Note 181 — SCHOOL AND CLERKS

From a recent work, Educational Charters and Documents, by H. F. Leach, we learn that the clergy taught both themselves and others from the earliest times; for instance, in the seventh century, Aldhelm, writing to the Bishop about his studies, tells him how after long struggles he grasped at last, in a moment, by God's grace, "the most difficult of all things, what they call fractions." In the tenth century a canon of King Edgar enjoins that "every priest in addition to lore to diligently learn a handicraft," and later in the same century the Council enacted that "priests shall keep schools in the villages and teach small boys without charge," and also that they ought always to have schools for teachers, "Ludi magistrorum scholas" in their houses, thus they would prepare others to take up the work professionally which they were doing for nothing. Five hundred years later we find it ordered at Bridgenorth, in 1503, that "no priste keep no scole, after that a scole mastur comyth to town, but that every child to resorte to the comyn scole." But the plague broke out and swept away "scole masturs" and pupils alike, and in 1529 the Convocation of Canterbury once more bade all rectors, vicars, and charity priests to employ some part of their time in teaching boys the alphabet, reading, singing, or grammar; and appointed a Revision Committee of one archbishop, four bishops, four abbots, and four archdeacons to bring out a uniform Latin grammar for all schools. That grammar was taught in Latin in the tenth and eleventh centuries we know from the Colloquy of Œlfric, 1005, and from his preface to the first English-Latin grammar, in which teachers were told that "It is better to invoke God the Father giving him honour by lengthening the syllable (Pāter) rather than cutting it short (Păter); no, comparing pronunciation as is the Britons' way, for God ought not to be subject to the rules of grammar."

Ed.