The dissenting academies were schools, colleges and nonconformist seminaries (often institutions with aspects of all three) run by dissenters. They formed a significant part of England’s educational systems from the mid-seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
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It was difficult for any but practising members of the Church of England to gain admission to the old English universities, at Cambridge and Oxford. English Dissenters included Nonconformist Protestants who could not in good conscience subscribe to the articles of the Church of England, but also Quakers, Roman Catholics, and Jews. As their sons were debarred from preparing for the ministry or the professions in the universities, many of them attended the dissenting academies. Many of those who could afford it completed their education at Leyden, Utrecht, Glasgow or Edinburgh, the latter, particularly those who were studying medicine or law.[1] Many students attending Utrecht were supported by the Presbyterian Fund.[2]
While the religious reasons mattered most, the geography of university education also was a factor. The Durham College of Oliver Cromwell was attempt to break the educational monopoly of Oxbridge, and while it failed because of the political change in 1660, the founder of Rathmell Academy was Richard Frankland who had been involved in the Durham College project. Right at the start of the dissenting academy movement, Frankland was backed by those who wished to see an independent university-standard education available in the north of England.[3]
Credentials were still important to the world at large, though the system of academies came to form a network operating by personal recommendation. Tutors in the academies were initially drawn from the ejected ministers of 1662, who had left the Church of England after the passing of the Uniformity Act, and many of those had English university degrees. After that generation the tutors for the most part did not have those academic credentials to support their reputations, being products of the dissenting system themselves. In many cases other universities, particularly the Scottish institutions who were sympathetic to their presbyterian views, awarded them honorary doctorates.
For nearly all the period in which dissenting academies operated, the Presbyterian Fund Board gave scholarships to candidates for the ministry. It operated from the 1690s to the middle of the nineteenth century. An education at a dissenting academy was not the only option for the Fund Board, since a candidate could also be sponsored at a Scottish university, or elsewhere. An academy, to attract such students, had to offer a course of instruction approved of by the Board for its purposes. The Presbyterian Fund was not the only grant-giving body, since there had opened up a clear gap between the Presbyterians and Congregationalists, as the Independents started to be called (at least in London) during the 1690s, for reasons of doctrine. An early sign of the division was the fate of the Rathmell Academy after the death of Frankland: it migrated to Manchester under John Chorlton,[4] while a splinter group under Timothy Jollie, an Independent, had remained at Attercliffe (one of the locations of Frankland's migratory academy) to greater success.[5] The Coward Trust from 1743 funded Daventry Academy and a London academy under David Jennings, but was distinct from the ordinary Congregational funding (see Congregational Board of Education).[6] Funding might be central or local, and there could be doctrinal as well as practical reasons why a given academy was sent students with financial support.
The letter of the law could make the running of a dissenting academy difficult or impossible. In the general framework according to which schools must be licensed by the bishop, and ministers (who made up most of the teaching staff) could be in legal trouble for the activities that held together their congregations, some academies simply shut down. For a short period (1714 to 1718) the Schism Act was in force, and aimed precisely to do that; but the troubles of the academies were mostly before this legislation.
Proceedings in ecclesiastical courts were quite common in the 17th century, for example in the case of Benjamin Robinson.[7] The degree of religious toleration in the later half of the seventeenth century varied considerably according to laws passed by Parliament, and also in line with the public mood. Some academies, such as that of John Shuttlewood,[8] had a covert existence, while still training candidates for the ministry. Others were forced into remoter areas of the countryside, for example under the Five Mile Act. There were instances where dissenting academies were tolerated locally because of the absence of other good schools in an area: this certainly happened in the south-west and north-west of England. The regime of the seventeenth century, where tutors might be arrested at any time, changed to greater stability from the beginning of the reign of William and Mary. There were still cases of actions against schools, for example the proceedings against Isaac Gilling in the 1710s. In 1723 the regium donum, initially a grant to support Irish Presbyterians, became a national subsidy, and subsequently dissenting academies were more generally accepted.
Not all dissenting academies opened their doors freely. Some, especially some of those funded by the Independents, had religious tests of their own. Richard Frankland of Rathmell Academy and Timothy Jollie of Attercliffe, founders of two of the most celebrated early academies, opposed any departure from Calvinist theology. Jollie even forbade mathematics ‘as tending to scepticism and infidelity'.[9] Other academies were more broadminded. Indeed, many Anglicans sent their sons to the dissenting academies, because of their stricter regulation, and because they promoted a more contemporary curriculum based on the practical sciences and modern history. In some of the larger academies French and High Dutch (German) were taught.[10] The tutors and the students of the dissenting academies contributed in fundamental ways to the development of ideas, notably in the fields of theology, philosophy, literature, and science.
These academies were funded partly by fees for tuition and lodging, as many of these schools were run in large houses as boarding establishments. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, for example, was not only responsible for running her own household but also that of Palgrave Academy in its early days — she was accountant, maid, and housekeeper, not to mention a teacher in several disciplines.[11] They were also funded by philanthropic Dissenters such as William Coward (1647 - 1738), whose "will set up a trust fund ‘for the education and training up of young men … to qualify them for the ministry of the gospel among the Protestant Dissenters’, thus continuing the financial support he had given to such students in his lifetime"[12]. Sometimes this funding was organised along the lines of subscribers[13].
In the nineteenth century the academies’ original purpose to provide a higher education was largely superseded by the founding of the University of London and the provincial universities, which were open to dissenters, and by the reform of Oxford and Cambridge.
Newington Green, in those days a village north of London, had several. Charles Morton (1626–1698), the educator and minister who ended his career as vice-president of Harvard College, ran an influential one "probably on the site of the current Unitarian church"[14]. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography judges Morton's "probably the most impressive of the dissenting academies [prior to 1685], enrolling as many as fifty pupils at a time". The ODNB goes on to describe its advanced and varied curriculum (religion, classics, history, geography, mathematics, natural science, politics, and modern languages) and a well-equipped laboratory, and even "a bowling green for recreation". Lectures were given in English, not Latin, and Daniel Defoe, one of Morton's students, praised its attention to the mother tongue. Samuel Wesley the elder, a contemporary of Defoe's, described his teacher "as universal in his learning".[15]. Rev. James Burgh, author of The Dignity of Human Nature and Thoughts on Education, opened his dissenting academy there in 1750.[16] (His widow acted as a "fairy godmother" in helping the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft move her fledgling boarding school for girls from Islington to the Green in 1784,[17] finding her a house to rent and twenty students to fill it.[18]) Anna Laetitia Barbauld, so closely associated with other leading dissenting academies, chose to spend the latter third of her life in Newington Green.
Homerton College, Cambridge started life as a dissenting academy in Homerton, then another village north of London.
Palgrave Academy (fl. 1774-1785) in Palgrave, Suffolk was run by the married couple Anna Laetitia Barbauld and her husband Rochemont Barbauld, a minister, who had met at Warrington.
The Tewkesbury Academy, set up by Samuel Jones, had as its students both Dissenters such as Samuel Chandler and those who became significant Establishment figures such as Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Secker and Joseph Butler.[19]
Philip Doddridge was chosen in 1723 to conduct the academy being newly established at Market Harborough. It moved many times, and is probably best known as Daventry Academy. It ended up in London under the name of Coward College, as it was largely supported by the bequest of William Coward. The college was one of three that amalgamated in 1850 into New College London. Hugh Farmer was educated at this college in its earlier days, as was Joseph Priestley.
Warrington Academy, known as “the Athens of the North” for its stimulating intellectual atmosphere, led eventually, via Manchester and York, to Harris Manchester College, Oxford.
Rathmell Academy, which had half a dozen homes, was set up by Richard Frankland.
Attercliffe Academy, set up by Frankland, was fostered by Timothy Jollie[20], as mentioned above.