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An English Grammar School ca. 1450: Latin Exercises from Exeter (Caius College MS 417/447, folios 16v–24v)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2016

Nicholas Orme
Nicholas Orme*
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Extract

Our knowledge of school education in medieval England has been immeasurably advanced during the last fifty years or so by the study of school textbooks. When the topic of medieval English schools was first identified in the 1890s, by A. F. Leach and others, it centered chiefly on their organization. Scholars collected references to their existence and continuity, together with the rather sparse records of their constitutions, masters, and pupils. Then, in the 1940s, the late R. W. Hunt drew attention to the manuscripts by which Latin and English were taught and studied in schools, a source that has since been explored by other writers. The study of manuscripts, it is now clear, enables us to understand much of what the schools taught, to gauge better the objectives and standards of school education, and to measure the similarities and differences between schools. Some of the surviving manuscripts cannot be attributed to particular schools, masters, or pupils, and therefore form a guide to education only in general. Others can be more exactly located. Dr. David Thomson, who has studied twenty-four fifteenth-century school manuscripts that contain material in Latin and English, is able to link at least half to particular schools, including Basingwerk Abbey (north Wales), Battlefield College (Shropshire), Beccles (Suffolk), Eton College (Bucks.), Exeter (Devon), St. Anthony's School (London), Magdalen College School (Oxford), St. Albans (Herts.), and Winchester College (Hants.). Other manuscripts can be attributed to Barlinch Priory (Somerset), Newgate School Bristol (Gloucs.), and Lincoln or its vicinity. This is a wide selection of places, geographically and institutionally. There are schools connected with monasteries (Barlinch and Basingstoke), fee-paying town grammar schools (Beccles, Exeter, and St. Albans), and the free grammar schools endowed during the later Middle Ages, such as Eton, St. Anthony's London, Magdalen College Oxford, and Winchester.

Type
Articles
Information
Traditio , Volume 50 , 1995 , pp. 261 - 294
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by Fordham University 

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References

1 This article has benefited much from the advice and help of the Revd. Dr. David Thomson and especially from that of Professor Vincent P. McCarren. Access to the manuscript and permission to reproduce it have been kindly granted by the master and fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.Google Scholar

2 Especially A. F. Leach, The Schools of Medieval England, 2nd ed. (London, 1916).Google Scholar

3 R. W. Hunt, The History of Grammar in the Middle Ages, ed. Bursill-Hall, G.L. (Amsterdam, 1980). See also, for example, Brother Bonaventure, “The Teaching of Latin in Later Mediaeval England,” Mediaeval Studies 23 (1961): 1–20; Nicholas Orme, English Schools in the Middle Ages (London, 1973), 87–115; David Thomson, A Descriptive Catalogue of Middle English Grammatical Texts (New York and London, 1979); idem, An Edition of the Middle English Grammatical Texts (New York and London, 1984); G. L. Bursill-Hall, A Census of Medieval Latin Grammatical Manuscripts (Stuttgart, 1981); Nicholas Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England (London, 1989), 73–151; De Ortu Grammaticae: Studies in Medieval Grammar and Linguistic Theory in Memory of Jan Pinborg, ed. Bursill-Hall, G. L. (Amsterdam, 1990); Tony Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth-Century England, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1991); and Cynthia Renée Bland, The Teaching of Grammar in Late Medieval England (East Lansing, Mich, 1991).Google Scholar

4 Thomson, , Descriptive Catalogue, passim.Google Scholar

5 Orme, , Education and Society, 73–121.Google Scholar

6 For descriptions and discussions, see Thomson, , Descriptive Catalogue, 141–47, 212–18 and 290–315.Google Scholar

7 Below, pp. 266, 268.Google Scholar

8 The Register of Edmund Lacy, Bishop of Exeter, 1420–1455: Registrum Commune, ed. Dunstan, G. R., 5 vols., Exeter, Devon & Cornwall Record Society, new series, 8, 10, 13, 16, 18 (1963–72), 4:211, 248.Google Scholar

9 Exeter, Devon Record Office (hereafter DRO), Chanter XII (i), fol. 143r.Google Scholar

10 A John Berdon, clerk, acolyte, was given letters dimissory to be ordained in any diocese on 15 September 1456, three days before William's ordination as subdeacon (DRO, Chanter XII (i), fol. 34r). This could be a mistake for William; if so, he went some distance away to be ordained, for there is no trace of his ordination in the two nearest dioceses of Salisbury and Wells.Google Scholar

11 A John Smyth was ordained subdeacon, deacon and priest in 1457, and another — alias Writer — deacon and priest in 1457, both of them to titles provided by St. Nicholas Priory, Exeter, implying a connection with the Exeter area (DRO, Chanter XII (i), fols. 144v–5v. Both men were probably close contemporaries of Berdon.Google Scholar

12 Rawlinson D 328, fols. 120r, 121r.Google Scholar

13 For John's career at Exeter Cathedral, see Orme, Nicholas, The Minor Clergy of Exeter Cathedral, 1300–1548 (Exeter, 1980), 7, 66, and for Carter's career, ibid., 2, 6, 97.Google Scholar

14 Ibid., 2, 6, 7, 66, 97.Google Scholar

15 Reg. Lacy, Exeter, ed. Dunstan, , 4:255; DRO, Chanter XII (ii), fols. 145v, 146v.Google Scholar

16 Reg. Lacy, Exeter, ed. Dunstan, , 4:156; Orme, Minor Clergy, 110; Exeter Freemen 1266–1967, ed. Rowe, Margery M. and Jackson, Andrew M., Exeter, Devon & Cornwall Record Society, extra series, 1 (1973), 57.Google Scholar

17 On what follows, see Orme, Nicholas, Education in the West of England, 1066–1548 (Exeter, 1976), 42–57. The list of schoolmasters (56–57) has since been revised in Orme, Minor Clergy, 8–10.Google Scholar

18 Orme, Nicholas, “The Medieval Clergy of Exeter Cathedral: II. The Secondaries and Choristers,” Reports and Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science and Literature 115 (1983): 79–85.Google Scholar

19 [John Hooker,] The Life and Times of Sir Peter Carew, Knight, ed. Maclean, J. (London, 1857), 3–5.Google Scholar

20 London, Public Record Office, KB 27/176 rot. 1d, Easter 32 Edward I. They were witnesses in the proof of age of Richard de Merton of Brenton in Exminster.Google Scholar

21 The Register of Edmund Stafford, 1395–1419, ed. Hingeston-Randolph, F.C. (London and Exeter, 1886), 414.Google Scholar

22 Below, p. 291.Google Scholar

23 For Boryngton's career, see Orme, , Minor Clergy, 9, 99, and idem, Education in the West of England, 6.Google Scholar

24 At Melcombe Regis (Dorset) on 25 May (Trowbridge, Wiltshire Record Office, Reg. Robert Nevill, ordination lists).Google Scholar

25 On Leland and this work, see Thomson, , Descriptive Catalogue, 4–12.Google Scholar

26 On these works, see ibid., 4–12, 40–54, and Thomson, An Edition of the Middle English Grammatical Texts, passim.Google Scholar

27 E.g., conferuari for conseruari (below, C6), totam for cotam (C14); urbibus for urbis (C79).Google Scholar

28 This was probably common practice in schools: another surviving set of notes organized under days of the week was made by a pupil at Barlinch Priory (Somerset), some decades later than the Bodleian collection (Orme, Education and Society, 118–20).Google Scholar

29 Ibid., 73–151.Google Scholar

30 I am grateful to Vincent McCarren for pointing this out.Google Scholar

31 Orme, , English Schools in the Middle Ages, 180–81.Google Scholar

32 Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D 328, fol. 122v.Google Scholar

33 These fifteenth-century references to scholars as holy-water clerks are unusually late; most of the evidence relates to earlier centuries.Google Scholar

34 Rawlinson D 328, fol. 181r.Google Scholar

35 Orme, Nicholas, Exeter Cathedral As It Was, 1050–1550 (Exeter, 1986), 78.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., 78–80.Google Scholar

37 Rawlinson D 328, fol. 120r.Google Scholar

38 Orme, , Exeter Cathedral as it Was, 50.Google Scholar

39 In 1530, the cathedral chapter ordered the choristers to absent themselves from the choir during an outbreak of “pestilential plague” (Exeter Cathedral Archives, D&C 3551, fols. 63–64.Google Scholar

40 Rawlinson D 328, fol. 122v.Google Scholar