Tudor education and apprenticeship

Most families educated the boys for work and the girls for marriage and running a household. The wealthiest families hired a tutor to teach the boys at home or sent the children to live with families of similar or preferably greater wealth and status. This was important for helping the children make connections and contacts in a period when it was vital to know important people in order to make a career or find a suitable marriage partner.

Parents who were perhaps not wealthy enough to hire a private tutor, but could afford to pay for education, sent their boys to a grammar school or a school attached to a cathedral. These schools taught mathematics, Greek and Latin.

An important employer for men seeking a career with an intellectual dimension was the Church. The Church not only employed priests and bishops, but also canon lawyers, estate managers, scholars and lecturers. Until the Tudor period, and with the exception of medicine, the universities primarily trained men for a career in the Church. This career, however, came with a price. Until 1532 men in holy orders - and that included most clerics and scholars - were not allowed to marry. During the Reformation this rule was changed, and priests could marry. (The Roman Catholic Church, however, still does not allow its priests to marry.) This relaxation of the rules also applied to scholars, however some Oxford and Cambridge colleges did not allow senior fellows to be married. (Some people think that the distractions of family life impinge on the thought processes of the philosopher!)

During the Middle Ages, a career in the Church had allowed for a certain amount of social mobility in an otherwise static social system. Through patronage of a clergyman the son of a tradesman could eventually aspire to a place at university and forge a career for himself.

A good example of a "local boy made good" is Miles Smith, born in Hereford in 1550, who was the son of a fletcher (a bow and arrow maker). After studying at Hereford Cathedral School, he went up to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. A talented linguist, he was employed by King James I to work on a translation of the Bible. After several appointments within the Church, he became Bishop of Gloucester in 1612.

[Original author: Toria Forsyth-Moser, 2003]