The Grammar School of St. Martin’s-le-Grand
Of the third ancient school, that of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, there seems to be no history recoverable. Presumably when Henry VII. annexed the college to Westminster Abbey the documents were transferred too. But only one small Register of St. Martin’s, written in the fifteenth century, remains in the Westminster Chapter Muniments, and there is no mention in it of the school. There is, however, one reference to the schoolmaster in the City Letter Books.[[87]] “On Thursday before 24 August, 26 Edward I., 1298, John, the cap, hat, or hood-maker (cappeler) of Fleet Street entered into a recognizance to Master Hugh of Whittington (Wytington), schoolmaster (Magistro scolarum) of St. Martin’s-le-Grand for payment of £8 at Michaelmas year. Afterwards Master John of Whittington, brother and executor of the said Hugh, came and acknowledged that he had been satisfied of such sum. Therefore it was cancelled.” The entry is enough to show that the school was going on and that the master was a man of substance, being able to lend the then considerable sum of £8.
The latter half of the fourteenth century was signalised by considerable activity in the foundation of new, or changes in old, grammar schools. This was due to two conflicting forces. On the one hand, it was due, as it was expressed in Wykeham’s foundation deed of New College, Oxford, to “the general disease of the clerical army, which through the want of clergy, caused by pestilence, wars, and other miseries of the world, we have seen greviously wounded,” or, as it was more shortly put in changing the appointment of a master of St. Peter’s School, York, in 1369, from a five-years’ appointment to a life tenure, to “the late Death and the rarity of M.A.s.” The demand for clergy to fill the ranks thinned by the Black Death of 1349 and its subsequent outbreaks, caused a demand for grammar schools. On the other hand, the incipient revolt of the townspeople against clerical domination which manifested itself in the substitution of lay for clerical ministers in the field of politics, and by the open propagation of Lollard opinions against image worship, transubstantiation, confession, and the celibacy of the clergy, and so forth, in the field of religion, created a demand for learning and for schools. The conflict of the two opposing forces is shown in the petition presented to Richard II. in 1394 (the very year, it may be noted, of the transfer of Winchester College, founded in 1382, to its present buildings) by the ecclesiastical authorities of London, who claimed the monopoly of education in “the three ancient and privileged schools.” “The King’s devout chaplains and orators, William,[[88]] Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, the Dean of your frank chapel of St. Martin’s-le-Grand and the Chancellor of the Church of St. Paul in London,” set out how to them, “as well by the law spiritual as by customary prescription in that behalf, the order, management, and examination of the masters of certain schools of the faculty of grammar in London and the suburbs, belonged, belong, or ought to belong, to them, with the advice of the Bishop of London, from time immemorial.” “Yet” they complained, “lately certain strangers, feigning themselves Masters of grammar, having no sufficient learning in that faculty, without the assent, or knowledge, and against the will of the petitioners, wilfully usurped their jurisdiction, and kept General Grammar Schools in the City in deceit and fraud of the children, to the great prejudice of the King’s lieges, and the jurisdiction of Holy Church. But when the three Masters of the schools of St. Paul’s, the Arches, and St. Martin’s for the care and profit of the king’s subjects, had gone to law against the foreign masters in Court Christian, according to ecclesiastical law, their adversaries had sued them in the secular courts to make them abandon their pleas.” The petitioners, therefore, asked the King, both because of his interest in his free chapel of St. Martin, and of the prejudice done to the petitioners, to direct letters to issue under the Privy Seal to the mayor and aldermen “to attempt nothing whereby the jurisdiction of Holy Church, or the process between the parties in Court Christian might be disturbed.”
Whether the Privy Seal asked for was issued does not appear. Parliament was then supporting the Lollards.[[89]] But next year Richard was fetched back from his Irish War to put them down, and the leading Lollards had to recant on pain of death. Certain it is that the three church schools retained their monopoly for nearly half a century more. It was then attacked and broken up by assailants from within the pale of the church itself and by orthodox churchmen. The first breach of it, apparently for purely educational reasons, was made by the establishment of a grammar school in St. Anthony’s Hospital in Threadneedle Street.