It is particularly unfortunate that Bishop Stubbs should also have been misled by the plural form used in the original for a school into misunderstanding the mention of the school of St. Paul’s for a reference to schools, meaning more than one. There has been no more prolific source of misrepresentation as to the whole status and history of mediæval schools than this misunderstanding. Yet it is beyond doubt that until the middle of the fifteenth century the word school was habitually not scola but scolæ.[[54]] The official title of a grammar schoolmaster was not Magister Scole Gramatices or Gramaticalis but Magister Scolarum Gramaticalium. He was schoolsmaster not schoolmaster. This was the style almost universally used in official and formal documents up to the reign of Edward VI. In less formal documents, such as Account Rolls and the like, the singular form began to oust the plural as nearly as possible in the year 1450. Before that time, though there are occasional uses of the word in the singular, the normal use was in the plural. A few references to original documents will be enough to show the identity of meaning of the singular and plural forms. Thus, in an inquiry as to St. Cross Hospital near Winchester in 1373,[[55]] when evidence was given that among the 100 poor fed every day in the Hundredmen’s Hall, there were 13 poor scholars sent from the Grammar School of Winchester; some witnesses call them “poorer scholars of the grammar school (scole gramaticalis) of the city of Winchester,” and others, “poor scholars from the grammar school (scolis gramaticalibus) there,” the school being called indifferently the grammar school and the high school of the city of Winchester. Again in the Winchester College Account Roll for 1394, the head-master of the college grammar school, which was not the same as the City grammar school, is called both Magister Scolis and Magister Scole. This evidence is the more clinching as it is rare at that date to find the word school in the singular at all. Indeed, except at Winchester and London, as will be seen presently, where there seems to have been a higher standard of classical accuracy, I do not know of another instance of the word school in the singular in the fourteenth century.
The clearing up of this point is important, as the plural use has made people[[56]] search for two or more schools, and in consequence has led them to confound two entirely different schools, the Grammar School for the world at large, and the Song School chiefly, if not exclusively, for the choristers; and, in consequence, to maintain that the mediæval grammar schools were poor starved things, where a dozen choristers at most stumbled through their declensions and their psalter.
The documents of Richard de Belmeis then are not the foundation of St. Paul’s School. On the contrary, they point to it as previously existing, and to the schoolmaster as already one of the dignitaries or principal persons of the chapter. The true date of foundation and the real founder of St. Paul’s School must be sought in the foundation and founder of St. Paul’s Cathedral Church itself. The first foundation was in 604, when[[57]]
Augustine, Archbishop of the Britains, ordained two Bishops, Mellitus and Justus: Mellitus to preach to the province of Essex, separated from Kent by the river Thames, and close to the Eastern sea, whose metropolis is London city placed on the banks of the said river, an emporium for many nations, coming by land and sea; whose king then was Saberet (or Sebert) nephew of Ethelbert by his sister Ricula, though placed under the power of Ethelbert, who then ruled all the English race up to the Humber. When the province received the word of truth on the preaching of Mellitus, King Ethelbert made in the city of London the church of St. Paul the Apostle, in which he and his successors had their bishop’s See.
After Ethelbert and Sebert died in 616[[58]] there was a reaction to the old religion, and Mellitus fled abroad. When he tried to return, after the conversion of Ethelbert’s successor in Kent, London would not have him. It remained heathen till Oswi, King of the Northumbrians, converted Sigebert, a refugee prince, who, on returning home, made Cedd bishop of the East Saxons. But no mention is made of London as his See, and Tilbury[[59]] rather appears to have been his principal church. He died of the plague in 664. Wine,[[60]] expelled from Winchester, bought the See of London from Wulfhere, King of the Mercians, somewhere about 666. Thenceforward the history of the See and church is unbroken. It is only therefore from this last date that we can reckon the continuous history of St. Paul’s Cathedral or its school. There is no direct reference to the school in Bede, as there is to that of Canterbury, when the King of the East Angles got schoolmasters thence in 631. But the place[[61]] where lived the learned Nothelm, Bede’s principal informant as to the history of southern England, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, and Erkenwald or Earconwald, bishop from 675 to 692, whose name and fame in later ages, as the local saint of London, completely eclipsed that of St. Paul himself, much as St. Swithin did that of St. Peter at Winchester, can hardly have failed to maintain a school, any more than Canterbury or York or Winchester.
The original statutes of St. Paul’s Cathedral have not survived. The earliest statute affecting the school appears in a collection made during the deanery of Henry of Cornhill,[[62]] 1243 to 1254, who had been Chancellor of St. Paul’s from 1217 till he became Dean. It is a statute relating to the duties of the Chancellor. When present, it is said,
the Chancellor makes out the table (tabulam) of lessons, masses, Epistles, Gospels, acolytes, and performers of the service in course for a week (ebdomadariis) and hears the lessons [i.e. the reader has to read them over to him beforehand to see that he reads them correctly]. On feast days he hears the Bishop read, hands him the book to be read from at the beginning of mattins; and, clothed in a silk cope, holds the book for the Bishop to read at the last of the [nine] lessons. [The Chancellor himself, a later statute informs us, read the 6th lesson.] He introduces the clerks of lower grade to be ordained, and after examining them in school presents them to the Bishop for ordination, and administers justice to every one who makes any complaint as to their conduct. All scholars living in the city are under him, except those of a school of the Arches, and a school in the Basilica of St. Martin’s the Great, who claim that they are privileged in these and other matters. The Chancellor also keeps the chest with the school books in it.
The reference to a school (unam scolam) in St. Mary-le-Bow and St. Martin’s respectively, may be compared with the plural for the same schools in the writ of Bishop Henry of Blois.
In the digest of the statutes of St. Paul’s made during the deanery of Ralph of Baldock, 1294-1304, the words as to the Chancellor’s supremacy over the schools are repeated almost verbatim; but the plural form scolarum is used instead of the singular for the single schools at St. Martin’s and St. Mary-le-Bow respectively. This is pretty conclusive testimony of the identity in meaning of plural and singular for a single school. In this latter digest we find further details about the chancellor and a special statute, headed, “of the appointment of an M.A. to the Grammar School (scolæ grammaticæ).” The body of the statute is part of the statute as to the chancellor. It says:
The Chancellor appoints a master of arts to the Grammar School (scolis) and is bound to keep the school itself (scolas ipsas) in repair. He composes the letters and deeds of the Chapter. He reads whatever has to be read in Chapter. He is the chief keeper of the seal, and receives a pound of pepper for every deed that is sealed or renewed, the Chapter receiving 3s.