Customs and Fashions in Old New England

								

was also in orthography--if we judge from the letters of the times,
where "horrid false spells," as Cotton Mather called them, abound.
It is natural to dwell on the religious teaching of Puritan children,
because so much of their education had a religious element in it. They
must have felt, like Tony Lumpkin, "tired of having good dinged into
'em." Their primers taught religious rhymes; they read from the Bible,
the Catechism, the Psalm Book, and that lurid rhymed horror "The Day of
Doom;" they parsed, too, from these universal books. How did they parse
these lines from the Bay Psalm Book?



    "And sayd He would not them waste; had not

        Moses stood (whom he chose)

    'fore him i' th' breach; to turn his wrath

        lest that he should waste those."
Their "horn books"--



              "books of stature small

    Which with pellucid horn secured are

    To save from fingers wet the letters fair,"
those framed and behandled sheets of semi-transparent horn, which were
worn hanging at the side and were studied, as late certainly as the year
1715 by children of the Pilgrims, also managed to instil with the
alphabet some religious words or principles. Usually the Lord's Prayer
formed part of the printed text. Though horn-books are referred to in
Sewall's diary and in the letters of Wait Still Winthrop, and appear on
stationers' and booksellers' lists at the beginning of the eighteenth
century, I do not know of the preservation of a single specimen to our
own day.
The schoolhouses were simple dwellings, often tumbling down and out of
repair. The Roxbury teacher wrote in 1681:



     "Of inconveniences [in the schoolhouse] I shall mention no other

     but the confused and shattered and nastie posture that it is in,

     not fitting for to reside in, the glass broke, and thereupon very

     raw and cold; the floor very much broken and torn up to kindle

     fires, the hearth spoiled, the seats some burned and others out of

     kilter, that one had well-nigh as goods keep school in a hog stie

     as in it."
This schoolhouse had been built and furnished with some care in 1652,
as this entry in the town records shows:



     "The feoffes agreed with Daniel Welde that he provide convenient

     benches with forms, with tables for the scholars, and a conveniente

     seate for the scholmaster, a Deske to put the Dictionary on and

     shelves to lay up bookes."
The schoolmaster "promised and engaged to use his best endeavour both
by precept and example to instruct in all Scholasticall morall and
Theologicall discipline the children so far as they be capable, all
A. B. C. Darians excepted." He was paid in corn, barley or peas, the
value of £25 per annum, and each child, through his parents or
guardians, supplied half a cord of wood for the schoolhouse fire. If
this load of wood were not promptly furnished the child suffered, for
the master did not allow him the benefit of the fire; that is, to go