There was a great deal of opportunity to receive a good Christian education in the city, both formally, for the few, and in all sorts of informal ways in the parishes. The main provider was the monastery and this must have been one of the ways in which the monks influenced the local clergy and laity.

In the first place the priory had its grammar or almonry school, which educated both future monks and the sons of local gentry. By the fifteenth century this school probably recruited largely from the kin of monks. It dated to at least the mid-fourteenth century and educated boys, about thirty poor boys being maintained at the priory's expense. An unknown further number would have been paying pupils. The priory had trouble financing this from time to time. In the fourteenth century the master briefly doubled the job with being incumbent of Mercator's chantry in St Nicholas's church. In the fifteenth century the master was also chaplain of the infirmary and of the Magdalen hospital, and then briefly the priory tried to combine the teaching under the priests of Langley's chantry, only to revert to the arrangement of combining the infirmary and the Magdalen. The list of masters can be traced until the dissolution of the monastery. In the midst of a financial crisis in the fifteenth century the monks asked the prior to give the relatives of monks priority in offering places in this school, though admitting that the prior must sometimes listen to the pleas of magnates ‘whom we cannot offend’.