SCHOOLS 



France as to provoke an appeal on their behalf even from Bernard himself : 

 * You should not persecute the Jews, you should not slay them, you should 

 not even put them to flight,' as it would prevent their conversion promised in 

 Romans xi, 26. 



A Hebrew historian says * * in England the King of Heaven saved the 

 Jews through the king of England. He turned his heart so that he protected 

 them and saved their lives and property. Praised be the help of Israel.' But 

 another Hebrew historian, Joseph ben Meir,' under date 1 146, says : 



The Lord saved the Jews by the hand of King Henry, for a king's heart is in God's hand. 

 He took nothing, not even a shoe-string from them. Even those who in this year were 

 compelled to defile themselves [i.e. be christened] found mercy from a priest, who led them 

 not for silver and not for presents, to France, where they remained till the cruelty of the 

 unbelievers had ceased. 



This passage is, however, inconsistent with itself and untrustworthy. In the 

 first place Stephen, and not Henry, was king in 1 1 46, and the salvation by 

 the king was not much of a salvation if the Jews were compelled to be 

 baptized and had to fly to France. However, the fact of the persecution and 

 the compulsory baptism may perhaps be considered to afford a reason for 

 Fitzharding founding a school for the enforced converts, or the children of 

 those who were killed, if any were. At all events, as will be seen, there was a 

 house in Wine Street known even in the sixteenth century as the Jews' 

 School, to give colour to the tale. 



There is no further evidence of any connexion of the Kalendars' Gild 

 with the Grammar School. It does not seem to have remained long under 

 their control. For Leland, the itinerant antiquary of Henry VIII, tells us 

 that * William Erie of Gloucester, founder of the monasterye of Cainesham, 

 gave the prefecture and mastershippe of the Schole in Brightstow to Cainesham 

 and took it from the Calenderies.' ' Keynsham Abbey, in Somerset, about 

 6 miles from Bristol, was founded, according to Ricart's Calendar the foun- 

 dation deed itself was undated in 1171. That being so, it is strange that 

 insistence should have been laid on the foundation of the school under the 

 Kalendars in the inquisition of 1318. The school is not, however, mentioned 

 in the foundation charter of Keynsham Abbey, and no accounts are left to 

 show the precise relations of the abbey to the school, whether it provided 

 any endowments, or, as is more probable, merely acted as governing body, 

 appointing and dismissing the masters. The transfer of authority over the 

 school to a body of Augustinian canons outside the town is curiously parallel 

 to that which we saw took place at Gloucester; the school there being handed 

 over to the Augustinian canons of Llanthony Abbey, outside that city. 



We are enabled to fix the site of the school in the thirteenth century 

 from a document preserved, almost by accident, in the * Great Red Book of 

 Bristol,' an MS. still in the council house. The book itself is of the four- 

 teenth century, but on the fly-leaves at the beginning of it is copied a most 

 interesting rent-roll of the king's and the town's property in the borough, the 

 names of the tenants of which, followed as it is by an inquisition held for the 



1 Joseph Jacobs, The "Jews of Angevin England, 258, quoting Heir, Berichte Jer KreuzzBge, 64. 

 * Willccn, Geich'uhte der KreuzzBgt, iii, App. p. 1 6. ' Uebcr die Juden Vcrfolgung im Jahre 1146.' I 

 am indebted to Professor Margoliouth for this reference. 

 1 Itin. (ed. Hearn, 1744), vii, 88. 



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