SCHOOLS 



again reduced to 21. At last under an Order of the Charity Commis- 

 sioners, 26 January, 1897, Mr. Widdowson retired to the Hving at Foston, 

 with a sum of jC^oo down, and a pension of ^Tioo a year. 



DAVENTRY GRAMMAR SCHOOL 



Daventry, the grammar school of which seems to have spent the 

 larger portion of its existence in a state of suspended animation, possessed 

 a brotherhood ^ of the Holy Trinity and Holy Cross, governed by two 

 masters, in its parish church, which adjoined the church of the priory. 

 The fraternity was founded in 1383, to find thirteen wax tapers burning 

 before the Holy Cross and the chaplain to celebrate the morrow mass 

 (missam matutinalem) for labourers and wayfarers. Though the morrow- 

 mass priest in many places kept a school to fill up his time, having got 

 up so early, and though we may perhaps suspect him of doing the 

 same here, in view of the early restoration of a school, yet we have no 

 evidence whatever that he actually did so. The chantry certificates do 

 not mention Daventry at all. Perhaps the priory were trustees for the 

 brotherhood, and its possessions were, as was too often the case, con- 

 sidered confiscated with those of the priory. The school foundation 

 was contemporaneous with that of the incorporation of the town under 

 the name of bailiff and burgesses by letters patent" of Queen Elizabeth, 

 on 26 March, 1576, being founded a week later by will of 6 April, 

 1 576, of William Parker,^ presumably a native of IDaventry, who had 

 made his fortune in London as a draper. He demised his manor of 

 Upwicke and other lands belonging to it to his wife, for life, upon 

 condition that she should ' finde an honest discreete man to keepe a 

 grammar scboole and instruct children to the number of 50 scollers 

 frelye in the liberall scyence of grammar and the understandynge of the 

 Latyn tonge in Daventree ' ' and should pay ^20 to the scholemaster and 

 usher,' viz. ^^15 to the schoolmaster, and ^^5 to the usher. He also 

 directed a payment of j(^i8 a year to six poor persons. If default was 

 made the property was given over to the bailiff and burgesses of Daventry. 



The lady long survived her husband, and in 1601 was the wife of 

 Humphrey Corbet, when the bailiff and burgesses filed a bill against 

 him and her,* charging conspiracy to conceal from them what the lands 

 were which were charged with the school payments, and to contend that 

 the payments were not perpetual but limited to Alice Corbet's life and 

 that a fraudulent agreement had been made with the heir-at-law to defeat 

 the gift over to the town. They also alleged that Anthony Marshall, the 

 master appointed by the defendants, ' neither took half the number of 

 scholars proposed, nor taught them gratuitously, and by his negligence 

 and insufficiency those who had children to be instructed were driven to 



1 P.R.O. Guild Certif. (Chan.), 378. 



- Pat. 1 8 Eliz. pt. vii. ' Ctar. Com. Rep. xxiv, 9. 



* P.R.O. Chan. Dec. and Orders, 1602, fol. 264; cf. George 'Qz^st, Hist, and jintiq. of the County of 

 Northampton, London, 1822-30, i, 335, from Daventry town muniments. 



275 



