Note 104 — Chapter XXXI

— Maybe Christopher Wright, from his earliest school-days, had with reverence looked up to Edward Oldcorne, for the latter was the senior of the former by no less than ten years, so that when Oldcorne was a clever youth of fifteen years Christopher would be a little fellow of five, “with his satchel and shining morning-face,” though we may be permitted to hope that little Kit Wright did not “creep like snail unwillingly to school.” For it was at a school second to none in England that the future ill-fated Yorkshireman learned to con his “hic, hæc, hoc.” It was a school originally founded by Egbert, Archbishop of York, in the eighth century, and which, as the Cathedral Grammar School, had been rendered famous by Alcuin himself, the tutor of Charlemagne. It was a school re-founded and re-endowed in the Horse Fayre, now Union Terrace, on the left-hand side going down Gillygate, outside Bootham Bar, by King Philip and Queen Mary, especially for the training of priests for the northern parts. — See in Leach’s “Endowed Schools of Yorkshire” for an account concerning St. Peter’s School, Clifton, York, but no register of scholars of this ancient seat of learning now exists prior to the year 1828. (Title deeds and writings lent by Mrs. Martha Lancaster, of York, have enabled me to identify the site of the old school.)

It is, I take it, furthermore possible that Edward Oldcorne may have taught Christopher Wright; and if the relation of pedagogue and scholar ever subsisted between them, a bond of mutual regard would be created which the lapse of long years would not weaken. For an account of the kind of education given in a Grammar School in “the spacious days of Good Queen Bess,” see Dr. Elzé’s “Life of Shakespeare” (Bell & Sons), also H. W. Mabie’s very recent and able American “Life of Shakespeare” (Macmillan).