Of the intellectual life of the towns we know scarcely anything, and there is perhaps not much to be known. Scholars naturally drifted away to the Universities or London, and the society of the borough was occupied with other matters than learning. In Nottingham, in spite of the educational zeal of the jury, the first evidence we have of a town clerk who knew enough of the classics to quote a line of Vergil and a line of Horace is in 1534-1545; while it is not till 1587 that we find a clerk who had learned Greek.[38] On the other hand Bristol was evidently a centre of radiant light. An excellent education was given in its school, if we judge from the famous Grocyn, who was brought up there and left the school in 1463;[39] and its society was adorned by men of culture and wide intellectual curiosity. William of Worcester, the enquirer after universal knowledge, a man of science who practised medicine and cultivated his garden of herbs, as well as a man of letters, who at forty-three “hath gone to school to a Lombard called Karoll Giles to learn and to be read in poetry or else in French,” and to whom “a good book of French or of poetry” seemed as fine a purchase as “a fair manor,” might be seen in his later days at Bristol, practising the art of annalist, in which character he surveyed the whole town and carefully measured it by paces from end to end.[40] His friend Ricart, town clerk and historian, spent the twenty-seven years of his clerkship in writing his Calendar or Chronicle of 332 leaves in six carefully arranged parts, the first three being devoted to history and the last three to local customs and laws, in which he carried the story of Bristol through 3,000 years from the days of Brut to the reign of Edward the Fourth.[41]
It was inevitable that the purpose and theory of education should ultimately be modified by the change of masters, as well as by the change of manners, and already fervent reformers like Caxton began to look beyond “the alphabet and humanities” and discuss training in the mysteries of the English tongue itself. Among the “fathers ancient” who should command the reverence of scholars they counted the famous men of their own race and speech—men removed from them by but a generation or two—Chaucer “the father and founder of ornate eloquence,” Lydgate, the maker of “volumes that be large and wide,” and Occleve; and it is touching to see men, on the very eve of the heroic age of English literature, wistfully looking back to the vanished glories of their grandfather days, when, as it seemed to them, all the “fresh flowers” of style had been reaped by this handful of ancient worthies, and “of silver language the great riches” stored away in their treasury, so that the painful toiler who came after in search of “the embalmed tongue and aureate sentence,” could now get it only by piece-meal, or at the most might glean here and there by busy diligence something to show that he had reverently visited the fields of the blest.[42] The enlightened zeal of the learned indeed had still to wage a long warfare with the pedants of the schools and the barbaric notions of education that governed men’s minds; and the training vouchsafed to the poor boys of the fifteenth century was then and for many a century afterwards a rude and brutal one.[43] No doubt, too, the trader’s view of education, practical as it was, had a touch of unashamed vulgarity. “To my mind,” says the Capper in the Commonweal, “it made no matter if there were no learned men at all,” for “the devil a whit good do ye with your studies but set men together by the ears;” what men wanted was “to write and read, and learn the languages used in countries about us, that we might write our minds to them and they to us.” Scholars, on the other hand, trembled at the results to civilization and knowledge of the crude ideals of the mere man of business, who if he had his way would “in a short space make this realm empty of wise and politic men, and consequently barbarous, and at the last thrall and subject to other nations; for empire is not so much won and kept by the manhood or force of men as by wisdom and policy,[44] which is gotten chiefly by learning.” But whatever were their faults it was in the schools as much as in the council-chamber or shop that the revolution of the next century was being prepared; and the wide-reaching results of the spread of education in town and village were potent factors in the developement of a later England. “The fault is in yourselves, ye noblemen’s sons,” wrote Ascham, “and therefore ye deserve the greater blame, that commonly the meaner men’s children come to be the wisest counsellors and greatest doers in the weighty affairs of this realm.”[45]