THE ANCIENT SCHOOLS IN THE CITY OF LONDON
By A. F. Leach.
The history of schools in London, like the history of schools in England and mediæval Europe at large, necessarily begins with the history of its great churches. Throughout England until the Reformation, and, in theory at all events, until the Revolution, schools were ecclesiastical institutions, and education was a matter of purely ecclesiastical cognizance. The Ordinary, that is, the judge of the Ecclesiastical Court of first instance, had everywhere cognizance of all matters in dispute which concerned schools and scholars, their internal discipline and their relations to the external world. It could and did settle the question of school supply, how many schools there should be, and where.
If we want to know, therefore, what were the earliest and chief schools of London, we have only to ask, What were the earliest and chief churches of London? When we say churches, we must be careful to remember that the word churches for such purpose means churches of the secular clergy; that is, college and parish churches, not those of monasteries and religious orders. We must be careful not to confuse the two, and not to talk of St. Paul’s Cathedral Church as conventual, or of St. Martin’s-le-Grand Collegiate Church as a monastery. To do so is precisely like confusing New College, Oxford, with a Jesuit seminary, or Trinity, Cambridge, with a Salvation Army barracks.
The chief secular churches of London were, first and foremost, St. Paul’s Cathedral; next, the great Collegiate Church of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, now, alas! swallowed up by the General Post Office; and third, the Church of St. Mary-le-Bow, the London church of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the seat of his supreme ecclesiastical court, which has given its name to the Court of Arches, and was his “peculiar” property, exempt from the jurisdiction of the Ordinary, the Bishop of London.
In these three churches, some of the earliest extant documents of St. Paul’s reveal the existence of grammar schools, which were already old in the year 1138. These three schools, and they alone, constituted the whole of the public provision for education in London until the year 1441, when another grammar school was established in St. Antony’s Hospital. Some other schools were afterwards founded in connection with other churches before the Reformation. But while its earlier and its later pre-Reformation rivals have all disappeared, the earliest and greatest of all, the grammar school of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul’s, London, commonly called St. Paul’s School, with its unbroken pedigree of 800 years and upwards still ranks among the chief schools of the country, and holds as marked a position of pre-eminence in the greater London of 1900 as it did in the old narrow city of London in 1100.
The story of London schools should, then, be simplicity itself; the more so as it suffers from a lack of material. Yet it has been so obscured and complicated by successive writers that it has been converted into a tangled and twisted texture of guesses and fables, which we must endeavour to unravel.
It ought not to have been so. For, earlier probably than any other city in Europe, except York, London found its vates sacer, who for the admiration of his own and the information of later ages, sung the glories of its schools and scholars, their studies and their sports. Alcuin’s ninth-century poem[[38]] in Latin hexameters “On the Archbishops and Saints of the Church of York,” giving a vivid account of St. Peter’s School there, of which he was himself master in the third quarter of the eighth century, is the earliest account we have of any English school. The picture, drawn in poetic Latin prose of the twelfth century by “the son of Stephen,” of London schools and scholars, as they were during the boyhood of Becket, is not less full or vivid. One almost suspects from the way in which quotations from Latin poets are lugged in “by the hairs” that Fitzstephen was himself at one time a schoolmaster, before he became Becket’s chancellor and ended as a judge. At all events, he took a keen interest in schools and schoolboys, and devoted a good third of his famous description of London to the games and sports of the London schoolboy.
“In London,”[[39]] he says, “the three principal churches have famous schools privileged and of ancient pre-eminence, though sometimes through personal favour to some one noted as a philosopher more schools are allowed. On feast days the masters celebrate assemblies at the churches, arrayed in festive garb. The scholars hold disputations, some augmentatively, others by way of question and answer. These roll out enthymemes, those use the forms of perfect syllogisms. Some dispute merely for show, as they do at collections;[[40]] others for the truth which is the grace of perfection. The sophists and pretenders are pronounced happy because of the mass and volume of their words; others play upon words. The rhetoricians with rhetorical speeches speak to the point with a view to persuasion, being careful to observe the precepts of their art, and to leave out nothing that belongs to it.
“The boys of the different schools hold contests in verse, or pose each other on the principles of grammar or the rules of preterites and supines. Others in epigrams, rhymes and metres use the old street eloquence, with Fescinnine licence scourging their schoolfellows, without mentioning names; hurling abusive epithets and scoffs at them: with Socratic salt girding at the failings of their fellows, or perhaps of their elders; and in bold dithyrambics biting them with the sharp tooth of Theon. The audience