The first school known to exist in Calstone was opened in 1711 by the rector George Millard. According to an article in vol 31 of Wiltshire Archaeological Society magazine (1900) Millard was presented to the rectory in Calstone in 1701 by George Duckett*. In addition to Calstone he was vicar of Box (from 1707) and of Hasebury (near Box) from 1712. His primary residence was at Box.
Several letters survive in the archives of the S.P.C.K (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge – an extant charity formed in 1698) in which Millard outlines his activities with respect to the charity schools he set up; one in Calstone and another in Box. In a letter dated 7th June 1712 he informs the SPCK that he had set up a small school in Calstone, at his own expense, in which he taught 6 poor children (among others) to read, taught the Church Catechism** and heard twice daily readings from the Common Prayer book. They were also given books, probably SPCK ones (see below).
In another letter dated 16th May 1716 Millard says that he still has 6 children in Calstone school, and a further 8 children had left the school having completed their studies since it was opened in 1711. He says that these 8 children were well instructed and most of them were employed in husbandry. He doesn’t explicitly mention whether both girls and boys were taught at his Calstone school but he does say that both were taught at Box so I assume he did the same here. It was usual practice for charity schools to teach both sexes. Interestingly he does genuinely seem keen to know what happened to the children after they left school. He states that as he is working on his own he doesn’t have the time to follow this up with each child. In this letter he also says that as Calstone only has 4 poor families he has started taking 2 children from Calne into his school to make up the numbers.
In another letter dated May-Day 1717 he proudly tells the SPCK that as well as teaching children in his two schools, he has instructed adults “one of which is a full 40 years old” to read. He says the gets even greater satisfaction from the fact that these adults now regularly attend church “before which they were very remiss in” and regularly read Psalms. He says that he has deployed his own method for teaching adults to read which is very successful. He paid the teachers and adult students 5 shillings each upon learning to read to the required standard. This equates to about 5 weeks wages for an adult farm labourer at the time – so quite a lot of money! The school in Box was partly funded by a bequest of £100 from Lady Rachell Speke specifically to teach poor children. Millard may have used some of this money to help to fund his activities in Calstone too.
The SPCK distributed Christian literature in the form of pamphlets and books targeting different social groups. They also produced broadsheets containing simple religious teaching. It is almost certain that this these publications would have been used as the basis of reading material within the school, along with the Bible of course.
As well as teaching children to read at his school in Box he also taught them to sing Psalms. In his letters he proudly boasts that “by Exercising them only 2 hours in a day, they became perfect in 4 Tunes in little more than a week”. They then sang in church “to the admiration of those present”. In 1718 he extended the practice of Psalm signing to the school in Calstone and said that they were “making good progress”.
For some reason Millard requested in his will that that all of his sermon notes, papers and books written in his own hand were to be burnt. After Millard’s death (in May 1740) it is not clear what happened to the Calstone school and whether the next rector, Robert Rodgers, took over responsibility. There is reference to the school on Bowen’s 1755 map of Wiltshire. This maybe because it still existed at the time or that the information on the map was out of date. It is not clear where the school was; It was possibly in the church, as it initially was at Box.
The next school in Calstone was a National School which opened in around 1845. More on this in a future article.
Interestingly when charity schools were being opened in the early 18th century in many places, supported by the newly formed SPCK, there was another opinion that the poor should not be educated. This view was famously championed by Bernard Mandeville, an Anglo Dutch social philosopher, in the controversial publication “The Fable of the Bees”, which in the 1723 was expanded to include “An Essay on Charity and Charity Schools”. This work, amongst other things, suggests that “The more a shepherd and ploughman know of the world, the less fitted he’ll be to go through the fatigue and hardship of it with cheerfulness and equanimity, the eternal response of the haves to the have-nots. Education of the poor was prejudicial to their morals and happiness. Ignorance on the other hand was the opiate of the poor, a cordial administered by the gracious hand of providence.”. He also argued that people who set up charity schools, such as Millard, did it primarily to promote themselves, to show the community how virtuous they were, rather than to primarily help the children of the poor. If you are interested in the thinking in this area in the early 18th century, I would thoroughly recommend listening to Melvyn Bragg’s “In Our Time – The Fable of the Bees” podcast, first broadcast 25 Oct 2018.
In a side note Millard regularly, and in vain, tried to correct the SPCK with the spelling of Calstone. The village was known as Calston at the time and the SPCK repeatedly called it Catston, much to Millard’s annoyance! As an added twist to the misspelling saga George’s name seems to have changed from Millard to Millar to Miller in his later life. His Will is in the name Miller but the earlier letters were signed Millard.
* George Duckett was a descendant of John Duckett the Royalist colonel who lived in Calstone House until parliamentary forces burnt it down in the English Civil War. He allegedly escaped in a hearse. This Calstone House may, or may not, have been on the site of East Farm which was renamed Calstone House 20 ish years ago. Maybe more on this in future article!)
** Church catechism is the practice of learning the sacraments, or more general religious teaching (Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer etc), through the practice of questions and answers, which have to be memorised. It is a technique much more widely used in the Catholic Church than the Anglican one. This led to some opponents of Charity Schools, such as Bernard Mandeville, suggesting that they were being used as a cover for increasing the spread of Catholicism in England.