SCHOOLS 



body corporate with a common seal ; the alderman and wardens being 

 empowered to acquire and hold lands and sue for them in the corporate 

 name. The brethren had power to hold meetings and make statutes 

 and ordinances. The grant was made without any fine 1 or fee. 



It is not to be inferred from the absence of any mention of the 

 school in the licence that the school did not exist, or was not intended 

 to be created. Unfortunately the ordinances, if any, which were made 

 by the nominal founders, the Bishop and Lord Sandys or the alderman, 

 wardens and brethren, are not forthcoming. But the letters patent of 

 Philip and Mary, 24 February, 1556," reciting the re-foundation of the 

 gild under licence from her father, distinctly says that a school was 

 intended to be part of that re-foundation : ' From the revenues of which 

 fraternity or gild a priest was to have been provided and supported as 

 well for the celebration of divine worship within the said chapel as for 

 the education of youths 3 and boys in literature within the said town, as 

 we have heard from persons worthy of credit.' Many gilds, like the 

 famous gild of the Holy Cross of Stratford-on-Avon, in whose school 

 Shakespeare received his education, kept grammar schools, by maintain- 

 ing a chaplain who was authorized or required to teach grammar. Yet 

 there is no mention in the licence for the foundation of the Holy Cross 

 Gild of Stratford of any school, though there is positive evidence that 

 one was maintained from, if not before, its formal incorporation in 1405. 

 Silence therefore in the licence of Henry VIII. is no argument that 

 in the royal manor and town of Basingstoke the gild of the chapel 

 of the Holy Ghost had not maintained a grammar school for ten 

 years before 1548, or for centuries before that. 



THE HOLY GHOST CHAPEL 



The first mention of the chapel itself as yet known is in an 

 order* by William Raleigh, Bishop of Winchester, in 1244, f r l ^ e 

 establishment of the vicarage of Basingstoke, in consequence of the 

 appropriation of the rectory to Selborne Priory by his predecessor, 

 Bishop Peter de Rupibus, in 1234. According to that ordinance the 

 vicar was to maintain two chaplains in Basingstoke under him, ' one 

 to celebrate for the living and the other for the dead, as was usual 

 in times past.' The oblations of the chapel of the Holy Ghost of Basing- 

 stoke, excepting those which were offered for the dead buried there, or 

 of parochial right, were to be divided into three portions and were to go, 

 one-third each to the priory, the vicar, and repairs of the churches, viz. 

 of Basing and Basingstoke. The vicar was to do ordinary repairs to the 



1 Fine, not, as oddly translated in Basingstoke, ' without limit.' 



J Translated from Pat. 3 & 4 Philip and Mary in Basingstoke, p. 663 seq. 



3 This and not ' young men,' as in Basingstoke loc. cit., is the proper translation of juvenes. Boy- 

 hood ended, strictly speaking, at 14, and as boys stayed at grammar schools in the middle ages as 

 now till 1 8, the term youths was correct. 



* Basingstoke, p. 14. The reference is not given ; but the order seems to come (p. 655) from a 

 Selborne Priory document preserved at Magdalen College, Oxford, from an Inspeximus Charter passed 

 in 1318 by Bishop John Sandal. 



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