Introduction

The effects of changes in the concept of gentility are apparent from educational developments. Schools and colleges had greatly increased in number in the century before 1640 as a result both of new professional needs, and of a highly intellectual ideal of gentility, and Welsh gentlemen had shared fully in this flowering. However, by the eighteenth century, more emphasis was placed on manners and social polish, and a surfeit of academic learning was condemned as pedantry, although some slight acquaintance was required with many aspects of art, literature and science. As ‘virtuosi’, the landed classes had acquired new educational needs which could not wholly be satisfied either by the skills taught or the methods used in the traditional system. A solution was found by a renewed emphasis on old-established methods of private and informal instruction, like the domestic tutor, and wide experience of foreign travel. Glamorgan will be found to provide strong support for Professor Stone's account of the ‘educational depression’ from the 1670s, and especially his view that the Welsh kept older patterns alive a little longer than their English counterparts. Older institutions like the universities declined accordingly, because of new fashions, but also as a result of political fears that the over-production of educated men before 1640 had increased social unrest. Only in one significant respect does Glamorgan diverge from the national pattern: post-Restoration royalists tended to suspect grammar schools as havens of sedition, so these normally declined in the late seventeenth century.