LYNDWOOD'S ASSERTION OF CHURCH CONTROL. 59

so clearly placed before the common lawyers of England by this remarkable decision that no other case on the subject appears in the Year Books. Doubtless when more material analogous to that relating to Beverley Minster published by Mr A. F. Leach is given to the world we shall find other cases before the ecclesiastical courts. But it would be scarcely necessary to search further in common law reports-even if there were any probability of finding cases—since the principle of the right to teach at common law was finally concluded by the Gloucester Grammar School case.

While it is satisfactory to feel that the common law was strong enough in superstitious days to assert the elementary rights of the subjects in so hazardous a matter as education, yet it would be unhistorical to attribute great practical importance to a fact which has, fortunately or unfortunately, been sufficiently obscure to exclude it, except as a matter of casual and inaccurate reference, from the painful educational controversies of the last half-century. It will be sufficient if we keep the fact in mind during the subsequent development of events; and it may be remarked now that three centuries. were destined to pass away before the case we have just examined was recalled for the purposes of equity by a later generation of judges. In those three centuries the Church amid its marvellous vicissitudes never relaxed its hold on the teaching of youth and treated as dead or non-existent the sleeping though living doctrine of the common law. We have seen how thorough were Archbishop Arundel's Constitutions of 1408; we have seen with what determination he crushed or attempted to crush unlicensed teaching throughout the country; we have seen how explicit was Lyndwood, writing in the third decade of the 15th century in his remarks on the necessity of Catholicity in schoolmasters. "Contrarium autem facientes puniantur" is an unmistakeable and almost a regal phrase. That is the last expression of the medieval mind on the subject of education. Amid the clash of internecine arms

60

SUPPRESSION OF THE ALIEN PRIORIES, 1415.

The close of the Middle

Ages.

accompanied by the boom of clumsy cannon and by an underrumble of the new and wonderful printing-press the Middle Ages in England died. They have been painted as ignorant, brutal and picturesque. We may have our doubts as to the truth of the picture; we may well believe that the eighteenth century in the mass was more brutal, more picturesque, and less religious, and we may even believe that it was far more ignorant and far less moral. The Middle Ages left to the age of the Reformation educational possibilities that were recklessly squandered, though it is only just to the Tudor period to suggest that the clerical movement against the Lollards and the struggle for educational supremacy had already more than a century before the Reformation struck a heavy blow at general education in England'.

1 It would seem that the final suppression of the alien priories by Henry V. in 1415 (Rot. Parl. vol. iv. p. 22), involved the destruction of a considerable number of schools (see Strype's Stow, Bk. 1. p. 124). The number of houses suppressed has been variously estimated. Tanner in his Notitia Monastica (1744) puts the number at 96, while in an Account of the Alien Priories (1786) the total reaches 146. The latter book (vol. I. p. xi*) states that "Henry VI. endowed his foundations at Eton and Cambridge with the lands of the alien priories, in pursuance of his father's design to appropriate them all to a noble college at Oxford," and gives a list of the lands conveyed; but some of the lands were appropriated to private uses.

CHAPTER III.

EDUCATION AND THE STATE IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES.

The

The destruction of

foundations for Education.

15. IN the preceding chapter reference was made to a passage in the Monasticon as to the Gloucester Grammar School-the school that gave rise to the important law case that has been fully Medieval dealt with above1. In this passage occurs the phrase: "In 1535, this house lay void." words are pregnant with meaning. Many Houses lay void from that date. Henry VIII. in his haste to root up the tares, destroyed more wheat than he or his children were ever able to sow again. Many educational wheatfields became pasture land. The revived grammar schools, noble institutions as they were, could not and did not continue in its entirety that educational system which the Church had fostered with so much success, and to which the fourth Council of Lateran (1215) had given a world-wide significance in the command that there should be a schoolmaster in every cathedral, and that he should be licensed by the Bishop2.

1 See pp. 53 et seq.

2 Decreta, Tit. XI. See Sacrosancta Concilia, vol. xI. col. 164 (Paris; 1671). See also decrees of the third Council of Lateran, c. 18 (1179 a.d.) loc. cit. vol. x. col. 1518; and of the Council of Vienne (1311 A.D.)— Corpus Juris Canonici: Pars Secunda col. 1179 (Leipsic; 1881). In some cases municipal corporations ousted the ecclesiastical control. An instance of this may be given. On March 18, 1503, an order was made at the Great Court at Bridgnorth by the 24 burgesses "that there schall

62

HENRY VIII. AND THE UNIVERSITIES.

It is not part of the purpose of this book to trace the destruction of medieval grammar schools at the Reformation, though it is necessary to draw attention to the fact and to emphasise once again in doing so the injustice that the efforts of the Middle Ages have suffered in the matter of education at the hands of the Reformation, and therefore at the hands of the historians. But we must notice in passing that it is possibly not just to attribute to Henry VIII. any wilful hatred of Church-administered education. Those who desire to appreciate all sides of King Henry's attitude towards education may be referred to a remarkable passage in "a description of England," written in 1586 by William Harrison and included in Holinshed's Chronicles. Harrison is writing of those who desire to obtain educational endowments: "When such a motion was made by some unto king Henrie the eight, he could answer them in this maner; 'Ah, sirha! I perceive the abbeie lands have fleshed you and set your teeth on edge, to aske also those colleges. And whereas we had a regard onelie to pull downe sinne by defacing the monasteries, you have a desire also to overthrow all goodness by subversion of colleges. I tell you sirs that I judge no land in England better bestowed than that which is given to our universities, for by their maintenance our realme shall be well governed when we be dead and rotten. As you love your welfares therefore, follow no more this veine, but content your selves with that you have alreadie, or else seeke honest meanes whereby to increase your livelods, for I love not learning so ill, that I will impaire

no priste kepe no scole save oonly oon child to helpe hym to sey masse after that a scole mastur comyth to town, but that every child to resorte to the comyn scole in payne of forfetyng to the chaumber of the towne 20s. of every priste that doth the contrary.' This claim of control over education and over the priesthood is remarkable. It was, moreover, effective, for we find that on July 20, 1629, the corporation dismissed the headmaster and usher of the school (Historical Manuscripts Commission, 10th report, app. part iv. pp. 425-6, 428; Mrs A. S. Green's Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, vol. II. p. 18).

THE CHANTRY COMMISSIONERS.

63

the revenues of anie one house by a penie, whereby it may be upholden.'" We must, however, remember that this was written in the days of Queen Elizabeth, who loved her father's memory, and we must not forget that the Gloucester Grammar School "lay void in 1535," and that hundreds of other Houses and educational charities ceased to have any significance in the education of the people.

Edward VI. and the Grammar Schools.

Doubtless Edward VI. desired to revive and strengthen the Grammar School system, and the preamble to statute 1 Edw. VI. cap. 14 (1547)—“An Acte whereby certaine Chauntries, Colleges, Free Chapels, and the Possessions of the same, be given to the King's Majesty "-proposed the "alteration, chaunge and amendement of the same and converting to good and godlie uses, as in erecting Grammar Scoles to the education of Youthe in virte we and godlinesse, the further augmenting of the Universities and better provision for the poore and nedye." But the money derived from the sale of the Chantry lands was applied to far other purposes, and the most that was done was the preservation of occasional schools. The Commissioners appointed to enter into the Chantry lands were, by section eight of the Act, empowered to assign lands in any place where the dissolved corporation "shoulde or ought to have kepte" a grammar school or a preacher "to remayne and contynue in succession to a Scoole Maister or preacher for ever, for and towarde the kepinge of a Gramer Scoole or preaching." Under this section a considerable number of old schools were continued and constituted the New Grammar Schools. But the greater part of the settled lands were sold, and "educational endowments had to be left for later reigns, and largely to private munificence, the unique opportunity which the dissolution of the chantries presented for advancing the cause of education was practically lost1."

1 The Yorkshire Chantry Surveys, vol. 1. preface by Mr William Page, p. xvi. Published by the Surtees Society, 1892.