CHAPTER IX.

GOVERNMENT OF SOUTHWARK AND EDUCATION.

HE Borough of Southwark was independent of the City and governed by its own Bailiff till the year 1327, when the City of London, finding great inconvenience from the escape of the malefactors thither, out of the reach and cognizance of the City Magistrates, obtained a grant, by which the Mayor of London was constituted Bailiff of Southwark, and empowered to govern it by his deputy. However the inhabitants, some time after, recovered their former privileges which they enjoyed till King Edward VI. sold Southwark to the City of London for the sum of £642 2s. 1d., so that we know our value to a penny in this year 1550, and about a month after the passing of this patent, Southwark was made one of the City wards, named Bridge Ward Without, in consideration of the City's paying to the Crown an additional sum of 500 marks; upon which the number of Aldermen was increased from twenty-five to twenty-six, a new one being chosen to govern that borough. It was in May, 1550, that Sir John Ayolphe, Knight, Citizen and Barber-Surgeon, was chosen to be Alderman of Bridge Ward Without, he was to have the rule, survey and government of the inhabitants, and he was sworn and admitted to the office. But the young King died, and the sturdy Protestants of Southwark were not likely to have protection from Queen Mary, so without ceremony the Act was repealed, and Southwark was deprived of its Alderman and Common

Councillors, and ignominiously handed over to the Senior Alderman for the time being. For eight years only then in its history has Southwark had an Alderman of its own. By royal Charter, Southwark is an integral part of the City; this Charter has been unconstitutionally set aside by a simple vote of the Court of Common Council, and for more than 300 years Southwark has been deprived of its rights.

We will now turn to the subject of Education as connected with our Borough. It has been too much the custom to ignore the learning, the culture, the religion and the education of the middle ages, and to refer everything to the time of the Reformation. But schools there were, and people were taught and learned men trained, and intellectual work done before the sixteenth century.

The earliest description we have of London is that by Fitz-Stephen, the pupil and biographer of Thomas à Becket, and in it he says, "In the reigns of the King Stephen and Henry II., there were in London three principal churches which had famous schools, either by privilege and ancient dignity, or by favour of some particular persons, as of doctors which were accounted notable and renowned for knowledge of philosophy. Upon festival days the masters made solemn meetings in the churches where their scholars disputed logically and demonstratively; some disputed for show, others to find out the truth, rhetoricians spake aptly to persuade, observing the precepts of art, and omitting nothing that might serve their purposes; the boys of divers schools did cap or pot verses, and contended for the principles of grammar; there were some which on the other side with epigrams and rhymes, nipping and quipping their fellowes and the faults of others, though suppressing their names, moved thereby much laughter among their

auditors." Stowe says, after quoting the above, "The three principal churches which had these famous schools by privilege must needs be the cathedral church of St. Paul for one, the second, the monastery of St. Peter, at Westminster," and after some description of these two, he goes on to say the third school seemeth to have been in the monastery of St. Saviour's, at Bermondsey, in Southwark, for other priories (and he enumerates several, and amongst them St. Mary Overie, in Southwark), which had their schools, were of later foundation."

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Perhaps nothing shows so completely how greed, and not a true desire for the reformation of abuses, was Henry's object in dissolving the monasteries, as the fact that with the monasteries he swept away the monastic schools and their endowments; and for this even his most determined apologists can find no possible excuse, for Henry was a learned man himself, and a patron of learning.

But the people of Southwark had no intention that their children should be deprived of their educational, any more than of their religious, privileges, and so with the noble spirit of generous independence that they possessed, they set to work and founded for themselves schools which were to train their children in all the new learning of the day.

All honour then to the men of Southwark of that day, to Thomas Cure, and John Bingham, and William Bowker, and Christopher Campbell, who raised again St. Saviour's School, once the third School in the metropolis, and placing it under the shadow of the old priory church, made it heir to the double memories of the two ancient foundations. The "solution of continuity" was for so short a time that the present boys of St. Saviour's, may well vote themselves lawful descendants of these whose merry pranks

doubtless amused, and who shared the kindly encouragement of the many noble ladies who took refuge in the Monastery at Bermondsey, while at the same time they can imagine the other division of their predecessors, the boys of St. Marie Overie, racing backwards and forwards to school, along Bankside, playing perhaps at times in the Bishop's Park, and possibly giving to the great William of Wykham, himself the founder of public school education in England, the first idea of his noble twin foundations of Winchester School and New College, Oxford.

It seems probable, if not certain that the determination of the inhabitants of St. Saviour's to restore their ancient schools, dates before the time of Elizabeth, though their actual charter was not obtained till her reign, for we are told that "the parishioners of St. Saviour's set a noble example to their neighbours in the establishment of their admirable free grammar school, and the inhabitants of St. Olave's were not slow to follow so enlightened an example." As St. Olave's dates its foundation, I believe from 1560, St. Saviour's must necessarily have been earlier.

Thomas Cure, the Queen's saddler, seems to have been the prime mover in the good work, and he, with William Bowker, Christopher Campbell, and other inhabitants of St. Saviour's, addressed the Queen, and asked for a charter which was granted in the following terms, that they, the aforesaid worthies "had, at their own great costs and pains, devised, erected and set up a grammar school, wherein the children of the poor as well as the rich inhabitants were freely brought up; that they had applied for a charter to establish a succession;" she therefore wills, "that it shall be one grammar school for education of the parishioners and inhabitants of St. Saviour's, to be called 'a Free Grammar School of the Parishioners of St. Saviour in

Southwark,' to have one master and one under master; six of the more discreet and sad inhabitants to be governors, by the name of Governors of the Possessions and Revenues and Goods of the Free Grammar School of the Parishioners of the Parish of St. Saviour's, Southwark, in the County of Surrey, incorporated." And these by perpetual succession fill up vacancies in their numbers with the advice of twelve of the most discreet and godliest inhabitants of the Borough," selected by themselves; these again have power, "with the advice of the Bishop of Winchester, or, he absent, of any good learned man, to appoint a school-master and usher, from time to time, and also to purchase land.”

All that the parishioners obtained by this patent of Queen Elizabeth was the being made a corporate body in succession; the Queen gave them nothing to endow their school out of the funds which her father and her brother had both received from the Borough. In 1674, Mrs. Newcomen, whose name yet lives in the school still called after her, gave £5 a-year to increase the salary of the under master. In 1676 the school was burnt by the great fire which demolished so much that was old in the Borough, but it was very soon rebuilt.

In 1776 Dr. William Heberden, physician to George III., and who was for some time educated in this school, gave a donation of £500, three per cents., to increase the head master's salary. There were other benefactors at various times, so that the school has four exhibitions, three of £50, and one of £25 a-year to Oxford and Cambridge. The principal founder of these was John Bingham, also a saddler to Queen Elizabeth. He and Cure have both monuments in St. Saviour's Church, but their best memorial is the school they founded and endowed, and the succession of boys who have benefitted by their generosity.