THE ANCIENT SCHOOLS IN THE CITY OF LONDON
By A. F. Leach.
The history of schools in London, like the history of schools in England and mediæval Europe at large, necessarily begins with the history of its great churches. Throughout England until the Reformation, and, in theory at all events, until the Revolution, schools were ecclesiastical institutions, and education was a matter of purely ecclesiastical cognizance. The Ordinary, that is, the judge of the Ecclesiastical Court of first instance, had everywhere cognizance of all matters in dispute which concerned schools and scholars, their internal discipline and their relations to the external world. It could and did settle the question of school supply, how many schools there should be, and where.
If we want to know, therefore, what were the earliest and chief schools of London, we have only to ask, What were the earliest and chief churches of London? When we say churches, we must be careful to remember that the word churches for such purpose means churches of the secular clergy; that is, college and parish churches, not those of monasteries and religious orders. We must be careful not to confuse the two, and not to talk of St. Paul’s Cathedral Church as conventual, or of St. Martin’s-le-Grand Collegiate Church as a monastery. To do so is precisely like confusing New College, Oxford, with a Jesuit seminary, or Trinity, Cambridge, with a Salvation Army barracks.
The chief secular churches of London were, first and foremost, St. Paul’s Cathedral; next, the great Collegiate Church of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, now, alas! swallowed up by the General Post Office; and third, the Church of St. Mary-le-Bow, the London church of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the seat of his supreme ecclesiastical court, which has given its name to the Court of Arches, and was his “peculiar” property, exempt from the jurisdiction of the Ordinary, the Bishop of London.
In these three churches, some of the earliest extant documents of St. Paul’s reveal the existence of grammar schools, which were already old in the year 1138. These three schools, and they alone, constituted the whole of the public provision for education in London until the year 1441, when another grammar school was established in St. Antony’s Hospital. Some other schools were afterwards founded in connection with other churches before the Reformation. But while its earlier and its later pre-Reformation rivals have all disappeared, the earliest and greatest of all, the grammar school of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul’s, London, commonly called St. Paul’s School, with its unbroken pedigree of 800 years and upwards still ranks among the chief schools of the country, and holds as marked a position of pre-eminence in the greater London of 1900 as it did in the old narrow city of London in 1100.
The story of London schools should, then, be simplicity itself; the more so as it suffers from a lack of material. Yet it has been so obscured and complicated by successive writers that it has been converted into a tangled and twisted texture of guesses and fables, which we must endeavour to unravel.
It ought not to have been so. For, earlier probably than any other city in Europe, except York, London found its vates sacer, who for the admiration of his own and the information of later ages, sung the glories of its schools and scholars, their studies and their sports. Alcuin’s ninth-century poem[[38]] in Latin hexameters “On the Archbishops and Saints of the Church of York,” giving a vivid account of St. Peter’s School there, of which he was himself master in the third quarter of the eighth century, is the earliest account we have of any English school. The picture, drawn in poetic Latin prose of the twelfth century by “the son of Stephen,” of London schools and scholars, as they were during the boyhood of Becket, is not less full or vivid. One almost suspects from the way in which quotations from Latin poets are lugged in “by the hairs” that Fitzstephen was himself at one time a schoolmaster, before he became Becket’s chancellor and ended as a judge. At all events, he took a keen interest in schools and schoolboys, and devoted a good third of his famous description of London to the games and sports of the London schoolboy.
“In London,”[[39]] he says, “the three principal churches have famous schools privileged and of ancient pre-eminence, though sometimes through personal favour to some one noted as a philosopher more schools are allowed. On feast days the masters celebrate assemblies at the churches, arrayed in festive garb. The scholars hold disputations, some augmentatively, others by way of question and answer. These roll out enthymemes, those use the forms of perfect syllogisms. Some dispute merely for show, as they do at collections;[[40]] others for the truth which is the grace of perfection. The sophists and pretenders are pronounced happy because of the mass and volume of their words; others play upon words. The rhetoricians with rhetorical speeches speak to the point with a view to persuasion, being careful to observe the precepts of their art, and to leave out nothing that belongs to it.
“The boys of the different schools hold contests in verse, or pose each other on the principles of grammar or the rules of preterites and supines. Others in epigrams, rhymes and metres use the old street eloquence, with Fescinnine licence scourging their schoolfellows, without mentioning names; hurling abusive epithets and scoffs at them: with Socratic salt girding at the failings of their fellows, or perhaps of their elders; and in bold dithyrambics biting them with the sharp tooth of Theon. The audience
ready to laugh
With crincled noses redouble their shrill guffaws.”
The beginning of this passage states as plainly as can be that there were schools attached to the three principal churches, that they were ancient even then, and privileged. By privileged is meant, not as Lord Lyttelton[[41]] in his Henry II. interprets it, that “by particular privilege was taught not only grammar, but poetry, rhetorick and logick”; but, as the context shows, that these schools were the only schools allowed at all, though occasionally a special schoolmaster was allowed on sufferance and by personal favour. Stow, who was the first to quote this passage, went on[[42]] to identify the three schools. The first, he supposed rightly, was St. Paul’s. But for the second he puts “S. Peter’s at Westminster,” and supports it by a quotation from Ingulphus’ Chronicle, now admitted on all hands to be a fifteenth-century forgery. The third, says Stow, “seemeth to have been in the monastery of St. Saviour at Bermondsey in Southwark. For other priories, as of St. John by Smithfield, St. Bartholomew in Smithfield, St. Mary Overies in Southwark, and that of the Holy Trinity in Aldgate, were all of later foundation.”
This is a curious conglomeration of errors: which has unfortunately been blindly adopted by subsequent writers. Even if there had been a grammar school at Westminster, it could not possibly be described in the twelfth century as being in London, since Fitzstephen himself speaks of Westminster as being two miles off. The placing of a London school at St. Saviour’s, Bermondsey, is even more open to the same objection of not being in London.
It is an interesting question from what MS. of Fitzstephen Stow derived his knowledge of this passage about schools. Out of four ancient MSS. now extant, only one, and that the latest, contains the passage. These MSS. are: (i.) MS. Lambeth 138 (wrongly referred to as 1168 in the Rolls edition of Fitzstephen). This is of the thirteenth century and has not the Description of London at all. (ii.) MS. Douce 289 at the Bodleian. This is also of the thirteenth century. It has the Description of London, but having lost its first leaf has only the last few words about schools, (iii.) MS. Cotton, Julius, A, xi., at the British Museum. This is of the early fourteenth century and has not got the Description at all. (iv.) Lansdowne MS. 398, late in the fifteenth century. This is the only MS. which has the Description of London and its schools in full, and it does not mention the churches which kept them. On the other hand, the Description of London, apart from the Life, is written at the beginning of the Liber Custumarum of the City of London, now in the Guildhall, a MS. of the first half of the fourteenth century. It contains the passage about the schools and after the word churches inserts “viz. the Bishop’s see, the church of St. Paul’s, the church of Holy Trinity and the church of St. Martin.” Mr. Riley, in his edition of the Liber Custumarum, thinks that Stow had this book before him. But the omission by Stow of the names of the three churches, and his bad guess as to what the churches were, seem to show conclusively that the Guildhall MS. was unknown to him, unless he garbled it for the sake of avoiding a difficulty.
As we have seen, Stow says that Trinity Priory was not founded till after the time of which Fitzstephen was writing. In this he was mistaken. The Priory purports in its chartulary[[43]] to have been founded by “good Queen Mold,” the wife of Henry I., in 1108, and its most interesting endowment, the Portsoken, the land of the English Knights’ Gild outside Aldgate, in virtue of which the Prior of Christchurch, or Creechurch, as it was nicknamed, was ex officio an Alderman of the City of London, was given in 1125. There does not, however, seem to be any mention of a school in connection with the church before or after the foundation of the Priory either in its chartulary, or elsewhere.[[44]]
On the other hand, we have testimony contemporary with the time of which Fitzstephen was writing, and many subsequent references, extending up to the time of Henry VIII., which show conclusively that the three churches with schools were St. Paul’s, St. Martin’s-le-Grand, and St. Mary-le-Bow, and that they preserved their monopoly till the middle of the fifteenth century. There was therefore no room for any recognised school in, or connected with, Trinity Church. Three explanations appear to be possible. (i.) There was a school in Trinity Church while it was a secular church, belonging to the College Church of the Holy Cross, Waltham, which ceased on its being converted into a Priory. (ii.) There was an adulterine or unlicensed school there, put down by the very document which conveys the contemporary testimony as to what the legitimate and privileged schools were. But more probably (iii.) the words are an interpolation due to a gloss by some badly-informed commentator.
The curious thing is that in the very passage quoted, Stow cites, though inaccurately, a patent of Henry VI. by which, as we shall see, authority was given for the erection of certain schools, besides those at St. Paul’s, at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, and St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheap. It is rather strange that Stow did not know of the famous document at St. Paul’s, which tells us plainly what these three ancient and famous schools were. But then he had not the advantage we enjoy of Sir Henry Maxwell-Lyte’s admirable Calendar of the St. Paul’s Muniments.[[45]] The one in question runs thus:
Henry, by the Grace of God, minister of the church of Winchester, to the Chapter of St. Paul’s and William, Archdeacon, and their officers, greeting.
I command you by your obedience that after three summonses, you launch the sentence of excommunication against those who, without a license from Henry, the Schoolmaster, presume to teach (anywhere) in the whole city of London; except those who teach the schools of St. Mary of the Arch and St. Martin’s the Great. Witness, Hilarius, at Winchester.
It is at first sight mysterious that Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester, should, even though he was King Stephen’s brother, thus interfere in the affairs of another diocese. The explanation is that he was in fact acting as Bishop of London at that time, holding the See during its vacancy in commendam, or in charge. This fact enables us to fix the date. It must lie between 1138, when, according to the chronicler, Ralph de Diceto,[[46]] who was Dean of St. Paul’s, “the Pope with the King’s consent, committed the care of the church of London to Henry, Bishop of Winchester,” and 1140, when “the Empress (Matilda) was received by the Londoners for their lady, and she made Robert of the Seal, bishop of London.” Rival schoolmasters had no doubt taken advantage of the relaxation of discipline during the prolonged vacancy of the See, consequent on the Pope’s setting aside the election of the Abbot of St. Edmund’s Bury to it, to set up “adulterine” or unlicensed schools. When the See was placed under a strong guardian, the arm of the church was stretched out to defend the monopoly of its children.
But the injunction against rival schools was not, as has been represented by Dugdale,[[47]] any special favour to Henry the schoolmaster of St. Paul’s. It was merely in accordance with the common law of the church. We find precisely the same kind of proceeding going on at Winchester itself[[48]] at about the same time, and again as late as 1629; while copious instances of its use are to be found at Canterbury in the fourteenth, and at York and Beverley[[49]] in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Master Henry had been appointed schoolmaster by Richard Belmeis, Bishop of London, and his appointment is still extant among the archives of St. Paul’s, not only in a chartulary copy but in the actual original itself. As it is probably the oldest instrument of its kind in England, it is given in full.
Collation of the School[[50]]
Richard, by the Grace of God, Bishop of London, to William, Dean, and the whole assembly of his brethren, and to William of Oschendon his steward, and all his men, Greeting and blessing in Christ.
I make known to you, my beloved, that I have granted to Henry, my canon, the pupil of Master Hugh, the school of St. Paul’s, as honourably as the church in best and most honourable wise ever held it, and the land of the court (atrio) which the aforesaid Hugh enclosed there to house himself in; and the meadow which I had granted to the same Hugh in Fulham, 4 acres; namely, the whole land from the ditch to the Thames (he paying) 12d. a year by way of acknowledgment at Michaelmas; and, in alms, the tithes of Ealing and the tithes of Madeley.
Witnesses, William of Winchester, William of Occhenden, steward, and Hugh de Cancerisio.
On the strength of this and a previous document, Bishop Stubbs speaks[[51]] of Bishop Richard de Belmeis, de Bello Manso (or Fairhouse), as having “founded” the “schools” (sic) “of St. Paul’s.” The previous document is only preserved in a copy in the early chartulary called Liber A. It is addressed to W. Dean and the whole assembly of canons (fratrum conventui) and informs the bishop’s “best beloved sons” that he has “confirmed (stabilisse) to Hugh the Schoolmaster, ex officio as Master, and to his successors in that dignity, the place of Mr. Durand in the corner of the Tower, where Dean William placed him by my orders between Robert de Auco and Odo.” The Bishop then proceeds, “I grant to him and to the privilege of the school the custody of all the books of my church,” and orders the dean to have a list of the books made out in an indenture, one part of which is to be placed in the treasury, the other to be kept by the schoolmaster, who is to be given seisin of the books; while any books that have been lent out, whether theological (divinorum) or of secular learning, are to be returned, on pain of excommunication. Hugh was also “to have the keys of the cupboards” (armariorum, aumbreys as they are now somewhat affectedly called) “which I ordered to be made for the purpose.”
As no witnesses are recorded, the date of this cannot be fixed, except as being between 1111, when William became Dean, and 1127, when Bishop Richard died. It must, of course, be before the document appointing Henry as schoolmaster in succession to this same Hugh.
Neither of the two documents supports Bishop Stubbs’ statement that Bishop Richard “founded” the “schools” of St. Paul’s. It is odd that the Bishop should have fallen into this mistake, as Dugdale[[52]] described the documents quite accurately, as grants to the Schoolmaster of St. Paul’s. Both of the grants imply that the schoolmaster’s office or “dignity” was in existence before. The later document is, of course, as it is called, merely a collation; an appointment of a new master, Henry, who had himself been a scholar in the school, to succeed a deceased master, Hugh. The earlier one merely confirms, not grants, to an existing officer or dignitary of the cathedral the residence he already enjoyed, at the same time annexing that particular residence to the office, while giving him the apparently[[53]] new duty of taking care of the books belonging to the church. The title of Master applied to Durand suggests that he too had been schoolmaster before Hugh, and lived in the same house as Hugh did, but that the house, then only an ordinary prebendal house, was now definitely made the schoolmaster’s official residence.
It is particularly unfortunate that Bishop Stubbs should also have been misled by the plural form used in the original for a school into misunderstanding the mention of the school of St. Paul’s for a reference to schools, meaning more than one. There has been no more prolific source of misrepresentation as to the whole status and history of mediæval schools than this misunderstanding. Yet it is beyond doubt that until the middle of the fifteenth century the word school was habitually not scola but scolæ.[[54]] The official title of a grammar schoolmaster was not Magister Scole Gramatices or Gramaticalis but Magister Scolarum Gramaticalium. He was schoolsmaster not schoolmaster. This was the style almost universally used in official and formal documents up to the reign of Edward VI. In less formal documents, such as Account Rolls and the like, the singular form began to oust the plural as nearly as possible in the year 1450. Before that time, though there are occasional uses of the word in the singular, the normal use was in the plural. A few references to original documents will be enough to show the identity of meaning of the singular and plural forms. Thus, in an inquiry as to St. Cross Hospital near Winchester in 1373,[[55]] when evidence was given that among the 100 poor fed every day in the Hundredmen’s Hall, there were 13 poor scholars sent from the Grammar School of Winchester; some witnesses call them “poorer scholars of the grammar school (scole gramaticalis) of the city of Winchester,” and others, “poor scholars from the grammar school (scolis gramaticalibus) there,” the school being called indifferently the grammar school and the high school of the city of Winchester. Again in the Winchester College Account Roll for 1394, the head-master of the college grammar school, which was not the same as the City grammar school, is called both Magister Scolis and Magister Scole. This evidence is the more clinching as it is rare at that date to find the word school in the singular at all. Indeed, except at Winchester and London, as will be seen presently, where there seems to have been a higher standard of classical accuracy, I do not know of another instance of the word school in the singular in the fourteenth century.
The clearing up of this point is important, as the plural use has made people[[56]] search for two or more schools, and in consequence has led them to confound two entirely different schools, the Grammar School for the world at large, and the Song School chiefly, if not exclusively, for the choristers; and, in consequence, to maintain that the mediæval grammar schools were poor starved things, where a dozen choristers at most stumbled through their declensions and their psalter.
The documents of Richard de Belmeis then are not the foundation of St. Paul’s School. On the contrary, they point to it as previously existing, and to the schoolmaster as already one of the dignitaries or principal persons of the chapter. The true date of foundation and the real founder of St. Paul’s School must be sought in the foundation and founder of St. Paul’s Cathedral Church itself. The first foundation was in 604, when[[57]]
Augustine, Archbishop of the Britains, ordained two Bishops, Mellitus and Justus: Mellitus to preach to the province of Essex, separated from Kent by the river Thames, and close to the Eastern sea, whose metropolis is London city placed on the banks of the said river, an emporium for many nations, coming by land and sea; whose king then was Saberet (or Sebert) nephew of Ethelbert by his sister Ricula, though placed under the power of Ethelbert, who then ruled all the English race up to the Humber. When the province received the word of truth on the preaching of Mellitus, King Ethelbert made in the city of London the church of St. Paul the Apostle, in which he and his successors had their bishop’s See.
After Ethelbert and Sebert died in 616[[58]] there was a reaction to the old religion, and Mellitus fled abroad. When he tried to return, after the conversion of Ethelbert’s successor in Kent, London would not have him. It remained heathen till Oswi, King of the Northumbrians, converted Sigebert, a refugee prince, who, on returning home, made Cedd bishop of the East Saxons. But no mention is made of London as his See, and Tilbury[[59]] rather appears to have been his principal church. He died of the plague in 664. Wine,[[60]] expelled from Winchester, bought the See of London from Wulfhere, King of the Mercians, somewhere about 666. Thenceforward the history of the See and church is unbroken. It is only therefore from this last date that we can reckon the continuous history of St. Paul’s Cathedral or its school. There is no direct reference to the school in Bede, as there is to that of Canterbury, when the King of the East Angles got schoolmasters thence in 631. But the place[[61]] where lived the learned Nothelm, Bede’s principal informant as to the history of southern England, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, and Erkenwald or Earconwald, bishop from 675 to 692, whose name and fame in later ages, as the local saint of London, completely eclipsed that of St. Paul himself, much as St. Swithin did that of St. Peter at Winchester, can hardly have failed to maintain a school, any more than Canterbury or York or Winchester.
The original statutes of St. Paul’s Cathedral have not survived. The earliest statute affecting the school appears in a collection made during the deanery of Henry of Cornhill,[[62]] 1243 to 1254, who had been Chancellor of St. Paul’s from 1217 till he became Dean. It is a statute relating to the duties of the Chancellor. When present, it is said,
the Chancellor makes out the table (tabulam) of lessons, masses, Epistles, Gospels, acolytes, and performers of the service in course for a week (ebdomadariis) and hears the lessons [i.e. the reader has to read them over to him beforehand to see that he reads them correctly]. On feast days he hears the Bishop read, hands him the book to be read from at the beginning of mattins; and, clothed in a silk cope, holds the book for the Bishop to read at the last of the [nine] lessons. [The Chancellor himself, a later statute informs us, read the 6th lesson.] He introduces the clerks of lower grade to be ordained, and after examining them in school presents them to the Bishop for ordination, and administers justice to every one who makes any complaint as to their conduct. All scholars living in the city are under him, except those of a school of the Arches, and a school in the Basilica of St. Martin’s the Great, who claim that they are privileged in these and other matters. The Chancellor also keeps the chest with the school books in it.
The reference to a school (unam scolam) in St. Mary-le-Bow and St. Martin’s respectively, may be compared with the plural for the same schools in the writ of Bishop Henry of Blois.
In the digest of the statutes of St. Paul’s made during the deanery of Ralph of Baldock, 1294-1304, the words as to the Chancellor’s supremacy over the schools are repeated almost verbatim; but the plural form scolarum is used instead of the singular for the single schools at St. Martin’s and St. Mary-le-Bow respectively. This is pretty conclusive testimony of the identity in meaning of plural and singular for a single school. In this latter digest we find further details about the chancellor and a special statute, headed, “of the appointment of an M.A. to the Grammar School (scolæ grammaticæ).” The body of the statute is part of the statute as to the chancellor. It says:
The Chancellor appoints a master of arts to the Grammar School (scolis) and is bound to keep the school itself (scolas ipsas) in repair. He composes the letters and deeds of the Chapter. He reads whatever has to be read in Chapter. He is the chief keeper of the seal, and receives a pound of pepper for every deed that is sealed or renewed, the Chapter receiving 3s.
“If the Dean has to be ordained”—we may remember that William of Wykeham was Dean of St. Martin’s-le-Grand when still only an acolyte, and Reginald Pole, though a cardinal and an ex-dean, was not a priest till the day before he became Archbishop of Canterbury—“the Chancellor calls him by the title of St. Paul’s.”
The chancellor is
the chief keeper of the school books in the chest, and ought to show them once a year to the Dean and others appointed for the purpose, and a copy of the list of them is to be kept by the Dean, the Chancellor and a third brother [i.e. canon] appointed for the purpose.
It is possible, of course, though not perhaps very probable, that there were no written statutes of St. Paul’s affecting the school earlier than those quoted. Whether there were written statutes or not, the writs of Bishop Richard prove the schoolmaster’s office to have been in existence at least 150 years before this earliest written statute. But we might have positively asserted that there was such an officer if those writs had not existed, because the maintenance of a schoolmaster was part of the customary constitution of cathedral churches. Alcuin’s description[[63]] of the duties of himself and his predecessor, Ethelbert or Albert, afterwards archbishop, as schoolmaster at York in the eighth century, shows a schoolmaster fulfilling precisely the same mixture of legal, clerkly, and educational duties which appear in the famous Institution of St. Osmund at Salisbury in the eleventh and the statutes of St. Paul’s in the thirteenth century. As early as 832 a definite conciliar decree embodied in the written canon law the obligation, already crystallised into custom, that every cathedral church should maintain a school.
When Earl Harold[[64]] founded, or rather augmented, in 1060 the collegiate church of secular canons of the Holy Cross of Waltham with a dean and twelve canons, the principal person next to the provost or dean, as he is indifferently called, was the schoolmaster. The history of the foundation was written for us by one who was made a canon before 1144, having been “from tender years brought up in the church and taught Latin in its bosom.”[[65]] He was one of those who were turned out in 1177, when, with vicarious liberality, Henry II. converted the college into a priory of regular or Augustinian canons, in satisfaction of his vow to found a monastery in expiation of Becket’s death. This canon tells us[[66]] how Harold having heard that the Dutch was the best model, imported Master Athelard, a native of Liege, who had been educated at Utrecht, to assist Wulfwin the Dean in settling the constitution of the church. Our author himself, who does not give his name, says that his master[[67]] was “Master Peter, son of Master Athelard.” For the secular canons were, like their modern successors, allowed to marry, and this was the real reason why the favourers of monkery charged them with evil living. He tells us how
a copious stream of learning flowed from this Peter after the fashion of the Dutch (Teutonicorum) and yet the lessons and classics and verse composition in no way lessened the practice of singing in the churches. So far from boyish habits were they, that they walked in procession, stood, read and sang, with as much gravity as if they had been monks; and chanted and sang by heart solos or in duets or trios, without book whatever had to be sung at the steps of the choir or in the choir itself.... As they came in procession, like canons getting up to mid-night matins, from school to choir, so when leaving choir they go to school.
Here, then, we see that a school, a grammar school, was regarded as an integral and necessary, and a most important part of the foundation of a collegiate church before the Conquest.
Similar evidence comes from another collegiate church of pre-Conquest foundation, that of St. Mary, Warwick. This church, situate in the middle of the town, is recorded in Domesday Book as possessing a hide of land. There was also a collegiate church of All Saints, a kind of garrison chapel, in the castle, the stronghold founded by Ethelfled, the Lady of the Mercians, against the Danes in 916, but which after the date of Domesday Book passed into the hands of one of the Norman invaders. Forty years after Domesday Book, in 1123, disputes having arisen between the two churches, the second Norman lord, Roger de Beaumont, confirmed to these two churches all their respective property as they held it in his father’s time. Then by a separate deed he confirmed “in alms,” i.e. in perpetuity free from feudal service, “to the church of St. Mary of Warwick the school (scolas) of the said church, that the service of God in the same may be improved by the attendance of scholars.” By a similar deed he must have confirmed All Saints in its school, as a writ of King Henry I. addressed to this Earl Roger and the ecclesiastical lords, the Bishops of Worcester and Chester, directs “that the Church of All Saints, Warwick, shall have all its customs and judgments of iron and water (i.e. the right of administering the ordeal) as they did in the time of Edward, and in like manner shall have its school (scolas).” A few years later the two collegiate churches were consolidated, the canons of All Saints being transferred from the castle, their residence there “being inconvenient,” and the property of the united church of St. Mary and All Saints was confirmed to it first by the Earl, then by the Bishop, including “the school of Warwick and trial of iron, water and duel.” So here again the school, and the right to keep it, is regarded as one of the most important attributes of a pre-Conquest collegiate church.
The statutes made on the new foundation of Salisbury Cathedral within twenty-five years of the Norman Conquest are preserved. They are not indeed in a contemporary document, but written in a thirteenth-century hand in a new version of these statutes made on the removal of the cathedral from Old Sarum to the present Salisbury in 1220. There seems no reason to doubt their authenticity.
These are the dignities and customs of the church of Salisbury which I, Osmund, bishop of the same church, in the name of the Holy Trinity, in the year 1091, have instituted and granted to the persons and canons of the same, with the advice of the Archbishop and the assent of King William.
The Dean and Chanter (Precentor), Chancellor and Treasurer shall be always resident in the church of Salisbury, without any kind of excuse....
The chanter ought to teach the choir as to singing and can raise or lower the chant.
The Treasurer is chief in the custody of the treasures and ornaments and the giving out of lights.
In like manner the Chancellor (cancellarius) (is chief) in teaching school and correcting the books.
Dean and Chapter, Treasurer and Chancellor have double commons, the rest of the Canons single commons.
The Sub-Dean holds under the Dean the archdeaconry of the city and suburbs, the Succentor under the Precentor that which belongs to the choir (cantariam).
If the Dean fails, the Sub-Dean fills his place, so the Succentor has the Precentor’s.
The Schoolmaster (archischola) ought to hear the lessons and determine on them, carry the seal of the church, compose letters and deeds, and mark readers on the list, and the Precentor in like manner the singers.
Here, then, we find four principal persons, of whom one, the chancellor, is also called schoolmaster. He is the legal and educational, while the chanter or precentor is the musical officer of the chapter. In the fourteenth century copy of the statutes of York Minster it is said of the chancellor that he “was anciently called Schoolmaster”; and the twelfth-century historian of the Minster, a contemporary of Bishop Richard of Belmeis, describes how Thomas of Bayeux, the first Norman archbishop there, had just established or (as we may infer) re-established a provost and schoolmaster; but afterwards, about 1090, established that which afterwards became the regular cathedral “foursquare” constitution of dean (instead of provost), precentor, treasurer, and chancellor.
In the oft-quoted Liber A at St. Paul’s, written in the thirteenth century, the copies of the writs of Bishop Richard of Belmeis and Henry of Blois, with some later documents, are headed “Of the Schoolmaster (De Magistro Scolarum) and Chancellor, seven letters”: and a marginal note to a later document of Bishop Richard Fitz Neal (1189-99), increasing the endowment of the schoolmaster, runs, “Note—the tithes given to the Schoolmaster of St. Paul’s, now the Chancellor.”
The analogy, therefore, of other cathedral and collegiate churches, corroborated as they are by the records of St. Paul’s itself, the knowledge that we have of the existence of schools, not only at great capitals like Canterbury, Winchester, and York, but even at small places like Warwick and Waltham, amply justify us in asserting confidently that the schoolmaster and school of St. Paul’s existed not merely before the days of Bishop Richard de Belmeis, but before the Conquest, and in all reasonable probability from the days of Bishops Wine and Earconwald.
What were these London schools? What did they teach? Lord Lyttelton[[68]] in his History of Henry II. spoke of them as “schools or rather colleges,” meaning university colleges, and Sir George Buck in 1631 described them as the Third Universitie of England.[[69]] This was because of the mention of logic, and the statement that, not indeed as Lyttelton says, “many” but other “schools” were occasionally opened “by persons of note in philosophy,” by special favour.
But to infer from this a University of London in the twelfth century is to transfer to it the ideas of the eighteenth century. The Trivium, the “trivial task” of the twelfth century school-boy, included rhetoric and dialectic as well as grammar. Grammar meant not only grammar strictly speaking, but the general study of classical literature. Rhetoric included not only the art of persuasion, the rules of oratory, but generally Latin composition, prose, and verse,[[70]] and declamation or recitation. Rhetoric was naturally incomplete without dialectic or logic, the art of argument. So powerful during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries did dialectic become, that not only did theology become almost a branch of logic but grammar itself was taught and practised “dialectically.” The “rostrum,” on which dialectic and rhetoric were practised, was to be found in the school of Winchester College as late as 1650.
The distinction drawn by Fitzstephen between the boys who capped verses and the other scholars who held debates in rhetoric and logic was not coincident with that between a grammar school and a university college. The word “boy” was used strictly, as it still was as late as the Elizabethan statutes of grammar schools, for those under fourteen years of age, who were carefully distinguished on the one hand from children or infants under seven, and from youths (juvenes) of fourteen to twenty-one. Then, as now, youths of eighteen and upwards were found in the grammar schools, and William of Wykeham, and the advisers of Henry VI. in the foundation of Eton, all Wykehamists, were no innovators raising the age of schoolboys when they prescribed nineteen as the leaving age for the scholars of Winchester and Eton.
There is therefore no necessary ground for the inference that the schools of London in the first half of the twelfth century bore any different character from that which they had in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, when the same schools are described simply as grammar schools.
On the other hand, the period of which Fitzstephen wrote was that of the origin of universities. It saw the birth of Bologna, of Paris, and of Oxford. At Paris, the university grew out of the extension and the rivalry of the schools, the grammar schools, of the cathedral church of Notre Dame and the collegiate church, as it then was, of St. Geneviéve. At Oxford there is every reason to believe that the university developed in like manner from the schools of the collegiate churches, as they then were, of St. Frideswide and St. George in the Castle.[[71]] The “University” side of the schools finally emancipated itself, at an earlier period even than at Paris, from ordinary ecclesiastical control, through the conversion of these two collegiate churches into houses of regulars, and the extinction therewith of their control of secular scholars, while the Chancellor of Lincoln was too remote to exercise any effective government such as was exercised by the Chancellor of Paris.
It was quite within the bounds of probability then that London also would develop a university out of the three ancient schools, and the permitted rivalry, by special favour, of the schools of other “doctors of philosophy.” But it was not to be. London even then was too great a commercial emporium, the prizes of successful trade were too attractive, business was too absorbing, the hum of markets and wharves was too loud for the voice of learning to make itself heard, or for schools, whether of theology or arts, to attract the pick of the intellect of the City. Paris, though the political capital, was not also the commercial capital of France, where Rouen, the independent capital of a rival power, occupied, to it, the position which the Port of London bore to London. The King’s Court and the King’s Chancery were the main avenues to success for clerks, and even so late as the reign of Henry III. the Castle of Winchester and Beaumont House at Oxford, or the Manor of Windsor, rather than the Tower of London, or even Westminster Hall, were the favourite resorts of the King’s Court, and the residence of the royal treasury and the royal chancery. Hence London never developed an Abelard and a mainly theological university like Paris. The settlement at Westminster of the royal courts, and the superior importance in England of the common law to the civil law for somewhat similar reasons, prevented London from producing an Irnerius or a Gratian and giving rise to a legal university such as that of Bologna. Indeed the greater fame of Paris and Bologna universities themselves was in the cosmopolitan spirit which, under the centralising influence of the Roman Church, made learned Europe almost a single nation, a potent obstacle to the development of a university of London.
No exact definition of a university has yet been given, nor is capable of being given, and it may be doubted whether there is any university now in existence which really corresponds to the mediæval university. But one salient mark of a university, a number of teachers and a number of adult students in the higher faculties, in theology and law, or philosophy, certainly existed at Paris in the days of Abelard, and to some extent in Oxford, but did not seemingly exist in London, or if it did exist was quenched by Henry of Blois’ mandate.
If the London schools formed a university in 1138, a fortiori did the School of York form one in 735. In Alcuin’s description of the School of York as it flourished under Archbishops Egbert and Albert, an even greater multiplicity of subjects was taught than in the three schools of London in Fitzstephen’s day. Albert, its master,[[72]] “moistened thirsty hearts with diverse streams of teaching and varied dews of learning, giving to some the science of the art of grammar, pouring on others the rivers of the tongues of orators; these he polished on the whetstone of law, those he taught to sing together in Æolian chant, making others play on the flute of Castaly, and run with the feet of lyric poets over the hills of Parnassus.” Here we get the Grammar, Song, and Rhetoric of later days. Song had in London in 1130 already been relegated to a separate school. At York there was taught also arithmetic and geometry, and the method of calculating the ecclesiastical calendar, the music of the spheres, astronomy, physiography, “the rising and falling of the wind, the movements of the sea, the earth’s quake,” and natural history, “the nature of men, cattle, birds, and beasts.” Above all, Albert taught theology. This curriculum is considerably more extensive than that of the London schools, embracing many of what we should now regard as university subjects. York afterwards branched off into three schools—the Chancellor’s Theological School; the Grammar School under the Chancellor’s deputy, who became the Schoolmaster par excellence; and the Song School under the precentor. Yet as we should not call York School under Albert or Alcuin a university merely because many subjects were taught in it, neither can we dub the London schools of the twelfth century a university.
We must therefore negative the claims of London to the possession of a university in the first half of the twelfth century. But we can at least claim that St. Paul’s School occupied the same position then as now, as the chief day-school for the sons of middle-class citizens. Becket’s biographer tells us what his education was: “Thomas spent the years of infancy, boyhood, and youth quietly in his father’s house, and in passing through the City school (scolis urbis); but when he became a young man he went to study at Paris (Parisius studuit). As soon as he came back, he was taken into public life in London, being made a clerk and accountant in the Sheriff’s office.” The true translation of scolis urbis is the city school; and the city school meant the school of the cathedral church of the City, the School of London. To this school Becket, whose father had at one time been sheriff of London, was sent. After leaving school, Becket went, in modern parlance, to Paris University before entering on professional life. He was born in 1118, so, as he may be presumed to have gone to Paris at about eighteen or nineteen years of age, he must have gone there about 1137, the time when John of Salisbury, the greatest writer of the age, was also there, sitting at the feet of Abelard, then lecturing in the College of St. Geneviéve. Mr. Rashdall, laying down a somewhat arbitrary definition, maintains that Paris was not then, strictly speaking, a university, though he admits it was such probably by the middle of the century.
However that may be, it is clear that in Becket’s case, as in John of Salisbury’s, the schools of Paris, not the schools of London, were regarded as giving “university” training. Fifty years later Becket would have gone to Oxford and the “martyrdom” would never have occurred. As it was, after his English and Pauline training, he was, with disastrous results, inoculated with the “fool fury of the Seine.” Still, St. Paul’s School may claim in him one of the earliest and most famous known Paulines, Henry the schoolmaster being the earliest.
It has to be confessed that from Becket’s time onwards to Colet’s we know scarcely anything of St. Paul’s School beyond the bare fact evidenced by the statutes already quoted of 1243-54 and 1294-1304, and certain fourteenth- and fifteenth-century documents to be presently quoted, that it was pursuing the even tenor of its way. While there are documents at Canterbury containing very full evidence of the great position occupied by the Grammar School of the Archbishop and the Grammar schoolmaster there in the first half of the fourteenth century, while an unbroken series of the Acts of the Chapters of York and Lincoln preserve continual notices of the grammar schools of York and Lincoln, there is an absolute dearth of such records at St. Paul’s. One solitary Chapter Act Book of the Canons of St. Paul’s remains, and that is one of the last quarter of the fifteenth century. It is singularly uninteresting, being almost entirely concerned with continual renewals of leave of absence granted to the canons who were called Residentiary because, unlike the other canons, they were supposed to be always resident; with renewals of leases and the division of the spoil among the residentiary canons, and the “correction” of vicars—choral and minor canons—for devotion to the forbidden sex. All we know is that the Grammar School went on and that it was not the Song School or a choristers’ school, because we have conclusive evidence that this Song School was a different institution. Two statutes[[73]] in terms corresponding to those about the chancellor and the Grammar schoolmaster deal with the precentor (cantor) and the Song schoolmaster. “It is the Precentor’s duty to rule [or teach, regere] the choir in the raising and lowering of the chant, and in singing the psalms. It is his duty through the Song Schoolmaster to place the singers’ names on the table, to stir up the lazy to sing, and gently rebuke those who run about the choir in a disorderly fashion. On the greater feasts, if he is in choir and instructed as a singer, he begins the antiphons after the Benedictus and Magnificat and the processional chants and sequences. He examines the boys to be brought into the choir and given a title as choristers.” A statute as to those choristers made during the deanery of Ralph de Diceto, the historian, between 1180 and 1200,[[74]] shows that they were already then boarded in the Almonry. “As the boys of the Almonry ought to live on Alms” (or, as we might say, “as charity boys ought to live as such”) “they are to sit on the ground in the canons’ houses, not with the vicars at table, lest they become uppish and drunken and perhaps too pampered, and so unfit for the service of the church. Besides they sometimes go too early without saying goodbye to their host; and sometimes when they return to the Almonry from the feast, they despise the living there and spread evil reports of their Master.” The statute refers to the custom under which the residentiary canons had to give three meals daily to two minor canons, two chaplains, four vicars choral, two Almonry boys; the vergers and bell-ringers. The Master referred to was not the Grammar schoolmaster, as has been rashly assumed by some, but the Almoner, the master of the almshouse. To the early cathedral churches a hospital or almshouse was as essential an appendage as a choir and a Grammar School. Some of them still survive. The Dean of Hereford is still ex officio Master of St. Ethelbert’s Hospital, attached to St. Ethelbert’s Cathedral. York had its St. Peter’s Hospital, the ruins of the chapel of which, afterwards called St. Leonard’s Hospital, may still be seen. St. Paul’s, therefore, had its almonry, a Norman-French word for almshouse, and its almoner. In statutes made in 1263 the almoner is enjoined to distribute alms according to the method ordained by those who gave endowments for the purpose; poor people and beggars who die in or near the churchyard he is to bury gratis without delay. “He is to have, moreover, daily with him 8 boys fit for the service of the church, whom he is to have instructed either by himself or by another master in matters pertaining to the service of the church and in literature [i.e. grammar] and good behaviour; taking no payment for the same.”
An Almoner’s Register begun in 1345 is fortunately extant,[[75]] which records the statutes, charters, and customs of the office. In it, the almoner records against himself that “if the Almoner does not keep a cleric to teach the choristers grammar, the schoolmaster of St. Paul’s claims 5s. a year for teaching them, though he ought to demand nothing for them because he keeps the school for them, as the Treasurer of St. Paul’s once alleged before the Dean and Chapter is to be found in ancient deeds.” The allegation that the Grammar School was kept for the choristers is historically untrue, though it is probably true that the choristers ought to have been admitted free to it. At least, the question was solemnly raised at Beverley in 1312,[[76]] when the Grammar schoolmaster wished to make all choristers beyond the original number attending the Grammar School pay fees; but the succentor, the Song schoolmaster, contended that he was bound to teach all the choristers free, and after inquiry by the Chapter into the “ancient customs” of the church it was decided that he was so bound, only the succentor was not to defraud him by admitting boys to the choir merely for the sake of getting free education in the Grammar School. Whatever may have been the choristers’ rights in the matter, the fact that the Grammar schoolmaster claimed and received payment for them shows with absolute conclusiveness that the Grammar School was not a choir school or a choir-boys’ school.
Yet Mr. Lupton, late Surmaster of St. Paul’s School, in his Life of Colet actually cites[[77]] the will of one of the almoners, William of Tolleshunt, made in 1329, as proof that the Cathedral school, which he confuses with the Almonry school, “not only existed and flourished, but contained within itself the germs of a University.” Yet what are the facts? The Almoner says:[[78]] “I bequeath a shilling to each senior and 6d. to each junior of the boys of the church whom I educated in the Almonry. Also I give them my best Hugocio and the big and little Priscian, bound in one volume, Isidore’s Etymology, and all my grammar books, except those which my clerk Ralph has, and all the volumes of sermons which the Boy-Bishops used to preach in my time, to remain in the Almonry for ever for the use of the boys living in it, and never to be lent outside, or given away or sold.” The will goes on, “I bequeath also my books of the art of Dialectic (of which John of Stoneground has the old and new Logic), with the books of Natural History and other books of that art, in order that these books may be lent to boys apt for learning (ad scolatizandum) when they leave the Almonry; due security being taken for their return, to prevent their being alienated. The books of physic also, of which I have several about medicines; and also the books of the civil law, viz. the Institutes, Code, Digest, and Authentics, and these legal works I give to the use of the boys in the manner above written.”
ST. PAUL’S SCHOOL (BEFORE ITS REMOVAL TO HAMMERSMITH)
Says Mr. Lupton: “There were works on Logic, on Physic, on Medicine, on Civil Law ... all were expressly bequeathed to the use of the boys.” Yes, but while the grammar books were for the use of the boys in the Almonry, these other books were, by the express terms of the will, to be lent to boys who had left the Almonry, when they went on to university studies, so that the very words cited to show that this school was something more than a grammar school prove the exact opposite; and this very case cited to show that the school in question was the St. Paul’s Cathedral Grammar School shows that it was a district foundation and intended only for the eight boys in the Almonry. That these eight boys, afterwards increased to ten, were the choir-boys, is shown by the will of Bishop Richard of Newport,[[79]] in 1315, giving to this very William of Tolleshunt, Almoner, one of his executors, and to the Almoner for the time being a house near St. Paul’s the rents of which, after paying £1 to the maintenance of the Lady Chapel, were to be applied “to the support of one or two of the Almonry boys for two years after they have changed their voices.” Again, among the earlier statutes of the Almonry it is ordered that “the boys after entering the choir are not to leave it except when their duty requires it.” William of Tolleshunt himself, too, bequeaths by his will a trust estate bequeathed to him some six years before “for the Almonry boys serving the choir, for their shoes.”
In 1348 Sir John Pulteney,[[80]] knight, gave 20s. a year to the almoner to provide the choristers with summer clothes.[[81]] In return for the shoes the boys had to sing De Profundis, with the usual Pater Noster, Ave Maria and collects, every morning on getting up and every evening on going to bed; and for the summer clothes to sing an anthem after complin with prayers for the dead in the Pulteney Chapel. In 1358 William of Ravenstone,[[82]] Almoner, gave a tenement called the Stonehouse in Paternoster Row “for the support of an additional chorister or two.” That the choristers when clever were meant to go on to the universities is clear from a payment out of the chantry of Bishop Ralph (Baldock) who died in 1313. He gave 3s. “to poor students being sometyme choristers of the said cathedral church towards ther exhibicion yearly,” while a later benefactor Thomas Ever, in the reign of Henry IV., gave a like sum specifically “to the poore choristers of Paules towards their exhibicion in the University.”
There is no question, therefore, that, while there was a grammar school maintained for the benefit of the choristers, it was quite distinct from the choir school for teaching them singing, and from the Cathedral Grammar School open to all boys. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that the choir-boys, being lodged and boarded in the Almonry, had a tutor provided for them to see that they learnt grammar. For one can hardly call the teaching of eight or ten choristers a school.
There would not have been any need to insist on this school so much at length if the whole matter had not been thrown into confusion through the labours of a certain Miss Hackett who devoted herself in the first quarter of the 19th century to the interests of the choir-boys of St. Paul’s, who were then left without any proper schooling or care. She, with great energy, routed out all she could find in the records of St. Paul’s or elsewhere, relating to the choir-boys, and published it in a pamphlet misnamed Correspondence and Evidences respecting the Ancient Collegiate School attached to St. Paul’s Cathedral.[[83]] She succeeded in establishing in Chancery the claim of the choir-boys on the revenues of the Almonry. But her zeal outran her discretion, as whenever she saw in any of the records of St. Paul’s anything about a school or school-boys, she at once attributed it to the choir school and choirboys, and attacked the Chancellor, as well as the Almoner, on the ground that the St. Paul’s Grammar School was for the choir-boys. In this she failed. But she did a great deal of harm to the Cathedral Grammar Schools in general by imbuing people with the notion that they were mere choir-schools. Mr. Lupton makes the Grammar School to have been in Sharmoveres (now Sermon) Lane. Sharmoveres is a name of naught. It is simply a misreading of “Sarmoners,” i.e. Sermoners’ Lane, from a house which is said in a document of Edward I.’s reign to have belonged to “Adam le sermoner.” Sermon Lane is the modern shortening. This was not the Grammar School nor even the Almonry school, but a house bequeathed to the Almonry. Sermon Lane is at the west end of St. Paul’s, some little way from the church. The Grammar School was at the opposite or east end, in the churchyard, and quite close to the church.
Having thus cleared away the confusion between the Grammar School and the choristers’ boarding-house we must leave the history of the Almonry without following it further, and for a little while turn from the history of St. Paul’s School to that of its two mediæval rivals.