The universities, at first, were frequented chiefly by poor men’s sons, and scarcely attended by the upper classes. In Chaucer’s time, the _Clerk of Oxenford_ was lean and threadbare, and had but little gold, and his two Cambridge scholars were in no better case. Nearly two centuries later, Sir Thomas More says: “Then may we yet like poor scholars of Oxford, go a-begging with our bags and wallets, and sing ‘_Salve, Regina_’” (a carol) “at rich men’s doors.” However, gradually during the sixteenth century, a university education became so fashionable that rich men’s sons crowded in, and “scrooged” (I quote Dr. Furnivall) poor students out of the proceeds of endowments left expressly for them. Still, in 1517, the old ideal of a gentleman as yet held its own, as is amusingly related by Pace in his _De Fructu_. He tells how “one of those whom we call gentlemen, who always carry some horn hanging at their backs, as though they would hunt during dinner, said: ‘I swear by God’s body I would rather that my son should hang than study letters. For it becomes the sons of gentlemen to blow the horn nicely, and to hunt skilfully, and elegantly carry and train a hawk. But the study of letters should be left to the sons of rustics....’”
But Pace was equal to him. “You do not seem to me to think aright, good man,” said I, “for if any foreigner were to come to the king, such as are ambassadors of princes, and an answer had to be given to him, your son if he were educated as you wish, could only blow his horn, and the learned sons of rustics would be called to answer, and they would be far preferred to your hunter or fowler son,” &c.
The fashion among noblemen of sending their sons abroad to study, either at a university or with a tutor, did not prevail widely until later. In the twelfth century, indeed, the “English nation” was famous at the University of Paris, but was composed largely of poor but earnest students, some of whom became famous men; and even these had ceased to study there before the fifteenth century.
Younger sons of good birth, in the service of a man of rank, were usually taught by a “maistyr” or tutor in the household in which they were placed. It is only in later books like Seager’s that these rules of demeanour were applied extensively to schoolboys. Doubtless gentlemen’s sons went to Winchester (after 1373) and to Eton (after 1440); but of the thirty grammar-schools endowed before 1500, all the others were attended chiefly by the middle classes. The early monastic schools doubtless entertained young noblemen; but the cathedral schools founded by Henry VIII. seem to have been for citizens’ children, such as the boy in Symon’s _Lesson of Wisdom_, who is urged to learn fast so that when the old bishop dies he may be ready to take his place. However, even earlier we find complaints of the monastic schools which helped each shoemaker to educate his son, and each beggar’s brat to be a writer and finally a bishop, so that lords’ sons must kneel to him.