of sons of judges and masters in chancery and country gentlemen, like the Pophams of Dorset and the ffaringtons of Lancashire, if the gentle classes were not already in the habit of going to school. At Eton the number of noblemen and gentlemen commoners was doubled. The first or second headmaster and third provost of Eton, William Westbury, a Winchester and New College scholar, was almost certainly the son of the chief justice of that name. In 1464 Mr Thomas Bourchier, son of the earl of Essex and of Eu, nephew of the archbishop of Canterbury, was a commoner outside college at Winchester, and in 1479 the son of William Paston, the judge and Norfolk landowner, was writing verses at Eton in his letters home. In 1502 Sir John Percyvale founded Macclesfield grammar school expressly for “gentlemen’s and other good men’s sons thereabout.”
Tuition fees were normally paid in grammar schools. In 1277 the fee paid to the “master of glomery” at Oxford for five Merton founder’s-kin boys was 20d., or 4d. a head a term; in 1306 the “scolagium” of eight boys in the winter term was 3s., of seven boys in the Lent term 2s. 11d. and in the summer term 2s. 4d., a variation from 4d. to 412d. and 5d. a term, probably owing to variation in the length of the term, and representing 12d. a week. In that year the dica of the usher was 12d. a term, and in 1310 the usher was paid 4d. for three terms for eight boys, or 12d. a term. The usher must have been paid something by the master, as even in that age, when the majority of livings were under £3 a year, a halfpenny could hardly have been a living wage for eight weeks. Perhaps the usher got a share of the levy of 2d. a head for offerings to the light of St Nicholas, the school boys’ patron saint. For at Worcester in 1291 the bishop was called in to settle a quarrel between the schoolmaster and the rector of St Nicholas church as to the right to the wax which guttered from St Nicholas’ light, which the boys maintained. An undated Oxford statute of the 15th century fixes the upward limit of grammar school fees at 8d. a term (Reg. Giffard, f. 341). The tariff settled by the bishop of Norwich, for Ipswich grammar school in 1476–1477 was 10d. for grammarians, 8d. for psalterians, or those learning to read the psalter in Latin, and 6d. for primerians, or those learning the primer or accidence (Vict. Co. Hist., Suffolk, ii.). But the corporation rebelled against the fee of 10d. for grammarians, and in 1482 cut it down to 8d. a term. This was certainly the normal fee. In the return of chantries at their dissolution in 1548, the school at Newland is reported (Leach, English Schools at the Reformation, 78) to have been founded in 1446, to be “half-free, that is to say, taking of scholars learning grammar 8d. the quarter, and of others learning to read 4d. a quarter.”
At successive epochs there have been attempts to make education free (Journ. of Educ., June and July 1908). Hitherto after every attempt fees have crept back under some guise or other, as the endowments provided to ensure freedom were often inadequate to start with, and anyhow became inadequate by change in the value of money, while the inveterate habit of the rich in giving “tips” to secure special attention forced contributions on others. The movement began under the Roman Empire, Pliny founding a practically free school at Como, while successive emperors from Vespasian onwards extended the area and pay of public schools at the state expense, both of rhetoric and grammar. There can be little doubt that the cathedral schools were intended to be free just as much as the church services. Yet it had become necessary by the Lateran Council in 1179 for the canon law definitely to provide that, “to prevent the poor who could not be helped by their parents’ means from being deprived of the opportunity of learning and advancement,” every cathedral church should provide a competent benefice for a master to teach the clerks of the church and poor scholars gratis: and that in other churches if any endowment had been assigned for the purpose it should be restored, while no fees were to be exacted for licences to teach. At the next Lateran council in 1215 this canon was recited and its non-observance in many places lamented. The canon was confirmed and extended from cathedrals to all churches of sufficient means, while the cathedrals were also directed to provide a theological lecturer. That the first canon was not everywhere a dead letter is proved by the grant about 1180 of Archbishop Roger to the chapter of York of £5 a year “to the fee of your school,” charged on the synodals of three archdeaconries, confirmed by Archbishop Geoffrey (1191–1212), and arrears demanded in a violent letter by the chancellor to Archbishop Giffard in 1271 (A. F. Leach, Early Yorkshire Schools, c. 12-16). So at Bury St Edmunds in 1180 Abbot Sampson, who had himself when a boy and a secular clerk been admitted to the grammar school free as a special personal favour, first made the grammar school free of fees for “school-hire” by giving it a school house outside the abbey in the town, and a few years later endowed it with half of a living worth £5 a year, for which the master was to teach 40 boys free, relations of the monks being preferred. There were also many exhibition endowments, which made schools free or partially free for poor boys, such as the provision at St Cross Hospital, Winchester, founded in 1130, of free meals daily for twelve boys from the High School, Winchester; and an endowment given to the Durham Abbey almoner about 1180 for board and lodging of three boys from Durham grammar school, while at St Nicholas’ Hospital, Pontefract, the custom was ancient in 1267 to provide 40 loaves a week “except in vacations” for the scholars of Pontefract school, which is mentioned about 1100 as granted to the collegiate church in the castle there. It is significant that while the inquisition which established this custom was taken in French in 1267 it was confirmed in a mixture of Latin and English in 1464. In connexion with Stapledon Hall, now Exeter College, Oxford, Bishop Stapledon about 1327 provided for twelve scholars of Exeter Cathedral grammar school being boarded and clothed gratis in St John’s Hospital by one of the gates of the city. In 1441 St Anthony’s school was established in St Anthony’s Hospital, London. Later, as in the famous case of Banbury Hospital, under Stanbridge in 1501, hospitals were bodily converted into schools, a precedent frequently followed since. Henry VI., in 1441, under the guidance of Chicheley and Wayneflete, copied Winchester down to the minutest particulars, and the wording of its statutes, but with the important difference that its school was declared, what Winchester was not, a free grammar school open to all from all parts of England. Another class of school, which if not free at first generally became so, was that of the grammar schools established by joint stock effort of the numerous gilds, or trades unions, which studded the towns. As the London City gilds still keep chaplains, so nearly every gild maintained one or more priests to perform the gild masses, say grace at the gild feasts, and bury the gild brethren and sisters and pray for their souls. Some of the larger ones converted parish churches, as at Boston, into little less than cathedrals in size and splendour, with a staff of priests and singing clerks as large as that of the greatest collegiate churches. Some of these priests or clerks kept schools of grammar and of song. There are unfortunately no accounts of such gilds preserved earlier than the 15th or 16th centuries. But there can be no doubt that they kept schools much earlier than that. The grammar schools at Louth and Boston, which appear, the former in the 15th century and the latter in the 14th, in gild documents, occur in other documents in 1276 and 1329 respectively. The school of the gild of Wisbech in Cambridgeshire is similarly mentioned in 1446. At Stratford-on-Avon the school appears in the earliest extant gild accounts, in 1402, but existed more than a century earlier, when, in 1295, its master or “rector” was ordained a subdeacon side by side with the rector of the parish church, William Grenfield, a future archbishop of York. It was converted into a free school by endowments given by one of the gild priests in 1482, and has continued without intermission to the present day (Vict. Co. Hist., Warwick, ii. 329).
Probably the most numerous schools were those kept by chantry priests, endowed by single benefactors to pray for their souls, who sometimes by express terms of the foundation, more often perhaps to occupy their time or eke out not too substantial endowments, kept schools. These were sometimes free, more often at first not. But we know scarcely anything of these schools before the 14th century, the foundation deeds of those isolated institutions not having been preserved like those of colleges. We find, however, Oswestry endowed as a free school by David Holbeach, a lawyer, about 1406; Middleton, Lancashire, by Bishop Langley of Durham, in 1412; Durham itself by the same in 1414; Sevenoaks by William Sennock (Sevenock), a London grocer, the schoolmaster of which was “by no means to be in holy orders,” in 1432; Newport, Shropshire, by Thomas Draper,
