When will these words cease to be true of our land? They should be burnt into all our hearts.
[38a.] One of the inquiries ordered by the Articles issued by Archbishop Cranmer, in A.D. 1548, is, “Whether Parsons, Vicars, Clerks, and other beneficed men, having yearly to dispend an hundred pound, do not find, competently, one scholar in the University of Cambridge or Oxford, or some grammar school; and for as many hundred pounds as every of them may dispend, so many scholars likewise to be found [supported] by them; and what be their names that they so find.” Toulmin Smith, The Parish, p. 95. Compare also in Church-Wardens Accompts of St Margaret’s, Westminster (ed. Jn. Nichols, p. 41).
| 1631. | Item, to Richard Busby, a king’s scholler of Westminster, towards enabling him to proceed master of arts at Oxon, by consent of the vestrie | £6. 13. 4. |
| 1628. | Item, to Richard Busby, by consent of the vestry, towards enabling him to proceed bachelor of arts | £5. 0. 0. |
Nichols, p. 38. See too p. 37. [Corrigenda]
[39.] “He placed Æthelweard, his youngest son, who was fond of learning, together with the sons of his nobility, and of many persons of inferior rank, in schools which he had established with great wisdom and foresight, and provided with able masters. In these schools the youth were instructed in reading and writing both the Saxon and Latin languages, and in other liberal arts, before they arrived at sufficient strength of body for hunting, and other manly exercises becoming their rank.” Henry, History of England, vol. ii. pp. 354-5 (quoted from Asser).
[40.] None were so. T. Wright.
[41.] Gervaise of Canterbury says, in his account of Theobald in the Acts of the Archbishops, “quorum primus erat magister Vacarius. Hic in Oxonefordiâ legem docuit.”
Note deleted in [Corrigenda] and replaced with following paragraph:
‘The truth is that, in his account of Oxford and its early days, Mr Hallam quotes John of Salisbury, not as asserting that Vacarius taught there, but as making “no mention of Oxford at all”; while he gives for the statement about the law school no authority whatever beyond his general reference throughout to Anthony Wood. But the fact is as historical as a fact can well be, and the authority for it is a passage in one of the best of the contemporary authors, Gervaise of Canterbury. “Tunc leges et causidici in Angliam primo vocati sunt,” he says in his account of Theobald in the Acts of the Archbishops, “quorum primus erat magister Vacarius. Hic in Oxonefordiâ legem docuit.”’ E. A. F.
[41a.] Roger Bacon died, perhaps, 11 June, 1292, or in 1294. Book of Dates. [Corrigenda]