SCHOOLS 



troversy between the church of St. Paul, Bedford, and ' the church of St. Peter of the same town, 

 which is a possession of Merton ' — hence the name of St. Peter Merton, which got corrupted into 

 Martin, and then to Martyr — as to tithes of land given by Count Waldevus (Earl Waltheof) to the 

 one and by Stephen Long to the other. 



Two grants of Simon of Beauchamp himself appear to be the earliest endowments of the priory, 

 one ^* of ' my mill which is called the Castle mill ' and 5 acres of land, * to the canons regular of the 

 church of St. Paul of Bedford,' and another ' of the tithe of all my lands newly taken into cultiva- 

 tion and of my herds.' This last endowment must have been when the canons had moved out from 

 Bedford to Newnham, as it is granted to St. Paul's church * with the consent of Prior Auger and 

 the whole convent of Newnham for building and maintaining the monastery there and the offices 

 {officinarum) of the same place.' The priory therefore must have been started some years before 

 1 1 60, since there had been time for the controversies with Merton to develop and be settled in 

 that year, for Prior Augerius to give place to Prior William, and for the canons to have conceived the 

 plan of removing to Newnham ' scant a mile beneath Bedford on Ouse river.' 



Archdeacon Nicholas's deed recording that he had resigned the government of the school of 

 Bedford to Prior Augerius and the canons of that church (i.e. Bedford, not Newnham, which is not 

 mentioned) must therefore belong to the early period before the move to Newnham and the succes- 

 sion of William to the priorate. It can therefore hardly be dated later than 1 1 60. As he had held 

 the school ' some time * when he was made to surrender it, we may fairly attribute his accession to 

 the government as circa 1155. 



It must have been peculiarly bitter for the archdeacon thus to have to surrender to these inter- 

 lopers, who were only waiting for his death to seize his own prebend, the school which was 

 peculiarly an appurtenance of the secular clergy and not at all appropriate to regulars. The pathetic 

 tale of the last survivor of the old secular canons of Waltham Holy Cross — the foundation of King 

 Harold, the last English king — who were dispossessed to make room for the regulars at Waltham 

 Abbey, tells us how important a part the school played in the constitution of the old church. The 

 schoolmaster was the second person in the church and the boys attending the school went with all 

 the gravity of canons ' from choir to school and from school to choir.' A school, however, found no 

 place in the rule of St. Austin, learned man though he was, as expounded by the twelfth-century 

 masqueraders under his name. In their hands probably the schools in many cases vanished altogether, 

 as seems to have been the case at Waltham. Nicholas may, however, have consoled himself with the 

 knowledge that the same thing was going on in other places at the same time. Derby presents an 

 almost exact parallel. There, too, the canons regular were planted at first in Derby and obtained a 

 grant of the castle mill and then moved out 'scant a mile ' below Derby on Trent river, and there, 

 too, ' the school of Derby ' was assigned to the governance of the regular canons. Similarly at 

 Gloucester the school was transferred to the canons of Llanthony and at Bristol to the canons of 

 Keynsham, At Bedford the school did not cease to exist, though from the time when Archdeacon 

 Nicholas declared that it belonged to the newly created priory it disappears from our view altogether. 

 No documents relating to Newnham Priory other than its chartulary in the British Museum seem to 

 be preserved. There is unhappily no survey extant nor any detailed account of the priory at or immedi- 

 ately after its dissolution, which took place 1 2 January, 1 540— I . But at the dissolution of chantries some 

 eight years afterwards we have a spark of evidence to show that the school went on at Bedford, and 

 was not transferred with the priory to Newnham, where indeed there would have been nobody to go 

 to it. In the rental given by the Chantries Commission of the chantry of Corpus Christi, which had 

 been founded in St. Paul's Church under a licence in mortmain, 4 July, 1505, for a chantry priest to 

 pray for the soul of William Joye, occurs this item : — ' The ferme of 3 cotages in Scole lane in the 

 tenure of 3 pore folkes, by yere, i 2j.' School lane could only have been so called because there was 

 a school in it. So we may confidently infer the existence of a school at, or not long before, the date 

 of the chantry certificate — 1 546. As it was not maintained out of the chantry or by the * Fraternity 

 of Bedford,' otherwise called the Trinity Gild, it may be inferred that it was either maintained with 

 a payment from the revenues of the priory, or, which is quite as likely, that it had no endowment at 

 all, and that while the prior as successor to the chapter of the collegiate church had the appointment 

 of the master, the master, who was as usual one of the secular clergy, was supported only by fees. 



This chantry of Corpus Christi and the ' Fraternity of Bedford ' first bring us into connexion 

 with the name of Harper. 



' The Brotherhode of the Trynities of Bedford ' was, we are told by the Chantry Com- 

 missioners, under the Chantries Act of Henry VIII in 1546^* 'founded to the use of the fraternitie 

 of the chaplayne of the Holy Trynitie to singe devyne service within the parish churche of Saint 

 Paul in Bedforde, as by a dede remayning with the Commyssioners it doth appeare. The landes ben 

 given to the Maire, BaylyflFe and Burgesses of the town of Bedforde to th' use of the said chapelayn,' 



" Karl. MS. 3656, fol. 20. 

 " Chant. Cert. 4, No. 21. 



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