The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume IX. From Steele and Addison to Pope and Swift.
§ 1. The Seventeenth Century Curriculum
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In the seventeenth century, the accepted educational curriculum of school and university, as distinct from the professional studies of divinity, law and medicine, was, in effect, the medieval seven liberal arts, but with the balance of studies somewhat changed. Of these, the quadrivium (arithmetic so-called, geometry, music, astronomy) belonged to the university; the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) was loosely distributed between schoolboys and freshmen, the latter being undistinguishable in modern eyes from the former. Anthony à Wood entered Merton in 1647 at the age of fifteen; Gibbon, more than a century later, was admitted at Magdalen before completing his fifteenth year; Bentley was a subsizar at St. John’s college, Cambridge, in 1676, at the age of fourteen. Whether the story be true or not that Milton was birched by his tutor at Cambridge, the following passage from Anthony à Wood seems conclusive that, so late as 1668, the Oxford undergraduates were liable to that punishment. Four scholars of Christ Church having broken some windows, the vice-chancellor “caused them to repair the breaches, sent them into the country for a while, but neither expelled them, nor caused them to be whipt.” Ten years later, the vice-chancellor ordered that no undergraduate buy or sell “without the approbation of his tutor” any article whose value exceeded five shillings. The Cambridge undergraduate of the eighteenth century was not a “man” but a “lad,” for himself and his companions no less than for his elders. The fact is to be remembered when the reform of university studies in that age is under discussion.