SCHOOLS 



collegiate church of secular canons, and had, as such, the duty of maintaining a grammar school 

 as part of its foundation, and this church was being broken up and handed over, with its school, to 

 the regular canons of Newnham. 



In Domesday Book we find St. Paul's Church mentioned several times. Bedford, we are told, 

 ' defended itself,' or, in other words, was assessed, * in the time of King Edward as half a hundred 

 and does so now, for our purposes by land or water (' in expeditione et in navibus '),' a strong testi- 

 mony, by the way, to the relative unimportance of the town, seeing that the borough of Hertford 

 was assessed at ten hundreds. ' The land of the town ' was never, the record says, 



hidated (divided into hides) and is not now, except one hide which used to lie in the church of 

 St. Paul's as charity property {in elemosina) in the time of King Edward and does now by rights. But 

 Bishop Remigius took it from the charity of St. Paul's, unjustly, as men say, and now holds it and its 

 appurtenances. It is worth loos. 



In accordance with this finding, under the heading of ' the bishop of Lincoln's land ' is included 

 'the church of Bedford with its belongings valued at loo^.' Then, last but one on the list 

 of the ecclesiastical landholders of the county, after 'the canons of London,' come 'number 13, the 

 canons of Bedford.' In the body of the document, after ' the Land of St. Paul of London,' comes 

 [' the Land] of S. Paul of Bedeford.' Under this we find 



Osmund canon of St. Paul's of Bedford holds in Bidenham (now Biddenham) of the king 3 virgates 

 . . . worth 10/. This land Leviet the priest held as charity {in elemosina) of King Edward, and after- 

 wards of King William, which priest at death gave to the church of St. Paul I virgate of this land. 

 Ralph Tailgebosc added two other virgates to the same church as charity. In the same vill Canon 

 Ansfrid holds one virgate worth 3/. This land Morwen held and could sell to whom he * wished. 

 This land Ralph Tailgebosc assigned as charity to the church of St. Paul. 



The first entry in Domesday Book is no doubt the authority on which Leland in the tiiiie of 

 Henry VIII based his statement that ' St. Paul's is the principal church of the town and was before the 

 Conquest, a College of prebendaris. The prebendaris had their houses about the circuit of St. Paul's, 

 of the which the names of two prebends remain and houses belonging to them, tho' their staules be 

 in Lincoln.' By this he meant that it was a collegiate church such as St. George's, Windsor, 

 and Westminster Abbey are now ; colleges of secular canons having not only their common or 

 capitular estate, as our modern canons of Windsor and Westminster have, but also each his separate 

 estate or prebend. But it is by no means certain that Leland is right. It is, of course, clear that 

 St. Paul's existed before the Conquest, since it held land as a charitable endowment in the time of 

 Edward the Confessor, and that the church was collegiate, as the hide of land in Bedford taken away 

 by the bishop of Lincoln was a larger endowment than that of a single priest. But the Biddenham 

 estate held by canons Osmund and Ansfrid was given partly by Leviet the priest, partly by Ralph 

 Taillebois, who was sheriff of Bedfordshire after the Conquest. So that, though, to speak in 

 terms of modern law, one virgate was already in mortmain in Edward the Confessor's time, it 

 was not part of the endowment of St, Paul's, but part of the endowment of one who was 

 probably the parish priest at Biddenham, and was only given to St. Paul's by his will. Thus the two 

 prebends of Biddenham were a post-Conquest endowment. 



The canons of St. Paul's held land in Harrowden in common. Under the 'lands of the 

 Countess Judith,' the Conqueror's niece, wife of Earl Waltheof, we find — 



In Hergentone [now Harrowden] the canons of Bedford hold 3 hides of the countess . . . worth 

 30/., when received zos., in the time of King Edward 40/. This land Azelin, a man of Earl Tosti 

 [King Harold's brother] held. He could not assign or sell without leave of him who held Canceston 

 [Kempston] the countess' manor. 



Presumably before the Conquest the canons of St. Paul's, Bedford, were canons only and not 

 prebendaries ; they shared, that is, in common estates and had not separate estates. 



Remigius, who removed the see of the vast diocese in which Bedford was from the Oxfordshire 

 Dorchester to Lincoln, apparently despised Bedford as much as he did Dorchester, which he makes 

 the king William Rufus in 1090 speak disrespectfully of in the Lincoln foundation charter as being 

 ' unfit and obscure.' ' The foundation charter of Lincoln, about four years earlier than Domes- 

 day Book, includes ' the church of St. Mary in Bedford and a hide of land, and a mill with its 

 appurtenances, and another hide in Fort with one virgate.' This was afterwards carved into two 

 prebends, Bedford Major or Bedford St. Mary or Bedford-cum-Kyrkeby, and Bedford Minor 



' Or 'she.' Morwen, or-Morwenna, is a female name. 



' ' Which see of Lincoln,' he says, ' incompetenter ac satis obscure in Dorchaecastra antiquitus posita 

 roerat.' 



2 153 20 



