SCHOOLS 



and popular by establishing a governing body, which should admit other 

 elements besides the dean and chapter, who are constituted for wholly 

 different purposes and with quite other interests. 



The sole endowment of the school is now 180 a year, and that not 

 paid to Mr. Hayden as grammar schoolmaster, but as teacher of the choristers. 

 We saw that already in 1835 the proper stipends payable to the grammar 

 school from the cathedral endowment amounted to over 630 a year. 

 With the growth of population and the fall in the value of money the fair 

 proportionate payment out of the revenues of the cathedral estates in the 

 hands of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners would be represented by a much 

 higher figure now. 



THE NOVICES' SCHOOL, ST. PETER'S ABBEY, GLOUCESTER 



Though St. Peter's Abbey, the chief monastic institution of Gloucester- 

 shire, had nothing to do with the public school of Gloucester, it seems to 

 have done some educational work for the benefit of its own inmates, the 

 novices, and in later times for its almonry or charity boys, who were 

 also choristers in the Lady chapel. The only reference which is known to 

 the monkish school, the school of the novices, is in 1 3/8, 1 when Richard II 

 held his first Parliament at Gloucester from 20 November to 17 December, 

 staying by turns at Gloucester and Tewkesbury abbeys. When he was at 

 Gloucester he and his whole court (familia) were lodged in the abbey, which 

 was so crowded by them and the Parliament, the monks' refectory being 

 used * for the laws of arms,' i.e. for the Marshal's courts, and the Guest Hall 

 for the Common Parliament, that 



for some days the convent had its meals in the dormitory, though afterwards, being better 

 advised, in the schoolhouse, during the whole Parliament, as well on flesh days as on fish 

 days, while their dinner was cooked in the orchard. 



The chronicler laments the destruction of the turf in the cloister, in which 

 the school was, in accordance with custom, situate, ' which was so worn by 

 the exercises of wrestlers and ball-players that no traces of green were left 

 on it.' 



But this novices' school was no public school nor a school at all in our 

 sense of the word. The novices could never have been more than ten at any 

 time, and by analogy from even larger monasteries like Winchester and 

 Durham must have generally consisted of only three or four youths and 

 sometimes none ; while outsiders were strictly excluded. 



GLOUCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD 



St. Peter's Abbey, however, seems to have taken a leading part in pro- 

 moting education, a propos of the movement at the end of the thirteenth 

 century for giving a university education to the Benedictine monks. About 

 ten years after the foundation of Merton College at Oxford, the regulars seem 

 to have thought it time to follow the lead of the secular clergy, and set up a 

 permanent home for the members of the Benedictine order in the place which 



1 Hiit. Mm. i, 53. 

 2 337 43 



