Education in Medieval Scotland
The Education Act 1496 decreed that all sons of barons and freeholders of substance should attend grammar schools to learn "perfyct Latyne".
[1] For education, outside of occasional references in documents concerned with other matters, they amount to a handful of burgh records and monastic and episcopal registers.
Fuller sources for Ireland of the same period suggest that there were filidh, who acted as poets, musicians and historians, often attached to the court of a lord or king, and who passed on their knowledge in Gaelic to the next generation.
They often trained in bardic schools, of which a few, such as the one run by the MacMhuirich dynasty, who were bards to the Lord of the Isles,[5] existed in Scotland and a larger number in Ireland, until they were suppressed from the seventeenth century.
[2] The new religious orders that became a major feature of Scottish monastic life in this period also brought new educational possibilities and the need to train larger numbers of monks.
Dominican friars were noted for their educational achievements[11] and were usually located in urban centres, probably teaching grammar, as at Glasgow and Ayr.
[15] The growing humanist-inspired emphasis on education cumulated with the passing of the Education Act 1496, thought to have been steered through parliament by the Keeper of the Privy Seal William Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen,[15] which decreed that all sons of barons and freeholders of substance should attend grammar schools to learn "perfyct Latyne".
All this resulted in an increase in literacy, which was largely concentrated among a male and wealthy elite,[8] with perhaps 60 per cent of the nobility being literate by the end of the period.
[14] From the end of the eleventh century, universities had been founded across Europe, developing as semi-autonomous centres of learning, often teaching theology, mathematics, law and medicine.
[16] Until the fifteenth century, those Scots who wished to attend university had to travel to England, to Oxford or Cambridge, or to the Continent.
[14] Among these travelling scholars, the most important intellectual figure was John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308), who studied at Oxford, Cambridge and Paris.
[17] The continued movement to other universities produced a school of Scottish nominalists at Paris in the early sixteenth century, of which John Mair (1467–1550) was a member.
Henry Wardlaw, bishop of St. Andrews, petitioned the anti-Pope Benedict XIII during the later stages of the Great Western Schism, when Scotland was one of his few remaining supporters.
As a result, Scottish scholars continued to visit the Continent and returned to English universities after they reopened to Scots in the late fifteenth century.
This put an emphasis on classical authors, questioning some of the accepted certainties of established thinking and manifesting itself in the teaching of new subjects, particularly through the medium of the Greek language.
[22] However, in this period, Scottish universities largely had a Latin curriculum, designed for the clergy, civil and common lawyers.
They did not teach the Greek that was fundamental to the new humanist scholarship, focusing on metaphysics and putting a largely unquestioning faith in the works of Aristotle, whose authority would be challenged in the Renaissance.
[17] A major figure was Archibald Whitelaw, a teacher at St. Andrews and Cologne who later became a tutor to the young James III and served as royal secretary from 1462 to 1493.
[24] By 1497, the humanist and historian Hector Boece, born in Dundee and who had studied at Paris, returned to become the first principal at the new university of Aberdeen.
[25] These international contacts helped integrate Scotland into a wider European scholarly world and would be one of the most important ways in which the new ideas of Humanism were brought into Scottish intellectual life in the sixteenth century.
