The value of the lands and possessions of the Hospital is put in the chantry certificate at £55 : 6 : 8 gross, with deductions of £4 : 1s., bringing it down to £51 : 5 : 8. The stipends of the two priests were £8 each; of the curate of Seynt Benet Fynkes, £8; and of “the clerk that keepeth our Lady’s mass,” £9. These four make up the four priests we find in the Hospital accounts. The steward received £5, while the poor cost £31 : 17s.; the “sexten” had £2. The schoolmaster’s stipend was £16; so that so far from the school being plundered at this time, the Master was far better paid than several of his predecessors, and received more than the Masters of Winchester or Eton.
The total expenses came to £95 odd. “And so lacketh for the proportion of the same house £40 : 11 : 11, which ys borne by the Dean and Cannons of Wyndsore, whereunto this Hospytalle is annexede [and] unytide.” This is a somewhat slim way of putting the fact that the surplus expenses of the Hospital were met by subscriptions from the public to such an amount, that instead of the Dean and Chapter of Windsor defraying the deficit out of their own revenues, a sum three or four times as large as the whole revenue from endowment of the Hospital found its way into their pockets.
The Chantries Dissolution Act of Henry was only permissive, giving the King, during his life, power to take possession of any chantries or colleges he chose; and advantage was taken of it to enter on barely half a dozen colleges, of which Windsor was not one. In 1547, a new Act of dissolution of colleges and chantries was passed in Edward VI.’s first Parliament; but Windsor was, alone among colleges that were not educational, specially exempted from its provisions. There is, however, a certificate, by the Chantry Commissioners of London and Middlesex, for the parish of St. Benet Finck, in which, while certifying a chantry in the parish church, they say complainingly (the certificates were in fact drawn up by the church wardens) that the Dean and Chapter of Windsor “is parson,” and the value of the same £16, “and but one priest by them found to serve the same, which priest is very unhable to serve the same.” They add that “within the said parish is a Grammar Scole by the name of a Fre Scole, called Saynt Anthonies, the Scolemaister whereof is nowe Maister Edmond Johnson, and his wages paid by the Stewarde of Seynt Anthonyes, and how muche is not knowen.”
Now Stow is said to have been born about 1525. He tells us in a passage which is a locus classicus in the history of London schools as much as the famous “Description” of Fitzstephen himself, that in his youth, which, for this purpose, we may take to be from 1535 to 1545, the arguing of the schoolboys as to the principles of grammar of which Fitzstephen wrote, was still continued.[[110]]
For I myself in my youth have yearly seen on the eve of St. Bartholomew the Apostle, the scholars of divers grammar schools repair unto the churchyard of St. Bartholomew, the Priory in Smithfield, where, upon a bank, boarded about under a tree, some one scholar hath stepped up, and there hath opposed and answered, till he were by some better scholar overcome and put down, and then the overcomer, taking the place, did like as the first, and in the end the best opposers and answerers had rewards; which I observed not but it made both good schoolmasters and also good scholars diligently against such times to prepare themselves for the obtaining of this garland. I remember there repaired to these exercises amongst others the Masters and scholars of the free schools of St. Paul’s of London, of St. Peter’s of Westminster, of St. Thomas Acon’s Hospital and of St. Anthony’s Hospital; whereof the last named commonly presented the best scholars and had the prize in those days.
It is very doubtful, for reasons which will appear when we come to deal with Westminster and St. Thomas Acon’s, whether Stow’s memory was accurate when he brought scholars from Westminster and the Mercers’ School to St. Bartholomew’s before its dissolution. However that may be, Stow goes on:
This Priory of St. Bartholomew being surrendered to Henry VIII. those disputations of scholars in that place surceased; and was again, only for a year or twain, in the reign of Edward VI., renewed in the cloister of Christ’s Hospital, when the best scholars then still of St. Anthony’s school, howsoever the same be now fallen both in number and estimation, were rewarded with bows and arrows of silver given to them by Sir Martin Bowes, goldsmith.
Now, as Christ’s Hospital was only founded on June 26, 1552, and then, as we shall see, as a mere Foundlings’ Hospital, and Edward VI. died in the following January, there was not time for these renewed contests in his reign and Stow’s memory must have been at fault. The resuscitation of the contests is more likely to have taken place in the reign of Mary when the “old learning” and boy-bishops and the like revived with the “old religion.” However that may be, the school continued to flourish under Elizabeth, on Stow’s own showing.[[111]]
Nevertheless, however, the encouragement failed. The schollers of Paules meeting with them of St. Anthonies, would call them “Anthonie pigs” and they againe would call the other “Pigeons of Paules,” because many pigeons were bred in Paules church, and Saint Anthonie was always figured with a pig following him, and, mindfull of the former usage, did for a long season disorderly in the open streete provoke one another with “Salve tu quoque! placet tibi mecum disputare?” “Placet.” And so proceeding from this to questions in grammar, they usually fell from wordes to blows, with their satchels full of bookes, many times in great heaps, that they troubled the streets and passengers; so that finally they were restrained, with the decay of St. Anthonies schoole.
Strype,[[112]] in his edition of Stow a century later, gives further evidence: