and the king, his erstwhile friend, might one day make merry all together.
More’s education shared much of its content with that of men across Europe and the Americas and the near-East for a great deal of recorded history. But it also, we have noted, gave him throughout his life the resources to choose the good as the particular demands of providence dictated. If the classical education movement is not to founder under the various strains to which it is subject, then it must recover such strengths as shaped More. The good man skilled in persuasion stakes his life on something beyond himself. He requires a vision of something that compels his pursuit of the good and affords him the resources requisite to that pursuit. One path to that vision and to those resources lies through history and the example of England in More’s childhood. The study of classical literatures by means of the classical languages imparts to students a share in a conversation, a conversation of enormous depth, replete with exemplars of virtue and vice, fashioned in styles which, by emulation and reflection, allow students of the classical tradition to become both cunning and virtuous. And a classical education wedded to Christian liturgy grants students a share in St. Catherine’s understanding that all the way to heaven is heaven.
More recognized the vanity of seeking a perfect society on earth. He recognized, too, that no one place on earth should count so much with a man that he lose sight of heaven. Throughout his life, though, he bent all his cunning and his virtue to God’s glory and to the greatest possible improvement of the society in which he found himself. He did not attend a song school, yet Roper reports that the Duke of Norfolk, “coming on a time to Chelsea to dine with him, fortuned to find him at the church, singing in the choir.” Norfolk, says Roper, upbraided More’s singing, calling it unworthy of a king’s chancellor, to which More smilingly replied, “‘Your Grace may not think that the King, your master and mine, will with me, for serving of God his master, be offended, or thereby count his office dishonored’.” If we cannot sing in our time, it is a pitiable thing, yet not so pitiable as to be beyond remedy. The past is rarely so far as we assume, provided that good people put themselves to the task of persuading others to the good, aware of the good that has been, recovering what can at present be recovered, holding fast to what merriment is yet to come.