How Information Spread Among the Gentry, 1550-1640

Abstract

During the first half of the sixteenth century, the English gentry came to realize that its continued access to the controls of power would depend less on birth and military prowess and more on literacy and learning. As a result, the sons of gentlemen flooded into the grammar schools, where they acquired a good knowledge of classical Latin and, rather less commonly, the rudiments of Greek. Together with the languages of the ancients, the schoolboys imbibed at least something of classical ideals. Principally they learned the duty of service to the common weal, a service to be expressed politically. That ideal had permeated Roman education and, through the writings of humanist educational theorists such as Erasmus, was embodied in the curricula of the English grammar schools and universities. Young men were trained in the arts of argument. They learned the trick of compiling a commonplace book, under whose artfully devised headings they entered the “flowers” of their reading. Then, when occasion demanded it, in conversation or letter, in the law courts or parliament, they could search out the appropriate topos, in their memories or in their notes, and bring to bear the weight of classical (and even modern) wisdom. So much, indeed, might be learned by all grammar school boys. Those who proceeded to the universities added further weapons to their armories. Since the universities existed principally to train theologians and preachers, a function whose importance increased as it became necessary to defend English Protestantism from the attacks of Catholics and separatists, they emphasized dialectic.