Education for Boys Education for Boys Author Courtney Follett Author Kate McPherson Supervising Editor Kate McPherson Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Courtney Follett and Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Childhood Children Social Order Gender Boys Men Education Classical Literature Latin Literacy Literature and the Arts Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106–43 BCE) Ovid (43 BCE–17/18 CE) Published file. Updated metadata proofed updated author respStmt. swapped the desc and figDescs to be correct. added image citation and figure Fixed capitalization in source titles. Created File. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Courtney Follett Courtney Follett

Courtney Follett was a student at Utah Valley University.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
The Schoolmaster, an ink on paper drawing by Dutch artist Cornelius Dusart, c. 1680. This unruly scene depicts boys of different ages reading, writing, and perhaps fighting in a simple classroom. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.
Overview

Formal education was primarily reserved for young boys from the middle or upper social classes. Many of these privileged boys attended grammar school from age seven to fourteen. The number of boys enrolling in grammar school increased in the Elizabethan period as part of the Protestant emphasis on education. After grammar school or extensive private tutoring, a select few elite English students might continue their education at the University of Oxford or Cambridge if their intellectual abilities and finances permitted. Scholarships for bright boys who lacked resources were rare but did exist. More commonly, boys and young men would begin an apprenticeship in a career path.

Grammar School

Although children from nobility were often taught by private tutors at home, most boys of the prosperous classes attended a local grammar school. These grammar schools enrolled the sons of prosperous minor landowners, merchants, skilled artisans and tradesmen, and lawyers. Starting in the 16th century, large numbers of grammar schools were founded throughout England to raise literacy, which was crucial for the newly Protestant nation. New doctrine encouraged each person to study the Bible individually, so literacy was tied to piety. The general purpose for education during this period was to instruct students in literacy but also on how to behave themselves appropriately based on their social class and to become better members of a Protestant nation.

Curriculum and Methods

Boys learned to read and to write English in a petty school and then in Latin in a grammar school. They also studied basic principles of Christianity. From ages seven to ten, students focused on spelling, grammar, rhetoric, and basic Latin. Most commonly, the schoolmaster spoke only in Latin and required students to do the same. Boys were expected to become proficient in Latin, the language of the educated population throughout Europe, or face physical punishment, including beatings with a birch rod. Discipline was strict.

Students from ages ten to fourteen advanced their Latin skills but were sometimes also trained in arithmetic, philosophy, religious studies, literature, and occasionally Greek. Classical Latin authors such as Ovid, Cicero, and Catullus anchored the curriculum.

Teachers during this period relied on rigid teaching modes such as memorization and recitation, believing them the most accurate form of learning. New ideas about education were promoted by writers like Roger Ascham, who tutored Queen Elizabeth I. His book The Schoolmaster, published in 1570 after his death, advocated for educating boys using more humanistic approaches.

The typical school day began at 6:00 AM and ended at 5:00 PM, with a lunch break of an hour or more. School for these students continued for around forty-one weeks per year, with only a few weeks off for holiday breaks.

Further Education

After grammar school, some elite young men either went to a university or to study the law at the Inns of Court. At either the University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge, they would have to be admitted to one of the colleges, where they studied the traditional medieval curriculum of theology, supplemented by studies in grammar, rhetoric, and logic, alongside astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, and music. It was an education designed in the Middle Ages to prepare men for the priesthood, and so newer knowledge and literature were not formally studied. Young men could earn a baccalaureate degree in about three years, and a few earned a master’s degree after two more.

At one of the Inns of Court, young men read law, but there were no formal classes or tutorial system. Instead, the young men lived at one of the four Inns of Court, attended court sessions, and read law for seven years prior to being called to the bar.

The vast majority of boys and young men began work in a family business, or they started an apprenticeship to prepare for a career. Most boys began apprenticeships between ages 11-14. Boys seeking to enter a skilled trade completed seven years of apprenticeship before becoming eligible to be a journeyman and begin working for wages, usually in their early 20s.

Key Print Sources Jewell, Helen M. Education in Early Modern England. Red Globe Press, 1999. Preiss, Richard, and Deanne Williams. Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Key Online Sources Best, Michael. The Education of Boys. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/ideas/education/boys.html. Accessed 17 Sep. 2018. Best, Michael. Roger Ascham. Shakespeare’s Life and Times.Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/prose/ascham.html. Accessed 17 Sep. 2018. Gillard, Derek. Education in England: A History. Education in England. http://www.educationengland.org.uk/history/. May 2018. Accessed 27 Feb. 2023. Wrightson, Keith. Education: Cultural Influences Underlying an Increase in Schooling. Lecture at Yale University. 29 Oct. 2009. Bewminate.com, edited by Matthew MacIntosh. https://brewminate.com/education-and-literacy-in-early-modern-england/. Accessed 24 Feb. 2023.
Image Source Dusart, Cornelius. The Schoolmaster. c. 1680. Ink on paper. <title level="m">The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/459316.