Page:The History of CRGS.djvu/13

 situated would provide a fitting landmark for the 1353 will; would be suitably placed for the dumping of refuse over the wall near "le posterne," and moreover would lie within the Bishop's soke, and alongside his church—that is, precisely where on general grounds we should expect to find it. In the Middle Ages not only were the schools normally under the control of the clergy, but often were lodged within the fabric of the church itself, as, for instance, in a chamber above the porch ; and although for the scolae ejusdem ville of 1206 and the "great school" of 1353 a larger and more conspicuous building is required it may, nevertheless, have been attached to the church, as a western extension to the nave. Today the church tower, the lower stages of which are late fifteenth—century work, occupies this position, which is indeed the normal position for a western tower, but the body of the present church, which was rebuilt in 1714 and again in 1872, stands on a more northerly site than before, so that the relation of tower to church has been altered: formerly the tower was not on the central axis of the church, but at its north-west corner (Morant, ii, 4). Now such a position was most unusual, a central situation, according to the high authority of Dr. J. C. Cox, being almost invariable in the later Middle Ages- unless the tower "occupied some other position, generally due to exigencies of the site or to some defect of the ground." As there is here no such defect the anomalous position of the medieval tower must presumably be attributed to "exigencies of the site," or in other words to the presence of some other building at the west end of the nave when in the fifteenth century it was decided to add a western bell-tower. The fact that this was not added to the end of our suggested extension to the nave implies that it was a secular building rather than a part of the church, and the only secular building likely to occupy such a position will be a school, for there is no reason whatever to suppose that at any date dwelling houses have clustered about this rather isolated church. In 1086 Domesday Book gives only 14 houses in the whole of the four acres of the soke, and even two centuries later, as appears from tax assessments of Edward I's reign, the population of the town had increased by little more than 40 per cent (Morant, i, 47). Overcrowding, then, cannot have been the reason for erecting a building near the church.

Thus, in 1464, when the curtain falls for the last time on the medieval school, we see it as a satellite to the Church of St. Mary-at-the-Walls at the western extremity of the town. When next it rises, a century later, the scene has shifted to the parish of All Saints in the eastern half of the town, to a house in Culver Street, where the Royal School has now been established. But before turning to this new chapter in the School's history it will be convenient to recite here for the sake of completeness two further items from the borough records. What we have already considered has concerned the school building; the remaining references are to a schoolmaster. They tell us little or nothing about the Rh