A Renaissance Education: The Schooling of Thomas More's Daughter

It's early morning in August.

The year is 1535, and a young woman is on a mission.

She's on her way to collect a head

which is rotting on a spike on London Bridge.

The only way to identify it is by a missing tooth.

When she collects the skull, she wraps it in a linen cloth

and hides it in her basket.

The severed head is her father's.

Sir Thomas More, one of the greatest intellectuals in Tudor England.

And now a traitor who'd been imprisoned in the Tower of London

by his former friend Henry VIII.

She is More's devoted daughter Margaret,

and she's just risked everything to retrieve her father's remains.

But this isn't just a tale of courage

in the face of a brutal regime.

Thomas More's plucky daughter also tells a very different story,

about the transforming power of knowledge.

The intellectual forces at work in the 16th century

proved pivotal for education.

At the start of the Tudor period,

most children learned little more than their letters and prayers.

But the ideas that shaped Margaret More's life

changed the history of education.

And with it, the cultural life of the nation.

The Tudor age began in 1485.

The vast majority of people worked on the land,

and education was beyond the reach of most.

The children who did get some kind of schooling were mainly boys.

Parents rarely encouraged their daughters.

But Margaret's experience would be very different.

Margaret More was born in London in 1505.

Most of the city she knew was destroyed in the Great Fire,

but you can still find traces of Tudor London

that Margaret would have recognised.

Like the Church of St Bartholomew the Great.

Now Protestant, it still holds part of its services in Latin,

as it would have done in Margaret's day.

Back then, England, like the rest of Europe, was Catholic,

and knowledge and education were firmly in the grip of the Church.

Margaret's father Thomas More was a fervent Catholic.

He was also a successful lawyer and influential writer.

He was to become Lord Chancellor,

one of Henry VIII's most trusted advisers.

Thomas had been well educated,

and he was determined to give his daughters

the same education as his son.

We take that for granted, but then it was a truly radical idea.

At the turn of the 16th century,

the majority of women barely needed an education.

Most would have to cook and clean when they grew up,

so that's what their mothers taught them.

My experience is entirely different.

I'm a terrible cook, but I got a brilliant education.

In Tudor England, though, they weren't expected to do much more

than learn the alphabet and memorise the Lord's Prayer.

But Margaret was a gentleman's daughter.

And Thomas had bold plans for her,

because he was one of the new breed of thinkers, a humanist.

Humanism was born in the city states of 14th century Italy -

Padua, Verona, Florence.

But now it was spreading through northern Europe.

This philosophical and cultural movement

of the Italian Renaissance was based on the study of the classics.

Humanists believed that education was about becoming a good citizen.

True nobility didn't depend on who your father was,

but on how you behaved.

So children needed a curriculum that reflected real human experience.

One modelled on classical ideas about education.

They should study languages, rhetoric, history and literature.

Margaret was reading at the age of three,

and one of her first books was Aesop's Fables.

A hungry fox saw some grapes hanging from a trellis,

and decided to get hold of them.

But he was unable to do so, and went off muttering to himself,

"They're not ripe, anyway."

So with some men, when they are too weak to achieve their purpose,

they blame the times.

This is the first English edition of Aesop's Fables,

produced by William Caxton in 1484.

It could have been this very edition Margaret read.

The pictures are so full of life, and the print is so fresh,

it almost could have been printed yesterday.

The Mores' house is long gone,

but they'd have lived somewhere like this,

a big, bustling household with lots of servants.

And at its heart was something Thomas called his school.

He wanted to inspire his children to use their minds,

so the serious business of education also needed to be fun.

Life in the More house was filled with intellectual challenges,

quizzes and conundrums.

If a clock has an hour hand and a minute hand,

when and how often will they overlap?

But was it all fun and games in the More school room?

It depends what you mean by fun and games.

Thomas More was strict, Margaret's father,

about what you could do with your spare time.

Amateur dramatics were fine, and they did that,

and I'm sure that involved a lot of dressing up.

Margaret, when she was very little, had pets.

She had a pet monkey, she had a rabbit, she kept hens.

But what More thought was really the best were games that improved

the children's minds.

So what was Margaret's daily educational routine?

The language of learning was Latin.

At first, of course, you would learn the grammar.

And then you would move to translation.

You would translate from Latin.

Quite often you would translate your English back into Latin

and compare your version with the original text

so that you could learn about style.

And in the More household,

the children would sit round the table

and write letters to each other or their tutor,

describing what they'd done the previous day,

or what they were going to do tomorrow.

Of course, they all knew those things,

but it was the practice that was involved.

And have any of her letters survived?

There is a copy here of a letter which Margaret wrote

later in life, ten years later in life.

You can see this is an extraordinarily special

sort of handwriting.

It is an italic hand. That means that it was

a hand that was first pioneered in Italy

by the founders of the humanist movement.

Look at these very, very tall, beautifully spaced consonants.

If she was doing the laundry list, it wouldn't look like this,

it would be scribble.

If she was writing a quick note to a friend,

it wouldn't look like that.

But Margaret was also taught something that very few girls

would ever learn, and even fewer would need.

Of course, the Holy Grail was rhetoric.

Rhetoric is essentially persuasion.

Imagine a barrister who is going into court for the prosecution.

He makes a brilliant speech,

and the defendant is convicted and sent to prison.

In these rhetorical games which they played,

and again they thought this was great fun,

you came out of the room, and you went back

and gave the winning speech for the defence.

And then the question was, which winning speech was more winning?

Rhetoric trains you for public life.

The public world that was of course denied, at that time, to women.

Margaret had to push the boundaries to be allowed to practise speeches.

Margaret relished the art of rhetoric.

And her father, like all humanists,

encouraged the reading of the classics.

And in particular, the works of the Roman orator Cicero.

The questions he had asked 1,500 years before

lay at the very heart of Tudor life.

Should one remain in one's country even under a tyranny?

Should a man who has done great service to his country

go out of his way to run risks for it?

Or should he be permitted to take thought for himself

and his loved ones,

abandoning endless struggles against those who have the power?

Before long, the question of working for a tyrant

would become all too real for Thomas More.

It would be a century in which people were often forced to choose

between personal beliefs

and the pragmatic question of political survival.

Subjects hotly debated by Thomas More and his fellow humanists.

In England, humanism first took hold in Oxford.

With just a handful of followers,

maybe just another wave of doomed idealists.

But they were soon to get a supporter with a lot of clout.

Their teachings influenced a child who was to become

the future King of England, Henry VIII.

When Henry came to the throne in 1509, he was 17,

and already the best educated king England had ever had,

thanks to his humanist education.

He'd studied classics, poetry, history and languages,

and he developed a passion for astronomy

which he shared with Margaret More.

They shared a teacher, too.

In 1519, Thomas brought home

a brilliant Bavarian called Nicholas Kratzer,

who thrilled the children with the wonders of the stars.

A year later, he was appointed the king's personal astronomer.

Thomas was delighted by his daughter's enthusiasm for science.

He wrote to tell her as much while he was away on royal business.

I hear you are so far advanced in that science that you cannot

only point out the Polar Star or the Dog Star,

or any of the ordinary stars,

but are able also to distinguish the sun from the moon.

Onward, then, in that new and admirable science

by which you ascend to the stars.

Dr Jim Bennett is the director

of Oxford's Museum of the History of Science.

If I were Nicholas Kratzer, say, teaching Margaret More astronomy,

I would definitely start with the armillary sphere.

This is for beginners?

It is for beginners, and it brings the heavens into

a small instrument that you can demonstrate very easily.

You can see the celestial equator.

You can see the band of the Zodiac. Sagittarius. Capricorn.

And the whole heavens turn around.

Just in the way that you see the heavens themselves turning

when you are outside.

One of the most obvious things for us

is that the sun isn't at the centre, but the Earth.

In Margaret's universe, before Copernicus,

the Earth is at rest in the centre.

And if one wanted to go further with astronomy,

might one use other instruments as well?

We know that Margaret More was taught to use an astrolabe.

Yes. This is an astrolabe.

It is a more complicated instrument than the armillary sphere,

but essentially a projection of the heavens on to a flat surface.

You have the stars,

so each of these little curly points represents a star.

And just as the heavens turn around the Earth in Margaret's universe,

once a day, so the star map on the astrolabe can turn.

So Margaret really was very privileged to have access

to this kind of cutting-edge equipment?

Indeed she was. The idea of learning astronomy from an astrolabe...

The astrolabe is the most advanced astronomical instrument of its time.

The idea of having Nicholas Kratzer as your tutor was extraordinary,

one of the leading astronomers of Europe,

and I would say her father chose her astronomical tutor

extraordinarily well.

Being taught astronomy shows just how exceptional

Margaret's education was,

expanding her intellectual horizons way beyond the City of London.

But for the king and his ambitious merchants,

Nicholas Kratzer's brand of astronomy would eventually have

a much more practical use, in navigation.

This was the Age of Discovery,

when Europe began to explore new territories and trade routes.

Spanish and Portuguese sailors had been using

sophisticated scientific instruments for some time.

But it didn't take long for England to catch up.

And with greater geographical and scientific expertise

came greater prowess in trade and war.

Henry sponsored trade expeditions, built up the Navy,

and defended England against French invasion.

And England had lost no ground to its competitors

in another sphere of technological innovation.

One which would increase literacy,

lay the foundations for a rich literary culture

and revolutionise education.

This is a replica printing press.

And printing introduced the mass production of books

for the first time.

Here are the cases where the type is kept.

You can see that in our upper case

we've got the capitals and numerals

In the lower case here, the small letters.

When we talk about upper and lower case letters today,

these are the physical cases in the printing house.

That's where it comes from? The actual cases.

Wonderful. So here I have a "y".

'After a clumsy attempt at lining up a single word,

'I realise how skilled Tudor typesetters must have been.'

You don't need to press down hard at all.

-The ink will do the work.

-Exactly.

It's very tricky getting the ink right to the edges, isn't it?

-So this has to come down.

-That's it.

-It just folds over there.

-Fold this down on top.

-Oh, it's quite heavy isn't it?

-It is a bit.

Just gently put it down.

You don't want it to bounce at all.

-That's it.

-And that's ready to go.

-All set.

-All set.

So you turn the handle anti-clockwise.

-That will roll the whole bed underneath the pattern.

-Like rowing!

-As far as it will go?

-As far as it will go.

-Like that?

So now, the moment of truth.

And there's our first attempt.

And what's so striking about this,

even for a beginner having a first go, is the speed of it.

Compared to a medieval clerk or scribe handwriting a page of text.

This is so fast. It's really revolutionary, isn't it?

Once the presses are rolling, thousands of copies can come off

-without too much further ado.

-Absolutely.

Printing didn't just revolutionise publishing.

It helped lay the foundations of a national curriculum

by mass producing textbooks.

It would also play a key role in administration.

Paperwork was at the heart of government and commerce

as a new economic era dawned.

Henry VIII's father, Henry VII, had expanded the role of government

and created the beginnings of a modern civil service.

A new political culture had been born.

It was a world which would need businessmen, lawyers and diplomats.

To keep up with their neighbours, these future professionals

would need to be masters of negotiation and debate.

Europe was enjoying a period of economic growth,

and its population was increasing.

Political alliances were crucial.

Each nation needed to hold its own

with its allies and trading partners.

To supply young men to represent it on the international stage,

England looked to its grammar schools.

Grammar schools weren't a new idea.

They'd been around since 12th century.

The large ones at Eton and Winchester

had been set up to give boys a free education.

Some were part of a monastery.

And many of the boys who studied there

went on to careers in the church.

By the early 16th century,

England already had several hundred grammar schools.

They offered an education based on the study of Latin.

Teachers used exercises called vulgaria to teach the basic grammar.

This is the Stanbridge Vulgaria, one of the best-selling grammar

books of the 16th century, and this particular copy we know

belonged to someone, perhaps a boy, named Thomas Frognall,

because he wrote in it several times to say so.

And it begins with a poem telling the reader what to do with the book.

"Choose Latin words in your heart to impress, to the end that ye may

"with all your intelligence serve God your maker holy unto his reverence.

"And if ye do not, the rod must not spare

"You for to learn with his sharp moral sense.

"Take thou good heed and harken your vulgare."

What's wonderful about this is that it isn't a book for show.

It's a book to be used,

and you can see the thought processes of Tudor education on every page.

And here at the beginning of Stanbridge's vocabulary, we have a

wonderful woodcut of a schoolmaster sitting, teaching his charges.

Only three of them sitting round his feet, rather than the hubbub

of most grammar school rooms,

and in his hand his birch twigs, in case they get out of line.

And then the sentences begin that

boys needed to learn how to translate into Latin.

"Good morrow. Good night. God speed. How farest thou?"

And down here we get to the word for a goggle-eyed woman.

Where would we be without that?!

This is Magdalen College School in Oxford.

Latin is still on the curriculum here,

but it's studied very differently now.

Today they're going to find out how it was done in Tudor classrooms.

There would have been a bit of teacher violence here and there...

Just like Margaret More, grammar school boys were taught Latin

as the cornerstone of a humanist education.

But their translations were a little more earthy.

These students have been given sentences from the vulgaria

to translate from Latin into English,

so they can experience what their Tudor counterparts had to deal with.

My Latin's not what it was, but I'm going to have a go at them too.

Some of them are very, very strange.

Any major problems?

Any other bits of vocab?

-Merda.

-Merda?

Think to your knowledge of French.

OK, merde as in crap.

So what did you think? Were these hard? Harder than normal?

-Unusual.

-Unusual? Unusual. OK.

It's a long time since I was in a Latin class,

more than 20 years, so I'm sure you'll have done better than me.

Who got something for the first one?

Sum in articulo purgandi viscera. I got completely stuck with this one.

Anyone prepared to have a go?

OK. You got?

This one was like, "I'm on the point of cleaning out my innards."

Which quite literally means, "I'm about to visit the toilet"!

Diarrhoea, probably, we're talking about, aren't we?

What about the next one?

Caput meum est plenum pediculorum.

-OK.

-"My head is full of lice."

Lovely. So what do you make of this?

What do you think is the point of having sentences like this?

Connects you with your school life.

Stuff that would captivate students' attention.

Captivates the students' attention. So you think poo, lice and diarrhoea

and things like that is a good way to get attention?

Yes. It's the sad truth!

Joking aside, the vulgaria were just the starting point.

A Tudor grammar school boy could

spend up to seven years mastering the finer points of Latin.

When the bell rings,

these pupils can leave their Latin in the classroom.

But in a Tudor school, boys had to talk in Latin all the time.

And learning to talk persuasively, the art of rhetoric,

gave them a great start in life.

It was, after all, vital for anyone wanting a career in government,

and meant they could aspire to some

of the top jobs in the country, no matter what their background.

Social mobility might seem like a very modern phenomenon.

In fact, it's been around for centuries.

In Tudor England, a bright boy from a poor background who'd learnt Latin

at grammar school stood a real chance of climbing the greasy pole.

Take the story of Thomas Wolsey.

He rose to become the second most powerful man in England.

Entirely thanks to his education,

because he came from a very humble family.

I'm off to East Anglia

to find out some more about the rise of this remarkable man.

Wolsey was born in the early 1470s in Ipswich.

His family lived here in St Nicholas Street.

There are still documents that mention Wolsey's father

in the local record office.

Wolsey senior was an innkeeper and butcher,

but barely managed to stay on the right side of the law.

Robert Wolsey was an habitue of the courts of Ipswich

and every time they met, which was only once a year,

on a Tuesday in Whitsun week, he had to answer about a dozen charges.

And I think we have an example here. What was the charge in this?

I think this is one of his most serious charges,

when he's accused of keeping a house of ill fame.

But the actual wording is "fostering harlots and adulterers

"within his house against the peace of the King."

And he and a number of other people are paying fines,

and he's paying 40 pence.

40 pence, which is a big one.

40 pence was the equivalent of about a week's wages

for a skilled craftsman.

With a rocky start in life,

the local grammar school would prove to be Wolsey's salvation.

Wolsey was prodigiously clever,

and from his Ipswich grammar school he went on to Oxford.

It was the beginning of a stellar career.

At the turn of the 16th century,

the Church provided a ready-made career structure

for well-educated boys.

Wolsey would rise to be a cardinal,

one of the highest positions in the Church.

Eventually he would also become Lord Chancellor,

and the King's right-hand man.

Education had broadened his mind and his horizons.

He wasn't alone.

Grammar schools were offering more and more boys from humble backgrounds

a route to the top.

Some of Henry VIII's most influential advisers

made their way into the political elite through their education.

But there was no slacking if you wanted to move up in the world.

I'm going to Stratford, to one of the oldest remaining

Tudor schools in the country, to get a flavour of daily life.

Hard work was what humanist teachers expected from their pupils.

The school day was 12 hours long.

Lessons began at 6am in the summer and 7am in the winter.

Imagine all those boys climbing these steps every morning

trying to remember their Latin verbs.

No food was provided at school and they had to bring their own

ink and candles to study by.

It's said that William Shakespeare studied in this very schoolroom,

and suffered too, because pupils lived in constant fear of beatings.

"Now at five of the clock by the moonlight

"I must go to my book and let sleep and sloth alone.

"And if our master hopes to wake us, he brings a rod instead of a candle."

There could well have been 100 boys in this classroom.

And there is a seat beside the door which is where the usher sits.

Now, the usher is the schoolmaster's assistant.

And at the other end, we have the great seat of the schoolmaster,

where he is presiding over the room.

The boys are arranged on forms, which are simply benches.

No back, no desk in front of it.

You sit in long lines on these benches.

And you're all down the sides of the room, facing inwards.

So that the master and the usher see the whole of the room in profile.

And I think that was an easy way to see if somebody was misbehaving.

So what would be the worst punishment a boy might have to face?

If anybody has seriously erred against school discipline,

or haven't learnt their lesson properly, they will be beaten.

For that purpose, you call out some other boys to help.

Sometimes you hoist the naughty boy onto the back of another boy.

You then pull his trousers down

and the master will administer the birch, which is a bundle of twigs,

onto his bare bottom.

So this is real pain being inflicted?

There would be real pain.

And there are lots of mentions of this in school exercises.

"I had a beating earlier this morning", and the master will say,

"Well, that's warmed you up for the day, hasn't it?"

Why was it held to be necessary or perhaps even good to beat boys?

It's because of their theory of human development.

They believed that if you left children to their own devices,

they would only play.

So in order to instil knowledge and virtue at that age,

you've got to call them to attention.

You've got to lick them into shape

as bears were believed to do with their cubs.

I think it's all part of manliness.

It's all very male and very character forming.

Education was still very much a male preserve. But change was afoot.

By the 1520s the influence of humanism in England was growing.

Margaret More's schooling had made the unthinkable thinkable.

And women's education was beginning to be taken seriously

at a very high level, by the Court itself.

Henry VIII and his Spanish wife, Catherine of Aragon,

often visited Cardinal Wolsey here at his home at Hampton Court Palace.

They'd spend days in conversation

with some of Europe's finest intellectuals.

Among them, one of Spain's leading humanists, Juan Luis Vives.

In 1524, in the hope that the King and Queen would be his patrons,

Vives published a book, The Instruction Of A Christian Woman.

It gave advice on how to bring up girls.

Vives argued that girls should be educated,

but he had some reservations.

It might seem extraordinary today, but essentially he was worried

about them having their own opinions.

"A woman must not follow her own judgment

"lest with her slight initiation into learning and the study of letters,

"she mistake false for true, harmful for salutary.

"Her whole motivation for learning should be to live

"a more upright life, and she should be careful in her judgment,

"and hold firm to what is approved by the authority of the Church

"or the unanimous accord of good men."

Thomas More had educated Margaret way beyond what Vives had suggested.

But even he believed that education for girls had its limits

and that it was about making them more virtuous.

It certainly wasn't for public display.

But his brilliant daughter had other ideas.

In 1524, in the full knowledge that her father would be appalled,

she wrote and published a book.

It was a translation of a book about the Lord's Prayer

by the leading humanist thinker of the day, Erasmus.

It was the very first time that an English woman who wasn't royal,

had published a book in her own lifetime.

A rare copy is kept here in the British Library.

In Tudor England, a woman publishing a book was shocking.

And the only concession Margaret made

was not to put her own name on the title page.

It doesn't say "by Margaret More".

What it actually says is

"by a young, virtuous and well-learned gentlewoman

"of 19 years of age".

And lo and behold, immediately below

is this fantastic picture of Margaret More

standing at her - you stood then, you didn't sit -

at her writing desk, surrounded by her books.

Where she crossed the line is that, as a woman,

she shouldn't have been doing it.

-So this was a radical step?

-It was explosive.

Not only was she a woman, she'd crossed the boundaries.

It was a transgression. It was also a religious book.

And that's incredibly sensitive.

You are not supposed to publish a religious book,

especially on a major topic like the Lord's Prayer,

that hasn't been vetted by the Church.

For the Church, this is as if the roof is going to fall in.

And did the roof fall in? What were the ramifications?

The printer is called to the Church Court to be investigated for heresy.

Margaret isn't having any of that.

She goes straight to the top, to Cardinal Wolsey, and amazingly,

he licences this book.

And we know that because on back of this title page

there is Wolsey's coat of arms, indicating he's approved this book.

-Was it popular, Margaret's book?

-I think it was.

This is clearly the second edition.

It can't be the first, because it's got Wolsey's special licence

on the title page. There are three editions that are known to survive.

Why was it so popular?

It was in English that people wanted to read.

Margaret wrote like an angel.

Her English is probably 20 years ahead of its time.

It's fluent, it's colloquial.

It draws you into the work.

The language used is almost as important as the subject matter.

O, Father in Heaven,

which of thy exceeding goodness most plenteously feedest all things

that thou has so wondrously created.

Provide for us, thy children,

which are chosen to dwell in thy celestial and heavenly house.

So had Margaret had more of a chance to publish,

we could have seen greater things?

This is the tragedy.

What the people were crying out for was a vernacular Scripture,

a Scripture in English,

not in the Latin vulgate that they couldn't read.

She could have done this better than anybody else in England,

but it doesn't enter their head she's a woman.

She's not on the agenda, she doesn't exist.

I found it so moving to see Margaret's extraordinary education

distilled into one small book,

and to think how much of a risk she took in publishing it.

Margaret was an educational trailblazer,

but Thomas was terrified

that by publishing a book and drawing attention to herself,

she'd bring the whole idea of female education into disrepute,

maybe even stop it in its tracks.

But the publication of Margaret's book

would soon be eclipsed by more devastating questions.

A chain of events was about to unfold

which would leave Tudor England changed for ever.

A woman's right to publish and the Church's power to censor

would be overshadowed by the life-or-death question

of loyalty to one's sovereign.

For the Mores, 1533 turned out to be a terrible year.

From being a favoured Royal adviser, Thomas now found himself

in dramatic conflict with Henry VIII.

He was forced to choose between his God and his King.

Henry wanted a son and heir.

He was convinced his marriage to Catherine of Aragon was invalid

and that he should be allowed to marry Anne Boleyn.

But for that, he needed the blessing of the Pope.

And the Pope said no.

Henry spent several years sending envoys to His Holiness

to try to convince him to change his mind,

but the answer was always the same.

When the Pope refused,

Henry did something extraordinary for a Catholic King.

He married Anne anyway, and broke with the Church of Rome.

Then, in 1534, he made himself supreme head of the English Church.

The English Reformation had begun.

Shock waves reverberated throughout Tudor England.

When Henry severed ties with Rome,

he demanded total loyalty from his subjects.

Thomas More found himself

torn between the two great forces in his life -

the King and his faith.

In the end, God won.

More was imprisoned in the Tower of London for just over a year

before he was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death.

BELL TOLLS

Margaret was about to lose not only her father

but the man who had educated her.

While he was in the Tower, she wrote to him constantly.

The letter Margaret wrote to her father before his execution

is the very poignant expression of a daughter's love.

Give me, your most loving, obedient daughter and hand-maid,

and all us, your children and friends,

to follow that that we praise in you,

and to our only comfort

remember that we may, in conclusion, meet with you,

mine own dear father,

in the bliss of heaven.

Thomas More was beheaded on 6th July 1535.

BIRD CAWS

The effects of Henry's break with Rome

were felt not just by the More family

but by the whole nation.

BIRD CAWS

England was convulsed by Henry's Reformation.

What was to follow

was one of the greatest acts of vandalism in English history -

the dissolution of the monasteries.

Henry started selling off Church land

and in under five years, over 800 monasteries,

friaries and nunneries were destroyed.

This is the kind of place that sends shivers down your spine.

It's the the bare skeleton of what was once a magnificent building,

and it's a last trace of Catholic England,

a world that's gone for ever.

Reading Abbey was once one of the richest in England...

until 1539,

when it fell victim to Henry's dissolution of the monasteries.

And it wasn't only the monks who suffered

when the monasteries were closed.

With them went the grammar schools they'd supported.

By the end of the 1540s,

thousands of children had nowhere to go to school.

But the pupils at Reading were lucky.

Henry decided to preserve the free grammar school

set up here by the monks.

Not wanting the dissolution of the monasteries to damage education,

he established several King's schools across the country.

Henry also saw an opportunity to use education

to force the Reformation through.

All education was now by Royal appointment.

Royal injunctions dictated how children should be brought up

as faithful members of the Church of England

rather than the Church of Rome.

The new Church used a powerful tool to install religious doctrine,

a question-and-answer method known as the Catechism.

That comes from humanism. The humanists believed very strongly

in dialogue as the best way of teaching.

They thought dialogue really engaged the person

in their own education,

and it's also just a way of breaking down

this vast body of dogma

into manageable sentences that a child can understand and learn.

Who would have taught children the Catechism?

In the first instance, it would've been your local church,

your local vicar,

but, really, this ended up being devolved into families,

mothers and, particularly, godmothers.

"What is your name?"

"Eleanor Palmer."

"Who gave you this name?"

"My godfathers and godmothers in my baptism."

"What did your godfathers and godmothers then for you?"

"They did promise and vow three things in my name.

"First, that I should forsake the Devil and all his works.

"Secondly, that I should believe all the articles of the Christian faith.

"And thirdly, that I should keep God's Holy will."

So when parents were catechising their children,

this was something fundamentally important to their child's entire future?

Their child's entire salvation,

because without that fully-instructed, rational faith, they couldn't be saved.

Learning the catechism was therefore literally a life-saving kind of business,

'more like doing a first aid course nowadays.'

It's very hard to imagine your average schoolchild

learning great swathes of religious doctrine like this today.

And not only that, but a law was later passed

saying that if children didn't know their catechism

by the time they were eight, their families would be fined.

'By 1550, the Protestant Reformation was firmly established.

'And at its heart was the English Bible.'

It had been published in the 1530s

and was becoming the most widely read book in the country.

It offered direct access to the word of God.

What better incentive to learn to read?

'Literacy levels rose,

'but children didn't limit themselves to religious texts.'

'The printing press had revolutionised publishing,

'and in Margaret More's London, more books than ever were passing from hand to hand.'

The Tudor sense of humour tended toward the scatological.

Rude jokes usually went down well.

But the 16th century did have its disapproving voices.

William Tyndale, the first translator of the Bible into English,

was concerned that children were being corrupted

by the popular texts pouring off the presses.

'Tales like The Friar And The Boy, a favourite among Tudor children,

'with its story of Jack,

'who casts a farting spell on his wicked stepmother.'

"She stared him in the face.

"With that, she let go such a blast as made the people all aghast.

"It sounded through the place, each one did laugh

"and made good game.

"But the cursed wife grew red through shame and wished she had been gone."

'This was an era of great cultural upheaval.

'Change was happening so fast that, without the supportive relationship with her father,

'Margaret withdrew into a world of religious contemplation,

'devoting her energies to her father's memory

'and educating her own children according to his principles.'

In the years since Margaret began her extraordinary education,

humanism had permeated English culture

and the Reformation had begun to transform Tudor society.

These momentous changes unleashed a burst of unprecedented artistic activity

under the aegis of another woman who had had a first-class humanist education.

Unlike Margaret, though, she used it in a very public way.

'Elizabeth I was born in 1533,

'the only child of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.

'Her mother was executed, and it was only at the age of nine,

'when she was taken under the wing of Henry's sixth wife, Catherine Parr,

'that Elizabeth's education really took off.'

She was a gifted pupil who threw herself into her studies.

Elizabeth received the same superb education as her brother, Edward.

She studied astronomy, maths and history,

and was taught both classical and modern languages.

'Elizabeth made this beautiful book for Catherine Parr when she was 11.'

It's her translation of a French poem called The Mirror Of A Sinful Soul.

'It's written in her own hand

'and bound in a piece of exquisite embroidery.

'The needlework was a traditionally feminine skill.'

The scholarship of the words most certainly wasn't.

'At the beginning of the book, before the translation starts,

'Elizabeth has written a dedication to her stepmother

to show off not only her beautiful handwriting, of which she was very proud,

but also her skill at putting together a rhetorical address.

And she begins,

"To our most noble and virtuous Queen Catherine,

"Elizabeth, her humble daughter, wisheth perpetual felicity and everlasting joy."

'Elizabeth follows her letter to Catherine with a note to the reader.'

"If thou dost read this whole work, behold rather the matter, and excuse the speech,

"considering it is the work of a woman which hath in her neither science or knowledge."

It's extraordinary that at the age of 11,

Elizabeth has already mastered the rhetorical skill of false modesty

that was to serve her so well as Queen.

I fell in love with history when I was five years old

and I read a book about Elizabeth's childhood.

This book has been in my imagination ever since.

When Elizabeth was studying, her fate was deeply uncertain.

But when she eventually come to the throne in 1558, her training in rhetoric gave her a great advantage.

Her extraordinary speeches played a huge part in establishing her authority as Queen.

When the Spanish Armada was threatening England in 1588,

Elizabeth gave one of her most famous speeches.

I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman,

but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England, too.

And think foul scorn that Parma or Spain,

or any Prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm,

to which, rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms.

I myself will be you general, judge

and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.

Elizabeth's education helped make her one of the greatest monarchs England had ever had.

Under her rule, England defended its borders against the Spanish

and expanded them in exploring new worlds.

She was the glorious queen of a flourishing kingdom.

But, as a woman, Elizabeth was in an exceptional position.

She could put her education to very public use.

Unlike Margaret More, who died in 1544.

She may never have achieved real recognition,

but she had been in the vanguard of an intellectual revolution.

The humanist values underpinning her education

were the foundation stones of the English Renaissance,

which would reach its height in the reign of Elizabeth.

From the Queen down, education was playing a new part in shaping what it meant to be English.

And at the heart of this English Renaissance

was a grammar-school boy from Stratford, William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's memories of his grammar school education in the 1570s clearly influenced his work.

And he wrote one of the most memorable accounts of growing up in As You Like It.

One man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

At first the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

Then the whining school boy, with his satchel

and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school.

One of the wonderful things about Shakespeare is that he

leaves all sorts of fingerprints of his background in his work.

So, for instance, in his comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor,

there's a wonderful scene that offers a Latin lesson.

There's a Welsh schoolmaster, and we know Shakespeare had a Welsh schoolmaster here in Stratford,

and there's a clever, cheeky boy who's being given a grammar lesson

and the boy, surprise surprise, is called William.

Is there any way of telling whether he enjoyed it, enjoyed school?

Well, does any little boy enjoy getting up at 6.00am

and studying 12 hours of Latin grammar and syntax every day?

That said, when it actually came to studying the literature that was available in the upper forms,

Shakespeare was clearly very excited.

His imagination was fired by the poetry, the stories of the great poets of ancient Rome.

Can we tell what he read at school?

One of the key texts was by the great humanist educator Erasmus.

It would teach you the art of using language in clever and varied ways.

So, for example, an exercise Shakespeare would have done

would have begun with the boys saying, "greetings" in Latin.

"Salve!" And then, "greetings to you".

"Salve et tu". Then, "Greetings to you father". "Salve et tu pater".

Making it more and more complicated, then maybe throwing in a bit of comedy

to keep it lively for the boys.

"Greetings to you, you who fills the bottomless pit

"of your stomach with cake and indulges in an excess of ale".

You suddenly see there the language is becoming

like that of Shakespeare's comedies, of Falstaff, for example.

If he hadn't had this grammar school education,

could he still have become the William Shakespeare we know today?

I really don't think he could. I think there's an absolutely symbiotic relationship between

the Tudor educational revolution,

the great expansion of the number of grammar schools in 16th century,

and the literary renaissance of the Elizabethan era.

That's to say, the grammar schools were founded for the mundane reason

of providing a generation of boys who could become

civil servants, legal administrators, secretaries to politicians,

but the brightest, most imaginative boys were inspired

by what they learnt of the techniques of language and the literature of the ancient world,

inspired to become poets and dramatists themselves, not to become civil servants.

So, the flowering of the theatre and poetry

in the last 20 years of Queen Elizabeth's reign

really was precisely to do with that educational revolution.

Shakespeare, as a poet, as a playwright, really began in school.

Shakespeare's achievement

was to show just how rich a language English could be.

And, along with the publication of the English Bible,

Shakespeare played the greatest part in creating the language we speak today.

The England Shakespeare knew was very different from the one

Margaret More grew up in almost a century before.

The Church of England had given the country a new identity with the English language at its core.

And the flowering of that language in literature and philosophy

had given us the English Renaissance.

The ideas about education that had shaped Margaret More's life

had helped to change England forever.

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