The Ancient Schools in the City of London
The history of schools in London, like the history of schools in England and mediæval Europe at large, necessarily begins with the history of its great churches. Throughout England until the Reformation, and, in theory at all events, until the Revolution, schools were ecclesiastical institutions, and education was a matter of purely ecclesiastical cognizance. The Ordinary, that is, the judge of the Ecclesiastical Court of first instance, had everywhere cognizance of all matters in dispute which concerned schools and scholars, their internal discipline and their relations to the external world. It could and did settle the question of school supply, how many schools there should be, and where.
If we want to know, therefore, what were the earliest and chief schools of London, we have only to ask, What were the earliest and chief churches of London? When we say churches, we must be careful to remember that the word churches for such purpose means churches of the secular clergy; that is, college and parish churches, not those of monasteries and religious orders. We must be careful not to confuse the two, and not to talk of St. Paul’s Cathedral Church as conventual, or of St. Martin’s-le-Grand Collegiate Church as a monastery. To do so is precisely like confusing New College, Oxford, with a Jesuit seminary, or Trinity, Cambridge, with a Salvation Army barracks.
The chief secular churches of London were, first and foremost, St. Paul’s Cathedral; next, the great Collegiate Church of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, now, alas! swallowed up by the General Post Office; and third, the Church of St. Mary-le-Bow, the London church of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the seat of his supreme ecclesiastical court, which has given its name to the Court of Arches, and was his “peculiar” property, exempt from the jurisdiction of the Ordinary, the Bishop of London.
In these three churches, some of the earliest extant documents of St. Paul’s reveal the existence of grammar schools, which were already old in the year 1138. These three schools, and they alone, constituted the whole of the public provision for education in London until the year 1441, when another grammar school was established in St. Antony’s Hospital. Some other schools were afterwards founded in connection with other churches before the Reformation. But while its earlier and its later pre-Reformation rivals have all disappeared, the earliest and greatest of all, the grammar school of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul’s, London, commonly called St. Paul’s School, with its unbroken pedigree of 800 years and upwards still ranks among the chief schools of the country, and holds as marked a position of pre-eminence in the greater London of 1900 as it did in the old narrow city of London in 1100.
The story of London schools should, then, be simplicity itself; the more so as it suffers from a lack of material. Yet it has been so obscured and complicated by successive writers that it has been converted into a tangled and twisted texture of guesses and fables, which we must endeavour to unravel.
It ought not to have been so. For, earlier probably than any other city in Europe, except York, London found its vates sacer, who for the admiration of his own and the information of later ages, sung the glories of its schools and scholars, their studies and their sports. Alcuin’s ninth-century poem38 in Latin hexameters “On the Archbishops and Saints of the Church of York,” giving a vivid account of St. Peter’s School there, of which he was himself master in the third quarter of the eighth century, is the earliest account we have of any English school. The picture, drawn in poetic Latin prose of the twelfth century by “the son of Stephen,” of London schools and scholars, as they were during the boyhood of Becket, is not less full or vivid. One almost suspects from the way in which quotations from Latin poets are lugged in “by the hairs” that Fitzstephen was himself at one time a schoolmaster, before he became Becket’s chancellor and ended as a judge. At all events, he took a keen interest in schools and schoolboys, and devoted a good third of his famous description of London to the games and sports of the London schoolboy.
“In London,”39 he says, “the three principal churches have famous schools privileged and of ancient pre-eminence, though sometimes through personal favour to some one noted as a philosopher more schools are allowed. On feast days the masters celebrate assemblies at the churches, arrayed in festive garb. The scholars hold disputations, some augmentatively, others by way of question and answer. These roll out enthymemes, those use the forms of perfect syllogisms. Some dispute merely for show, as they do at collections;40 others for the truth which is the grace of perfection. The sophists and pretenders are pronounced happy because of the mass and volume of their words; others play upon words. The rhetoricians with rhetorical speeches speak to the point with a view to persuasion, being careful to observe the precepts of their art, and to leave out nothing that belongs to it.
“The boys of the different schools hold contests in verse, or pose each other on the principles of grammar or the rules of preterites and supines. Others in epigrams, rhymes and metres use the old street eloquence, with Fescinnine licence scourging their schoolfellows, without mentioning names; hurling abusive epithets and scoffs at them: with Socratic salt girding at the failings of their fellows, or perhaps of their elders; and in bold dithyrambics biting them with the sharp tooth of Theon. The audience
ready to laugh
With crincled noses redouble their shrill guffaws.”
The beginning of this passage states as plainly as can be that there were schools attached to the three principal churches, that they were ancient even then, and privileged. By privileged is meant, not as Lord Lyttelton41 in his Henry II. interprets it, that “by particular privilege was taught not only grammar, but poetry, rhetorick and logick”; but, as the context shows, that these schools were the only schools allowed at all, though occasionally a special schoolmaster was allowed on sufferance and by personal favour. Stow, who was the first to quote this passage, went on42 to identify the three schools. The first, he supposed rightly, was St. Paul’s. But for the second he puts “S. Peter’s at Westminster,” and supports it by a quotation from Ingulphus’ Chronicle, now admitted on all hands to be a fifteenth-century forgery. The third, says Stow, “seemeth to have been in the monastery of St. Saviour at Bermondsey in Southwark. For other priories, as of St. John by Smithfield, St. Bartholomew in Smithfield, St. Mary Overies in Southwark, and that of the Holy Trinity in Aldgate, were all of later foundation.”
This is a curious conglomeration of errors: which has unfortunately been blindly adopted by subsequent writers. Even if there had been a grammar school at Westminster, it could not possibly be described in the twelfth century as being in London, since Fitzstephen himself speaks of Westminster as being two miles off. The placing of a London school at St. Saviour’s, Bermondsey, is even more open to the same objection of not being in London.
It is an interesting question from what MS. of Fitzstephen Stow derived his knowledge of this passage about schools. Out of four ancient MSS. now extant, only one, and that the latest, contains the passage. These MSS. are: (i.) MS. Lambeth 138 (wrongly referred to as 1168 in the Rolls edition of Fitzstephen). This is of the thirteenth century and has not the Description of London at all. (ii.) MS. Douce 289 at the Bodleian. This is also of the thirteenth century. It has the Description of London, but having lost its first leaf has only the last few words about schools, (iii.) MS. Cotton, Julius, A, xi., at the British Museum. This is of the early fourteenth century and has not got the Description at all. (iv.) Lansdowne MS. 398, late in the fifteenth century. This is the only MS. which has the Description of London and its schools in full, and it does not mention the churches which kept them. On the other hand, the Description of London, apart from the Life, is written at the beginning of the Liber Custumarum of the City of London, now in the Guildhall, a MS. of the first half of the fourteenth century. It contains the passage about the schools and after the word churches inserts “viz. the Bishop’s see, the church of St. Paul’s, the church of Holy Trinity and the church of St. Martin.” Mr. Riley, in his edition of the Liber Custumarum, thinks that Stow had this book before him. But the omission by Stow of the names of the three churches, and his bad guess as to what the churches were, seem to show conclusively that the Guildhall MS. was unknown to him, unless he garbled it for the sake of avoiding a difficulty.
As we have seen, Stow says that Trinity Priory was not founded till after the time of which Fitzstephen was writing. In this he was mistaken. The Priory purports in its chartulary43 to have been founded by “good Queen Mold,” the wife of Henry I., in 1108, and its most interesting endowment, the Portsoken, the land of the English Knights’ Gild outside Aldgate, in virtue of which the Prior of Christchurch, or Creechurch, as it was nicknamed, was ex officio an Alderman of the City of London, was given in 1125. There does not, however, seem to be any mention of a school in connection with the church before or after the foundation of the Priory either in its chartulary, or elsewhere.44
On the other hand, we have testimony contemporary with the time of which Fitzstephen was writing, and many subsequent references, extending up to the time of Henry VIII., which show conclusively that the three churches with schools were St. Paul’s, St. Martin’s-le-Grand, and St. Mary-le-Bow, and that they preserved their monopoly till the middle of the fifteenth century. There was therefore no room for any recognised school in, or connected with, Trinity Church. Three explanations appear to be possible. (i.) There was a school in Trinity Church while it was a secular church, belonging to the College Church of the Holy Cross, Waltham, which ceased on its being converted into a Priory. (ii.) There was an adulterine or unlicensed school there, put down by the very document which conveys the contemporary testimony as to what the legitimate and privileged schools were. But more probably (iii.) the words are an interpolation due to a gloss by some badly-informed commentator.
The curious thing is that in the very passage quoted, Stow cites, though inaccurately, a patent of Henry VI. by which, as we shall see, authority was given for the erection of certain schools, besides those at St. Paul’s, at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, and St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheap. It is rather strange that Stow did not know of the famous document at St. Paul’s, which tells us plainly what these three ancient and famous schools were. But then he had not the advantage we enjoy of Sir Henry Maxwell-Lyte’s admirable Calendar of the St. Paul’s Muniments.45 The one in question runs thus:
Henry, by the Grace of God, minister of the church of Winchester, to the Chapter of St. Paul’s and William, Archdeacon, and their officers, greeting.
I command you by your obedience that after three summonses, you launch the sentence of excommunication against those who, without a license from Henry, the Schoolmaster, presume to teach (anywhere) in the whole city of London; except those who teach the schools of St. Mary of the Arch and St. Martin’s the Great. Witness, Hilarius, at Winchester.
It is at first sight mysterious that Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester, should, even though he was King Stephen’s brother, thus interfere in the affairs of another diocese. The explanation is that he was in fact acting as Bishop of London at that time, holding the See during its vacancy in commendam, or in charge. This fact enables us to fix the date. It must lie between 1138, when, according to the chronicler, Ralph de Diceto,46 who was Dean of St. Paul’s, “the Pope with the King’s consent, committed the care of the church of London to Henry, Bishop of Winchester,” and 1140, when “the Empress (Matilda) was received by the Londoners for their lady, and she made Robert of the Seal, bishop of London.” Rival schoolmasters had no doubt taken advantage of the relaxation of discipline during the prolonged vacancy of the See, consequent on the Pope’s setting aside the election of the Abbot of St. Edmund’s Bury to it, to set up “adulterine” or unlicensed schools. When the See was placed under a strong guardian, the arm of the church was stretched out to defend the monopoly of its children.
But the injunction against rival schools was not, as has been represented by Dugdale,47 any special favour to Henry the schoolmaster of St. Paul’s. It was merely in accordance with the common law of the church. We find precisely the same kind of proceeding going on at Winchester itself48 at about the same time, and again as late as 1629; while copious instances of its use are to be found at Canterbury in the fourteenth, and at York and Beverley49 in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Master Henry had been appointed schoolmaster by Richard Belmeis, Bishop of London, and his appointment is still extant among the archives of St. Paul’s, not only in a chartulary copy but in the actual original itself. As it is probably the oldest instrument of its kind in England, it is given in full.