A HISTORY OF HAMPSHIRE 



It has been said 1 that the provision for commoners was not in the 

 original scheme of Wykeham, but added ' about two years after the 

 college was opened.' But as the college buildings were opened in 1394, 

 as additional statutes or new statutes were made in that year, and 

 commoners appear on the earliest extant Steward of Hall's Book, begin- 

 ning at Michaelmas 1395, this theory will not hold. 



James Ramsey appears in this book as an extraneus commensalis, or 

 'stranger commoner.' He was admitted a scholar on 28 October, 1395. 

 Another commoner was Richard Stanstede, who appears in the fourth 

 week with ve. po. or venit primo against his name. After a few weeks 

 he became ' chapel clerk,' and then a chaplain. 



Next year, 13967, two classes of commoners are found, with a 

 distinction which prevailed till the fifteenth century, some being what 

 were afterwards termed fellow-commoners, from having their meals or 

 commons with the fellows, and the others called in the Hall Books in 

 the language of the statutes, extranei commensales, or strangers admitted to 

 table, who dined with the scholars. The first fellow commoners are 

 described 2 as ' two sons of John Uvedale,' that is John Uvedale of 

 Bletchingley, who had married the heiress and in 1 381 3 inherited the 

 estates of Sir John Scures (Wykeham's first patron, when constable of 

 Winchester Castle), the lord of Wickham, Hants, from which Wykeham 

 took his name. The other commoners were eleven in number, com- 

 prising two Cranleighs, senior and junior, 4 no doubt relations of the 

 warden and archbishop of that name, and one Thomas Clerk, who is 

 described as puer officialis. As he would have exceeded the statutable 

 number of commoners, it is probable that he occupied some position like 

 that of a pupil-teacher or ' bear leader ' to some of the commoners. Of 

 the ten commoners half became scholars ; three, Cranlegh or Cranley, 

 Banbury and Mordon the same year, and two more, Pope and Bannyng, 

 the year afterwards. In the seventeenth century this was still the case ; 

 many of the commoners strictly so called, the commoners in college, 

 were boys who were afterwards admitted as scholars, and had gone as 

 commoners pending a vacancy. 



In 1400 another commoner, John Popham, one of the knightly 

 family of Pophams of Popham near Micheldean in Hampshire, and now 

 of Somerset, Dorset, and the Isle of Wight, was pardoned thirty-one 

 weeks' arrears of commons ' by the founder.' The Hall Book of 1401-2 

 provides another list of commoners with the sums they paid for commons, 

 which varied from 1 6d. to %d. a week ; a shilling a week being the 

 amount of a fellow's and 8*/. a week the allowance for a scholar's 

 commons. 



p. 109. 



2 Coll. Mun. ; Computus Magistri Johannis Morys, 20-21 Richard II. 



3 The Family of Brocas, by Professor Montagu Burrows (Longmans, Green & Co., 1886), p. 328 ; 

 cf. Wykehairfs Register, ii. 279, 329. 



4 In these early documents senior and junior are used indiscriminately with major and minor for 

 two brothers. In later days Winchester settled down to senior and junior only, while Eton adopted 

 major and minor only. 



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