Introduction

Viewing the Grammar School curriculum as a whole, during the two hundred years preceding 1660, it is convenient to regard it as a contrast to the curriculum of the Middle Ages. The mediaeval curriculum consisted in a general course in the Seven Liberal Arts, preparatory to specialistic training in Theology or Law. In the mediaeval point of view there was, it is true, a certain aspect of knowledge as an organic whole, which was to some extent obscured in the developments of the 16th and 17th centuries. Grammar became the first of school subjects both in order of study, as it was in the Middle Ages, and in order of importance, Grammar dethroned Logic, and in the 16th and 17th centuries see Logic slowly and surely disappearing from the old range of the Trivium studied in the schools, as Music was lost along with the rest of the Quadrivium.