Islands marriage ages may have been lower. Lower down in society boys might be apprenticed to a trade, or become agricultural servants. Girls might go into domestic or agricultural service. For those higher up in society and increasingly for those lower down, this might be after a period of schooling. For the wealthy and sometimes for the very talented, they might move on to one of Scotland's universities. It is clear that football was played by sixteenth-century schoolboys, and probably servants and apprentices, because of widespread attempts to ban it. Education The Humanist concern with widening education that had become significant in the Renaissance was shared by Protestant reformers. For boys, in the burghs the old schools were maintained, with the song schools and a number of new foundations becoming reformed grammar schools or ordinary parish schools. There were also large number of unregulated "adventure schools", which sometimes fulfilled a local needs and sometimes took pupils away from the official schools. At their best, the curriculum included catechism, Latin, French, Classical literature and sports. A series of acts attempted to establish schools in every parish from 1616. By the late seventeenth century there was a largely complete network of parish schools in the Lowlands, but in the Highlands basic education was still lacking in many areas. The widespread belief in the limited intellectual and moral capacity of women, vied with a desire, intensified after the Reformation, for women to take personal moral responsibility, particularly as wives and mothers. In Protestantism this necessitated an ability to learn and understand the catechism and even to be able to independently read the Bible, but most commentators, even those that tended to encourage the education of girls, thought they should not receive the same academic education as boys. In the lower ranks of society, they benefited from the expansion of the parish schools system that took place after the Reformation, but were usually outnumbered by boys, often taught separately, for a shorter time and to a lower level. They were frequently taught reading, sewing and knitting, but not writing. Female illiteracy rates based on signatures among female servants were around 90 per cent, from the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries and perhaps 85 per cent for women of all ranks by 1750, compared with 35 per cent for men. Among the nobility there were many educated and cultured women, of which Mary,