Whether the Privy Seal asked for was issued does not appear. Parliament was then supporting the Lollards.[[89]] But next year Richard was fetched back from his Irish War to put them down, and the leading Lollards had to recant on pain of death. Certain it is that the three church schools retained their monopoly for nearly half a century more. It was then attacked and broken up by assailants from within the pale of the church itself and by orthodox churchmen. The first breach of it, apparently for purely educational reasons, was made by the establishment of a grammar school in St. Anthony’s Hospital in Threadneedle Street.
St. Anthony’s Hospital and School
This hospital was so interesting an institution in itself, and the erection and career of its school have been so much misrepresented, that its history is worth telling at some length. Stow’s[[90]] account of this hospital is rather long but not very correct. It “was sometime a cell to St. Anthonies of Vienne. For I read that King Henry III. granted to the brotherhood of St. Anthony of Vienne, a place among the Jews, which was sometime their synagogue, and had been builded by them about the year 1231; but the Christians obtained of the King that it should be dedicated to our blessed Lady, and since, an hospital being there builded, was called St. Anthonies in London. It was founded in the parish of St. Bennett Fynke ‘for a mayster, two priestes, one scholemayster and 12 poore men.’” “Moreover, king Henry VI. in the twentieth of his reign gave unto John Carpenter, D.D., master of St. Anthonies Hospital and to his brethren and their successors for ever his manor of Ponington, with the appurtenances” and other property “towards the maintenance of 5 scholars in the University of Oxford to be brought up in the faculty of arts, after the rate of 10d. a week for every scholar, so that the said scholars before their going to Oxford, be first instructed in the rudiments of grammar at the College of Eton, founded by the same king. In the year 1474 Edward IV. granted to William Say, B.D., master of the hospital of St. Anthony’s to have priests, clerks, scholars, poor men, and brethren of the same, clerks or lay men, quoristers, proctors, messengers, servants in household and other things whatsoever, the like as the Prior and Convent of St. Anthony’s of Vienne. This Hospital was united, annexed and appropriated unto the Collegiate Church of St. George in Windsor about the year 1485. This goodly foundation, having a free school and almshouses for poor men, builded of hard stone, adjoining to the west end of the church, was of old time confirmed by Henry VI. in the year 1447.” Such is his account of the origin of the foundation. He then deals with its latter end. “One Johnson (a schoolmaster there) became a prebendary of Windsor and then by little and little followed the spoil of this hospital. He first dissolved the choir, conveyed the plate and ornaments, then the bells, and lastly put out the Almsmen from their houses, appointing them portions of 12d. a week to each (but now I hear of no such matter), their houses with other be now letten out for rent, and the Church is a preaching-place for the French nation. The school-house was commanded in the reign of Henry VI., and sithence also, above other; but now it is decayed and come to nothing, by taking from it what thereunto belonged.”
The Hospital was at first a cell of the Hospital of St. Anthony at Vienne, a hospital famous throughout the world. There is no mention of any local habitation of the brethren of St. Anthony in England before 1249. Then in a document at Windsor, dated 1253, a grant to the hospital of the earlier date is mentioned, when the Church of All Saints, Hereford, was bestowed upon it by Henry III., and in 1253 a letter from Pope Alexander IV. congratulates the same king on having granted to the Master and Brethren of St. Anthony’s “a place in London among the Jews.” For further on this subject see Mediæval London, vol. ii. p. 268.
Later writers have for the most part followed Stow. Thus Mr. Lupton in his Life of Dean Colet repeats[[91]] the story that the original foundation included a schoolmaster; and says that Edward IV. “augmented it. The school continued into the reign of Elizabeth, the rest of the property was not left to wait for the inquisition of Henry VIII.,” and then repeats, as typical, Stow’s story of the plunder by Prebendary Johnson. Again, Dr. Sharpe says,[[92]] “The Hospital appears to have always supported a Schoolmaster from its foundation.”
As a matter of fact, the school was no part of the original foundation of the hospital, and only made its appearance when the main institution had undergone a complete revolution. The hospital existed for at least 100 years longer, and the school began at least 200 years later, and continued for nearly 100 years more than Stow leads us to believe. The life of the hospital lasted for as nearly as possible four centuries. It began about 1249; it ended in 1666. For the first 150 years of its existence it was in tutelage to a foreign and monastic parent. A brief period of independence followed under native English clerical (not monastic) rulers, for some three-quarters of a century; and the era of its complete and formal release from tutelage was signalised by the foundation of the Grammar School in it, which enjoyed the highest reputation for about 100 years. The institution was then again placed under an external master. But the school continued to flourish, and, instead of being destroyed in the reign of Elizabeth, lasted into the reign of Charles II., under whom both school and hospital perished, never to be revived, in the Great Fire of London.
In 1434 John Carpenter became master or warden of the hospital, and he must be regarded as the second founder of the hospital and the actual founder of its school. He was a very considerable person in his day, being a great promoter of education and supporter of the secular clergy as against the regulars, the monks, black canons, and friars. His fine tomb, restored out of all antiquity by the ill-directed gratitude of Oriel College, is still to be seen in the ancient collegiate church of Westbury-on-Trym near Bristol. He was anxious to establish the secular canons of that church as his episcopal chapter instead of, or at least in addition to, the monks of Worcester. Indeed he actually called himself Bishop of Westbury and Worcester. He became Provost of Oriel in 1425, and Master of the hospital at least seven years later.
Carpenter was mixed up with the foundation of Eton as well as with that of St. Anthony’s School. When he was made Bishop of Worcester, he was consecrated in the collegiate church of Eton, and it was as a trustee of Eton and Oriel, and only nominally in his capacity as Master of St. Anthony’s, that the grants, mentioned by Stow,[[93]] of the manor of Ponington, and quit-rents from several places in Hampshire, were made to him and the brethren of the hospital. What became of this grant it seems impossible to find out. No mention of it occurs in the accounts of the hospital, nor do the authorities of St. George’s, Windsor, Eton, or Oriel know anything of the property. Probably it was one of the Lancastrian grants for the benefit of Eton on which Edward IV.’s Act of Resumption operated, and so passed away from Eton and Oriel for ever.
In 1441 the revolution in the constitution of the hospital was consummated. A Bull of Pope Eugenius IV. released the brethren of the hospital from the obligation to use a common dormitory and refectory, which by the Augustinian rule they were bound to use (though it is stated that there was no such dormitory or refectory), and enabled the clerks who served it to live in any decent place, until a dormitory and refectory were provided—a politic way of completely authorising its conversion into a house of seculars. At the same time, by the licence of Robert (Gilbert), Bishop of London, the church of St. Benet Finck was entirely appropriated to the hospital, and converted from a rectory into a vicarage. This was in order that the revenues of the rectory, worth sixteen marks a year, might be applied to the maintenance of “a master or fit Informer in the faculty of grammar,” “to keep a grammar school (regere scolas gramaticales) in the precinct of the hospital or some fit house close by, to teach, instruct, and inform gratis all boys and others whatsoever wishing to learn and become scholars (scolatizare).”
Its foundation was only one of a long series of school foundations which marked the period of the reign of Henry VI., who, far more than Edward VI., is entitled to the credit of being the patron king of school-boys. Eton, Newport, Shropshire, Newland, Wye (now the Wye Agricultural College, Kent), Alnwick, Towcester, are some among the grammar schools still existing which were founded in the ten years 1440-50; while there were many more which are no longer existing or have been degraded into elementary schools, or converted into exhibition funds. The movement was the first breath of the Renaissance stirring the dry bones of the schools. It was the outcome of a beginning of reaction against the excessive cult of scholastic logic, and a desire to return to the humanities of the “artists” as opposed to the sophistry of the theologians. Considering the conspicuous part taken in the new movement by men like Beckington, Waynflete, and Say, all Wykehamists, we may attribute a considerable share of it at least to the influence of Wykeham’s foundation at Winchester.