A HISTORY OF GLOUCESTERSHIRE 



for 105 foundationers, including choristers and lay clerks, was 93 ft. long by 

 20 ft. broad ; and the new chapel of New College, Oxford, which was for 

 the same number, but men instead of boys, was i 50 ft. long and 35 ft. broad ; 

 excluding the ante-chapel. But the secular clerks were much less rich and 

 less richly catered for than the monks, and it is impossible to believe that a 

 chapel of considerably less than half the size of Winchester College and a 

 third the size of New College could have been intended for 100, still less 

 for 200 monks. We may fairly assume, therefore, that 60 was about 

 the highest number at Gloucester College. In 1537 there were only 

 32 students. 1 



Gloucester having the best chambers in the place probably kept up 

 its number of three or four students. As they were there for seven years at 

 least, this represents a very small proportion of the whole number of monks 

 receiving a university education, and cannot entitle St. Peter's Abbey to be 

 regarded as a place of great learning. The abbey had no further special 

 connexion with the college, in which at least 14 other monasteries had 

 chambers for their students, while ' 38 can be definitely connected with 

 Gloucester College.' It would, therefore, be out of place to pursue further 

 the history of an institution, which only in its beginning and its name had 

 any definite connexion with Gloucester. 



ALMONRY SCHOOL AT ST. PETER'S ABBEY, GLOUCESTER 



Soon after the beginning of the sixteenth century there seems to have 

 been an organized movement for the reform of the monasteries and an endea- 

 vour made to turn them into something like colleges, or at least to make them 

 societies of more or less learned men. The bishops in their visitations were 

 in the habit of ordering the monks to provide themselves with grammar 

 masters. We find this going on in the dioceses of Norwich and of Canter- 

 bury, and at Winchester, while quite a band of fellows at New College seem 

 to have gone out as such teachers to various religious orders. Something of 

 the sort must have happened at Gloucester, for we find Abbot William s and 

 the convent on 1 6 April, 1515, making a grant headed 8 ' Writing of John 

 Tucke, bachelor of arts, of his offices of Master of the Grammar School and 

 of the song school or of the children of the chapel ' (' de officiis suis magistri 

 Scole Gramaticalis et Scole cantus sive puerorum capelle'). It is noticeable 

 that the word school is at this time in the singular. The grant included an 

 annuity of 6, 3 from the cellarer and 3 from the master of the chapel ; 

 a robe or gown ' of the best cloth such as the gentlemen in our house receive ' 

 (' de meliori panno prout generosi in domo nostra recipiunt '), and two cart- 

 loads of fuel to be delivered at his house. Besides this the chapel-master 

 was to give him a mark of silver to find himself a gown. At his house, too, 

 he was to have every day in the year a large helping (ferculum) both of the 

 first course and the second, as shall be set before a monk, and daily a loaf 



1 Worcester Coll. 27. 



1 Oddly written as Willielmus in Hist. Man. Glouc. (Rolls Ser.), iii, 290. It must have been Willelmus 

 in the original. 



1 Miss Rose Graham supplied the heading from the contemporary Index in the M3. It is not given in 

 the printed edition in the Notts Series. 



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