This chapter maps how students moved, sometimes literally and sometimes figuratively, between church and schoolroom, and the purposes religious music-making served in these contexts. It focuses on students’ performance of psalms, especially how particular performance practices (processing two-by-two) and the selection of psalms with moralizing texts inculcated potentially unruly children into the Protestant faith through bodily discipline and the act of communal singing. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the “Easter Psalms” sung at the Spital Sermon by children from the school at Christ’s Hospital as a multisensory event. Religious speech, music, and the display of the children’s bodies in their characteristic blue uniforms worked together to solicit charitable donations for the school and to demonstrate their piety, a performance practice that continues to this day. However, the potential for disruption, for something to go awry, for the script to be overturned is ever present, then and now.

This chapter describes the educational institutions of post-Reformation England and the conflicted role music, theater, and dance played in English life and educational schema. According to English conduct books and prescriptive literature, music and dance were necessary skills for accomplished gentlemen and gentlewomen to possess; they might also be useful for students at charity schools, who sought socio-economic improvement through marriage or the procurement of apprenticeships. Yet, as many scholars have noted, there was also a strong suspicion and overt antipathy toward music-making, playacting, and dancing – some religious thinkers believed that these activities could lead to lasciviousness, decadence, and effeminacy. Others expressed concern that female students might develop inappropriate relationships with their music and dance teachers.