The customary period of the novitiate was seven years. During this time the novice was under the sole care of the novice-master, through whose hands he received all his necessary clothing and bedding, supplied ultimately by the Chamberlain. He received none of the monetary allowances made to professed monks, nor indeed was he allowed to handle money at all. His instruction came from the novice-master, who was to report the matter if he shewed signs of special ability in order that his claims to a university career might be considered, in accordance with the Benedictine custom of sending to Oxford one in twenty of the community.
The main subject in the educational system was of course the Latin tongue in order that a proper understanding might be acquired both of the Scriptures and of the various orders of service. The latter indeed had to be learnt by heart and the novice-master would hear the repetition.
John Islip would seem not to have shewn any great ability as a scholar, at least in Latin, for he was not one of those selected to proceed to the university. He was sufficiently advanced, however, to be professed and ordained priest in his twenty-second year in accordance with a special privilege of the Westminster community. Scarcely had he said his first mass when he was appointed domestic chaplain to the Abbot and probably at the same time to the office of Sub-almoner. The former appointment would bring him into intimate contact with a wider life than he had hitherto known, while the latter would provide the first test of those administrative abilities which might mark him in due course for promotion to higher offices.
The duties of the Abbot’s chaplain in these later years of the monastery of Westminster are nowhere defined. In the fourteenth-century Customary of Canterbury it is written that such chaplains should be polite, discreet and pleasant, especially to all strangers. They form as it were a link between the Abbot and his Convent and are bidden to foster the love of the Abbot to the Convent and that of the Convent to the Abbot. Their other duties relate mainly to the due performance of masses in the private chapel and the general regulation of the Abbot’s household. At Durham it was the custom for the chaplain to be summoned to the bedside of a dying monk “who staied wth him till he yealded ye ghoste,� but no such duty seems to have been required at Westminster, the Prior being deemed responsible for the last offices. It can, however, hardly be wrong to assume that the position was one of tact and confidence as well as of invaluable experience to a man who within a comparatively few years was himself to occupy the Abbot’s place.
As Sub-almoner Islip’s duties were of a very practical character. His primary responsibility was for the children of the almonry and of the song school. These had their meals in common and were clothed and educated at the expense of the monastery. In due course the Sub-almoner took them to London to be apprenticed to masters of different trades, and would use the opportunity to purchase russet-coloured fustian for the coats of the “syngyng children,� with white cotton to line them, black velvet to bind them, and “sylkyn poyntts� for further decoration. His interest in the children did not end with their passing from his immediate control, for visits were paid from time to time to their masters and presents made in time of sickness.
Apparently the purchase of music books came into his department—if we may judge from a payment of five shillings made on one occasion for a “pryksong booke of masses, antems and other songis.â€� Year by year on St. Nicholas’ Eve and Day the festival of the Boy-Bishop was kept by the singing children, and it was the Sub-almoner’s duty to provide the necessary costumes as well as provisions for the festivity, such as milk-bread, “cowmfetts,â€� and the like. New shoes and hosen were bought as well as gloves, and eight pence had to be provided for the Boy-Bishop’s offering at the shrine of St. Edward and the altar of Our Lady of the Pew.
The singing children assisted at the high mass and evensong on all the principal feasts, and doubtless some of them developed a vocation for the monastic life.
Besides the charitable care exercised by the Sub-almoner over the children of the almonry and song school, he was in part also responsible for the children of the Grammar School whose parents were not in need of charity. The latter had a master of their own who was paid three shillings and four pence a quarter in money for his trouble, but probably received his board and lodging in addition. The grammar children, as they are called uniformly both in monastic times and throughout the years immediately succeeding the dissolution, find a complete continuity with the Westminster School of to-day, and it is in consequence with no surprise that we read in a Sub-almoner’s notebook about the year 1526 of the payment of sixteen pence for “wryttyng of a play for the children.�
Among the officials responsible to the Sub-almoner were the butler and keeper of the “Corde Hall� or Corde as the monastic Misericorde was commonly called, and here it would seem the grammar children took their meals.
With such cares as these Islip’s life can have been no idle one, though he did not think it worth while to record in his diary anything of such commonplace tasks. These were duties within the cloister so to speak, and he began his diary on his appointment to offices which would take him farther afield and provide him with responsibilities to which his earlier duties might seem trivial.