SCHOOLS 



establishment was accordingly measured not by a daily allowance besides 

 their stipend, which was to cover everything, but by a yearly allowance of 

 livery and a monthly allowance for commons. The stipends were set out in 

 chapter 30, the liveries in chapter 29, and the commons in chapter 28. 

 They were : 



The head master therefore ranked in pay and position next to the 

 canons, above the minor canons, while the usher ranked below the minor 

 canons, with the deacon and lay clerks. In hall, however, the head master 

 did not preside, one of the minor canons, who was steward and received an 

 additional stipend for his trouble, supervising the arrangements and being 

 responsible for the meals. The low position of the usher may be explained 

 by the fact that he was usually a very young man, in or hardly out of 

 his teens, and not intended to stay long, being on his promotion to orders 

 and a head-mastership or a living. The pay allotted for the two masters 

 together came to 20 is. ^d. or 4^. more than the maximum allowance of 

 a canon : and if the canon was non-resident beyond his allowed holidays 

 of 80 days, or neglected any of the services when resident, as he was pretty 

 sure to do, the allowance to the school considerably exceeded that to a canon. 



The dean and chapter of Gloucester effectively prevented any full 

 history of the school being written by the careless custody or destruc- 

 tion of all their Chapter Act books before 1617, and all their accounts 

 before 1635. 



Nothing at all is discoverable of the school before 1558, and then all we 

 know is the name of the master, Robert Amfield. 1 In 1563 John Lightfoot 

 was usher. In 1576 a new master and usher came in the persons of Tobias 

 Sandford and Francis Pearson. We may say here once for all that as far as 

 is known every master and every usher was in holy orders, if not when he 

 came at all events shortly afterwards, though there was in fact no statutory 

 obligation on them to be so. So that in every case the prefix of Reverend, 

 which was not in fact commonly used till the seventeenth century, must be 

 understood as an epitheton constans. Both master and usher were also, with 

 few if any exceptions, Oxford men. Tobias Sandford, for instance, took his 

 B. A. degree at Oxford 12 April, 1570, M.A. 19 June, 1574. He after- 

 wards was incorporated at Cambridge, if the identification is correct, as 

 Bachelor of Medicine in 1578. He left the school in 1580, apparently to go 

 off to practise medicine. This was no uncommon thing with Elizabethan 

 schoolmasters. Medicine was still, as it had been wholly in the Middle 



1 Rev. T. D. Fosbrooke, New Hist. ofGlouc. (1819). 

 323 



