[177] Ambleside Town and Chapel, Transactions, C. and W. An. S., n.s. vol. vi., p. 47, where particulars of some of the following curates and their assistants are given.
[178] May mean server or sufferer. But whether we are to take it that John Osgood served as a clergyman or suffered as a Quaker is not easy to decide.—Ed.
[179] See page 173, note.
[180] There were sad doings among the Pluralists and absentee parsons of the eighteenth century; and the unpaid curates were often addicted to drink. See Ambleside Town and Chapel, pp. 56-7 and onward.
[181] From a recent work, Educational Charters and Documents, by H. F. Leach, we learn that the clergy taught both themselves and others from the earliest times; for instance, in the seventh century, Aldhelm, writing to the Bishop about his studies, tells him how after long struggles he grasped at last, in a moment, by God's grace, "the most difficult of all things, what they call fractions." In the tenth century a canon of King Edgar enjoins that "every priest in addition to lore to diligently learn a handicraft," and later in the same century the Council enacted that "priests shall keep schools in the villages and teach small boys without charge," and also that they ought always to have schools for teachers, "Ludi magistrorum scholas" in their houses, thus they would prepare others to take up the work professionally which they were doing for nothing. Five hundred years later we find it ordered at Bridgenorth, in 1503, that "no priste keep no scole, after that a scole mastur comyth to town, but that every child to resorte to the comyn scole." But the plague broke out and swept away "scole masturs" and pupils alike, and in 1529 the Convocation of Canterbury once more bade all rectors, vicars, and charity priests to employ some part of their time in teaching boys the alphabet, reading, singing, or grammar; and appointed a Revision Committee of one archbishop, four bishops, four abbots, and four archdeacons to bring out a uniform Latin grammar for all schools. That grammar was taught in Latin in the tenth and eleventh centuries we know from the Colloquy of Œlfric, 1005, and from his preface to the first English-Latin grammar, in which teachers were told that "It is better to invoke God the Father giving him honour by lengthening the syllable (Pāter) rather than cutting it short (Păter); no, comparing pronunciation as is the Britons' way, for God ought not to be subject to the rules of grammar."
Ed.
[182] Dr. Fox's Parish Registers of England.
[183] The dates of these legacies are incorrectly given on the list within the church.
[184] Rydal Hall MSS., Grasmere, was by no means behind the times in education. There was no parish school at Clayworth, Notts., in 1676, when an independent master was encouraged by permission to teach within the church; and an effort made to raise a school "stock" or endowment failed five years later. See Rectors' Book of Clayworth.
[185] The Mackereths made no pretention to learning, and Robert Pooley or Powley acted as school-master after the Revd. Noble Wilson in Sir Richard Fleming's time, and he was keeping the registers in 1814.