Rethinking the Form and Function of Schools in Seventeenth-Century England: a detailed examination of the Wase Papers, Corpus Christi College, Oxford

Abstract

Historians writing about education in early modern England have generally been able to rely on only two types of primary source: contemporary authors who concentrated on teaching methods, and surviving school records. The former covered only one aspect of education while locating enough of the latter to provide a statistically representative national sample of schools is challenging. The result has been accounts of educational provision that were necessarily based on incomplete evidence. Yet a primary source containing information about 537 endowed schools, much of it very detailed, has existed for 350 years: the Wase Collection held in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford contains manuscripts gathered as part of the first national survey of schools in England and Wales conducted between 1673 and 1677. While the existence of the Collection was publicised in 1953 it has never been fully analysed, probably because the variations in the ways in which the information is presented made the analysis of the data too complex a task prior to the ready availability of computerised databases. The purpose of the research of which this dissertation is the first result, is to undertake that analysis and, in so doing, establish what the collection adds to our knowledge of education in early modern England. This work has provided new information on many aspects of education in the period including the variety of schools, the ways in which secondary education was provided to poor children and the funding of endowed schools. It has also been possible to examine aspects of education in the period about which little has been written such as the ways in which schools were managed and schoolmasters’ backgrounds. The collection contains so much material that it enables a re-evaluation of many important aspects of the history of schooling in the seventeenth century.