SCHOOLS 



FEES FROM A NEW PREPOSTOR s. d. 



Ye two Butlers 036 



FEES FROM A NEW OFFICER 



Ye Warden's man 026 



Ye Manciple 026 



Ye two Cooks 050 



Ye two Butlers 050 



Ye three Scullions 030 



Ye Almoner oio 



Ye Table Chorister . o i o 



There are several items in this statement which would strike the 

 modern parent as odd, e.g. that a scholar should pay for his chamber 

 ware, the college only supplying beds, even the daily making of these 

 being an extra ; that he should pay for keeping the school and the latrines 

 (fork us = foricas, the 'notion' still in use) clean, should 'tip' his own 

 schoolfellows the then not inconsiderable sum of half a crown for the 

 performance of those prefectural functions 1 and subscribe another half- 

 crown for their benefit on leaving as superannuated. Enforced charity 

 as evidenced in a shilling to the almoner is, of course, nothing unusual 

 even now. The ' officers,' the five senior prefects holding certain offices 

 of Prefect of Hall, School, Chapel and Library are still mulcted in 

 customary tips, though not on entrance into office or to quite so many 

 functionaries. ' Rod money,' or paying for the provision made for your 

 own chastisement, was an item known in many, perhaps in all, ancient 

 schools, as at Hexham, where it was provided for in the statutes in 1590, 

 ' and the Schoolmaster's ferules of every of his scholars born without the 

 parish shall be 4^., that is, lid. at every of the said quarter days.' 



Nutting money was for the expenses of carriage for the September 

 outing to gather nuts, which Malim's Elizabethan account of Eton shows 

 to have been an institution there also. Window money is for the break- 

 age of windows, a constant item of expense in all old school accounts, 

 when, there being no regular outlet for superfluous energies in games, the 

 boys were apt to take it out on the windows. ' Cause,' probably pro- 

 nounced ' causey,' money was for maintaining the footpath across the 

 fields from Blackbridge to Hills, now nearly destroyed by encroachment 

 of town and railway. ' Church money ' is said to be a payment to the 

 vergers for keeping the seats in the cathedral, 3 whither the school repaired 

 on Sunday mornings. Commoners, it may be observed, paid also fire 

 money and candle money, from which the ' children ' were exempt by 

 reason of special endowments such as Thomas Chandler's, who commemo- 

 rated his own name by the provision of those luxuries. Commoners seem 

 to have been exempt from almsgiving, the almoner being perhaps a 

 purely college officer. 



Hardly had the domestic discords between Warden Nicholas and 



* The modern Wyckhamist will notice that prefects were then commonly called prepostors, as at 

 Eton still. 2 Annals, p. 383. 



343 



