Trade Creates the Need for Schooling
The growth of commerce and industry made education more widespread. In a farming economy literacy had been an extravagant luxury, but in the commercial world it was an absolute necessity. The law accepted this change only after some hesitation. In England the landowners and feudal lords asked Richard II (1391) to enforce the earlier statute under which serfs could not send their children to school without the lord's consent, and, if they did, had to compensate him for the loss of the child's labor. Richard refused, and under his successor a decree declared that any parent might send children to school. With education thus made free, primary schools multiplied.
The Elementary and Grammar Schools
In the villages the schools attached to monasteries stayed open; in the towns primary schools were founded by churches, hospitals, endowments and guilds. Attendance, even in the countryside, was voluntary but common. Teachers were mostly priests, though in the fourteenth century the number of lay teachers grew. The curriculum stressed the catechism, the creed, the principal prayers, reading, writing, arithmetic, singing, and the rod. Even in the grammar schools the whip was the instrument of teaching. One theologian said that the spirit of children must be taught obedience, and parents agreed with him. Agnes Paston told the tutor of her idle son that if he did not improve he should be beaten, adding that she would rather see him die under the master's blows than perish in ignorance and neglect.
In the grammar schools religious instruction continued, and "grammatica" was added, which meant not only grammar and composition but the language and refined literature of classical Rome. Average boys studied reading and writing in Latin without enthusiasm, as something needed for foreign trade and for a career in the Church. The best secondary schools of the age were those founded in the Netherlands and Germany by the Brethren of the Common Life; one of them, at Deventer, had 2,000 pupils. William of Wykeham, the wealthy and energetic bishop of Winchester, founded the first free public school in England (1372) and left a good precedent: the great, through private or public gifts, helped schools provide a basic education for a limited number of chosen children. Henry VI followed his example and founded Eton, generously endowed (1440), to prepare pupils who wished to enter King's College, Cambridge.
Girls and Noble Boys
The education of women, from the primary stage upward, was limited to the home, apart from a few of noble birth. Many middle-class women, such as Margaret Paston, learned to write fluent English, and a few gained some acquaintance with literature and philosophy. Boys of the nobility were trained in ways that went beyond school. Until the age of seven they were taught by the women of the household and were then sent as pages to relatives or neighboring lords. There, with little affection, they learned reading, writing, religious duties and social manners from the ladies and the local priest. At fourteen they became squires, serving and attending their lord and master. Now they learned riding, archery, hunting, lance-throwing and fighting, and left bookish learning to their inferiors.
Oxford and Its Colleges
Meanwhile one of the most treasured legacies of the Middle Ages, the university, was growing and maturing. As zeal for building churches and religious edifices cooled, zeal for founding colleges and higher schools rose. In this period Oxford saw the founding of New College, Queen's College, and the colleges of Exeter, Oriel, Lincoln, All Souls, Magdalen, Brasenose, Corpus Christi, and a divinity school. These were not yet colleges in the modern sense but halls and residences for selected students, and only about a tenth of Oxford's students lived in them.
Most university teaching was given by clergy in classrooms of the schools or in lecture rooms scattered through the town. The Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans and other friars had colleges of their own at Oxford. Some of the most famous men of the fourteenth century came out of these monastic academies, among them Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, both of whom struck heavy blows at traditional theology. Law students at the Inns of Court in London received their own instruction.
At Oxford there was no love between townsmen and the gowned scholars. In 1355 the hostility of the opposing camps broke into open fighting, and so many were killed that the year became known as the year of the great massacre. Although the whipping of students began at English universities (1350), the students were thoroughly unruly and troublesome. Since sports and games within the university were forbidden, young men spent their energy on blasphemy, drinking and debauchery, and taverns and brothels flourished on their account. Attendance at Oxford fell from its thirteenth-century peak to about a thousand, and after the suppression of Wycliffe the bishops' oversight cut sharply into academic freedom.
Cambridge and the Celtic Universities
Cambridge gained greatly from Wycliffe's debates and from the Lollards' terror. Conservatives took their sons out of Oxford and sent them to the new university at Cambridge, so by the end of the fifteenth century the two institutions had equal numbers. King's College, Queen's College, St. Catharine's, Jesus, Christ's, St. John's, and other new colleges such as Michaelhouse, University or Clare Hall, Pembroke, Gonville and Caius, Trinity and Corpus Christi, rose along the banks of the Cam. Like Oxford's residential halls, they became colleges in the modern sense, and during the fifteenth century more teachers chose to teach in them and more students gathered there. Classes began at six in the morning and continued until five in the afternoon. Meanwhile Ireland and Scotland, despite their weak finances, founded the universities of St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Trinity College, Dublin, four institutions destined to give the intellectual world of the British Isles geniuses generation after generation.
France and Paris
In France, as in everything else, education suffered greatly from the Hundred Years' War. Even so, the growing need of society for lawyers and physicians added the attraction of those fields to the traditional appeal of Church careers and led to new universities at Avignon, Orléans, Cahors, Grenoble, Orange, Aix-en-Provence, Poitiers, Caen, Bordeaux, Valence, Nantes and Bourges. In the fourteenth century the University of Paris, perhaps because the foundations of absolute monarchy were crumbling, became a center of national power. It struggled and argued with the Parlement, gave counsel to the king, acted as a court of appeal in French theology, and was known to most scholars of the continent as the "university of universities." The rise of foreign and provincial universities reduced its numbers. Even so, its faculty of arts was said to have had a thousand teachers and ten thousand students in 1406 alone (the book's figures), and in 1490 all faculties together numbered close to twenty thousand students, lodged in about fifty colleges.
Discipline here was easier and milder than at Oxford, student morals reflected manliness more than religion, and Arabic, Greek, Chaldean and Hebrew were included in the curriculum.
Spain and Portugal
Spain had founded its great universities in the thirteenth century at Palencia, Salamanca and Lérida, and now added others at Perpignan, Huesca, Valladolid, Barcelona, Saragossa, Palma, Sigüenza, Valencia, Alcalá and Seville. Church control over them was complete and theology ruled; even so, Alcalá assigned fourteen chairs to grammar, literature and rhetoric and twelve to theology and canon law. For a time Alcalá became the largest educational center in Spain, with 7,000 students by 1525. Poor students were given funds for their studies. A professor's salary was set by the number of his pupils, and professors were required to step down after four years; if they had satisfied the university authorities, they were eligible to be chosen again. In 1300 Dinis, king of Portugal, founded a university at Lisbon, but student riots led him to move it to Coimbra, which is its pride today.
Central Europe
Intellectual activity in central Europe in this period was greater and more intense than in France or Spain. In 1347 Charles IV founded the University of Prague, which soon became the intellectual guide and the voice of the Bohemian people. Other universities arose at Kraków, Vienna, Erfurt, Heidelberg, Cologne, Buda, Würzburg, Leipzig, Rostock, Louvain, Trier, Freiburg im Breisgau, Greifswald, Basel, Ingolstadt, Pressburg (Bratislava), Mainz, Tübingen, Copenhagen, Uppsala, Frankfurt an der Oder and Wittenberg. In the second half of the fifteenth century these institutions seethed with students, debates and disputes; Kraków alone had at one time several thousand pupils (the book's figure is garbled). The Church paid most of the cost and naturally demanded intellectual conformity, but princes, nobles, towns and merchants also helped with funds and facilities. Frederick, elector of Saxony, paid part of the cost of Wittenberg from the sale of indulgences whose proceeds he did not send back to Rome.
Scholasticism Within, Humanism Without
Scholastic philosophy sat in the chairs of philosophy in the universities, while humanism grew and matured outside them. For that reason most German universities in the age of the Reformation lived on the Church's table, with two important exceptions: Erfurt, where Luther studied, and Wittenberg, where Luther taught.