endorsed “of the schoolmaster, now the chancellor.” When he
dropped the title of schoolmaster, the chancellor ceased himself to
teach any school except the theological school, in which he continued
to lecture until the Reformation, but he always remained the
educational officer of the chapter. Thus at York in 1307 he was
bound to be a master in theology, i.e. D.D., and “to him belongs the
collation to grammar schools; but the school of York, he ought to
give to a regent in arts” (i.e. an M.A. who has not taken his degree
more than two years) “to hold for three years, and not longer,
except by grace for four years.” The grammar schools outside
York to which he was to appoint were probably those in York
diocese, outside special liberties, such as Beverley (itself a collegiate
church), but except for an appointment by the chapter, when the
chancellorship was vacant, to Doncaster grammar school in 1351
(A. F. Leach, Early Yorks. Schools, i. 22), we do not know what
they were. At Lincoln “no one can teach in the city of Lincoln
without his (the chancellor’s) licence and all the schools in Lincolnshire
he confers at his own pleasure” (Vict. County Hist.: Lincs. ii.).
In London the chancellor was called schoolmaster until 1205. The original writ is still extant (Mem. St Paul’s, A. ii. 25), in which, in 1138, Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester, acting as bishop of London, holding the see in commendam during a vacancy, enforced the exclusive privilege of Henry the Schoolmaster (scolarum magistro) of St Paul’s, ordering the dean and archdeacon “to excommunicate those who without a licence from schoolmaster Henry presume to teach in the city of London, except those teaching the schools of St Mary le Bow and St Martin’s le Grand.” St Martin’s le Grand was itself a collegiate church with a dean and chapter and the duty and right of keeping a grammar school, and St Mary le Bow was a “peculiar” of the archbishop of Canterbury and extra diocesan to on on.
Precisely similar provisions prevailed at the great collegiate churches like Beverley and Ripon in Yorkshire, and Southwell in Nottinghamshire (A. F. Leach, Mem. of Southwell Minster, xli. ii. 13, 205), all pre-Conquest churches and secondary cathedrals to the vast diocese of York. At the former, where we hear (Hist. Ch. of York, Rolls ser., i. 281) a curious tale about the schoolmaster (scolasticus), c. 1100, falling in love with a girl he saw in church, the schoolmaster also became chancellor. In 1304–1306 we find a series of reported cases in which he enforced by excommunication the monopoly of the grammar schoolmaster he appointed against unlicensed rivals teaching in the chapter liberty (A. F. Leach, Beverley Chap. Act Book, i. 42, 48, 55, 102, 108, 114). Similarly the collegiate churches in the castles of Pontefract and Hastings (Vict. County Hist.: Sussex, ii.) had their grammar schoolmasters about 1100. They were spread all over the kingdom.
The grammar school was a public school open to every one. It has been indeed repeatedly asserted that the cathedral schools were choristers’ schools and taught nothing but the psalter and a little elementary Latin grammar. The assertion is founded on a complete misunderstanding. It is a question whether there were any choristers in the 12th century or whether they are not a later introduction, the canons and their vicars choral or choir deputies at first doing the singing themselves. Choristers at Salisbury are not mentioned in the Institution of St Osmund, and they first appear in the 1220 edition of that document. At Lincoln we first find choristers mentioned in a statute of 1236, “To the Precentor belongs the instruction and discipline of the boys and their admission and ordering in choir.” At York the 1307 edition of the statutes says “the collection (i.e. appointment of masters) to song schools belongs to the singer,” now called preceptor, “and cases affecting them ought to be heard and decided by him, though execution belongs to the chapter” (Leach, Early Yorks. Schools, i. 12). At St Paul’s there was no preceptor till the 13th century and there is no mention of choristers till 1263, though school-boys (pueri scolarum) appear as witnessing a deed between 1142 and 1148 and receiving 4d. for cherries for doing so. It must be remembered also how very small the number of choristers was and how incapable of constituting a school. At St Paul’s they were only eight until the 15th century, at York only seven in the 14th. So far from the grammar school being a school solely or even chiefly for choristers, there are several cases in which contests arose whether they had any right of admission to the grammar school. Thus the 14th century register of the almoner or almsgiver of St Paul’s, who about 1180 was given a house for the poor, in which later the choristers were boarded, records that the grammar schoolmaster claimed five shillings a year for teaching them grammar. At Beverley in 1312 a contest between the grammar schoolmaster and the song schoolmaster took place as to whether the grammar schoolmaster was bound to admit all choristers free, or only the original number of seven. It was held after evidence as to old custom that all must be admitted free. But there could have been no doubt if the grammar school had been for their sole or chief benefit. A contest at Warwick between the grammar schoolmaster and the music schoolmaster, about 1215 (or 1315), owing to the latter intruding on the domain of the former, was settled by the chapter on the basis that the latter was to teach no grammar, but only “those learning their letters, the psalter, music and song” (A. F. Leach, Hist. Warwick School, 62-66). Everywhere from the 13th century onwards the song or choristers’ school was of the nature of an elementary school, like that attended by Chaucer’s “litel clergeon” in the Prioress’ Tale, in which the boy “sat in the scole at his prymer” but could not construe the Alma Redemptoris because “I lerne song, I can (i.e. know) but smal grammere.” Even in quite small places, as at Northallerton, Yorkshire, the distinction between the grammar school and the song school was at first strictly drawn, but tended to disappear in the dearth of M.A.s after the Black Death (Early Yorks. Schools, ii. 60-62). In the larger places the distinction was strictly maintained until the Reformation, when the song schools disappeared, except in the cathedrals and the few collegiate churches, including Winchester and Eton, which survived it, and at Newark and Coventry.
The cathedral and collegiate church grammar schools under the control of the secular clergy in the person of the chancellor of the church furnished the chief, and perhaps in the 12th century the sole, supply of schools. There is, however, some excuse for the notion that monasteries kept them, in the fact that in England, differing from the rest of the world, the cathedral churches had, in many of the chief places, notably Canterbury, Winchester and Worcester, during the monastic outburst connected with the names of Ethelwold bishop of, Winchester and Dunstan of Canterbury, been taken from the secular clergy, and monks placed in their room. In those places there was no chancellor. But so essentially was education regarded as the business, not of monks, but of the secular clergy, that even in these places the grammar schools were not placed under the monks but remained under the immediate care of the bishop, either personally or through his archdeacon, a secular. Thus we find at Winchester about 1154 Master Jordan Fantosme and John Joichel (Jekyll), “clerks of the bishop of Winchester,” carrying an appeal from the bishop about the right to teach the school at Winchester first to the Court of Arches and then to the pope, and as late as 1488 Bishop William Waynflete appointing a master to the grammar school “called in the vulgar tongue, the High School” (A. F. Leach, Hist. Win. Coll.). This school was in Symonds Street outside the monastic precinct. So at Canterbury the grammar schoolmaster appears among lay witnesses in 1259; his right to excommunicate anyone assaulting his scholars or carrying on a rival school was allowed on appeal to the Court of Arches, on production of a confirmation by the archbishop of the right as already ancient in 1292, and appointments by the archbishops of the master in 1306, 1311, 1375 and 1443 are preserved (The Times, Sept. 1897). Here also the school was outside the monastic precinct, by the parish church of St Alphege in the town (Guardian, 12 and 19 Jan. 1898). Similar evidence is forthcoming at Worcester, Norwich, Carlisle and elsewhere.
At the end of the 11th and beginning of the 12th century a renewed movement began for the further extrusion of the secular clergy, on the ground of their wicked lives, the wickedness being that they insisted on the liberty to marry, and for the conversion of collegiate churches into monasteries of the new orders, first of Cluniac monks, then of Augustinian, Black or regular canons, who eschewed matrimony. Thus Dunwich School passed under the rule of Eye Priory (Cluniacs) between 1076 and 1083; and Thetford School to Thetford Priory (Cluniacs) in 1094, though it was released again to the secular dean of Thetford in 1114. Similarly the government of Gloucester School was handed over to Llanthony Abbey (Augustinians) in 1137; Reading School was given to the newly-founded
