SCHOOLS 



SUFFOLK, like Essex and other' east 

 coast counties, bears manifest traces 

 of its early commercial and industrial 

 prosperity, due to the intercourse with 

 Flanders and the Hanse Towns, in 

 the number and importance of its ancient 

 grammar schools as of its ancient churches. 

 We find specific evidence of not less than a 

 dozen grammar schools in the county before 

 1548, and we may be sure that there were 

 many more, notices of which have not come 

 down to us. These schools are as usual found in 

 connexion with the secular clergy, not the monks. 

 Indeed, the Suffolk schools emphasize this fact. 



It will be seen that this county affords the 

 earliest specific mention of the foundation of a 

 school in England, at Dunwich in the year 631 

 or thereabouts, and that by a bishop who was not 

 a monk, which school was handed over to the 

 governorship of the regular canons of Eye, four 

 and a half centuries later. At Thetford the 

 school's independence of the monks, who had 

 invaded it on the removal of the cathedral to 

 Norwich in William Rufus' reign, was success- 

 fully asserted for the dean by the bishop, and 

 the bishop himself is found nominating the 

 masters till the dissolution of the monasteries. 

 The most conspicuous case, however, is that of 

 Bury St. Edmunds, which has been most per- 

 sistently called a monastic school and credited 

 to the foundation of the monks in the person of 

 Abbot Samson. Yet the abbey registers them- 

 selves furnish the most conclusive proof that the 

 school was not monastic. So far from having 

 been founded by Abbot Samson, the accounts 

 of the two endowments given by him ; first, 

 about 1181, a new schoolhouse, and 18 years 

 afterwards a yearly payment of 2 from a 

 portion of a living in the patronage of the abbot, 

 afford irrefragable evidence that the school was 

 not founded by this abbot, but was attended by 

 him when he was a boy, a clerk, before he 

 became a monk or a novice, and was under a 

 master who was a clerk and not a monk. The 

 evidence from the abbey registers that this 

 school was outside the precinct of the abbey is 

 equally against its being intended for monks. 

 For the rule of the Benedictines was against the 

 monks going outside the precinct ; and though 

 this, like most monastic rules, was often broken, 

 it could not have been broken by boy novices. 



It is abundantly clear that the school was the 

 public school of the town, that the masters were 

 clerics, not monks, and that all the monastery 

 had to do with it was, in virtue of the episcopal 

 and archidiaconal jurisdiction transferred to the 

 abbot, to appoint the masters and maintain their 

 rights and privileges. There was a monastic 

 school in the abbey, of course, but among all 

 the voluminous records of the abbey which have 

 descended to us, only a single mention of it 

 in striking contrast to the numerous references 

 to the public grammar school has yet been 

 found. That was, when the chronicler vouches 1 

 as eyewitnesses of a miracle in 1112-14, 'three 

 boys of the monks' school (de scola monachorum), 

 namely Ralph, afterwards sacrist, Guy and Walter, 

 who were still living, when the chronicler wrote. 

 There are unfortunately no obedientiaries' rolls 

 here as at Winchester and Durham, which 

 would show us what this so-called school was in 

 point of numbers. But it stands to reason that 

 the number of novices in a monastery which at 

 its highest consisted of 60 to 80 monks, 2 who 

 stayed all their lives, could never have exceeded 

 a dozen, and in point of fact, at Winchester and 

 Durham, was generally under half-a-dozen, and 

 sometimes none. Anyhow, this monks' school 

 did nothing for the general public, who were 

 provided for by the grammar school, which must 

 undoubtedly have existed from the first founda- 

 tion of Bury by King Athelstan, as a college, 

 not of monks, but of secular priests. It certainly 

 casts a lurid light on the monks' want of 

 care for the welfare of the people by whose 

 industry they were supported that out of their 

 vast possessions, amounting to ^2,336 a year, 

 which cannot be put at less than ^46,000 a year 

 of our money, they never contributed a farthing 

 of endowment to the grammar school, beyond 

 the 2 a year given by Abbot Samson in 1198. 

 The sole contribution to education by this great 

 abbey, recorded in the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 

 I 535> ' s 'jC 2 ^ 131. 4</. in alms given yearly to 

 4 poor scholars of the University of Oxford for 

 their sustentation and maintenance (exibicione) 

 there at school.' Though paid by the treasurer 



1 Battely, Aittiquitatei Rutupinae et Surgi S. Edmundi 

 (1745), 61. 



' In 1514 at Norwich Priory, which should have 

 consisted of 60 monks, there were only 38. At Bury 

 at the dissolution there were 60. 



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