ready to laugh
With crincled noses redouble their shrill guffaws.”
The beginning of this passage states as plainly as can be that there were schools attached to the three principal churches, that they were ancient even then, and privileged. By privileged is meant, not as Lord Lyttelton[[41]] in his Henry II. interprets it, that “by particular privilege was taught not only grammar, but poetry, rhetorick and logick”; but, as the context shows, that these schools were the only schools allowed at all, though occasionally a special schoolmaster was allowed on sufferance and by personal favour. Stow, who was the first to quote this passage, went on[[42]] to identify the three schools. The first, he supposed rightly, was St. Paul’s. But for the second he puts “S. Peter’s at Westminster,” and supports it by a quotation from Ingulphus’ Chronicle, now admitted on all hands to be a fifteenth-century forgery. The third, says Stow, “seemeth to have been in the monastery of St. Saviour at Bermondsey in Southwark. For other priories, as of St. John by Smithfield, St. Bartholomew in Smithfield, St. Mary Overies in Southwark, and that of the Holy Trinity in Aldgate, were all of later foundation.”
This is a curious conglomeration of errors: which has unfortunately been blindly adopted by subsequent writers. Even if there had been a grammar school at Westminster, it could not possibly be described in the twelfth century as being in London, since Fitzstephen himself speaks of Westminster as being two miles off. The placing of a London school at St. Saviour’s, Bermondsey, is even more open to the same objection of not being in London.
It is an interesting question from what MS. of Fitzstephen Stow derived his knowledge of this passage about schools. Out of four ancient MSS. now extant, only one, and that the latest, contains the passage. These MSS. are: (i.) MS. Lambeth 138 (wrongly referred to as 1168 in the Rolls edition of Fitzstephen). This is of the thirteenth century and has not the Description of London at all. (ii.) MS. Douce 289 at the Bodleian. This is also of the thirteenth century. It has the Description of London, but having lost its first leaf has only the last few words about schools, (iii.) MS. Cotton, Julius, A, xi., at the British Museum. This is of the early fourteenth century and has not got the Description at all. (iv.) Lansdowne MS. 398, late in the fifteenth century. This is the only MS. which has the Description of London and its schools in full, and it does not mention the churches which kept them. On the other hand, the Description of London, apart from the Life, is written at the beginning of the Liber Custumarum of the City of London, now in the Guildhall, a MS. of the first half of the fourteenth century. It contains the passage about the schools and after the word churches inserts “viz. the Bishop’s see, the church of St. Paul’s, the church of Holy Trinity and the church of St. Martin.” Mr. Riley, in his edition of the Liber Custumarum, thinks that Stow had this book before him. But the omission by Stow of the names of the three churches, and his bad guess as to what the churches were, seem to show conclusively that the Guildhall MS. was unknown to him, unless he garbled it for the sake of avoiding a difficulty.
As we have seen, Stow says that Trinity Priory was not founded till after the time of which Fitzstephen was writing. In this he was mistaken. The Priory purports in its chartulary[[43]] to have been founded by “good Queen Mold,” the wife of Henry I., in 1108, and its most interesting endowment, the Portsoken, the land of the English Knights’ Gild outside Aldgate, in virtue of which the Prior of Christchurch, or Creechurch, as it was nicknamed, was ex officio an Alderman of the City of London, was given in 1125. There does not, however, seem to be any mention of a school in connection with the church before or after the foundation of the Priory either in its chartulary, or elsewhere.[[44]]
On the other hand, we have testimony contemporary with the time of which Fitzstephen was writing, and many subsequent references, extending up to the time of Henry VIII., which show conclusively that the three churches with schools were St. Paul’s, St. Martin’s-le-Grand, and St. Mary-le-Bow, and that they preserved their monopoly till the middle of the fifteenth century. There was therefore no room for any recognised school in, or connected with, Trinity Church. Three explanations appear to be possible. (i.) There was a school in Trinity Church while it was a secular church, belonging to the College Church of the Holy Cross, Waltham, which ceased on its being converted into a Priory. (ii.) There was an adulterine or unlicensed school there, put down by the very document which conveys the contemporary testimony as to what the legitimate and privileged schools were. But more probably (iii.) the words are an interpolation due to a gloss by some badly-informed commentator.
The curious thing is that in the very passage quoted, Stow cites, though inaccurately, a patent of Henry VI. by which, as we shall see, authority was given for the erection of certain schools, besides those at St. Paul’s, at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, and St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheap. It is rather strange that Stow did not know of the famous document at St. Paul’s, which tells us plainly what these three ancient and famous schools were. But then he had not the advantage we enjoy of Sir Henry Maxwell-Lyte’s admirable Calendar of the St. Paul’s Muniments.[[45]] The one in question runs thus:
Henry, by the Grace of God, minister of the church of Winchester, to the Chapter of St. Paul’s and William, Archdeacon, and their officers, greeting.
I command you by your obedience that after three summonses, you launch the sentence of excommunication against those who, without a license from Henry, the Schoolmaster, presume to teach (anywhere) in the whole city of London; except those who teach the schools of St. Mary of the Arch and St. Martin’s the Great. Witness, Hilarius, at Winchester.