CHRIST’S HOSPITAL
When we pass from the pre-Reformation schools to the great institution of Christ’s Hospital, which has become indissolubly associated with the name of Edward VI., the first Protestant king of England, we might expect to find that we passed from darkness to light; from groping in the dark after fragmentary hints of evidence, to an era of charters and documents well known and well understood. Yet there is no great school the history of which has been more misunderstood or misrepresented than that of Christ’s Hospital. In 1898, at the laying of the foundation stone of the new buildings at Horsham, Sussex, which are destined to convert Christ’s Hospital from a London school into a “non-local” public school, the Duke of Cambridge, as Chairman of the Governors of Christ’s Hospital, gave the layer of the stone, the Prince of Wales, a succinct version of the story of its origin.
“It was founded,” he said, “by the saintly King Edward the VIth, who, besides assigning it a site in the City of London, with his own hands inserted in the charter power to take lands in mortmain, which has enabled the munificence of subsequent benefactors to provide for nearly three and a half centuries for the nurture and education of children.”
So the historian of Cambridge University, Mr. J. Bass Mallinger,[[13]] speaking of Edward VI. had said: “Upwards of 30 Free Grammar Schools founded at this time have permanently associated the name of Edward VI. with popular education”; and among the thirty free grammar schools founded by him, he includes Christ’s Hospital.
Carlisle, in his Endowed Grammar Schools, made a more cautious statement.
“The precise endowment of the institution by the Royal Founder is not known. It is certain that part of the premises which it now comprises, commonly called Grey Friars and the Cloisters, with a part of the building, were given by Edward VI.”
A closer examination of the facts will show us that Christ’s Hospital was not founded as a grammar school; that neither site nor buildings were given by Edward VI.; and that he did not inscribe a licence in mortmain with his own hand. Christ’s Hospital was founded as a Foundling Hospital and Ragged School for gutter children of both sexes, by the inhabitants of London, by means of public subscriptions and rates, on a site and in buildings already acquired by the City from Henry VIII., and Edward VI.’s contribution to it consisted of a piece of parchment, some confiscated church linen, and his name.
Perhaps the most startling revelation to those who have heard so often of the magnificence of the foundation of Edward VI., is to find that Christ’s Hospital at first had no endowments beyond its sites and buildings, and never received a penny of income from the property comprised in Edward’s charter.
Christ’s Hospital is alone among the great public schools in that it has entirely departed from the class and the objects for which it was originally intended. Winchester and Eton, Westminster and St. Paul’s were intended always for the same class or classes which now frequent them. The scholars were meant to be, and were, taken from the poorer members of the upper middle class, squires, parsons, barristers, merchants, and the like, “who could not, without help, send their sons to the University”; the commoners or paying boys from the richer members of the same class. Christ’s Hospital, unlike these, was intended for the poorest of the poor. Its foundation was not due, like that of the other ancient public schools, to any single founder, or to any desire to further education. It was a part of a great scheme to put down pauperism, and so effect by voluntary and charitable effort what in Elizabeth’s day and since has been effected, or attempted, by compulsion and the Poor Law. It was intended to rid the streets of London of the curse of sturdy rogues and vagabonds, on principles which were strictly in accordance with the doctrines of political economy, and would be highly approved by the Charity Organisation Society. It aimed at getting rid of the poor by setting those who were merely unfortunate to work, while making things unpleasant for the undeserving and idle, and by bringing up their children in the way they should go to earn their own living.
CHRIST’S HOSPITAL, FROM THE CLOISTERS, 1804
The establishment of Christ’s Hospital is inextricably mixed up with that of the other “Royal Hospitals,”[[14]] St. Bartholomew’s and St. Thomas’s Hospital and the Bridewell. It may be traced to a movement to rid London, and especially the parish churches, of the crowds of poor, some sick and diseased, some mere idle “rogues and vagabonds.” Historians like Father Gasquet in his Henry VIII. and the Monasteries, following some older authors, laudatores temporis acti, write as if beggary and vagrancy were a special product of the Reformation Era, and were caused by the suppression of the monasteries. This is putting the cart before the horse. It could easily be shown that hundreds of years earlier the State made efforts to put them down. But for the present purpose we need go no further back than the first part of the sixteenth century. In London an Act of Common Council,[[15]] passed in 1518, before Luther had ever been heard of beyond Wittemburg, and long before the suppression of monasteries had even been dreamt of by Henry, directed that for getting rid of “all mighty beggars, vagabonds, and all other suspect and evil-disposed persons out of this city, every alderman in his ward shall get two or three persons in each parish to form lists of all persons living on alms, and certify them to the Common Council.”
But, while the monasteries and friaries, and especially the latter—those great schools of pauperism and seminaries of beggary—were continually creating new swarms of the poor they were supposed to relieve, any real diminution of beggary was hopeless. We find the Common Council in 1533, before the suppression, vainly trying to abate the evil by the institution of a voluntary poor-rate, directing the aldermen to “weekly depute some honest persons of every parish to gather the devotions of the parishioners, and the same to be delivered at the church doors to poor folk,” so as to prevent them crowding into the churches, carrying their disgusting sores and infection with them.
Almost immediately after the dissolution of the monasteries, August 1, 1540, the City began to negotiate with Henry VIII. for the purchase of the “four houses and churches of Friars,” the Black, White, Grey, and Austin, because they were the finest buildings in the City after St. Paul’s and St. Martin-le-Grand. The Grey Friars’ Church was no less than 300 feet long. The City urged that they would be “a very great comfort, aid and refuge for the avoiding and eschewing” of plague and sickness. They offered “a thousand marks esterling (£666 : 13 : 4), if they can be gotten no better cheap, down for them.”[[16]] Sir Richard Gresham was the negotiator, and had to inform the court of aldermen that His Highness thought the citizens “pinchpence” to offer so little, and refused. At last, however, in 1547, they came to an agreement, not for all the houses unfortunately, but for the Grey Friars only. They also acquired St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, which had been dissolved as part of the Priory of St. Bartholomew, and Bethlehem or Bedlam Hospital, which, being in the hands of the secular clergy, had not been dissolved. What was paid for the grant does not appear in the documents; though that something considerable was paid there is little doubt. On December 27, 1547, the City got a conveyance from Henry, confirmed by charter of the same date, with a licence in mortmain precisely in the same words as the one which, we are told, was so providentially invented by Edward VI.; as was perhaps not surprising since the formula was some two centuries old.
Henry purported to make the grants of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and the Grey Friars’ Church, cloisters, and conventual buildings with the whole precinct, and all the houses in it, valued at some £50 a year, because he considered “the miserable estate (the poor, aged, sick, sore and impotent people), as well men as women, lying and going about begging in the common streets of the City of London[[17]] and the suburbs of the same ... to the great infection and [an]noyance of his grace’s loving subjects.”
St. Bartholomew’s was to be a hospital or house for the poor. The Grey Friars was not granted for a hospital but for a church. It was to be a parish church for the Grey Friars’ precinct, Newgate and St. Sepulchre’s parish, with a vicar; “a visitor of Newgate,” or prison chaplain, and five other priests, partly curates, partly chantry-priests, all to be appointed by the corporation of the City. The City, that is, “the Mayor and Commonalty and citizens,” were given a licence in mortmain to hold lands up to the value of a thousand marks a year for the purposes of this grant. By the same grant they were made the custodians of the Bethlehem Hospital.
The Common Council, on obtaining possession of the Grey Friars’ Church, promptly gutted it[[18]] of all its famous and beautiful tombs, royal and civic alike, stripping down its stall-work, and reducing the dimensions of the nave. In fact, they emulated the Crown and nobility in the work of plunder and destruction, not sparing their own ancestors.
At first efforts were made to maintain St. Bartholomew’s Hospital by voluntary donations, “a weekly collection of the devotion of the people,” but this was found not to “take any good success or semblance of good contynnance,” and by an order of Common Council, September 29, 1547, “a moietie or half deale of one hole fiftene” was levied for its support. In December 1543 certain dues levied in respect of the measuring of leather up to 500 marks a year were granted to it; and the other 500 marks to be paid out of the half-fifteenth[[19]] was assessed instead on the Companies at the rate of £24 a quarter from the Mercers down to 13s. 4d. a quarter from small Companies like the Glaziers.
In 1549 the City was already in treaty with the Protector Somerset[[20]] “for the alteration of parcel of the foundacion of the house of the poor.” Nothing, however, was done during his stormy reign, which ended by his being sent to the Tower in January 1550. In the following Lent, Lever,[[21]] the Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge, preached some famous sermons at St. Paul’s Cross, inveighing against the breach of the Acts of dissolution both of monasteries and chantries, according to which the proceeds were to be applied “for erecting of Grammar Schools, the further augmenting of the Universities and better provision for the poor.” He voiced, not merely the wishes of his own college and university, but also those of the City of London. Edward VI.’s action has been attributed to a sermon of Ridley “the martyr,” the Bishop of London, in 1552. It seems doubtful, however, whether Ridley was the prime mover or only an agent of the City. A letter of his own, intended to be pathetic, but which surely must have had a ring of comicality even to his contemporaries, goes to show that Lord Mayor Sir Richard Dobbs was the originator of the movement.
“O Dobbs, Dobbs, alderman and Knight, thou in thy year didst win my heart for evermore for that honourable act, that most blessed work of God, of the erection and setting up of Christ’s holy hospitals and truly religious houses which by thee and through thee were begun.... Thou didst plead their cause (the cause of Christ’s ‘silly members’) yea and not only in thine own person thou didst set forth Christ’s cause but to further the matter thou broughtest me into the Council Chamber of the City before the Aldermen alone, whom thou hadst assembled there together to hear me speak what I would say as an advocate by office and duty in the poor man’s cause.”[[22]]
The Bishop, in fact, acted as the Bishops of London now do, as a kind of public orator and common vouchee of all charitable organisations; he was not the originator or organiser.
The detailed story of the foundation is told in an account written by J. Howes, “Renter” of Christ’s Hospital, in the form of a delightful dialogue between Dignity (an Elizabethan alderman) and Duty, or Howes himself.[[23]]
Dobbs, he tells us, with the Bishop and a few others, “devised a book” to provide for the various classes of poor. “First[[24]] they devised to take out of the streets all the fatherless children and other poor men’s children that were not able to keep them, and to bring them to the late dissolved house of the Grey Friars, which they devised to be an Hospital for them, where they should have meat and drink and clothes, lodging and learning, and officers to attend upon them. They also devised that there should be provision made to keep the sick from the whole, and laid a ‘platte’ (a plot or plan) to have purchased Finsbury Court, and there to have kept the children in fresh air in the time of sickness, because they feared lest through the corrupt nature of the children, who might infect one another, being packed up in one house, and so put the whole city in danger of infection. Then the Governors devised that the sucking children and such as were not able to learn should be kept in the country and always at Easter brought home.” The lame and aged poor were to be removed to St. Thomas’s Hospital, forthwith; the “Lazar” people should be removed out of the streets, and have monthly pensions paid to them to the end they should not annoy the King’s subjects resorting to the City; and all the decayed poor citizens should be made known and every one of them have weekly a pension according to his necessity. But “all the idle and lusty rogues, as well men as women, should all be taken up and conveyed into some house where they should have all things necessary and be compelled to labour.” A committee of thirty was appointed to collect statistics. They reported that the number to be provided for was—
| Fatherless children | 300 |
| Sore and sick persons | 200 |
| Poor men overburthened with their children | 350 |
| Aged persons | 400 |
| Decayed householders | 650 |
| Idle vagabonds | 200 |
| 2100 | |
They then set to work to provide ways and means.
The committee of thirty found close on £1500 themselves. The parsons were set to work to extract weekly “pensions” from their parishioners; boxes were distributed to the wardens of every Company. There was a “devise that every honest householder in London should have a bill printed, wherein there was a glass window left open for his name and for his sum of money,” and the churchwardens were to get these filled in.
In February 1551[[25]] the City began to negotiate for the purchase of “the Hospitall in Suthwarke,” the Hospital of St. Thomas à Becket in Southwark, which until the Dissolution had been in the hands of Augustinian canons. On the 25th March the Privy Council granted an order for the purchase to be carried into effect. A detailed estimate of the charges and net income of the hospital on the proposal to purchase is extant at the Record Office.[[26]] From this it appears that the total gross value of its possessions was £314 : 17 : 1: the charges for the poor, the priests, and so on were estimated at £154 : 17 : 1, leaving a surplus of about £160 a year. Of this, £36 odd was derived from land estimated at twenty years’ purchase, and £123 from houses and cottages taken at fourteen years’ purchase. The City paid £2461 : 2 : 6 down for the grant of the endowment, with the hospital site and buildings thrown in. The transaction was completed by Letters Patent of August 12 and 13, 1551, which included a licence in mortmain up to £46 a year above the issue of the lands, i.e. £200 a year in all.
Having acquired St. Thomas’s Hospital for the sick poor, the City next set itself to work to petition[[27]] the King for a grant of the old palace of Bridewell. For the proposed inhabitants of this they had in “readiness most profitable and wholesome occupations for the continuing in godly exercise ... which is the guider and begetter of all wealth, virtue and honesty.” This was followed up by a further grant of the Savoy Hospital, founded by Henry VII. on the site of the old mansion of John of Gaunt, and completed by Henry VIII. It was intended for old soldiers and pilgrims.
We gather from Howes that the motives of the King in making the grant of Bridewell, and of the revenues of the Savoy Hospital, to Christ’s Hospital were not of the very highest order.
“What” [says Dignity] “should move the King to depart from so beautiful a house as Bridewell was, so richly garnished, with so great charges, and being so late builded, and to convert the lands of the Savoy to the City?”
“The situation of Bridewell” [replies Duty] “was such that all the cost was cast away; there was no coming to it but through stinking lanes or over a filthy ditch, which did so continually annoy the house, that the King had no pleasure in it. And therefore the King being required by the citizens to converte it to so good a use God moved his heart to bestow it to that use, rather than to be at any charge in keeping of it, or to suffer it to fall down; and so not profitable to any. And this, I am sure, was the reason that moved the King. For at that time it stood void and was daily spoiled by the keepers. And now as touching the turning over of the Savoy lands you shall understand that the Savoy was erected by King Henry VIIth in the time of papistry chiefly for pilgrims, wayfaring men, and for maimed and bruised soldiers that they might have meat, drink and lodging for a time. The pilgrims being suppressed and so no use of them, and as for such wayfaring men and soldiers as that house did commonly harbour, [they] were none other but common rogues and idle pilfering knaves, which they received in at night and every morning turned out at the gates without meat, drink or clothes; and so lay wandering all day abroad seeking their adventure in filching and stealing, and at night came and were received in again. And so the Savoy was nothing else but a nursery of all villany. The revenues and profits of the rents came wholly to the use of the Masters, who were priests, and officers of the house. And so the virtuous prince King Edward had great reason in converting the lands to the City, where the poor received the profits.”
The Savoy lands were worth £450 a year; but the institution was in debt to the amount of £178, which the City had to pay off, and they also had to pension the officers of the Savoy Hospital to the extent of £101 : 6 : 8 a year.
According to Howes, all the income from endowment went to St. Thomas’s Hospital, the Bridewell was maintained by labour, and Christ’s Hospital chiefly by the liberal devotion of the citizens; but if any one of these three wanted then the other two did supply the lack.
Meanwhile on July 26, 1552, the City began to repair the Grey Friars for the use of the poor children.
Separate committees of the thirty above-mentioned were appointed to prepare or “make sweet” the various places for the poor. That for Christ’s Hospital consisted of Mr. Roe, “which was afterwards Lord Mayor,” as Treasurer, and Stephen Cobbe, John Blondell, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Bartlett, Thomas Eaton, and Richard Grafton as “surveyors.” “The late dissolved Grey Friars at that time[[28]] stood void and empty, only a number of ‘whores and rogues’ harboured therein at nights; saving one Thomas Bryckett, vicar of Christchurch, with whom the Governors compounded and bought all his tables, bedsteads and other things; and made out of his lodgings ‘a compting house and lodging for their clerk.’” Then they appointed officers: a warden, clerk, steward, butler, under-butler, cook, two porters; surgeon, barber, tailor, coal-keeper, a “mazer” or bowl scourer, a matron, twenty-five sisters or nurses, a porter, and a sexton. With them were also the schoolmasters in the old triple division of grammar, song, and writing, with reading (assumed in the ordinary grammar school to have been already mastered) added.
There was—
| £ | s. | d. | |
|---|---|---|---|
| A Grammar Schoole Mayster, John Robynson, whose yearly fee was | 15 | 0 | 0 |
| A Grammar Usher, James Seamer | 10 | 0 | 0 |
| A Teacher to wrighte, John Watson | 3 | 6 | 8 |
| Schoolmasters for the Petties ABC, Thomas Lowes and Thomas Cutts, whose yearly fees to each of them was | 2 | 13 | 4 |
| A schule maister for musicke | 2 | 13 | 4 |
| A teacher of pricksonge whose yearly fee was | 2 | 13 | 4 |
John Watson the writing master was also clerk, in which latter capacity he received £10 a year. The status of the various teachers may be judged from the fact that the head surgeon received the same stipend as the head schoolmaster; the under-surgeon received £4 against the usher’s £10, while the arts got £8. The “Absies,” i.e. ABC or elementary schoolmaster, received 13s. 4d. a year more than the barber, and a great deal less than the porters, who had £6 a year each.
The foundation was a stupendous charitable effort, the money it cost being certainly underestimated by the common reckoning at twelve times the then value, or £30,000 of our money. It included, for instance, “500 feather beds, and 500 pads of straw to put under the feather beds, and as many blankets and 1000 pair of sheets” from one contractor alone. In all, double that number was provided. But many “there were that brought feather beds, coverlets, sheets, blankets, shirts and smocks, and disbursed great sums of money, which never came to any public account.” The “virtuous prince” himself was most generous. He issued a warrant under his own hand “that all the linen belonging to the churches in London should be brought and delivered to the Governors for the use of the poor, reserving sufficient for the Communion Table, with towels and surplices for the ministers and churches.” The linen, we are told, did good service, “and especiale in St. Thomas Hospital.”[[29]]
In November 1552[[30]] no less than 380 children were taken into the house. At first the “idle men and women” were also brought into Christ’s Hospital “and put in what is now (i.e. in 1582) the schoolmaster’s house, where they were kept from doing any further harm, although not employed to any occupations, for the place served not.” When Bridewell was obtained, the workhouse folk were removed there; but this was not before midsummer 1554.[[31]]
The preparation of Christ’s Hospital was entirely done by voluntary contributions. For St. Thomas’ the City granted £100, and “turned over” to it “£50 a year of that which had been purchased from the King.” But no endowment income was forthcoming for Christ’s Hospital. Nor is it possible to ascertain how much capital was given for Christ’s Hospital alone as the contemporary “State and charge of the new erected Hospitals—A.D. 1553”[[32]] gives the cost of St. Thomas’ indistinguishably mixed with that of Christ’s Hospital. The total was £2479 : 15 : 10, towards which £2476 was received in subscriptions and donations.
Though Christ’s Hospital was in full working order from November 1552, the legal foundation, which appears to have been delayed by the conclusion of the arrangements about Bridewell, was not complete till June 1553. An “Indenture of Covenants,” dated June 12, 7 Edward VI. (1553), was made in English between the King and the mayor, commonalty, and citizens of London, which was carried out by Letters Patent in Latin on the 26th June. The patent contained grants of the manor of Bridewell, the lands belonging to the Savoy Hospital, and the bedding in the same; but not the hospital itself. It created the City Corporation a special corporation with a separate common seal by the name of “the Governors of the possessions, revenues and goods of the Hospitals of Edward the Sixth, King of England, of Christ, Bridewell and St. Thomas the Apostle,” and gave them a licence in mortmain to hold lands for the purposes of the three hospitals up to 4000 marks (£3333 : 16 : 8) a year.
The charter in the most distinct terms emphasises the poor law character of the foundation, and states also with equal distinctness that the idea did not originate with the King. “Whereas we pitying the miserable estate of the poor, fatherless, decrepit, aged, sick, infirm and impotent persons, languishing under various kinds of diseases, and also of our special grace thoroughly considering the honest and pious endeavours of our most humble and obedient subjects the Mayor and Commonalty and citizens of our city of London, who by all ways and methods diligently study for the good provision of the aforesaid poor and of every sort of them”—such is the preamble to the grant. The charter deals with every class of destitute poor: sick, aged, orphans; the poor by misfortune; and rogues and vagabonds; the wilfully poor. The preamble states as its object “that neither children yet being in their infancy shall lack good education and instruction, nor when they shall attain riper years shall be without honest callings and occupations, nor that the sick or diseased when they be recovered and restored to healthe may remain idle and lazy vagabonds, but that they in like manner may be placed and compelled to labour.” In like manner the conclusion of the charter is a grant to the corporation of power to search towns and playhouses, and arrest ruffians, vagabonds, and beggars.
The story of the boy king inserting the licence in mortmain with his own hands is absurd. The licence, occupying a good quarto page of close print, is in the usual legal common form. The story arose, no doubt, from an exaggerated version of Strype’s[[33]] tale that “space was left in the patent for His Grace to put in what sum it pleased him” up to the yearly value of which the City might hold lands in mortmain for the hospitals, not Christ’s Hospital alone, but all together. “He looking on the void place called for pen and ink, and with his own hand wrote this sum, 4000 marks by the year.” Unfortunately for the story, in the patent the sum is written in the same hand as the rest of the document, and the sum had been previously settled, since it appears in the agreement executed a fortnight before, and could not have been altered without a breach of contract. In the agreement it is written in a different hand to the rest of the document; but there is no reason to think that it was Edward’s own hand, which it does not the least resemble. So much for the legend of St. Edward the VI. It is as apocryphal as the picture, said to be by Holbein, which hangs in the Great Hall of Christ’s Hospital and shows Edward on his throne surrounded by the Council, giving the charter to the Lord Mayor on his knees, while 15 boys and 15 girls of the Hospital kneel in the foreground, the smallest boy and girl facing the throne and holding up their hands in rapt admiration. It is a matter of history that the poor boy-king died within a week of the date of the charter—July 6, 1553,—and was invisible for many days before he died; a passing glimpse of him being exhibited to assure the people that he was still alive.
The foundation of Edward VI. nearly succumbed under his successor Mary. When “she came out of Norfolk and was to be received into London, the Governors set up a stage without Aldgate and placed themselves and the children on the stage, and prepared a child of the Free School to make an oracion to hir. But when she came near unto them she cast her eye another way and neither stayed nor gave any countenance to them.” “She did not like ‘the blewe boyes,’” said Howes; “but if they had been so many Grey Friars she would have given them better countenance.” According to him, “the Friars made great friends and great means to be restored to that house because it stood whole, and was not spoiled, as other houses were, but they never durst open their mouths to suppress that house as long as Friar John was within the land.” He tells a famous tale, “how Friars Peto and Perrin did their good wills to have subverted all.” But Friar John, a Spaniard, was brought by the rest of the Commissioners to have his opinion, who, “being there at dinner-time and seeing the poor children set at the tables in the hall and seeing them served with meat, he was so wrapt in admiration that suddenly he burst into tears, and said in Latin to the company that he had rather be a scullion in their kitchen than steward to their king.” “Alfonsus,” the King’s Confessor, also supported them, while Dr. Story was made a friend by having been given the lease of the house where he dwelt, which was “parcel” of the Friars, for he thought that if the Friars were restored that then they would bring his house in question; while the Bishop of Chichester being tenant of the chief lodging of the Prior was also friendly for the same reason. The children were therefore kept undisturbed, though Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, when Chancellor, “clapped Mr. Grafton fast in the Fleet for two days because he suffered the children to learn the English Premier when they should have learned the Latin Absies (A, B, Cs).”
There is plenty of evidence as to the class of children taken into Christ’s Hospital. The most striking is a passage from Howes’ book. “A number of the children,” he says, “being taken from the dunghill, when they came to sweet and clean keeping and to a pure diet died outright.... And a number of them would watch daily when the porters were absent that they might steal out and fall to their old occupation.” This is corroborated by the Court Book of the Hospital, which unfortunately only begins in December 1556, with such entries as this: May 10, 1557, “Graunted that a woman child left on Mr. Gunter’s stall in Cornhill, and by him kept since Candlemas, should be admitted.” November 8, “a woman childe left in a pewe at St. Peter’s, Cornhill, admitted.” March 14, 1557, a child “found in Thames Streete near the Bridge admitted.” In the “Children’s Register,” beginning 1563, we come across many names pointing to the foundling origin of the children. Richard Nomoreknowen, five years old. He died in the sick-ward in 1570. Augustine Old Change, six years old. “To service, March 30, 1567.” “Dorothy Buttriedore” (she had evidently been deposited behind the buttery door), “three years old. To service, 1570. Delivered to Mr. His for his own, but received back. Delivered to Margaret Garraway for her own, 1571; again to F. Tousbury, April 19, 1572.” “Jane Fridaiestreete, aged six, sent to service 1568.” Perhaps the two quaintest names were “Grace-That-God-sent-us,” “delivered out on the 19th, and died April 21, 1563,” and “Jane-that-God-sent-us,” sent to service 1568.
Stow says of Christ’s Hospital: “A full Courte shal be when xiij of the Governours of this said Hospitall be assembled at the least, whereof two shal be Aldermen, the one of them to be the President, with ten Commoners besides the Thresorer; and what these xiij Persons or vij of them at the leaste, the President being one of the Number, shal decree, ordaine or agree upon, the same shal stand in Force, and shal not be altered nor disallowed except by a like Courte to be called in that behalfe.
“Item. That no Governour be taken into this Hospitall in the Place of any that shal happen to die within the Year except it be at a full Courte, to be holden as afore, for weighty Causes; and the Name of him so admitted, to be presented to the Maior and Courte of Aldermen, before he be called to receive his Charge.
“Item. That no Sale of Land, Tymber, or Wood, Lease, Alienation, Buildinge, or Reparation be determined or done, of Lands or Tenements geven to th’ onlye Use of Christ’s Hospitall, or in any wise belonginge properlie to the same, except at a full Courte, to be holden in the said Hospitall as before.
“Item. That no Reward be given to any Person above the Some of v Shillings at once; which must be done by the consent of the Thresorer and one of the Almoners at the least; except first the same be graunted and determined in a full Courte, as before.
“Item. That there be no Leases lett in Reversion but one Year before the ould Lease be expired; and that no such Graunt be made but by a full Courte, as before, or els not; and that all the same Leases be drawn in Paper by a Scryvenor, one of the Governours of the saide Hospitall, before they be engrossed; and he to be allowed for every Draught accordinge to the Quantitie: And the Clerke of the said Hospitall to engrosse them, and to procure the Sealing of all such Leases before the Lord Maior and Courte of Aldermen, in the Chamber of London, where the Common Seal of the Hospitall doeth remaine.
“That noe manner of Bargaines be made for Timber, Tile, or such like, or any other Necessaries for the saide howse, before the same be determined at a full Courte, to be holden as before; and the Persons then and there to be named and appointed which shal be the Doers thereof” (Stow, Appendix II.).
In 1680 Sir John Frederick rebuilt the hall at his own expense; Sir Robert Clayton rebuilt the east cloister and south front. In 1825 the Hospital was largely rebuilt.
The two chief classes in the school are the Grecians and Deputy Grecians; of which many of the former go on to the universities with exhibitions. The Mathematical School was founded by Charles II. in 1672, and the boys are called “King’s boys.” The King’s boys and Grecians are the only boys who remain in the school after the age of fifteen. The ancient costume, consisting of long blue gown, leather belt, yellow stockings, combined with an absence of head-covering, makes the boys conspicuous wherever they may be. The old customs of supping in public in Lent, and the visit to the Lord Mayor on Easter Tuesday, are still kept up. But the old English diet of bread and beer for breakfast was done away with in 1824.
Among the most distinguished names of old scholars are those of S. T. Coleridge, the poet (d. 1834), Charles Lamb (d. 1834), Leigh Hunt (d. 1859). The system of admission is by presentations by governors; the Lord Mayor makes two presentations annually. A governor must give at least £500.
For an account of the Grey Friars see Mediæval London, vol. ii. p. 348.
Photo, R. W. Thomas.
AN EXCITING GAME, CHRIST’S HOSPITAL