The same deeds state that the founder, John Dowman, endowed the school with lands sufficient to pay £13 6s. 8d. a year to the Master and Wardens of the Gild for
finding with the same a fit man sufficiently learned in the science of grammar to teach and instruct all and singular scholars resorting to the town of Pocklington for the sake of education.
At School in the Fourteenth Century.
(From an old Manuscript).
Each of the five East Riding Schools mentioned has been spoken of as a Grammar School. This name exactly describes their purpose; for they existed in order that boys might learn the mysteries of Latin Grammar. Together with the study of this went the reading of Latin authors, usually taken in the following order:—Aesop and Terence, Vergil, Cicero, Sallust and Cæsar, Horace and Ovid.
If you should find yourself wondering why this great attention to the study of Latin, there is a very simple explanation to be given. Latin was then the universal language of professional men. It was written, spoken, and read by all those of the educated classes. Priests, doctors, lawyers, merchants—all used it. The building-accounts for the Beverley North Bar are written in Latin, the Minster records are written in Latin, the Town records are written in Latin. A knowledge of Latin Cwas the gateway to a commercial as well as a professional career.
Part of the Seal of a
Lincolnshire Grammar
School, a.d. 1552.
Until 1349 it was the custom for boys to translate their Latin authors into Norman-French, this being the ordinary language of ‘gentlefolk.’ But then the change of making English the medium of translation was introduced; and thirty-six years later an English chronicler lamented that, because of the change, ‘grammar-school children knew no more French than did their left heel.’