SCHOOLS 



we naturally look for the earliest school. But 

 we find no evidence of one before the days 

 of Queen Elizabeth, when there existed two 

 schools, which have now been united, St. 

 Saviour's and St. Olave's Grammar Schools. 

 The absence of evidence as to what there 

 was in the way of a school before, has been 

 supplied by a Isad guess started by the great 

 Elizabethan antiquary, Stow, in his Survey 

 of London. Fitzstephen, cleric and judge, in 

 the famous Description of London, which 

 formed a prelude to his life of St. Thomas 

 of Canterbury,* written about 1170, teUs how 

 ' in London three principal churches of the 

 city have famous schools of privilege and 

 ancient pre-eminence (dignitate), though 

 sometimes through personal favour to some 

 one noted for his learning {notati secundum 

 philosophiam) more schools are allowed,' and 

 describes how on feast days the boys of those 

 three schools met and held disputations and 

 contests in grammar, in verse and in Latin 

 epigrams. The three schools were, as shown 

 by many other documents, St. Paul's School 

 (the Grammar School of the cathedral school 

 of St. Paul, which was granted to and incor- 

 porated by Colet in the present St. Paul's 

 School), St. Martin's-le-Grand, the school of 

 the ancient collegiate church of that name, 

 and St. Mary-le-Bow, which was the ' pecu- 

 liar ' of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and 

 the seat of the principal ecclesiastical court of 

 England ; the Court of the Arches or the 

 Bow, and took its name from the church in 

 which it sat. By Stow's time the ancient 

 glory of the two latter schools had been for- 

 gotten. So he, casting about to identify the 

 three schools of Becket's day put rightly 

 St. Paul's for the first, but for the second, 

 St. Peter's at Westminster,^ while the third 

 he says 



seemeth to have been in the monastery of 

 St. Saviour at Bermondsey in Southwark. 

 For other priories as of St. John by Smith- 

 field, St. Bartholomew's in Smithfield, St. 

 Mary Overies in Southwark, and that of the 

 Holy Trinity in Aldgate were all of later foun- 

 dation. 



His history is here all wrong. Except 

 St. John's, Clerkenwell, all these priories were 

 in existence when Fitzstephen wrote, while 

 Westminster School was not.' His geography 



» Materials for the History of Thomas a Becket. 

 Rolls series, iii. 3. 



' Liber custumarum. 



^ Stow's evidence for the early existence of 

 Westminster School was a passage in Ingulph's 

 Chronicle, a fifteenth century forgery or romance. 

 There seems not to have been any school at West- 



is as erroneous as his history. Neither West- 

 minster nor Bermondsey was in London. 

 Fitzstephen himself describes Westminster as 

 a village two miles from London ; while Ber- 

 mondsey, being in another county, across the 

 river and under a different ecclesiastical, and, 

 therefore, scholastic jurisdiction, could still 

 less be supposed to be in London. Moreover, 

 it would be against all we know of monastic 

 houses to suppose that they kept schools for 

 anyone but their own novices. Schools were 

 founded by private benefactors, some of whom 

 were, no doubt, priors or abbots, and were 

 placed under the mastership or governorship 

 of monasteries, while as landlords or lords of 

 manors or as being in possession of episcopal 

 or archidiaconal jurisdiction, abbots and 

 priors sometimes kept school boarding houses 

 for the aristocracy. But that it was any part 

 of the duty, in theory or in practice, of monas- 

 teries as such to keep schools, that is, public 

 grammar schools for the use of the public, is 

 a mere delusion. At Bermondsey Abbey there 

 is no trace of any school. But the Annals of 

 the Abbey record,* how in 1 21 3 Prior Richard 

 founded on the Cellarer's property a house, 

 built against his wall, called the Almonry or 

 Hospital of the lay brethren and of boys, in 

 honour of St. Thomas the Martyr. The Prior 

 directed the Almoner to pay the Cellarer 

 IOJ-. 4^. a year rent ; and the said Almoner was 

 exempt from episcopal jurisdiction like the 

 monastery itself. Analogy with Canter- 

 bury ^ and Winchester * Westminster, and 

 Durham, suggests that the boys in 

 this Almonry, who acted as choristers 

 and page-boys to the monks, were in 

 a sense a school, that is that a grammar- 

 master was provided for them ; but the 

 number of boys did not exceed thirteen, and 

 it was in no sense a public grammar school, 

 though possibly outsiders were by favour 

 admitted to benefit by the tuition. But at 

 Bermondsey there is no positive evidence of a 

 school. A school in connexion with St. Mary 

 Overies might be a more hopeful quest, since 

 before it became a Priory it was a collegiate 

 church, and, as happened at Christchurch 

 Hants, St. Paul's Bedford, and at Derby, 

 among other places, the school may have 

 been kept alive when the church passed under 

 the ' dead hand.' Or there may have been 



minster, except the novices' school, which was not 

 a real school until the reign of Edward HI. when a 

 Grammar School was started in the Almonry about 

 1354. Seejournal of Education, ]3nuity, 1905. 



* B. M. Harl. 231. 



s We saw above under Kingston how there was 

 a school in the Canterbury Almonry. 



8 V.C.H. Hants, ii. Ancient Schools. 



173 



