Lowestoft Schools 1570-1730

Annot’s Free Grammar School

The single most important event in the process of public education in Lowestoft during the early modern period came in June 1570, when Thomas Annot (merchant) founded a free grammar school. A summary of the original deed of gift is to be found in the Rev. John Arrow’s Memorandum Book (he was Lowestoft’s parish priest, 1760-89) – Norfolk Record Office - PD 589/92, pp. 13-14. And it is also present in Edmund Gillingwater’s An Historical Account of the Ancient Town of Lowestoft (1790), p. 299. The preamble particularly has an evocative quality about it. As he considered the state of the town in which he lived, Annot saw that it was “replenished with great numbers of youth who are very uncivil and ignorant for want of good Instruction and Education And the more for that they have within the said Town small or no trade to bring up their youth of the younger sort until they shall be trained and used to the Sea or other Service to preserve them from Idleness and other Misdemeanours…” 

Thus it was that he dedicated the revenues from an estate in Wheatacre, Norfolk, to pay a salary of £13 6s. 8d. to a master who would instruct forty boys in “the Rules and Principles of Grammar and the Latin Tongue and other Things incident and necessary to the said Art”. Thus, the curriculum was not as wide-ranging as some other contemporary grammar schools, where boys were taught both Latin and Greek, and where (during the early part of the seventeenth century) even Hebrew might have been introduced to older students. However, its teaching of Latin would also seem to have placed it on a higher level than some of the other free schools and lower forms of grammar school of the time, where the skills taught were often largely concerned with basic literacy and with practical mathematics and accounts. Though nothing is stated, starting age would probably have been around seven years old, leaving at something like twelve to fourteen. 

It was intended that the forty scholars in Lowestoft be indigenous to the town, but if there were not enough to make up the number then a simple residential qualification would suffice. And if the full complement could not be mustered from among the youth of the town, then the number was to be made up from boys living anywhere in the local half-hundred of Lothingland. No records for the institution have survived, but it is known that the first schoolhouse stood immediately east of the churchyard in an enclosure belonging to the Town Trust (it is mentioned in the 1618 Manor Roll – Suffolk Archives, Ipswich - 194/A10/73). It performed the function for the best part of a hundred years, before falling into a state of disrepair. In 1674, part of the Town Chamber (on the first floor) was fitted out as a replacement schoolroom and served this purpose from then on, throughout the rest of the seventeenth century and for much of the eighteenth. The commitment shown towards education on the part of the town fathers, in making premises available, is typical of the time – though Annot’s School never benefited from the revenues deriving from charitable lands, as was the case in some other communities.

After the death of Thomas Annot, in November 1577, the responsibility for paying the schoolmaster’s salary fell first of all on his widow, Agnes, and then upon his step-daughter Christian and her husband, William French (merchant). The legal complications which ensued after the deaths of the founder, hinging upon certain of his heirs (and supposed heirs) disputing the legality of the original bequest, led to an expensive lawsuit in 1591. Most of the money spent on defending Annot’s intentions was drawn from the Town Lands revenue, which was meant primarily to be spent on the relief of poverty in the community. Eventually, after the dispute had dragged on for another seventeen years, a Chancery decree of 10 June 1608 was made to safeguard the school’s existence. Both John Arrow’s Memorandum Book, pp. 21-6, and Gillingwater’s work, pp. 323-5, are able to cast light on the matter.           

Another threat to its survival came much later, during the 1670s (resulting perhaps from the dilapidated state of the original building), when Sir Thomas Allin (or Allen), a former townsman, tried to close it down in favour of a foundation of his own. Allin had been granted a baronetcy in 1669 for his services as a leading Naval Commander and, having made a considerable fortune from prize money and the manipulation of naval contracts, had purchased the Somerleyton Estate in 1672. He lived there for the last thirteen years of his life (he was sixty years old when he acquired the property), setting himself up as a country gentleman. At some point during his retirement, it seems that he formed the desire to leave a permanent memorial to himself in his native town and saw the opportunity to do this, using a large house on a freehold plot on the north side of Swan Lane, close to its western boundary with Fair Green (on land held, significantly, by the manor of Somerleyton). In today’s terms, the location would have been to the west of Jubilee Way and not far from the lower end of Park Road.

This building is the one referred to in the 1674 Hearth Tax as having eleven fire-places, and and it eventually became the so-called Shire House, where legal Quarter Sessions and Petty Sessions were held during the second half of the eighteenth century. Allin might well have had it built for his future retirement, before acquiring the Somerleyton estate made it surplus to requirement. He certainly seems never to have lived in it and, having bought his country seat, he tried to thrust it upon the people of Lowestoft as an appropriate venue for the school that he wished to endow as a replacement for Thomas Annot’s. He was not successful in his attempts, and nor was his son Thomas, who succeeded his father to both the baronetcy and the Somerleyton Estate in October 1685. The reasons for the Allins’ failure to assert their will are not clear, but there are two possibilities. 

It is likely that the leading Lowestoft townsmen (who had allowed the re-location of Annot’s School to the Town Chamber) wished to see it continue its hundred-year function.  Then there is the matter of possible resentment on their part towards one of their own kind who, having gained both fame and fortune, seemed desirous of perpetuating his own memory in the home-town where he no longer chose to reside. Furthermore, Allin had also acquired the Lowestoft manorial title in 1672, as well as that of Somerleyton, and there is perhaps more than a hint of resentment towards him on the part of the chief tenants of the manor in imposing a fine of 20s on him at the annual let court (which dealt with infringement and breaking of manorial rules), in 1672 and 1673, for not maintaining a steelyard (weighing apparatus) in the main market-area.   

It is clear that the first Sir Thomas was serious in his attempt to set up a school because he attempted to stop the salary of the master of Annot’s foundation - though his means of doing so are not known. The man in question was called Henry Britten and a letter written by him in retirement at Wickham Market on 26 December 1701 describes how “old Sir Thomas” made life awkward for him because of his refusal to resign from his post (Gillingwater, pp. 326-7). It also makes reference to how Allin’s building was being used to house a school teaching writing and English, run by a man called John Evans – he who functioned as both scrivener and Town Clerk in Lowestoft during the later part of the seventeenth century and the earlier part of the eighteenth (arriving in town at some point  and first appearing in parish register material on 20 February 1682, when he and his wife Dorothy had a son John baptised). Sir Thomas wished to divert the salary of Annot’s schoolmaster to his new educational venture, but Henry Britten stood his ground – almost certainly with the backing of the townspeople. When, eventually, he did resign in 1696, both Sir Thomas Allin and his successor were dead and there appear to have been no further attempts to close down the free grammar school. 

In 1716, the number of pupils was formally reduced from forty to sixteen, with the decision being taken that the master should only teach as many boys as he received pounds clear in remuneration. This seems to have been in recognition of the fact that £16 per annum (the original salary had been augmented by £2 13s. 4d. by the Chancery decree of 1608) was not a great deal of reward for instructing forty boys. The school continued in existence until the later years of the nineteenth century (though amalgamated by then with a National School) and it finished its days during the earlier part of the twentieth as Mariner’s Score School – an all-age establishment for children who lived in the northern part of town. 

Given the fact of some degree of commitment on the part of local people towards Annot’s School, it is disappointing that no documentary evidence has survived to show specifically who was educated there. The remarks of the founder, in considering the state of the young male population of Lowestoft in 1570, would seem to suggest that he was thinking of boys who belonged to the families of seafarers, and perhaps of lesser tradespeople and craftsmen, rather than those of the merchant fraternity. In the event, it is not known who received formal education as a result of Annot’s munificence and a certain amount of conjecture has to be employed in arriving at any notion of the foundation’s effect on the town. As is demonstrated elsewhere in these pages (in the article on Literacy), there was quite a high degree of this among merchants, tradespeople, seafarers and craftsmen, and much of the proficiency was probably due to the influence of Annot’s School. Furthermore, there are no references in any of the native townspeople’s wills to bequests of money left to either of the universities at Cambridge or Oxford – which may suggest that, whatever education was received by Lowestoft’s boys and young men, it was contained within a local context. 

The only evidence of a bequest to one of the universities is to be found in the will of Ann Hunt (gentleman’s widow), in December 1671. She endowed a scholarship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in memory of her son, John Collins, who had studied law there and who had died in Lowestoft the previous month. He was the young man referred to elsewhere in the pages (again, in the article on Literacy in the town, where his large collection of books was mentioned). Neither he nor his mother was native to Lowestoft. They were simply living there at the time of their respective deaths.

By the terms of its foundation, the master of Annot’s School had to be a man of good character and a member of the Church of England. Any successful candidate for the post was recommended by the Vicar of Lowestoft and his two churchwardens to the Chancellor of Norwich Diocese. The Chancellor then made the appointment formally and granted the master’s licence (Gillingwater, p. 325). At least six of the men appointed were in holy orders and there may have been others who were also ordained. Unfortunately, the lack of documentation on the school does not allow all the serving masters to be named.

Stephen Phillipp, a clergyman, was the first of them and he performed his duties from the time of inception until his death in 1605. He became well integrated into the life of his adopted town through marrying into a family of mariners and blacksmiths (the Witchinghams) in July 1571 and by later becoming Parish Clerk. He kept the registers from 1584 onwards, thereby reversing a trend ascertainable in Elizabethan times whereby parish clerks sometimes undertook to act as schoolmasters if they were competent to do so. He may well have assumed parochial duties in order to supplement his income (he and his wife produced eleven children, though only three of them survived), and he also acted as a scribe for probate material: thirty-two wills and seven inventories written in his exemplary hand have survived.

He may already have known (or had knowledge of) the Vicar of the time, William Nashe (1561-74), because Nashe also had married into the Witchingham family after the death of his first wife in February 1562 (Thomas Nashe, the Elizabethan writer and wit was a child of this second union). On the other hand, both Vicar and Schoolmaster would have been quite closely acquainted through their respective duties, so it is equally possible that  Phillipp became acquainted with the Witchinghams through regular contact with the minister. His own will of 26 November 1605, written by an unknown scribe (his burial being recorded on 4 December), left his wife the house in which they lived – this, suggesting that the Annot’s School building itself abutting the Churchyard wall did not incorporate accommodation for the Master. Or, if it did, was not adequate for the needs of Phillip and his family.

His successor, Brian Warde, another ordained man, only served as schoolmaster in Lowestoft for about five years. His burial is not recorded in the registers, but his death must have occurred before 29 November 1612, the date on which his widow remarried. A son, Thomas, was baptised a week later on 7 December, so it would seem that Margaret Warde had delayed the child’s christening, having first arranged herself a husband (one Edward Barnard, a widower himself) to ensure its well-being. She and her first husband had married as single people in September 1607. During his relatively brief time in Lowestoft, Brian Warde also acted as vicar for a five or six month period in 1610 between the death of John Gleson (June) and the arrival of Robert Hawes (December).

There is a gap of twelve years before the next master is detectable. Richard Linsye was in holy orders and, just like Stephen Phillipp and Brian Warde, he was also a married man. He and his wife had a daughter baptised in November 1624, followed by another daughter in February 1626 and a son in July 1628. Linsye himself was buried in July 1641 and the only other documentary information relating to him is a surviving will of 1633 (that of Henry Wodshed, a yeoman) of which he was the scribe. No successor to him is identifiable and the next ascertainable appointment is that of Henry Britten in 1667. Britten does not feature at all in parish register entries, and if it were not for Sir Thomas Allin’s attempt to divert the Annot bequest his period of service might have gone unrecorded. Again, he appears to have been ordained, because a court baron minute of the 1670s refers to him as “clerk” – the term “clerk in holy orders” being a common description of Church of England clergy.

He was succeeded in 1696 by the Revd. John Troughton who, in due course, was also to act as curate of the combined benefice (lasting for a few years) of Lowestoft and Kessingland. When Troughton resigned from the post in about 1705, Joseph Poolhouse became at least the sixth clergyman to fill it and he worked at his calling for twelve years, before being presented to the living of Carlton Colville. There is no record of an immediate successor, so he may have continued teaching for a while as well as ministering to his parish. In 1720, Henry Wilde was appointed – a man who, according to Edmund Gillingwater (p. 300), had a talent for various Middle Eastern languages and was nicknamed “the Arabian Tailor” because of it – and who only remained in Lowestoft for about eighteen months before leaving to teach these foreign tongues in London. The name of his successor has not been discovered, which effectively brings to an end what is known of Lowestoft’s free grammar school during the period covered in this article.

Other schools

The establishment run by John Evans in the building erected by Sir Thomas Allin offered a less elevated curriculum than Annot’s School, but would have performed a useful function nevertheless. A contemporary report of it as “a writing school” identifies an emphasis on basic literacy and it may also have concentrated on simple numeracy as well, thereby equipping its pupils with what became known later as “The Three Rs”. Establishments of this nature were also referred to as petty schools (the word petty itself deriving from French petit and referring to the “small skills” of reading and writing as opposed to the greater ones of Latin and Greek) and there are a number of descriptions of them to be found in studies of the early modern period. At least one commentator (Lawrence Stone, in Past and Present, vol. 28 - July 1964 - pp. 42-4), expressed the opinion that such centres of learning fell into two different categories: petty schools themselves, which taught children basic literacy, and free schools (or lower forms of grammar school) which provided instruction in reading, writing, practical mathematics and accounts, and which aimed at preparing boys for apprenticeship. 

One thing which distinguished these places from the grammar schools proper was that the teaching was conducted in English vernacular, whereas the grammar schools used Latin and Greek as well as the native language. A number of Elizabethan teachers and educationalists (most notably, Richard Mulcaster) advocated not only use of the vernacular throughout all schools in England, but also urged standardisation of both grammatical usage and spelling in order to produce a truly uniform national tongue. Their recommendations were not acted upon and it was another hundred years before a formal English grammar began to emerge. The logic and discipline of the new age of science and discovery demanded that the language become more ordered and such formal grammar as tended to emerge during the first half of the eighteenth century was based on Latin models, not English ones.

The academic concerns of John Evans’s school would have been of a less elevated nature than those of Thomas Annot’s, but it is no easier to ascertain who was taught there than it is to discover who attended the latter. Given the classical emphasis of the grammar school (which is certainly attested in its early days by the Latin texts present in Allen and Margaret Coldham’s shop – again, referred to elsewhere in this site’s pages, in the article on Literacy in the town) ), it is tempting to see it as the venue for education of the sons of the wealthier members of the community, with Evans’s place serving the children of lesser tradespeople and craftsmen. However, comment has already been made concerning whom Annot may have had in mind when making his endowment, so it is probably wise not to speculate too far. In any case, both schools are so far apart in their respective times of origin that they can in no sense be seen as rivals. Once they were both in operation, it may well be that the people in Lowestoft who wished (and who could afford) to have their sons educated were provided with a choice between a classical education and a more utilitarian one. 

There is, of course, no evidence to suggest how good a teacher John Evans was – though he ought, at the very least, to have been worthy of imitation in the matter of handwriting. His script is both elegant and flowing, as may be seen in any of the surviving thirty-one wills and four inventories which were written by him between 1685 and 1705 – to say nothing of the Overseers’ Accounts for the late seventeenth century, which he kept in an exemplary fashion. He was probably involved in other official administrative business as well, because his burial registration of 3 January 1706 refers to him as “Town Clerk”. The widely-ranging employment of his literary skills was not so different from that of the master of Annot’s School one hundred years before, Stephen Phillipp; he, too, was in demand to perform a variety of tasks which drew upon his ability to read and write. What had changed was the situation appertaining to the increase in the amount of urban business in Lowestoft, which had grown sufficiently to warrant its being dealt with by one competent official.

After John Evans died, the school he ran came under the direction of Robert Baas. He leased the building from Sir Richard Allin of Somerleyton Hall on 9 April 1706 and details of the agreement may be found in an early nineteenth century manuscript history of the town: Robert Reeve’s unpublished ‘A History of Lowestoft and Lothingland’, vol. 4 (c. 1810), p. 273 – Suffolk Archives, Ipswich - 193/3/4. They reveal, among other things, that the master had his accommodation on the premises and that arithmetic was taught to the pupils, as well as reading and writing. Part of the agreement whereby Baas took over the school was that he should teach, free of charge, four poor boys from families receiving parish relief (in order to prepare them for apprenticeship). It seems to be implied, in the wording of the information, that this was the continuation of a practice already established rather than something new. 

Baas performed his function until his death in December 1718 (he left a widow and at least three children) and the eighteen surviving wills and three inventories written by him show that he had an elegant hand. He was succeeded by William Botson, son of a local mariner and a man whose handwriting was workmanlike rather than graceful. Three wills written by him have survived, one of them his own. He died a bachelor, at the age of forty-two, in March 1729, leaving the bulk of his estate to his sister Alice, his best suit of clothes to his younger brother Michael, and one shilling to his other sister, Elizabeth.

In addition to the school run successively by Messrs. Evans, Baas and Botson, there may also have been an earlier establishment of some kind in operation during the second half of the seventeenth century. Its proprietor was Thomas Tye, the preamble of whose will (20 April 1681) describes him as a scrivener, but whose burial registration of 11 May refers to him as a schoolmaster. Given the fact that John Evans and his family first appear in the parish registers in February 1682, it is possible that there are not two schools under discussion, but one. It is not known where Thomas Tye taught his pupils, but at the time of his death he owned, and lived in, a substantial house on the freehold land at the northern end of the High Street. He also owned a copyhold property on the north side of Blue Anchor Lane, near the junction with the High Street, which his wife Susan ran as a public house and which may have been called The Blue Anchor – after which the road was named. The possibility exists that, during the latter stages of his life, he was using the building erected by Sir Thomas Allin in the manner that John Evans was later to do, but there is no evidence of his tenancy. The thirty-one surviving wills written by him, covering the years 1657 to 1680 show his handwriting to have been stylish and individualistic – especially in the flourishes on the capital letters and the very thick downstroke employed on the letter t.

The last of the schools to manifest itself in Lowestoft was another whose existence is revealed in the burial record of the person who ran it. Mary Roomer (widow) was laid to rest on 20 January 1709. She is referred to in the registers as “a good school dame”, from which description it may be inferred that she was responsible for the instruction of younger children, including girls as well as boys. Her school, wherever it was located (possibly in her own house), probably differed a good deal from those (or that) of Thomas Tye and John Evans, having a level of teaching which was less demanding, less wide-ranging and almost certainly cheaper. Dame schools were, in fact, aimed at the poorer levels of society and domestic tasks such as knitting and sewing were sometimes taught, as well as very basic reading and writing. Parents paid what they could afford in the way of having their children educated and attendance by pupils was often very spasmodic.

Thus, in the latter part of the 17th century and early years of the 18th, Lowestoft had one of each of the three main types of school present in pre-industrial England: a grammar school, a petty school and a dame school. Annot’s free grammar school meant exactly what it said with regard to the tuition provided (it was a charitable foundation, with the master’s salary provided for), but books and writing materials would have had to have been paid for by the scholars’ parents, and the purchase of classical texts would not have been cheap. The other two schools in town would have made tuition charges as well, but no information has come to light concerning what the children’s parents had to pay. In the case of the dame school, it may have been no more than 1d. a day, but during the late seventeenth century that represented about 8% of a labourer’s summer day-wage and 5% of a craftsman’s (for the winter months, the proportion rose to 17% and 13% respectively) – these payments representing those made without the provision of food. 

Given these figures, it then becomes a question of which people could either afford to have their offspring educated or were prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to secure some kind of basic schooling for them. On the evidence of literacy data drawn from wills and probate inventories, it would seem that the education available in Lowestoft was largely taken up by the merchants, the tradespeople, the seafarers and the craftsmen. It does not seem to have had much of an impact on the lower orders: the labourers, the servants and the poor. Apart from the known number of forty boys in Annot’s School (reduced to sixteen in 1716), there are no other statistics available to reveal how much of the town’s youthful population was being educated at any one time. However, with two or three other institutions in operation, it may have been as high as about one hundred by the beginning of the eighteenth century. And, given the high rate of female literacy after 1700, the possibility has to be considered that girls were being educated in the petty schools as well as boys. If they were not, it has to be presumed that they acquired the ability to read and write within the home environment.

References in wills

Altogether, seventy-two of the 507 surviving Lowestoft wills between 1560 and 1730 contain specific directions for the upbringing of children (14.2%) – a comparatively high proportion compared with at least one area of rural Suffolk (South Elmham), which showed only 5.2%, though this did relate to an earlier overall period than this writer’s work on Lowestoft (Nesta Evans: ‘The. Community of South Elmham, Suffolk, 1550-1640’ - unpublished MPhil thesis, University of East Anglia, 1978, p. 252). If Lowestoft wills for the years 1560-1650 are considered, then forty seven documents: out of a total number of 231 make reference to care of the young (20.3%) – a higher proportion than for the overall period of study and one which reflects a higher rate of adult mortality (much of it due to epidemics) than that which prevailed later on. Another difference between Lowestoft and rural High Suffolk is that, in ten of the fifteen documents relating to the latter, the references to the education and bringing-up of children were meant to be taken in a general, unspecified way and only in the other five referred specifically to actual learning. In Lowestoft, seventeen of the seventy-two wills that mention the upbringing of children contain references to education in the accepted sense of the word, while another six request apprenticeship or service for sons and daughters, and a further one makes provision for both modes of training.

These twenty-four documents are fairly evenly spread across a time-span of about 150 years (1569-1721) and a breakdown of the testators’ occupations reveals that nine of them were from a maritime background (eight men and a widow), five were merchants, four were shipwrights or boatwrights, three were of yeoman level (two men and a widow), one was a brewer, one was a hatter and one the widow of a man of unknown status. The term “education” was not used exclusively for sons, and in eleven cases daughters were also included in the request for learning of some kind to be imparted. Most interesting of all the educational references is that to be found in the will of William Meeke (yeoman), 23 March 1602. He requested that his executor, Harry Askewe, guardian of his oldest son Raphe (aged thirteen years), ensure that the boy learnt to both speak and write French. In terms of the pattern of these twenty-four particular educational references, it is interesting to note that over half of them emanated from people with maritime connections, nine being from sea-going families and a further four from men who built craft of different kinds.

In so far as children may be seen as providing testators with motivation to make a will, 159 of the 338 married men whose documents have survived (47%) had to provide for two or more sons or for under-age children. It is not surprising, therefore, that there are regular references to the upbringing of children, often with the phrase “in the fear of God” being used by way of qualification (a common term of the time). There were sixty married male testators altogether whose children were all under-age: fifty-three of them laid responsibility for the upbringing with their wives, four with their executors, one with his wife and a supervisor, one with his mother and brother, and one with his mother-in-law. In the six individual cases where children’s upbringing did not involve the wife, five of the testators were widowed and the remaining one saw an executor given the responsibility. The six widows who made wills which include directions for the care of children placed responsibility on executors in four cases, on a brother and father-in-law in another, and on three brothers in the last.

On which note, this article reaches its conclusion. 

CREDIT:David Butcher