At the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, knowledge of ancient Greek for most educated Englishmen was something one could aspire to but not necessarily attain. Greek was learnt for reading alone and so less time was spent on its study than Latin, which at this period was learnt also for conversation:Footnote 1 this might explain why today, Greek remains a second language in schools, to be learnt after Latin.Footnote 2 Even in continental Europe, for one as learned as Erasmus, difficulties could be encountered in the study of the new language. ‘My Greek studies are almost too much for my courage’, he wrote in 1500, ‘while I have not the means of purchasing books nor the help of a master’.Footnote 3 What Erasmus lacked – namely a teacher and reading material necessary to learn from – was paralleled across Europe,Footnote 4 but nowhere more so than in English schools in the mid-sixteenth century. Without these, the schools in England also found it hard to introduce and maintain Greek in the classroom.
Erasmus' first visit to England, in 1499,Footnote 5 was made in order to learn Greek at Oxford. Although he could not afford to make the journey to Italy, the true centre of the revival of learning, nevertheless he was happy to visit an Oxford which had a growing reputation for excellence in Greek at this date:
There is in Oxford so much polish and learning in Latin and Greek that you would not really mind about going to Italy except for the sake of having been there.Footnote 6
The first Englishman who taught Greek at Oxford was William Grocyn or ‘Grocyn the Grecian’.Footnote 7 Grocyn was admitted to New College in 1465, became a Fellow in 1467, and remained there until at least 1481. It is quite possible that he was a recipient of lessons taught by the Italian Cornelio Vitelli from 1475 onwards.Footnote 8 What is definite is that he left Oxford in 1488 to travel and study in Italy, returning before the end of 1491. After his travels he publicly lectured in Greek at the university, and became the first English teacher of Greek at Oxford.
George Lily, son of the first High Master of St Paul's School,Footnote 9 declares that Grocyn learnt the rudiments of Greek in Britain, and then added to his learning abroad: ‘Grocyn, who drank up the rudiments of Greek and Latin in Britain, later strengthened his learning in Italy’.Footnote 10 Erasmus, similarly, writes: ‘surely Grocyn himself…first learnt the rudiments of Greek in England? After going to Italy he heard the best teachers, but meanwhile it benefited him to have learnt the rudiments beforehand from any men whatsoever.’Footnote 11
The ‘any men’ may possibly include Vitelli, and this leaves no doubt as to the existence of some Greek instruction in England before Grocyn. This was the Oxford to which Erasmus was drawn, a university undergoing a sea change of learning, and Grocyn's Greek lectures, delivered on his return from Italy in 1491, were the beginning of a new period of learning there.Footnote 12
This period was a fascinating era of letters in Oxford. Grocyn, Thomas Linacre, William Warham, William Horman, and John Colet were all at Oxford contemporaneously during the 1480s–90s, friends of each other, each with important connections. They are all strongly associated with the Greek language and its introduction into the educational circles of England. It is therefore not surprising that it did not take long for this new learning to find its way from the universities into the schools.
Greek in schools
Discovering which school was the first to teach Greek is not an easy task, with claims coming from Winchester, Eton, and St Paul's School. Let us attend to the claims of Winchester first.
William Horman was admitted to Winchester College as a pupil in 1468, and to New College, Oxford, in 1475; he became headmaster first of Eton, 1486–95, then of Winchester, 1495–1501.Footnote 13 In 1519 he published his Vulgaria Footnote 14 and in the chapter de scolasticis included a high number of references to Greek. Out of 250 sentences or phrases within the chapter, 25 contain references to Latin or Latin authors, and 9 contain references to Greek or Greek authors. The Latin authors mentioned are Cicero (Tully), Terence, Livy, Aesop, and Apuleius;Footnote 15 the Greek authors are Homer and Aristotle. The sentences include the following:Footnote 16
We have played a comedi of greke.
representavimus fabulam palliatam.
We have played a comedy of latten.
representavimus fabulam togatam.
He hath founded a reder in greke for a C ducatts a yere.
profitenti graece annua centena ducatorum constituit.
I am Arystottillys man.
Aristotelicae sum sectator disciplinae.
He applied hym self with great diligence to greke.
graeca studia ingenti cura secutus est.
Tell me in laten what he sayeth in greke.
quod graece dicit latine mihi interpretare.
Educational historians of this period have independently drawn similar conclusions from Horman's Vulgaria: namely, that Greek was a part of school education at this date; that the references made in the Vulgaria indicate that Greek was a subject of study in schools; that Horman was the first headmaster to offer Greek in schools; and that Horman's words seem to show that Greek flourished in his time at Winchester.Footnote 17 Leach says ‘there can hardly be a doubt that [Winchester] took the lead in the introduction of Greek into the curriculum of schools’Footnote 18 and continues with the claim that Horman
must have taught Greek in both schools. His Vulgaria…published in 1519, but reproducing exercises given when he was headmaster before 1502, is full of Greek phrases and references to Greek, even to the performance of a Greek play.Footnote 19
Unfortunately, the evidence that Leach cites is not sufficient to make such a claim. Horman's Vulgaria do indeed show that there is a strong likelihood that Greek was taught at Winchester before the end of the fifteenth century, but the book cannot and does not stand as evidence enough in its own right. The evidence for the early introduction of Greek at Eton College is stronger.
First, what Horman's Vulgaria shows to be likely for Winchester must also be likely for Eton, as he was headmaster of both schools, and his Vulgaria was published after his retirement from the classroom. Secondly, in a letter to Cardinal Pole, written in 1556, by Sir Thomas Pope, founder of Trinity College, Oxford, we read: ‘I remember when I was a yong scholler at Eton, the greeke tongue was growing apace: the studie of which is now alate much decaid.’Footnote 20
Pope, born c.1508, must be referring to a date around 1518 at the earliest, three years after Robert Aldrich became headmaster of Eton. His comment has therefore been used as evidence that Greek was perhaps introduced at Eton by Aldrich.Footnote 21 Certainly Pope's letter is sufficient to inform us that Greek was being studied at Eton by 1518, but it cannot tell us for sure when the language was introduced there. If we combine the evidence gleaned from Pope and from Horman, we may conclude that Greek was probably being studied at Eton during Horman's headmastership, 1486–95, and certainly during Aldrich's headmastership, 1515–21. Although Watson believes that there is no evidence for Greek at Eton, until Malim's Consuetudinarium of 1560,Footnote 22 Pope's letter provides a clear indication that Greek was being taught at the school by 1518. What is likely, though again difficult to prove, is that Greek was introduced during the reign of Horman and continued strongly under Aldrich.
So there is evidence for Greek being taught at Eton under Aldrich, and some evidence that it was taught at both Winchester and Eton under Horman. The third of the schools with a claim to have been the first to introduce Greek is St Paul's School, London. John Colet's statutes for St Paul's School were written in 1518, at about the same time that a young Thomas Pope was learning the rudiments of Greek at Eton. With regard to his requirements for the High Master, Colet's statutes suggest ‘a man hoole in body honeste and vertuouse and lernyd in good and clene laten litterature and also in greke yf suyche may be gotten’. As for what shall be taught, Colet includes: ‘I wolde they were taught al way in good litterature both laten and greke’ and that the Masters should ‘teche all way that is best and instruct the chyldren in greke and redyng laten’.Footnote 23 It is doubtful, though not impossible, that Colet would have included mention of a subject which was not being taught at the time of writing. His statutes therefore provide a probability that the subject was taught at St Paul's from its foundation, but no absolute proof.
Doubtless Greek had been taught at the school since it opened in 1510, for John Colet was exceptionally fortunate in his choice of the supremely educated William Lily, godson of Grocyn, as first High Master. Again, however, there is no actual proof of Greek being taught there, although Lily's genuine scholarship makes it very likely, as does the fact that John Clement and Thomas Lupset were both taught by Lily at St Paul's School and were successively lecturers in Greek at Oxford. Lily was a late contemporary of Horman, Linacre, et al. at Oxford, being admitted to Magdalen College in 1486, and was part of that phenomenal circle of learning mentioned above.Footnote 24
While there is much evidence allowing Lily to be one of the first, if not necessarily the first, teachers of Greek in English schools after the revival of learning, alongside Aldrich and Horman, it is difficult to ascertain which of Winchester, Eton, and St Paul's was the first to introduce Greek into the curriculum. However, attention should be paid to that fact that in Colet's statutes there is no naming of Greek authors to be taught, unlike the predominance of named Latin authors. Such a declaration is typical for all school statutes throughout the majority of the sixteenth century. Greek is often mentioned in these statutes as something to be acquired ‘if such may be gotten’, or else insisted upon (‘I would there were always taught Latin and Greek’), but on no single occasion are Greek authors specifically named until the founding of Harrow School by John Lyon in 1590.Footnote 25 One suggestion for the lack of named authors in St Paul's statutes is that the omission was due to Colet's own inadequacies in Greek.Footnote 26 Possibly so, but this would not explain the same absence in all school statutes for the next seventy years. Another, more likely, explanation is the fact that so few Greek books were printed in England in the first half of the sixteenth century, owing to a lack of demand.Footnote 27
Printing came later to England than to almost any other European country;Footnote 28 and even in Paris, laying one's hand on a copy of a Greek grammar at the turn of the century was a ferociously difficult business for Erasmus.Footnote 29 It must therefore have been a much more difficult task to acquire a Greek text printed in England, where the first two known books containing Greek characters were printed in Cambridge in 1521 and London in 1524.
Thomas Linacre's Latin translation of Galen's περὶ κράσεων – his De temperamentis (Cambridge, 1521) – contains seven Greek words, whose print is very fine, wispy, and difficult to read in places, but definitely Greek.Footnote 30 However, only three years later, advances had been made in Greek printing in England, with the publication of another of Linacre's works, De emendata structura Latini sermonis (London, 1524), a work on Latin grammar.Footnote 31 This was only the second book printed in England to contain Greek characters, but there is a far greater amount of Greek included here than in its predecessor.Footnote 32 Linacre includes a number of examples of Greek in the book, quoting liberally from Isocrates, Xenophon, Lucian and Thucydides, drawn in order to show analogies between Latin and Greek. As with the 1521 printing, the script is fine and spidery, but it is legible enough, and contains breathings and accents.
In the preface to his 1524 work, Linacre begs the reader's forgiveness for the poor standard of the Greek text (even though it is superior to that of three years earlier). The fact that he has to crave forgiveness for the book's lack of skill and type – ‘may you bear it with equanimity, dear reader’ – perhaps demonstrates the limitations of Greek printing in England in 1524: ‘for obviously the printer was unused to these letters and had not been instructed enough in the preparation of Greek characters, nor was that supply of Greek characters ready, which is needed for doing this’.Footnote 33
After Linacre, ‘the earliest Greek grammar published in England appears to be that of David Tolley, a physician, in 1547’,Footnote 34 followed in 1575 by the revolutionary grammar of Edward Grant, Graecae linguae Spicilegium.Footnote 35 Hallam believes that this absence was due to lack of demand.Footnote 36 This must be the correct explanation: after about 1530 (interestingly enough, the year of Clenard's Greek grammar, printed at Louvain, which was the standard book for the next forty-five years) there was a fall in demand for Greek in all schools throughout England. Why should this have been the case?
The absence of Greek
By the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, Greek was the new wine and was in great demand in certain circles. Erasmus himself – and let us not forget, the reason for his first visit to England was to learn Greek, as he could not afford to travel to Italy – was clearly impressed by what he saw in Oxford in 1499.Footnote 37 A generation later, the students in Oxford were still eager for the new literature. An eyewitness wrote in 1520: ‘The students rush to Greek [studies], they endure watching, fasting, toil, and hunger in the pursuit of them.’Footnote 38 And in 1528 Erasmus, again, could show just how far English schools had advanced in the teaching of Greek, when he wrote of English boys entertaining themselves with Greek epigrams.Footnote 39
At this stage, Hallam's theory of lack of demand scarcely seems credible. We have already seen Greek clearly being taught in at least three schools at the beginning of the sixteenth century; now Greek began to appear on the statutes of the new schools that rose uncontrollably throughout England in the sixteenth century.
The Ordinances and Rules for Bristol Grammar School, founded in 1533, demanded that the headmaster should be ‘well learned in the Latin and Greek’ languages. The Statutes of Canterbury Cathedral School, 1541, required the headmaster to be ‘learned in the Latin and Greek languages’; those of East Retford Grammar School (Nottingham), 1552, stated that, in addition to Latin, the headmaster must teach Greek and Hebrew grammar and Greek authors ‘if he be expert in the same’. The Statutes of Witton School (Chester) in 1558 expressed ‘I will there were always taught good literature both Latin and Greek’, which has conscious echoes of Colet's statutes, as do those of Merchant Taylors' School, in 1561, which required the headmaster to be learned ‘in good and cleane Latine literature, and, also, in Greeke, yf such may be gotten’.Footnote 40
Greek was spreading in importance and popularity, as these statutes show. However, not one school specifically names a Greek author to be taught, which compares unfavourably with the Latin authors who are often named. Perhaps in many schools the will to have Greek taught was greater than the actuality; and in some schools the founders did not even pay lip service to the new language. In 1528 Cardinal Wolsey wrote to the masters of his new school at Ipswich. His surviving letter is of great importance in educational history, as it is the earliest surviving example of a full, detailed school curriculum of the English Renaissance. The named authors to be read include Aesop, Terence, Virgil, Sallust, Caesar, Cicero, Ovid, and Horace. However, not only is there no mention of any Greek author, but Wolsey makes no mention whatsoever of Greek on the timetable: regardless of the apparent advances in Greek studies in England over the previous thirty years, Wolsey does not wish the subject to be studied at his new school.Footnote 41
Furthermore, in Richard Cox's Plan of Work for Saffron Walden Grammar School, 1525, and William Spicer's Deed of Endowment for Cuckfield Grammar School, 1528, there is again no mention of Greek appearing on the curriculum.Footnote 42 In outlining his wishes for Saffron Walden, Cox requires the children to be taught after ‘the ordre and use of techyng gramer in the scolys of Wynchester and Eton’, while three years later at Cuckfield, Spicer hopes ‘that the said master shall teach Grammar, after the form and usage in the Grammar School at Eton’.Footnote 43 Acceding to these requests, both Eton and Winchester sent copies of their curricula to Saffron Walden, and Eton sent a copy of theirs to Cuckfield. The curricula we have today, then, for Saffron Walden and Cuckfield at the end of the 1520s, are, essentially, those of Eton and Winchester at the same period.Footnote 44 What the lack of Greek at Saffron Walden and Cuckfield schools tells us is that Eton and Winchester, at the vanguard of Greek teaching at the end of the fifteenth century, were no longer teaching Greek thirty years later.
It is beyond doubt that, in spite of the phenomenal advances in Greek and Greek teaching in English schools from c.1485 to 1518, in spite of Horman's Vulgaria, Pope's letter, and Colet's Statutes, and in spite of lavish praise of English Greek studies by Erasmus, from 1530 Greek was scarcely being taught in English schools. This is clearly demonstrated in Pope's important letter of 1556: ‘I remember when I was a yong scholler at Eton, the greeke tongue was growing apace: the studie of which is now alate much decaid’. Historians have always, rightly, paid attention to the first half of this sentence. However, crucially, it is the latter half that tells of the decline, if not the cause of the decline, of Greek teaching in Eton, certainly, and most schools, probably. Further evidence of the decline of Greek studies can be seen by examining examples which have hitherto been used, incorrectly, by historians to promulgate the very progress of Greek.
In 1552 Edward VI visited Winchester College, and the occasion was celebrated with the presentation to His Majesty of a book of Latin verses, composed by the school pupils themselves. This book still exists.Footnote 45 It contains forty-two poems written by the boys, some of great charm and quality, and at the very end of the book is a twenty line poem of Greek iambics, sporting a reference to Pindar, signed in Greek by the pupil-author Thomas Stapleton. Much has been made of this poem as evidence of the existence of vigorous Greek teaching at the College in the middle of the sixteenth century.Footnote 46
However, this solitary Greek poem fails to stand up to inspection. It is placed at the end of the book, as if deliberately to show off ‘Greek learning’. The Greek is poorly written in a messy hand and the whole page looks rather unhappy after the high quality of its Latin predecessors. Furthermore, only two years later, in 1554, King Philip of Spain was married to Queen Mary at Winchester Cathedral, and the royal couple visited the College, to be greeted with the customary gratulatory verses.Footnote 47 Critically, every single one of the twenty-five poems is written in Latin and there is nothing in Greek. Why? Had Stapleton left the school? The 1552 Greek poem by Thomas Stapleton cannot be used as evidence of a lively state of Greek teaching at Winchester College in the middle of the sixteenth century. Rather, the opposite is true: that there was little, if any, Greek of quality being taught at the school.
The danger of Greek
Goldhill provides the most plausible reason for Greek's virtual disappearance from the classrooms of English schools between 1530 and 1560, when he discusses the publication of Erasmus' Novum testamentum at Basel, in 1519.Footnote 48 Knowledge of Greek was simply too dangerous, too heretical, as the Gospels were written in Greek and study of that arcane language was a challenge to the authority of the Church. Worse, Erasmus ‘tidied’ what he regarded as the poor-quality Greek of the Gospels, edited the text, and added a facing Latin translation. The result was predictably seen as an attack on the Catholic Church, and outrage, scandal, and violence ensued, throughout Europe.Footnote 49 For Erasmus and his circle (which included Colet), Greek studies were a better method of understanding Scripture; for the Church, making Greek available to more people was an attack on all it held dear.
In the forty years following Erasmus' publication of the New Testament, until 1559, twenty-five academics and students from Cambridge (Erasmus' alma mater) were burnt at the stake for heresy, many were pursued by the agents of Thomas More, many others went into exile. The absence of Greek studies in schools can be explained by the absence of texts; and texts were not being printed, because to be associated with Greek in the middle of the sixteenth century was a dangerous pursuit. Only in 1559 did the study of Greek become freer, when the religious settlement of that year ‘formally established Protestantism as the religion of England’.Footnote 50
In 1563 Elizabeth I paid a visit to Eton College, and received the gift of a presentation book of verses.Footnote 51 This is a most beautiful book, superbly presented with attractive drawings and elegant verses, many of which can be read backwards, or as acrostics of the name Elizabeth. All the poems are in Latin, with the exception of four lines of Greek elegiacs on the reverse of the title page. The Greek is of good quality, and so it should be; it was written by William Malim, headmaster of Eton at the time of the royal visit. Other than this, the book contains nothing of Greek written by any of the boys, although it is known that Greek was being studied at Eton from c.1560, as shown by Malim's Consuetudinarium, which included, among its list of what must be taught, Greek grammar for the top two forms.Footnote 52
In 1573 the Queen visited St Paul's School, which at this date was under the mastership of the same William Malim. She was presented with a copy of twenty-one poems, seventeen of which were written in Latin, and four in Greek.Footnote 53 These two presentation books, ten years apart, provide evidence to show the beginnings of a renascent Greek learning, not only at St Paul's but at other English schools as well. Elizabeth herself was an accomplished Greek studentFootnote 54 and would have welcomed the growth of Greek learning in schools. Only two years later, in 1575, Edward Grant's indefatigable Greek Grammar was published, which took Greek education to new heights.Footnote 55
Greek had been absent from English schools in the middle of the sixteenth century where Latin had not, and began to reappear from 1558, the year of Elizabeth's accession.Footnote 56 Thus, the study of Greek in English schools between 1530 and 1560 was probably more of an aspiration, rather than fact; and, as I have argued, this was due to a shortage of texts in an age when the study of Greek was regarded as heretical and dangerous to both Church and Crown.
