Having thus cleared away the confusion between the Grammar School and the choristers’ boarding-house we must leave the history of the Almonry without following it further, and for a little while turn from the history of St. Paul’s School to that of its two mediæval rivals.
St. Mary-le-Bow Grammar School
The history of the school of St. Mary-le-Bow is unfortunately soon exhausted. The only references to it, apart from the various mentions of it in connection with the two other privileged schools, which I have been able to find, are in the Archbishop’s Register at Lambeth. The first of these is an order from Archbishop Robert Winchelsea,[[84]] September 25, 1309, settling a dispute as to the right of appointment of the schoolmaster. It is addressed “To our official,” i.e. the Official Principal or Judge of the Archbishop’s Consistory Court. The archbishop says that he had received a petition from “Mr. John, rector of the Grammar School (scolarum gramaticalium) of the Church of the Blessed Mary le Bow (de arcubus) London,” showing that he had been appointed master of the school by the Dean of the church (the Dean of the Arches, as he is now called), to whom “by ancient and hitherto peacefully observed custom the order and government and appointment of Master is well known to belong.” But “after he had quietly taught (rexerit) the school,” the Official, “wishing to change this custom,” had appointed one Mr. Robert Cotoun and removed Mr. John. The Archbishop informed the Official that, if the facts were as stated, he was to let Mr. John enjoy the teaching of the said school freely.
The fact that the patronage of the school was vested in the Dean of Arches explains why we do not find appointments of the master in the Archbishop’s Registers as we do in the case of the Canterbury Grammar School. On March 23, 1382/3, however, an entry in Archbishop Courtney’s Register shows him committing to “his beloved son, William Poklyngton, clerk, the teaching and governance of the Grammar School of the deanery of our Church of Blessed Mary of the Arches now vacant and to our disposition belonging,” and appointing him master of the same school. The peculiar form of the appointment suggests that it was made by the Archbishop either because the deanery was vacant, or because the appointment had lapsed to him in default of the Dean. For some reason unknown this entry is cancelled in the original MS.
On October 4, 1399, Archbishop Arundel[[85]] “at his manor of Lambeth”—it is never called a palace in ancient documents; his “palace” was at Canterbury—in like manner “committed the teaching and governance of the Grammar School of the Arches of London with all its rights and appurtenances in the Deanery of the Arches” to “Mr. Thomas Barym, master in grammar.”
The school was clearly still in existence in 1446, when it is mentioned among the five grammar schools authorised by the ordinance of the ecclesiastical authorities, confirmed by Henry VI. Letters Patent of that year to be discussed later. These Letters Patent were interpreted by Stow[[86]] into a creation of the school of St. Mary-le-Bow. “In this parish,” he says, “was a Grammar-School by commandment of Henry VI., which school was of old time kept in a house for that purpose prepared in the churchyard, but that school being decayed, as others about the city, the school house was let out for rent, in the reign of King Henry the 8th for 4s. a year, a cellar for 2s. a year, and two vaults underneath the church for 15s. both.” It is probable, however, from the terms of the Letters Patent, that the school was held actually in the church, since St. Paul’s School is expressly described as being in the churchyard, while this school is, with equal exactness, described as being in the church.
The Grammar School of St. Martin’s-le-Grand
Of the third ancient school, that of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, there seems to be no history recoverable. Presumably when Henry VII. annexed the college to Westminster Abbey the documents were transferred too. But only one small Register of St. Martin’s, written in the fifteenth century, remains in the Westminster Chapter Muniments, and there is no mention in it of the school. There is, however, one reference to the schoolmaster in the City Letter Books.[[87]] “On Thursday before 24 August, 26 Edward I., 1298, John, the cap, hat, or hood-maker (cappeler) of Fleet Street entered into a recognizance to Master Hugh of Whittington (Wytington), schoolmaster (Magistro scolarum) of St. Martin’s-le-Grand for payment of £8 at Michaelmas year. Afterwards Master John of Whittington, brother and executor of the said Hugh, came and acknowledged that he had been satisfied of such sum. Therefore it was cancelled.” The entry is enough to show that the school was going on and that the master was a man of substance, being able to lend the then considerable sum of £8.
The latter half of the fourteenth century was signalised by considerable activity in the foundation of new, or changes in old, grammar schools. This was due to two conflicting forces. On the one hand, it was due, as it was expressed in Wykeham’s foundation deed of New College, Oxford, to “the general disease of the clerical army, which through the want of clergy, caused by pestilence, wars, and other miseries of the world, we have seen greviously wounded,” or, as it was more shortly put in changing the appointment of a master of St. Peter’s School, York, in 1369, from a five-years’ appointment to a life tenure, to “the late Death and the rarity of M.A.s.” The demand for clergy to fill the ranks thinned by the Black Death of 1349 and its subsequent outbreaks, caused a demand for grammar schools. On the other hand, the incipient revolt of the townspeople against clerical domination which manifested itself in the substitution of lay for clerical ministers in the field of politics, and by the open propagation of Lollard opinions against image worship, transubstantiation, confession, and the celibacy of the clergy, and so forth, in the field of religion, created a demand for learning and for schools. The conflict of the two opposing forces is shown in the petition presented to Richard II. in 1394 (the very year, it may be noted, of the transfer of Winchester College, founded in 1382, to its present buildings) by the ecclesiastical authorities of London, who claimed the monopoly of education in “the three ancient and privileged schools.” “The King’s devout chaplains and orators, William,[[88]] Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, the Dean of your frank chapel of St. Martin’s-le-Grand and the Chancellor of the Church of St. Paul in London,” set out how to them, “as well by the law spiritual as by customary prescription in that behalf, the order, management, and examination of the masters of certain schools of the faculty of grammar in London and the suburbs, belonged, belong, or ought to belong, to them, with the advice of the Bishop of London, from time immemorial.” “Yet” they complained, “lately certain strangers, feigning themselves Masters of grammar, having no sufficient learning in that faculty, without the assent, or knowledge, and against the will of the petitioners, wilfully usurped their jurisdiction, and kept General Grammar Schools in the City in deceit and fraud of the children, to the great prejudice of the King’s lieges, and the jurisdiction of Holy Church. But when the three Masters of the schools of St. Paul’s, the Arches, and St. Martin’s for the care and profit of the king’s subjects, had gone to law against the foreign masters in Court Christian, according to ecclesiastical law, their adversaries had sued them in the secular courts to make them abandon their pleas.” The petitioners, therefore, asked the King, both because of his interest in his free chapel of St. Martin, and of the prejudice done to the petitioners, to direct letters to issue under the Privy Seal to the mayor and aldermen “to attempt nothing whereby the jurisdiction of Holy Church, or the process between the parties in Court Christian might be disturbed.”