SCHOOLS 



The chaplains were as usual to excommuni- 

 cate the delinquents, and inhibit everyone hence- 

 forth from ' keeping such schools elsewhere than 

 in the school of the clerks of the congregation afore- 

 said or presuming to teach any boy song or letters 

 within the said jurisdiction.' 



Here then the St. Nicholas' Gild appears as 

 one of clerks, no doubt parish clerks, and their 

 charters of immemorial antiquity. 



It is strange that in the returns of gilds made 

 to chancery in 1389, the Gild of St. Nicholas 1 

 is said to have been founded only in 1282, when 



certain priests in the honour of the Lord Jesus Christ, 

 Blessed Mary the Mother of God, and Saint Nicholas 

 the most illustrious bishop, to celebrate yearly the day 

 of the translation of that saint and attest a purer 

 unity in love of the brotherhood, made a brotherhood 

 after the manner of a gild. They elected a governor 

 ' [gubernatorem) who with 12 priests should rule and 

 keep the said brotherhood, 



while ' up to 60 brethren and sisters ' might be 

 admitted to it, priests or laity. The ordinances 

 are only the usual provisions for a yearly meeting, 

 obits, and daily prayers for dead and living 

 members. 



But St. Nicholas' Gild seems to be only an off- 

 shoot of or secession from the original Douze Gild, 

 the Fraternity 2 of Clerks of Glemsford. According 

 to their return in 1389 they consisted of a master 

 and 12 clerks ' afterwards changed into priests.' 



Under the heading of ' Cnutus,' the return 

 says that the origin of the congregation was that 



in the time of King Canute faithful christians who 

 then existed, with the counsel and help and licence 

 of that most pious king, began it and established it 

 and handed it down to our brethren and to us, and 

 from the time of King Edward and William the 

 father and William his son, and the most wise and 

 prudent King Henry [I] has been kept with great 

 diligence and reverence (religione) and to the end of 

 the world will by God's gift be observed and kept for 

 the benefit of all the saints of God living and dead. 



It then sets out the number of masses that each 

 priest, and the number of psalters that each 

 deacon of the gild said for the king and queen, 

 and the brethren and sisters living and the total 

 number of masses in a year was 1,037, anc ^ °f 

 psalms 3,008, and the same number for the dead. 

 The laws of the gild under which it was practic- 

 ally a sick and burial club are then stated. Then 

 in the time of Edward the Confessor Abbot 

 Baldwin decreed that the congregation and its 

 sixty clerks should be free from all public customs 

 and labour such as burgate, watch (wasche) and 

 ward, army service (hereget), harvest labour (bed- 

 repe) and gelds payable by the borough, in con- 

 sideration of their keeping wakes day and night 

 for the good estate of the church of St. Edmund, 



1 B.P.O. Bk. vi, 30, 103 ; Bk. viii, 68; P.R.O. 

 Gild Cert. 415. The ordinances are printed in 

 Proc. Suff. Lmt. of Archaeol. xii, 1 4, by Mr. V. B. Red- 

 stone. 



1 P.R.O. Gild Cert. 419. 



and the abbot and monks, singing psalms round 

 the corpses of dead monks and praying for their 

 souls. 



Confirmation charters of William the Con- 

 queror, Henry I and Henry II, and of Arch- 

 bishop Thomas a Becket are given ; while an 

 undated one of Abbot Samson is the first to 

 mention a dedication to Blessed Nicholas the 

 Confessor, and adds the remarkable provision 

 that — 



if any layman in the town deputed to a vile office 

 (t'i/i officio deputatus) wishes to send his son to letters 

 (filium mum traJert lilteris) he shall by no means do so 

 without the leave of the congregation. 



A farther confirmation charter of Abbot Simon 

 dated 5 February, 1267-8, is the first to contain 

 the clause — 



No clerk in the town of St. Edmund shall presume to 

 teach anyone the psalter or singing without the licence 

 of this congregation, and if he does, he shall owe 2/. 

 to the congregation, as appears in the aforesaid gran;;, 



in which, in fact, it does not appear. 



The entrance fee of the gild was 5;. for a 

 clerk, 1 35. ifd. for a layman, and nothing for a 

 priest. The endowment, alleged to have been 

 given in the time of Canute, was very small, 

 consisting only of 13 acres in Melford, five 

 shops in Bury, and quit-rents of js. bhd. and 

 1 lb. of cummin. Not a word is said to explain 

 why this gild in Bury is called ' the congregation 

 of Glemsford,' but as Glemsford is in the tithing 

 of Melford it was probably so-called simply from 

 the situation of their small landed property. 



One of the abbey registers gives a still more 

 exalted origin for this gild, viz. that the twelve 

 clerks represent the secular clerks dispossessed by 

 Canute in 1020 to make room for the monks, 

 who after wandering about the country for forty 

 years were finally housed by Abbot Baldwin in 

 Bury, on condition of praying for the monks ; a 

 curious reversal of the normal order of things, 

 monks being established on purpose to hold up 

 the ever-burning lamp of prayer for laymen and 

 seculars. 



To return from the song to the grammar school. 

 In the Bury Register of the time of Henry IV-V, 

 preserved in the Cambridge University Library 

 (MS. Ft". 11-29), we again find the schoolmaster 

 being attacked, and again getting the abbot's 

 support against his assailants. This time it was 

 against a secular enemy, the bailiffs of Bury, 

 and it was the person of the master himself 

 that had to be defended, and we get the 

 name of the master, the first known to us — 

 William of Kimberley. On 4 August [1420 r], 

 the year is not given — Brother William, abbot, 

 tells his bailiffs of the town of St. Edmund, that 



whereas the grammar schoolmaster of the town of 

 Bury lor tne time being, the collation and disposition 

 of which school belongs to us, by immemorial cus- 

 tom enjoys the privilege and immunity that on all 



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