A HISTORY OF BUCKINGHAMSHIRE 



university students, and, secondly, in directly 

 connecting this collegiate-church-school with a 

 university students' collegiate church. He had 

 also set, not the first example by any means 

 the example which may have been the first was 

 set by John Grandison, Bishop of Exeter, in the 

 foundation of Ottery St. Mary's College and 

 Grammar School in 1332 but the first example 

 on a large scale of finding ready provision for 

 educational endowments in the purchase of alien 

 priories. The direct model and mother of Eton 

 was Winchester College, its grandmother was 

 Merton College, but its ultimate model was to 

 be found in the cathedral churches of York and 

 London and of Winchester and Canterbury be- 

 fore these passed into the hands of the monks. 



The alien priories, religious houses in England 

 belonging to monasteries abroad, nearly all in 

 France, had to pay in some cases their whole 

 surplus net revenues, in others fixed pensions, to 

 the mother houses abroad ; and these revenues 

 were naturally made the subject of taxation by 

 the French kings, and so the revenues and re- 

 sources of England were used against itself. In 

 Wykeham's time these alien priories were only 

 sequestrated during the war, and he had to 

 obtain papal bulls authorizing the foreign houses 

 to sell, and he had to pay a good price for what 

 he bought. Henry V confiscated them wholly 

 to the Crown. It has been alleged by Anthony 

 Wood that Henry V intended ' to have built a 

 college in the castle of Oxford . . . and there- 

 unto to have annected all the alien priories in 

 England.' This must be an egregious exaggera- 

 tion. An endowment of that amount would 

 have been overwhelming. The statement seems 

 to be an enlargement of John Rows, the War- 

 wick chronicler, who wrote in 1485 that 

 Henry V ' intended to found a noble college at 

 Oxford in which there should be deep research 

 in the seven sciences,' the ordinance for which 

 Rows himself in his youth had seen. But, con- 

 sidering that some fifty of the most splendid 

 collegiate churches, colleges, and schools were 

 richly endowed out of the alien priories, it is 

 quite impossible that Henry V could ever have 

 intended to bestow them all on one foundation. 

 The story shows, however, how the foundation 

 of colleges was in the air. 



Henry VI succeeded to the throne at nine 

 months old on i September 1422. So full 

 were the Privy Council of the advantages of 

 school education that three years later 6 they 

 directed that all the heirs of all the lords of the 

 realm, at least of the rank of barons, holding in 

 chief, who as minors were in the wardship of 

 the Crown, should be sent up and kept about the 

 person of the king and in his house at his ex- 

 pense, accompanied by at least one master. It 

 is possible, when we remember how Richard 



Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, the king's tutor, 

 travelled in Italy, and how Cardinal Beaufort, 

 his uncle, was at home abroad, that the Privy 

 Council were consciously imitating the famous 

 Giocosa or Home of Joy, the palace school 

 started by Vittorino da Feltre at Mantua in 

 1423, where he taught the children of the reign- 

 ing Marquis Gonzaga and others, from the age 

 of three to the age of twenty-three. Henry, poor 

 child, was only two years old when the Lady 

 Alice Boteler was appointed to teach him 

 courtesy and good breeding and other things, 

 with full 'leave to chastise us reasonably from 

 time to time as the case may require,' and on 

 1 6 March 1426 her salary was increased by 40 

 a year, charged on the fee-farm of Great Yar- 

 mouth. On i June 14.28,** i.e. as soon as he 

 ceased at seven years old to be an infant and 

 became a boy, the lady was superseded by 

 Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, who 

 was to teach him ' bons moeurs, lettrure, Ian- 

 gage, nurture et courtoisie, et autres virtus et 

 enseignements,' or, as it was expressed also in 

 English, ' shall do his devoir and diligence to 

 teche the Kyng, and make hym to be taught, 

 nurture, lettrure (literature), language, and other 

 manere of cunnyng as his age shall suffre him to 

 more comprehende, suche as it fitteth so greet a 

 prince to be lerned of.' Needless to say that ' our 

 reasonable chastisement as other princes of our 

 realm and other are accustomed to be chastised 

 ... if we estrange ourselves from learning and 

 commit faults,' was not forgotten. This Richard 

 Beauchamp contemplated a ' regal college of 

 Trinity ' at Guy's Cliff, but he contented him- 

 self with a chantry of two priests. Henry 

 Beaufort, Wykeham's successor at Winchester 

 and Henry's favourite uncle, had re-endowed, 

 and rebuilt on an ampler scale, the famous alms- 

 house of St. Cross by Winchester. He had 

 also assisted or authorized Winchester College to 

 increase its endowment by the acquisition of the 

 alien priory of Andover as early as 1413, though 

 the college only entered into possession in 1437. 

 The Earl of Suffolk who, after Duke Humphrey, 

 was practically Prime Minister and was one of 

 Henry's chief advisers and managers as regards 

 buildings, himself founded at Ewelme in Oxford- 

 shire in 1439 a hospital for 12 poor men with 2 

 priests to look after them, one a master and the 

 other ' a well disposed man apt and able to 

 teachyng, to teach and inform children in the 

 faculty of gramer.' Thomas Kemp, Archbishop 

 of York, in 1431 obtained licence in mortmain 

 for a college at his native place Wye, in Kent, 

 which included a grammar school. Above all, 

 Henry Chicheley, Archbishop of Canterbury, 

 the earliest successful product of Winchester and 

 New College, for whom, as his baptizer, 

 Henry VI had especial regard, founded a smaller 



'ActsofP.C.m, 170, 28 June 1425. 



Ibid. 296. 



150 



