A HISTORY OF GLOUCESTERSHIRE 



He was buried in St. Christopher in the Stocks, London, 1 where ' there 

 was a monument of pure touch,' i.e. touch-stone, with the inscription 



Robertus cubat hie Thornus mercator honestus 



Qui sibi legitimas arte paravit opes. 

 Huic vitam dederat puero Bristollia 



Londinum hoc tumulo clauserat ante diem. 

 Ornavit studiis patriam virtutibus auxit 



Gymnasium erexit sumptibus ipse suis. 



Then follows the usual request for the reader's prayer for rest for his ashes, and 

 a statement that he died at the age of 40. The use of the word gymnasium 

 for a school is noteworthy. It is one of several indications that we were 

 near being saddled, as the Germans were, with that pedantic term for a 

 school. 



In thus converting St. Bartholomew's Almshouse to a school the two Robert 

 Thornes were not, as one local historian 3 has it, ' setting a rare example of a 

 monastic foundation being sold to lay impropriation, and transformed in 

 character some years before the Parliamentary dissolution of religious houses.' 



Nor was Henry VIII, as other local historians have it, ' robbing a 

 hospital to give it to the Thornes.' The connexion of hospitals and schools 

 was, as we have seen here at Bristol itself in the case of Gaunt's Hospital, 

 very ancient. The Thornes and Henry VIII were but following the example 

 of Catholic popes and prelates and kings in converting to more useful purposes 

 charities which had outlived their usefulness, or the incomes of which had 

 outgrown their original purposes. Not only Edward II and Edward III 

 but Henry VI and Henry VII had set the example. The appropriation of 

 St. Julian's Hospital at Southampton to the support of Queen's College, Ox- 

 ford, and of St. Bartholomew's at Oxford to Oriel College, had been improved 

 upon by the bodily conversion of St. John's Hospital, Oxford, into Magdalen 

 College, and St. Mary Magdalen's Hospital, Reading, and St. John's Hospital, 

 Banbury, into Grammar Schools. These precedents have been followed over 

 and over again, and in our own day the surplus revenues of the Wyggeston 

 Hospital, Leicester, have furnished the most conspicuously successful of first 

 ' grade secondary schools in the Midlands, the Wyggeston Schools for boys 

 and girls. 



Of St. Bartholomew's Hospital very little seems to be known. It was 

 an almshouse for the poor and not a hospital for the sick, already in 1390," 

 when by his will Elias Spelby gave 40.;. to the poor in it. It is said that it 

 was in ruins at this time, when Leland visited it. But the statement rests 

 on a conjectural reading by Hearne of a transcript of Leland by Stow. 

 The fact that Lord De La Warr himself had lodgings there, and that there 

 were almspeople in it in 1532, whose interests were preserved, is sufficient 

 testimony that it was not in ruins. 



Of Nicholas Thorne, the brother and heir of Robert the younger, having 

 'overlived' his fellow-trustee Goodriche, it is said in the deed of 1561 that 

 he ' did make a gramer schole within the said howse of the Bartilmewes 

 and did place and sett one John Haris, scholemaster, to teche gramer there.' 

 The exact date does not appear. But, as we saw, in 1536 Frome Gate was 



1 Stow's Surv. of London (ed. Strype, 1720), ii, 123. ' Bristol, Past and Present, ii, 120. 



5 Wills in Great Orphan Book. 



364 



