The Dean and Chanter (Precentor), Chancellor and Treasurer shall be always resident in the church of Salisbury, without any kind of excuse....
The chanter ought to teach the choir as to singing and can raise or lower the chant.
The Treasurer is chief in the custody of the treasures and ornaments and the giving out of lights.
In like manner the Chancellor (cancellarius) (is chief) in teaching school and correcting the books.
Dean and Chapter, Treasurer and Chancellor have double commons, the rest of the Canons single commons.
The Sub-Dean holds under the Dean the archdeaconry of the city and suburbs, the Succentor under the Precentor that which belongs to the choir (cantariam).
If the Dean fails, the Sub-Dean fills his place, so the Succentor has the Precentor’s.
The Schoolmaster (archischola) ought to hear the lessons and determine on them, carry the seal of the church, compose letters and deeds, and mark readers on the list, and the Precentor in like manner the singers.
Here, then, we find four principal persons, of whom one, the chancellor, is also called schoolmaster. He is the legal and educational, while the chanter or precentor is the musical officer of the chapter. In the fourteenth century copy of the statutes of York Minster it is said of the chancellor that he “was anciently called Schoolmaster”; and the twelfth-century historian of the Minster, a contemporary of Bishop Richard of Belmeis, describes how Thomas of Bayeux, the first Norman archbishop there, had just established or (as we may infer) re-established a provost and schoolmaster; but afterwards, about 1090, established that which afterwards became the regular cathedral “foursquare” constitution of dean (instead of provost), precentor, treasurer, and chancellor.
In the oft-quoted Liber A at St. Paul’s, written in the thirteenth century, the copies of the writs of Bishop Richard of Belmeis and Henry of Blois, with some later documents, are headed “Of the Schoolmaster (De Magistro Scolarum) and Chancellor, seven letters”: and a marginal note to a later document of Bishop Richard Fitz Neal (1189-99), increasing the endowment of the schoolmaster, runs, “Note—the tithes given to the Schoolmaster of St. Paul’s, now the Chancellor.”