“If the Dean has to be ordained”—we may remember that William of Wykeham was Dean of St. Martin’s-le-Grand when still only an acolyte, and Reginald Pole, though a cardinal and an ex-dean, was not a priest till the day before he became Archbishop of Canterbury—“the Chancellor calls him by the title of St. Paul’s.”
The chancellor is
the chief keeper of the school books in the chest, and ought to show them once a year to the Dean and others appointed for the purpose, and a copy of the list of them is to be kept by the Dean, the Chancellor and a third brother [i.e. canon] appointed for the purpose.
It is possible, of course, though not perhaps very probable, that there were no written statutes of St. Paul’s affecting the school earlier than those quoted. Whether there were written statutes or not, the writs of Bishop Richard prove the schoolmaster’s office to have been in existence at least 150 years before this earliest written statute. But we might have positively asserted that there was such an officer if those writs had not existed, because the maintenance of a schoolmaster was part of the customary constitution of cathedral churches. Alcuin’s description[[63]] of the duties of himself and his predecessor, Ethelbert or Albert, afterwards archbishop, as schoolmaster at York in the eighth century, shows a schoolmaster fulfilling precisely the same mixture of legal, clerkly, and educational duties which appear in the famous Institution of St. Osmund at Salisbury in the eleventh and the statutes of St. Paul’s in the thirteenth century. As early as 832 a definite conciliar decree embodied in the written canon law the obligation, already crystallised into custom, that every cathedral church should maintain a school.
When Earl Harold[[64]] founded, or rather augmented, in 1060 the collegiate church of secular canons of the Holy Cross of Waltham with a dean and twelve canons, the principal person next to the provost or dean, as he is indifferently called, was the schoolmaster. The history of the foundation was written for us by one who was made a canon before 1144, having been “from tender years brought up in the church and taught Latin in its bosom.”[[65]] He was one of those who were turned out in 1177, when, with vicarious liberality, Henry II. converted the college into a priory of regular or Augustinian canons, in satisfaction of his vow to found a monastery in expiation of Becket’s death. This canon tells us[[66]] how Harold having heard that the Dutch was the best model, imported Master Athelard, a native of Liege, who had been educated at Utrecht, to assist Wulfwin the Dean in settling the constitution of the church. Our author himself, who does not give his name, says that his master[[67]] was “Master Peter, son of Master Athelard.” For the secular canons were, like their modern successors, allowed to marry, and this was the real reason why the favourers of monkery charged them with evil living. He tells us how
a copious stream of learning flowed from this Peter after the fashion of the Dutch (Teutonicorum) and yet the lessons and classics and verse composition in no way lessened the practice of singing in the churches. So far from boyish habits were they, that they walked in procession, stood, read and sang, with as much gravity as if they had been monks; and chanted and sang by heart solos or in duets or trios, without book whatever had to be sung at the steps of the choir or in the choir itself.... As they came in procession, like canons getting up to mid-night matins, from school to choir, so when leaving choir they go to school.
Here, then, we see that a school, a grammar school, was regarded as an integral and necessary, and a most important part of the foundation of a collegiate church before the Conquest.
Similar evidence comes from another collegiate church of pre-Conquest foundation, that of St. Mary, Warwick. This church, situate in the middle of the town, is recorded in Domesday Book as possessing a hide of land. There was also a collegiate church of All Saints, a kind of garrison chapel, in the castle, the stronghold founded by Ethelfled, the Lady of the Mercians, against the Danes in 916, but which after the date of Domesday Book passed into the hands of one of the Norman invaders. Forty years after Domesday Book, in 1123, disputes having arisen between the two churches, the second Norman lord, Roger de Beaumont, confirmed to these two churches all their respective property as they held it in his father’s time. Then by a separate deed he confirmed “in alms,” i.e. in perpetuity free from feudal service, “to the church of St. Mary of Warwick the school (scolas) of the said church, that the service of God in the same may be improved by the attendance of scholars.” By a similar deed he must have confirmed All Saints in its school, as a writ of King Henry I. addressed to this Earl Roger and the ecclesiastical lords, the Bishops of Worcester and Chester, directs “that the Church of All Saints, Warwick, shall have all its customs and judgments of iron and water (i.e. the right of administering the ordeal) as they did in the time of Edward, and in like manner shall have its school (scolas).” A few years later the two collegiate churches were consolidated, the canons of All Saints being transferred from the castle, their residence there “being inconvenient,” and the property of the united church of St. Mary and All Saints was confirmed to it first by the Earl, then by the Bishop, including “the school of Warwick and trial of iron, water and duel.” So here again the school, and the right to keep it, is regarded as one of the most important attributes of a pre-Conquest collegiate church.
The statutes made on the new foundation of Salisbury Cathedral within twenty-five years of the Norman Conquest are preserved. They are not indeed in a contemporary document, but written in a thirteenth-century hand in a new version of these statutes made on the removal of the cathedral from Old Sarum to the present Salisbury in 1220. There seems no reason to doubt their authenticity.
These are the dignities and customs of the church of Salisbury which I, Osmund, bishop of the same church, in the name of the Holy Trinity, in the year 1091, have instituted and granted to the persons and canons of the same, with the advice of the Archbishop and the assent of King William.