Austrey
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Seventeenth Century AustreyLocal
Schools
The
gentry were favoured with comparatively easy access to schooling and most
appeared to have had a healthy regard for education.
Usually their sons were packed off to school at a comparatively early
age, at around six or seven years. William
Lilly, the astrologer who started life as the son of a Leicestershire yeoman and
later attended the grammar school at Ashby, recalls that be was 'put to learn at
such schools and of such masters as the rudeness of the place and country
afforded’. Rude as it may have been his schooling nonetheless stood him in
good stead. The late Tudor and
early Stuart grammar school were stepping stones to centres of higher learning.
Their success is best measured, perhaps, by a survey by A.L. Hughes of
288 Warwickshire gentry families which shows that ninety-two per cent had sons
enrolled in the universities or inns of court by 1640. The increase in schooling
was part of a great wave of educational enthusiasm that swept across the
midlands in this period. Diocesan
subscription books provide lists of the schoolmasters who complied with an
enactment of 1562 that required them to subscribe to the Church of England's
thirty nine articles. The ecclesiastical subscription books from Lichfield show
that at least half the parishes in that diocese, including Austrey, were served
by licensed schoolmasters between 1584 and 1642. The
Austrey villagers
did not have to send their sons far to learn to read and write: they were
within walking distance of George Atrobus’ famous grammar school at Tamworth,
reputedly founded in the time of Edward III and endowed by Elizabeth I in 1558.
They also had the choice of a string of grammar schools founded and endowed by
the third earl of Huntingdon (in particular, the schools at Leicester, Hinckley
and Ashby), as well as the grammars school at Appleby and Market Bosworth, so
they could afford to be selective. The Appleby School charter records that the
school took boys from Appleby, Norton, Austrey, Newton, Stretton, Measham,
Snarestone and Chilcote as well as 'paupers' from Norton in the early 1700s. Schooling
was not the exclusive preserve of the gentry.
Puritan clergy took the initiative in setting up vernacular schools for
the children of the poorer husbandmen and labourers, regarding literacy as a
weapon against the perceived evils of ignorance and idleness.
Judging from the number of licensed schoolmasters in the county in the
first half of the seventeenth century, the clergy were particularly active.
Often the vicar or his curate taught elementary grammar to the sons of
his parishioners in the village church, as for example at Orton, where in 1638
the vicar had a licence ‘to teach English to children’. The earliest
indication of a school in Austrey is an entry in the parish register in 1581
describing John Bentley as a ‘schoolmaster’. The bishop of Lichfield’s
visitations of 1616 and 1662 confirm the existence of a non-endowed vernacular
school in the parish which probably charged around 2d a week to take
‘petties’ or junior school boys. Sources
and Notes
Robert
Lilly left his son William one half of his law books, dividing the remainder
between his three younger children: will and inventory, Robert Lilley, gent.,
1685.
William was the only boy in his form at Ashby who did not go on to
college, his father being as he remarks, ‘a mere yeoman’ Life
and Times. 6. 17, 36; School for John Aubrey in 1634 was ‘a mile’s fine
walk’ to a neighbouring parish: Brief
Lives, 31. A.L.
Hughes, 'County Community', loc. cit., 49. K.
Wrightson, English Society, 186. Leicester
was founded in the 1560s, Ashby in 1575, Hinckley in the early 1600s.
For details and ref. To Orton see, B. Simon, ‘Leicestershire Schools,
1625-40’, British Journal of Educational
Studies, iii (1954), 5-11, 46-7, 54.. Appleby
school charter in Nichols IV, 441; ref paupers in ‘Bishop Wake's survey’,
309; L.R.O. DE 1642/4.Wolstan Dixie endowed the school at Market Bosworth with
two scholarships and two fellowships at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1592:
Nichols IV, 497; The early history of the school is touched upon in S.J.
Hopewell’s, Book of Bosworth School (Leicester,
1950). The
school at Tamworth was mentioned by Leland in 1541, rebuilt in 1667: H. Wood Borough
by Prescription: A History of the Municipality of Tamworth, Tamworth, 1958 ,
127-30; VCR Warws. II, 327 P.K.
Orphen, ‘The Recruitment Pattern of the Schoolmaster in the seventeenth
century’, Warwick History, iv:3
(Summer, 1979), 98. cf. fees in Simon, op.cit.
56. In
1723 Thomas Charnells of Snarestone started a school for 30 children with
particular provision for orphans and the poor among his tenants; Cf. Provisions
for a stock of £200 to fund 12-13 apprentices from Shenton, Austrey, Whitwick,
Measham (will of Thomas Monk of Shenton); for ‘a schoolmaster to teach the
poor children of Newbold Vernon to read and write’ (Nathaniel Lord Crew,
1720); to buy ‘bread and books for the poor’, (William Wightman of Barwell,
1724): Nichols I, 97-9, 107; for the…sons of the neighbourhud…to be taught
Gratis’ L.R.O. Letter from William Wilson to Sir John Moore, DE 1642/45. |
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