Note 26 — Chapter I

Bentham’s History of Ely Cathedral, 2nd Edition, 182. Hull Grammar School Gazette, 1891, No. 8, p. 88. See Riley’s Liber Albus, xix. There was a grammar master at Ewelme Almshouse 1461 (ibid. 627), where teaching was to be free (ibid. ix. 217-8). Four new grammar schools were opened in London in 1447, and during the reign of Henry the Sixth nine were set up in London alone (Pauli’s Pictures, 452). In 1472 Prior Selling, of Christchurch, reports to the Archbishop of Canterbury that he has provided a “schoolmaster for your grammar schools in Canterbury, the which hath lately taught grammar at Winchester and at S. Antony’s in London” (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 105). John Syre, the grammar school master in 1436, lived in Gayhow’s tenement, S. Alphege parish (ibid. 139). The Almshouse of the poor sisters in Reading was in 1486 turned into a grammar school (Coates’ Reading, 15); there was a school in Appleby taught by a chantry priest before the middle of the fifteenth century (Transactions of Cumberland and Westmoreland Arch. Soc. part ii. vol. viii.); and one in Preston whose master was made a burgess in 1415 (Memorials of Preston Guilds, 14). In Liverpool there was an endowed free school before the reformation (Picton’s Memorials, ii. 55-6). Miss Dormer Harris has learned from the town records that the expenses of the grammar school at Coventry in the fifteenth century, were paid by the Trinity Guild—in other words, by the Corporation. It is evident that when William Bingham, who founded a grammar school attached to Clare Hall, Cambridge, says that in 1439 he passed seventy deserted schools in travelling from Hampton to Ripon by way of Coventry (Boase’s Oxford, 108), we cannot infer from this any decay in education. It may have indicated a shifting of population, or more probably perhaps the results of the effort made in 1391 to prevent villeins from being put to the clerical schools in preparation for taking minor orders and so gaining emancipation from their lords. Rot. Parl. iii. 294.