U) ( \ ' Jf (\ ./v r *! r r ji < f} 5 7 > | \ f * ( i | 1 < t mt 51 i 11 ffi O [ ./: 1 t I I'llOiiriv '^y ■ ■; '/ k :}Kiy, ■ 7iK > v | National Library of Scotland illllllllllllllllllllillllllli *6000536714* Hfl2'2l3'D'/3gg' SCS.SH55. 511^54- SCOTTISH HISTORY SOCIETY FIFTH SERIES VOLUME 19 Scottish Schools and Schoolmasters 1560-1633 Scottish Schools and Schoolmasters 1560-1633 t John Durkan Edited and revised by Jamie Reid-Baxter SCOTTISH HISTORY SOCIETY 2006 THE BOYDELL PRESS © Scottish History Society 2013 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2013 A Scottish History Society publication in association with The Boydell Press an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN 978-0-906245-28-6 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Papers used by Boydell & Brewer Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall UK ^ & R k O' LDA/ n A ^ CONTENTS Acknowledgements viii Preface ix Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 Section I: Schools before the Reformation 3 1.1 Celtic schools 3 1.2 Post-Celtic schools 5 1.3 Monastery schools 9 1.3.1 Benedictines, including Tironensians and Cluniacs 9 1.3.2 Augustinians and Premonstratensians 13 1.3.3 Cistercians 16 1.4 Convents and the education of girls 19 1.5 The friars 20 1.6 Schoolmasters 22 1.6.1 Graduates 22 1.6.2 Collegiate clergy 23 1.6.3 Household chaplains 25 1.7 Schools in towns 27 1.8 Song schools 34 1.9 Schoolmasters’ qualifications 36 1.10 The eve of the Reformation 39 Section II: The Impact of the Reformation 45 11.1 The First Book of Discipline and roofless kirks 45 11.2 General Assemblies to 1567 48 11.3 The situation under the godly regents 53 II. 4 Readers 58 11.5 Recruitment of ministers: a pattern for recruitment of 60 schoolmasters? 11.6 Post-Reformation schools as university feeders 67 11.7 Universities, the Kirk and the state 70 Section HI: Schools after the Reformation 75 111.1 Schoolmasters affected by religious change 75 111.2 A case study in early Reformed schooling: James Melville at 79 Montrose 111.3 The school day 84 111.4 Buchanan’s plan for St Andrews in 1563 86 111.5 Terminology: schoolboys, schoolmasters and doctors 86 111.6 Pedagogues and aristocrats 89 Section IV: Schoolbooks, Grammarians and Schoolmaster Poets 97 IV.l Alexander Hepburn of Dundee and his grammar 97 IV.2 Andrew Simson of Dunbar and texts used in teaching 99 IV.3 John Ray of Edinburgh 108 IV.4 Hercules Rollock of Edinburgh 110 IV.5 Alexander Hume of Dunbar and the grammar monopoly 112 IV.6 Andrew Duncan of Dundee and his grammar 125 IV.7 James Carmichael of Haddington and his grammar 129 IV.8 George Lightbody of Haddington and his grammar 139 IV.9 Robert Williamson of Cupar and his grammar 140 IV. 10 David Wedderburn of Aberdeen wins the grammar monopoly 147 Section V: Subjects other than Grammar 151 V. l Music and song schools 151 V.2 Writing schools 166 V.3 Languages 172 V.4 Dame schools, fencing schools 175 V. 5 Religious teaching 175 Section VI: Schoolmasters and their Status 177 VI. l Burgh schoolmasters 177 VI.2 Parish schoolmasters 180 VI.3 Doctors 182 VI.4 Schoolmasters’ circumstances: evidence from testaments 183 VI.5 Endowment of schools 184 VI.6 Schoolmasters in the courts 186 Section VII: Schooling in the Highlands 191 Section VIII: Final Considerations and Conclusions 197 VIII.l Royal interference in education 197 VIII.2 Growth of educational provision to 1633 199 VIII.3 The school day c.1630 201 VIII.4 Final conclusions 203 Appendices 1. Scottish university matriculations 1560-1633 207 2. Pointers for local history research 210 2.1 Schoolmasters in Ayr 210 2.1.1 Grammar school 210 2.1.2 Music school 214 2.2 Glasgow down to 1700 215 2.2.1 Pre-Reformation masters 215 2.2.2 Post-Reformation masters 217 2.2.3 Other Glasgow parishes 225 List of Schools and Schoolmasters in Scotland 1560-1633 229 Supplementary List: Schools and Schoolmasters 1634-1660 383 Bibliography 393 Index of schoolmasters’ names 419 General index 440 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book has been a long time in the preparation. It began with my discovery that the Registers of Deeds in the Scottish Record Office were worth exploring for the signatures of schoolmasters (and occasionally for their contracts of employment), and for indications of schools. Examina- tion of the Registers took well over a year of daily visits to the Register House. During that time I was fortunate to have aroused the interest in my project of many colleagues and co-workers on early records; these anonymous helpers I would like to thank. Especially helpful was Mr John Ballantyne who not only directed my attention to sources I might have ignored, but made a point of collecting names of schools and schoolmasters in registers post-dating 1633 where my own explorations ended. Another diligent helper was Professor Robert Adam of the History Department of St Andrews University, collecting material regarding the north-east. All this information I assembled on cards, where the schools were listed in alphabetical order and map-references supplied for less immediately iden- tifiable school sites. In this I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Miss Patricia Martin of Glasgow University Library. The transfer of this material by word-processor into an alphabetically arranged sequence for publication, the compilation of the alphabetical list of schoolmasters, a list of abbreviations and a bibliography were all the work of Helen Cummings, without whom these researches would never have seen the light. She was also responsible for typing part of the introduction. The rest was typed by Jamie Reid-Baxter, Honorary Research Fellow in Scottish History at Glasgow, who gave up some twelve months of paid work in Luxembourg, over several years, to work on the whole text. His work was held up for several years when the almost finished product was lost in a computer disaster in the Baillie Room of Glasgow University’s Scottish History Department, and so I must finally thank the Scottish History Society for their patience in awaiting delivery. John Durkan Lenzie, February 2006 PREFACE A word of explanation is required with regard to the unpardonably long delay in getting this monument of John Durkan’s scholarship into print. The original commissioners of this book, albeit not in anything like its present form, were the Scottish Record Society, the idea being to make available all the results of John’s years-long search through all surviving records for the names of schoolmasters throughout Scotland between 1560 and 1633, in the shape of the Lists which form the second part of the present volume. The preparation of the Lists of Schoolmasters had already been dealt with and typed up by Mrs Helen Gumming, working as a paid assistant on a short-term contract; in July 1995, it was my immense privilege to begin what turned out to be several summers of work as a volunteer assistant, by means of taking large blocks of unpaid leave from my job in Luxembourg with the European Parliament. My task was, on the one hand, to check references, and on the other, to type up the Introduction Dr Durkan was writing to put the Lists of Schoolmasters into context. That Introduction grew and grew - and grew. Once that task of transcription was complete, I did much reordering and reshaping of the material, all with Dr Durban’s approval: he read each version of the Introduction as I supplied it. At the end of summer 1999, the work was wellnigh complete when I left University Gardens late at night on the eve of yet another return to Luxembourg - and failed to make a back-up diskette copy of that final version. I was never informed of the identity of the person who shortly thereafter crashed the Baillie Room computer, wiping its hard disk, and thus elimi- nating the final electronic version of the Introduction and of the List of Schoolmasters. It was this setback that caused the initial delay to the publi- cation. Mercifully, there were hard copies of recent versions of the Intro- duction, and these were duly scanned in 2000. But scans are never perfect, and the work of proofreading them stretched out, as my own life and its demands increasingly intervened. Being based in Luxembourg (as I would be until May 2012) hardly made matters easier. It then transpired that the ancient computer on which Helen Gumming had painstakingly typeset the all-important Lists had ‘died’.The Lists were salvaged from the hard disk, but the typesetting had gone haywire, and though a hard copy existed, it could not be found. When Roger Mason of the University of St Andrews asked me why nothing was happening with Schools and Schoolmasters, I explained PREFACE the impasse and asked Dr Mason (as he then was) if he could perhaps supply a team of postgraduate students who could help me ‘blitz’ what remained to be done and get the book out.