“The state of schools in London before Dean Colet’s foundation was to this effect: the Chancellor of Paul’s (as in all the ancient cathedral churches) was master of the schools (magister scholarum), having the direction and government of literature, not only within the church, but within the whole city, so that all the masters and teachers of grammar depended on him, and were subject to him; particularly he was to find a fit master for the school of St. Paul, and present him to the Dean and Chapter, and then to give him possession, and at his own cost and charges to repair the houses and buildings belonging to the school. This master of the grammar school was to be a sober, honest man, of good and laudable learning.... He was in all intents the true vice-chancellor of the church, and was sometimes so called; and this was the original meaning of chancellors and vice-chancellors in the two universities or great schools of the kingdom.”
The same writer traces back St. Paul’s school to Henry the First’s reign, when the Bishop of London granted the schoolmaster for the time being a residence in the bell-tower, and bestowed on him the custody of the library of the church. A successor of this person had the monopoly of teaching school in London conferred on him by the Bishop of Winchester, saving the rights only of the schoolmasters of St. Mary-le-Bow and St. Martin-le-Grand.
The old cathedral school, which that of Colet doubtless gradually extinguished, lay to the south of his, and appears curiously enough not to have occupied the basement, but to have been, as we should say, on the first floor, four shops being beneath it. It was close to Watling Street. A passage in the Monumenta Franciscana shews that the site of Colet’s original school, which perished in the Great Fire, had been in the possession of bookbinders, and in the immediate neighbourhood was the sign of the Black Eagle, which, as we learn from documentary testimony, was still there in 1550.
At the epoch to which I am referring, the vocation of a bookbinder was, I think, invariably joined with that of a printer, and I apprehend that these shops formed part of a printing establishment.
The Black Eagle was an emporium for the sale of books, and it is to be recollected that in early days, where the typographical part was done in some more or less unfrequented quarter of the city, it was a common practice to have the volume on sale in a more public thoroughfare.
St. Paul’s Churchyard, in the days of Colet and in the infancy of his valuable endowment, was beyond question not only a place of great resort, but a favourite seat of the booksellers. For in the imprint to an edition of the Hours of the Virgin, printed at Paris, the copies are said to be on sale at London “apud bibliopolas in cimiterio sancti Pauli 1514;” and of this fact I could readily bring forward numerous other evidences.
Besides the vendors of literature, however, the site soon became one of the places of settlement of the teachers of languages, to whom the immediate proximity of St. Paul’s served as an useful introduction and advertisement; and in the time of Elizabeth a French school was established here, for the benefit of the general public, of course, but more especially, doubtless, with a view to such Paulines as might desire an extension of their studies.