“For the time of their entrance with vs, in our countrey schooles, it is commonly about 7. or 8. yeares olde: six is very soone. If any begin so early, they are rather sent to the schoole to keepe them from troubling the house at home, and from danger, and shrewd turnes, then for any great hope and desire their friends haue that they should learne anything in effect.” [Headnote: THE GOOD OLD TIMES OF SMOKE AND FILTH.] To return from this digression on Education. Enough has been said to show that the progress of Education, in our sense of the word, was rather from below upwards, than from above downwards; and I conclude that the young people to whom the _Babees Boke_, &c., were addressed, were the children of our nobility, knights, and squires, and that the state of their manners, as left by their home training, was such as to need the inculcation on them of the precepts contained in the Poems. If so, dirty, ill-mannered, awkward young gawks, must most of these hopes-of-England have been, to modern notions. The directions for personal cleanliness must have been much needed when one considers the small stock of linen and clothes that men not rich must have had; and if we may judge from a passage in Edward the Fourth’s _Liber Niger_, even the King himself did not use his footpan every Saturday night, and would not have been the worse for an occasional tubbing:-- “This barbour shall have, every satyrday at nyght, _if_ it please the Kinge to cleanse his head, legges, or feet, and for his shaving, two loves, one picher wyne. And the ussher of chambre ought to testyfye if this is necessaryly dispended or not.”