gentleman who had such a craving for forbidden fruit combined with legality (as Matthew Arnold said), to wit Henry VIII., cast a roving, calculating eye over the college and its appurtenances. Quick changes in the ménage, combined with provision of numerous successive trousseaux, had somewhat depleted the Royal marital coffers. Here, then, ready to hand, was a splendid opportunity for recouping expenditure, and Royal Bluebeard was not the man to let the grass grow under his feet before putting his hand to the business. Forthwith, Royal Commissioners were at Eton, drawing up an inventory of revenues to be confiscated; but before the spoliation could be consummated, the King of Terrors sternly raised his beckoning hand, and bowing to his summons, Henry passed out.

Since then, Eton has pursued the even tenour of her way, ever increasing in wealth and influence, its alumni the offspring of the "poor" in receipt of not much more than £1,000 a year; until now, in this twentieth century, it is doubtless one of the richest charitable patrician establishments in Europe.

By the Charter of Foundation, October 11th, 1440, Eton was constituted:

"A college... in and of the number of a Provost and 10 priests, 14 clerks, 6 chorister boys, these daily to serve at divine worship, and 25 poor and needy scholars to learn grammar there, and further of 25 poor and disabled men to pray for the souls of Henry V., Queen Katherine, and all his forefathers, and all the faithful departed, also of a master or teacher (informator) in grammar to teach the said needy scholars and all others whatsoever from any part of our realm of England coming to the said college freely (gratis) without exaction of money or anything else.

Incorporated under the title of the " Provost and King's College of the Blessed Mary of Eton by Windsor " it was granted the parish church of Eton, with power to transmute that church into a collegiate church, and with licence in mortmain to hold other property up to 1,000

marks, or £666 13s. 4d. yearly. (Approximately to-day, £8,700.)

Thereby, apparently, Henry VI. converted a parish church, with an endowment for a single priest, into a collegiate church, to be the abode of several priests, with the canonical free grammar school and almshouses attached. It seems that throughout England were many such colleges, some considerably antedating 1066.

On March 5th, 1441, "the Kynge's College of oure Ladye of Eton besyde Wyndesore" was endowed by letters patent bestowing on it a great mass of property which had belonged to alien priories, and a large part of which consisted of annual pensions payable from English cells to their parent or principal houses on the Continent. There were also large benefactions consisting of tithes, churches, and manors which had belonged to the alien priories, going as far west from Eton as the manors of Brimpsfield alien priory, on the Cotswolds, near Gloucester.

It would appear that the final suppression of the alien priories by Henry V. in 1415* involved the destruction of a considerable number of schools.† Tanner's Notitia Monastica (1744) estimates the number of houses suppressed at ninety-six, but in Some Account of the Alien Priories (London, 1786) the total leaps up to 146. This latter history informs us 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." Some of the lands conveyed, however (of which a list is given in this Account of the Alien Priories), were appropriated by contemporary land-grabbers.

Immediately accruing to Eton were £513 2s. Id. (about £6,670 monetary value of 1913), in addition to four whole priories, two manors and some odd lands given in immediate possession and probably worth between them

Rot. Parl., vol. iv., p. 22.

↑ Vide Strype's Stow, bk. i., p. 124.

another £100 (i.e., £1,300 to-day) a year. This computation excludes the prospectively large rents in connection with the reversionary interest which Eton had in those extensive alien priories, leased to neighbouring landed proprietors, the rents of which would accrue to Eton only on the expiration of the leases. The total income was rather larger than that on which Winchester began.

Originally there were ten chaplains on the foundation of the college, whose office, by the King's ordinance, was not freehold, but conductitii et remotivi (i.e., hired and removable). It should be noted, however, that the offspring of the unfree, the villein (or nativus), or the illegitimate was not to be admitted, and this provision was a distinctly retrograde one, by no means in accord with the practice at Wykeham's College of Winchester.

In relation to the admission of sons of villeins to the universities, we have, however, the following important facts to set against the above. In 1312 a fellow of Merton, Master Walter of Merton,* received manumission from the cathedral priory of Durham, and even as late as the reign of Elizabeth a manumission was granted to a fellow of Exeter College, and to his family. Evidently their villeinage was no bar to the attainment of University education by the sons of the unfree; nor, elsewhere, at the inception were nativi, or villeins, excluded from the public schools. Indeed, in 1391, Richard II. actually vetoed a petition from his reactionary land-holding House of Commons praying that "no neif or villein may send his children as heretofore † to advance their condition by the clerical status, and this in maintenance of the honour of all Freemen of the realm." It may be doubted, moreover, whether Henry VI. acted altogether spontaneously in decreeing the exclusion of the class of nativi from the benefits of his Eton foundation; for the spirit animating the Commons of 1391 was, about 1440, by no means extinct.

Reg. Palat. Dunelm, Rolls Series, 97. † Our italics.

Moreover, it fell to a fourteenth century Chancellor to warn the terroristic baronage of his day of the political and military disadvantages of unduly depressing the commonalty of England and the bowmen and archers of Cressy and Agincourt to the status of the Continental serfs.

We must not forget, too, that Latin and book-learning was despised by the sons of knights, who practised field sports, music, poetry, fighting, chess and deportment in their castles. John de Trevisa, chaplain to Thomas, Earl of Berkeley (Gloucestershire), about 1387, laments the decay of Norman-French in the education of the aristocracy, and implies that in the fourteenth century no gentlefolk's children attended the English grammar schools, and manorial records, to cite no other evidence, show that despite the prohibition of various lords and ladies, many villeins had evaded servile tenure by taking the way of the grammar school education. A residence, too, of a year and a day within city walls automatically manumitted an escaped labourer.

As far back as the twelfth to thirteenth centuries the tendency of the English serf or villein to rise out of his own rank, by the exertion of superior intellectual powers, had drawn down the courtly sneer of Walter Map, who, about 1180, was a wit at the court of Henry II., whose personal friend he was reputed to be. "In truth," wrote Map, in his Court Idlers, "the villeins whom we call rustics are attempting to nourish their ignoble and degenerate offspring upon the liberal arts to them ungranted. . . . They ransom their serfs from the lords, covetousness on both sides fights and conquers, freedom is bestowed upon the enemy of freedom . . .

Map was anxious about the security of feudal tenures, and he was girding at the policy of lords of manors who permitted bondsmen to have their sons ordained, or to send them to grammar school and university, on condition of the payment of a moderate fine. "The way was open,"

"

says Stubbs, even in the twelfth century," in England. So open, indeed, that the mysterious author of Piers Ploughman actually bewailed the fact 300 years later,

that

"Bondsmen's sons have been made bishops,

And bastards' sons have become archdeacons."

Moreover, in the late fifteenth century, have we not Skelton's "beastly rimes" denouncing, in Colyn Cloute, those who:

"Brought up of poore estate,

With pride inordinate,

Sodaynly upstarte

From the donge carte,

The mattocke and the shule [shovel]
To reygne and to rule ? "

Throughout the Middle Ages there went on a fairly steady process of infiltration from the lower to the upper ranks of society. Most of the important civil and legal offices of the State were filled by clerics, and the iron law of celibacy, apart from the innately democratic spirit of the Englishman, would render necessary this infiltration. Robert Grosseteste,* Bishop of Lincoln in the years 1235-1253, was twitted with his humble birth, "the son of a peasant father and mother,"† Sir Robert de Salle, "not by birth a gentleman" (says Froissart), who was knighted by Edward III. for his valour, and promoted governor of Norwich, was reminded at a memorable parley in the fields with the insurgent peasants of Jack Cade's

See the Chronicon de Lanercost, 1201-1346 (Maitland Club, 46), published 1839, P. 44, where an account is given of an after-dinner conversation between the Earl of Gloucester and the courtly Grosseteste, in which the latter amazed the "thunderstruck" Earl by saying he was the son of a humble father and mother, "but brought up from my youth among men renowned for excellence. . . I studied Scripture and tried to conform my acts" to the best Biblical characters. noble lord thanked him, and ever after held the Bishop in high esteem." † Richard de Bardney says of Grosseteste's origin, " Porcorum custos ascendit culmina cleri" (a swine-herd, he ascended to the pinnacle of the clerical world).

...

"The