The story of Coventry

by Mary Dormer Harris

But Mr Wheatley was not the only benefactor the city knew. Wealthy merchants were generous givers, and the education of youth and provision for the sick and needy were not matters held to be solely within the Church's province. The names of Richard Whittington and John Carpenter[584] of London, and of Cannynges of Bristol, deserve ever to be held in remembrance, and there are hundreds of other half-forgotten donors entitled to an equal fame. Thomas Bond, merchant of the Staple, founded at Bablake a hospital for ten men "and one woman to look after them," the candidates to be chosen on a general day of the Trinity guild, and, as bedesmen of this omnipotent fraternity, to repeat three times a day Our Lady's Psalter for the brethren of the guild. Both Bond's almshouse and that erected by William Ford, merchant, and William Pisford, at Greyfriars, still remain, and are among the few perfect specimens of domestic architecture of the sixteenth century that we possess. The latter, first enriched by Ford's will in 1509, contained six men and their wives, the nominees of the Trinity guild, each couple receiving 7-1/2d. a week for their maintenance.[585]

FORD'S HOSPITAL

But it was not the welfare of the aged alone which absorbed the charity of these merchants. To John Haddon, draper, is due the honour of initiating the system of granting loans to young freemen to aid them in beginning commercial life. By his will (1518) he bequeathed £100 to be distributed among men of the drapers' fellowship—poor clothmakers the Leet Book calls them—in loans of £5 each, to enable them to buy wool or cloth, for the cloth trade at that time was undergoing a period of great depression in Coventry, and £100 to be similarly divided in £4 loans among young freemen of all occupations; all loans, free of interest, to be repaid at the end of first year.[586] His example had numerous imitators;[587] but undoubtedly the gifts of Sir Thomas White, mayor of London and founder of S. John's College, Oxford, whom Mary knighted for his loyalty at the time of Wyatt's rebellion, surpassed the rest. At the time of their greatest need, in 1543, he lent the corporation £1400, wherewith they purchased certain lands and tenements confiscated at the Reformation, and they agreed to distribute £40 arising from the rents of the tenements in loans to apprentices of the city for nine years' use.[588] From some cause or other, probably by reason of his great and numerous acts of benevolence, and the backwardness of the corporation in paying a promised annuity, Sir Thomas fell into poverty in his later years, and seems to have been utterly cast down by the thought that his wife would be left without provision. "Whereas I have gently written unto you heretofore," he writes in 1566 to the mayor and corporation, "to let my wife have her annuity of £46 for part of her jointure, I require you as you shall answer before God at the day of judgment that you lett my wife have £24 assured to her during her life." Two days after another letter betrays his unbearable anxiety on this subject. If the mayor and corporation are not able to perform the undertaking with regard to the jointure, "I shall even," he says desperately, "cast my colledge for ever ... so am I utterly shamed in this world and the world to come."[589] Happily for the cause of "true religion and sound learning," the college was not abandoned, and we will hope the Coventry folk fulfilled their contract.

Long before the Reformation and Mr Wheatley's gift the sons of the Coventry burghers attended school, for it is an error to suppose that the education of the laity began with the grammar schools founded by Edward VI. Indeed these foundations were but the "fresh and very inadequate supply of that which had been so suddenly and disastrously extinguished"[590] at the Reformation. Nor was the occupation of teaching confined to the monasteries. The trading-class in or before the fifteenth century threw themselves heartily into the work of providing schools for the coming generations. In most cases the support of these institutions was committed to the leading local guild. In London alone nine grammar schools were set up in the reign of Henry VI.,[591] and in many other places the bounty of some well-to-do bishop or merchant enriched country towns with the endowment of a grammar school. At Coventry there was, it is true, a school at the priory for the "children of the aumbry,"[592] but it appears that there were other "teachers of grammar" in the city, whose well-being was a source of anxiety to the leet, and to these, perhaps, the citizens preferred to send their children to be instructed in the Latin tongue. In 1426 it was enacted by leet that "John Barton shall come to the city of Coventry, if he will, to keep a grammar school there."[593] Barton, however, if he came at all, probably soon made way for a successor, for in 1429 we find an order of leet to the effect that "Mayster John Pynshard, skolemayster of grammer, shall have the place that he dwellethe inne for xls. (40s.) be yere, whyles that he dwellethe in hit, and holdyth gramer skole hym self ther inne."[594] The prior appears to have looked upon these teachers as the rivals of the conventual schoolmasters, but the corporation did their best to soothe his jealousy, and in 1439 the mayor and six of the council, at the request of the leet, went to the prior to "commune" with him concerning this matter, "wylling hym to occupye a skole of gramer, yffe he lyke to teche hys brederen and childerun off the aumbry, and that he wolnot gruche ne move the contrari, but that every man of this cite be at hys fre chosse (choice) to sette his chylde to skole at what techer of gramer that he likyth, as reson askyth."[595] No doubt the town school continued to prosper, for we find at the time of the suppression of the chantries of 1543 that the Trinity guild paid £6, 13s. 4d. as a yearly salary to the schoolmaster. All this general activity in education goes to prove that the men of the later Middle Ages were not the illiterate boors historians have loved to imagine. The knowledge of reading, writing and Latin, or, as they called it, grammar, was surely very widely diffused, when not only a multitude of scribes, but farm bailiffs could make, audit and balance accounts in that language.[596]

Not only were the citizens called on to support by their charity almshouses and schools, and to furnish loans for youthful enterprise, but the poor made a constant demand on their bounty, and in the sixteenth century poverty was greatly on the increase. The town rulers were confronted with a problem which, then and subsequently, has been found incapable of solution—the problem of the "unemployed." In the reign of Henry VIII. a terrible influx of vagabonds from the country set in, well-nigh driving the local rulers to distraction. Here we first gain some glimpses of a surplus population of shiftless, landless, moneyless folk, driven by the decay of tillage to seek work in the towns. These families, together with the whole labouring class, were later reduced to unspeakable poverty by the debasement of the coinage and depreciation of silver, circumstances which, while affecting wages but little, greatly increased the price of food. This difficulty was at first unfamiliar to men's minds. Society had been hitherto somewhat stationary. Individuals lived and worked where their fathers had lived and worked before them, or at least remained in a town where they had been able by a seven years' appenticeship or by purchase to obtain civic rights. But townspeople were jealous of granting freedom to any but the well-to-do, who would be able to share the burden of taxation, and the wanderer, who by quitting home had dropped out of the framework of local society, became one of a herd of vagabonds liable to be punished according to the utmost rigour of the law.

The town rulers did not attempt to solve this question, they shelved it. This wretched population was perpetually ordered to "pass on." "And those bygge beggers," says an order of leet passed in 1518, "that wilnot worke well to gete their levyng, but lye in the felds and breke hedges and stele mannys fruyte ... let theym be banysshed the town, or els punysshe theym so without favor, that they shalbe wery to byde therin."[597] And again and again aldermen were exhorted to cause "lusty beggars and vagabonds" to "voyde out of their ward" upon pain of imprisonment.[598] Only such impotent and needy beggars as were licensed, and had the city seal, the sign of the elephant, on their bags, were allowed to remain and demand charity.[599] But the worthy men of the leet did not refuse to aid those who suffered undeservedly from the acutest misery. "If any by infirmity or multitude of children be not able by his labour to sustain his family," the aldermen were ordered to provide for their sustenance out of the town chest.

FOOTNOTES:

[506] Rough stones were used for paving (Riley, Liber Albus, xliv.). The Chamberlain's Accounts (Corp. MS. A. 7) contain frequent allusions to paving: "Item, paid for paving within the Bablake gate, iiis." "Item, ii lods pebuls for the same, xviiid."