Some English Academies

THE RUSH OF THE GENTRY into English schools and universities during sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has been well documented. Elizabethan writer, William Harrison, was merely reiterating a familiar complaint when he wrote of universities that although they had originally been founded for poor men's sons the rich do so incroch vpon them, and so farre hath this inconueience spread it selfe that it is in my time an hard matter for a poore mans child to come by a felowship (though he be neuer so good a scholer & woorthie of that roome.) (i) It is clear that English gentlemen were becoming increasingly enthusiastic about a new kind of education and that in course of this period they were showing that enthusiasm by crowding into existing school and university system. An ignorant Lord living at home shall be a scourge unto his farmers, a torment to his familie, a mocking stocke to his neighbours, a shame for his friends, and a slander to his Parents, wrote James Cleland in 1611. (2) He went on to say that such a man could scarcely be above meanest of his tenants. And he might have added that he would also be unsuited to those public responsibilities which were so much a part of, and indeed an important justification for, gentleman's existence. (3) It was not that gentlemen of preceding period had been uneducated louts, although comments of sixteenth-century critics sometimes make them appear so. Rather, content of their educa

Art · Art history · Political science · Sociology · The Renaissance · Classics · Scottish History and National Identity

• Practical mathematicians and mathematical practice in later seventeenth-century London

  Open Access•PHILIP BEELEY•The British Journal for the…•2019

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• Centuries of childhood

  Philippe Aries•Centuries of childhood•1962

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• The Queen's Wards. Wardship and Marriage under Elizabeth I

  Richard Ashton, Joel Hurstfield•The Economic History Review•1959

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