However that may be, it is clear that in Becket’s case, as in John of Salisbury’s, the schools of Paris, not the schools of London, were regarded as giving “university” training. Fifty years later Becket would have gone to Oxford and the “martyrdom” would never have occurred. As it was, after his English and Pauline training, he was, with disastrous results, inoculated with the “fool fury of the Seine.” Still, St. Paul’s School may claim in him one of the earliest and most famous known Paulines, Henry the schoolmaster being the earliest.
It has to be confessed that from Becket’s time onwards to Colet’s we know scarcely anything of St. Paul’s School beyond the bare fact evidenced by the statutes already quoted of 1243-54 and 1294-1304, and certain fourteenth- and fifteenth-century documents to be presently quoted, that it was pursuing the even tenor of its way. While there are documents at Canterbury containing very full evidence of the great position occupied by the Grammar School of the Archbishop and the Grammar schoolmaster there in the first half of the fourteenth century, while an unbroken series of the Acts of the Chapters of York and Lincoln preserve continual notices of the grammar schools of York and Lincoln, there is an absolute dearth of such records at St. Paul’s. One solitary Chapter Act Book of the Canons of St. Paul’s remains, and that is one of the last quarter of the fifteenth century. It is singularly uninteresting, being almost entirely concerned with continual renewals of leave of absence granted to the canons who were called Residentiary because, unlike the other canons, they were supposed to be always resident; with renewals of leases and the division of the spoil among the residentiary canons, and the “correction” of vicars—choral and minor canons—for devotion to the forbidden sex. All we know is that the Grammar School went on and that it was not the Song School or a choristers’ school, because we have conclusive evidence that this Song School was a different institution. Two statutes[[73]] in terms corresponding to those about the chancellor and the Grammar schoolmaster deal with the precentor (cantor) and the Song schoolmaster. “It is the Precentor’s duty to rule [or teach, regere] the choir in the raising and lowering of the chant, and in singing the psalms. It is his duty through the Song Schoolmaster to place the singers’ names on the table, to stir up the lazy to sing, and gently rebuke those who run about the choir in a disorderly fashion. On the greater feasts, if he is in choir and instructed as a singer, he begins the antiphons after the Benedictus and Magnificat and the processional chants and sequences. He examines the boys to be brought into the choir and given a title as choristers.” A statute as to those choristers made during the deanery of Ralph de Diceto, the historian, between 1180 and 1200,[[74]] shows that they were already then boarded in the Almonry. “As the boys of the Almonry ought to live on Alms” (or, as we might say, “as charity boys ought to live as such”) “they are to sit on the ground in the canons’ houses, not with the vicars at table, lest they become uppish and drunken and perhaps too pampered, and so unfit for the service of the church. Besides they sometimes go too early without saying goodbye to their host; and sometimes when they return to the Almonry from the feast, they despise the living there and spread evil reports of their Master.” The statute refers to the custom under which the residentiary canons had to give three meals daily to two minor canons, two chaplains, four vicars choral, two Almonry boys; the vergers and bell-ringers. The Master referred to was not the Grammar schoolmaster, as has been rashly assumed by some, but the Almoner, the master of the almshouse. To the early cathedral churches a hospital or almshouse was as essential an appendage as a choir and a Grammar School. Some of them still survive. The Dean of Hereford is still ex officio Master of St. Ethelbert’s Hospital, attached to St. Ethelbert’s Cathedral. York had its St. Peter’s Hospital, the ruins of the chapel of which, afterwards called St. Leonard’s Hospital, may still be seen. St. Paul’s, therefore, had its almonry, a Norman-French word for almshouse, and its almoner. In statutes made in 1263 the almoner is enjoined to distribute alms according to the method ordained by those who gave endowments for the purpose; poor people and beggars who die in or near the churchyard he is to bury gratis without delay. “He is to have, moreover, daily with him 8 boys fit for the service of the church, whom he is to have instructed either by himself or by another master in matters pertaining to the service of the church and in literature [i.e. grammar] and good behaviour; taking no payment for the same.”
An Almoner’s Register begun in 1345 is fortunately extant,[[75]] which records the statutes, charters, and customs of the office. In it, the almoner records against himself that “if the Almoner does not keep a cleric to teach the choristers grammar, the schoolmaster of St. Paul’s claims 5s. a year for teaching them, though he ought to demand nothing for them because he keeps the school for them, as the Treasurer of St. Paul’s once alleged before the Dean and Chapter is to be found in ancient deeds.” The allegation that the Grammar School was kept for the choristers is historically untrue, though it is probably true that the choristers ought to have been admitted free to it. At least, the question was solemnly raised at Beverley in 1312,[[76]] when the Grammar schoolmaster wished to make all choristers beyond the original number attending the Grammar School pay fees; but the succentor, the Song schoolmaster, contended that he was bound to teach all the choristers free, and after inquiry by the Chapter into the “ancient customs” of the church it was decided that he was so bound, only the succentor was not to defraud him by admitting boys to the choir merely for the sake of getting free education in the Grammar School. Whatever may have been the choristers’ rights in the matter, the fact that the Grammar schoolmaster claimed and received payment for them shows with absolute conclusiveness that the Grammar School was not a choir school or a choir-boys’ school.
Yet Mr. Lupton, late Surmaster of St. Paul’s School, in his Life of Colet actually cites[[77]] the will of one of the almoners, William of Tolleshunt, made in 1329, as proof that the Cathedral school, which he confuses with the Almonry school, “not only existed and flourished, but contained within itself the germs of a University.” Yet what are the facts? The Almoner says:[[78]] “I bequeath a shilling to each senior and 6d. to each junior of the boys of the church whom I educated in the Almonry. Also I give them my best Hugocio and the big and little Priscian, bound in one volume, Isidore’s Etymology, and all my grammar books, except those which my clerk Ralph has, and all the volumes of sermons which the Boy-Bishops used to preach in my time, to remain in the Almonry for ever for the use of the boys living in it, and never to be lent outside, or given away or sold.” The will goes on, “I bequeath also my books of the art of Dialectic (of which John of Stoneground has the old and new Logic), with the books of Natural History and other books of that art, in order that these books may be lent to boys apt for learning (ad scolatizandum) when they leave the Almonry; due security being taken for their return, to prevent their being alienated. The books of physic also, of which I have several about medicines; and also the books of the civil law, viz. the Institutes, Code, Digest, and Authentics, and these legal works I give to the use of the boys in the manner above written.”
ST. PAUL’S SCHOOL (BEFORE ITS REMOVAL TO HAMMERSMITH)
Says Mr. Lupton: “There were works on Logic, on Physic, on Medicine, on Civil Law ... all were expressly bequeathed to the use of the boys.” Yes, but while the grammar books were for the use of the boys in the Almonry, these other books were, by the express terms of the will, to be lent to boys who had left the Almonry, when they went on to university studies, so that the very words cited to show that this school was something more than a grammar school prove the exact opposite; and this very case cited to show that the school in question was the St. Paul’s Cathedral Grammar School shows that it was a district foundation and intended only for the eight boys in the Almonry. That these eight boys, afterwards increased to ten, were the choir-boys, is shown by the will of Bishop Richard of Newport,[[79]] in 1315, giving to this very William of Tolleshunt, Almoner, one of his executors, and to the Almoner for the time being a house near St. Paul’s the rents of which, after paying £1 to the maintenance of the Lady Chapel, were to be applied “to the support of one or two of the Almonry boys for two years after they have changed their voices.” Again, among the earlier statutes of the Almonry it is ordered that “the boys after entering the choir are not to leave it except when their duty requires it.” William of Tolleshunt himself, too, bequeaths by his will a trust estate bequeathed to him some six years before “for the Almonry boys serving the choir, for their shoes.”
In 1348 Sir John Pulteney,[[80]] knight, gave 20s. a year to the almoner to provide the choristers with summer clothes.[[81]] In return for the shoes the boys had to sing De Profundis, with the usual Pater Noster, Ave Maria and collects, every morning on getting up and every evening on going to bed; and for the summer clothes to sing an anthem after complin with prayers for the dead in the Pulteney Chapel. In 1358 William of Ravenstone,[[82]] Almoner, gave a tenement called the Stonehouse in Paternoster Row “for the support of an additional chorister or two.” That the choristers when clever were meant to go on to the universities is clear from a payment out of the chantry of Bishop Ralph (Baldock) who died in 1313. He gave 3s. “to poor students being sometyme choristers of the said cathedral church towards ther exhibicion yearly,” while a later benefactor Thomas Ever, in the reign of Henry IV., gave a like sum specifically “to the poore choristers of Paules towards their exhibicion in the University.”
There is no question, therefore, that, while there was a grammar school maintained for the benefit of the choristers, it was quite distinct from the choir school for teaching them singing, and from the Cathedral Grammar School open to all boys. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that the choir-boys, being lodged and boarded in the Almonry, had a tutor provided for them to see that they learnt grammar. For one can hardly call the teaching of eight or ten choristers a school.
There would not have been any need to insist on this school so much at length if the whole matter had not been thrown into confusion through the labours of a certain Miss Hackett who devoted herself in the first quarter of the 19th century to the interests of the choir-boys of St. Paul’s, who were then left without any proper schooling or care. She, with great energy, routed out all she could find in the records of St. Paul’s or elsewhere, relating to the choir-boys, and published it in a pamphlet misnamed Correspondence and Evidences respecting the Ancient Collegiate School attached to St. Paul’s Cathedral.[[83]] She succeeded in establishing in Chancery the claim of the choir-boys on the revenues of the Almonry. But her zeal outran her discretion, as whenever she saw in any of the records of St. Paul’s anything about a school or school-boys, she at once attributed it to the choir school and choirboys, and attacked the Chancellor, as well as the Almoner, on the ground that the St. Paul’s Grammar School was for the choir-boys. In this she failed. But she did a great deal of harm to the Cathedral Grammar Schools in general by imbuing people with the notion that they were mere choir-schools. Mr. Lupton makes the Grammar School to have been in Sharmoveres (now Sermon) Lane. Sharmoveres is a name of naught. It is simply a misreading of “Sarmoners,” i.e. Sermoners’ Lane, from a house which is said in a document of Edward I.’s reign to have belonged to “Adam le sermoner.” Sermon Lane is the modern shortening. This was not the Grammar School nor even the Almonry school, but a house bequeathed to the Almonry. Sermon Lane is at the west end of St. Paul’s, some little way from the church. The Grammar School was at the opposite or east end, in the churchyard, and quite close to the church.