Note 271 — Chapter III · THE UNIVERSITY AS A DEGREE-GIVING BODY

The school of glomery was nourishing in 1452 (Ely Register anno 1452); but a few years previously, when the statutes of King’s College were written, it was understood that grammar would be studied at Eton not at Cambridge. A century later (1549) the parliamentary commissioners introduced mathematics into the trivium where it replaced grammar. A school of grammar existed at the university side by side with the school of glomery [see the provision for the teaching of grammar at God’s House (below) and Peterhouse and Clare p. 153 of the last chapter]. As late as 1500 there was a magister grammaticae and a magister glomeriae, who, in ejus defectu, is represented by proctors (Stat. Cant.). “The Master of Grammar shall be browght by the Bedyll to the Place where the Master of Glomerye dwellyth, at iij of the Clocke, and the Master of Glomerye shall go before, and his eldest son nexte him.” A.D. 1591 (Stokys in G. Peacock). By Fuller’s time the master of glomery had ceased to exist. His work seems to have resembled the preparatory work of the Previous Examinations at the university to-day.

In the Curteys Register of Bury-St.-Edmund’s (in the time of Abbot Sampson xii c.) we have the students of dialectic distinguished from the students of grammar and the latter from other scholars—“dialecticos glomerellos seu discipulos,” and “glomerellos seu discipulos indistincte”; surely a clear reference to two branches of the trivium. The use of the word glomerel in O.E. law to signify an officer who adjusts disputes between scholars and townsmen, is obviously the result of a misinterpretation of Balsham’s rescript of 1276 “Inprimis volumus et ordinamus quod magister glomeriae Cant. qui pro tempore fuerit, audiat et dicedat universas glomerellorum ex parte rea existentium.... Ita quod sive sint scholares sive laici qui glomerellos velint convenire ... per viam judicialis indaginis, hoc faciat coram magistro glomeriae....” The form of the latter’s oath to the Archdeacon of Ely and the functions which fell to the master of glomery when the school became decadent, may also have led to the mistake (which was made by Spelman as regards the Cambridge glomerels). Cf. i. p. 14, iv. p. 207 n., and Fuller, Prickett-Wright Ed. pp. 52-4. The second of these editors, indeed, was the first to call attention (in 1840) to the irrefutable evidence in the Cole and Baker MSS. as to the meaning of master and school of glomery, and to light on the confirmation from the university of Orléans in the verses of the troubadour Rutebeuf. For glomery, see also Peacock, Appendix A, xxxii-xxxvi.

The foundation of God’s House in 1439 was due to Parson Byngham’s zealous desire to remedy “the default and lack of scolemaisters of gramer,” following on the Black Death. In a touching letter to the king (Henry VI.) Byngham points out “how greatly the clergy of your realm is like to be empeired and febled” by the default, and relates that “over the est parte of the wey ledyng from Hampton” to Coventry alone, “and no ferther north yan Rypon,” 70 schools were empty for lack of teachers. “For all liberall sciences used in your seid universitees certein lyflode is ordeyned, savyng only for gramer.”