Says Mr. Lupton: “There were works on Logic, on Physic, on Medicine, on Civil Law ... all were expressly bequeathed to the use of the boys.” Yes, but while the grammar books were for the use of the boys in the Almonry, these other books were, by the express terms of the will, to be lent to boys who had left the Almonry, when they went on to university studies, so that the very words cited to show that this school was something more than a grammar school prove the exact opposite; and this very case cited to show that the school in question was the St. Paul’s Cathedral Grammar School shows that it was a district foundation and intended only for the eight boys in the Almonry. That these eight boys, afterwards increased to ten, were the choir-boys, is shown by the will of Bishop Richard of Newport,^[79] in 1315, giving to this very William of Tolleshunt, Almoner, one of his executors, and to the Almoner for the time being a house near St. Paul’s the rents of which, after paying £1 to the maintenance of the Lady Chapel, were to be applied “to the support of one or two of the Almonry boys for two years after they have changed their voices.” Again, among the earlier statutes of the Almonry it is ordered that “the boys after entering the choir are not to leave it except when their duty requires it.” William of Tolleshunt himself, too, bequeaths by his will a trust estate bequeathed to him some six years before “for the Almonry boys serving the choir, for their shoes.”

In 1348 Sir John Pulteney,^[80] knight, gave 20s. a year to the almoner to provide the choristers with summer clothes.^[81] In return for the shoes the boys had to sing De Profundis, with the usual Pater Noster, Ave Maria and collects, every morning on getting up and every evening on going to bed; and for the summer clothes to sing an anthem after complin with prayers for the dead in the Pulteney Chapel. In 1358 William of Ravenstone,^[82] Almoner, gave a tenement called the Stonehouse in Paternoster Row “for the support of an additional chorister or two.” That the choristers when clever were meant to go on to the universities is clear from a payment out of the chantry of Bishop Ralph (Baldock) who died in 1313. He gave 3s. “to poor students being sometyme choristers of the said cathedral church towards ther exhibicion yearly,” while a later benefactor Thomas Ever, in the reign of Henry IV., gave a like sum specifically “to the poore choristers of Paules towards their exhibicion in the University.”

There is no question, therefore, that, while there was a grammar school maintained for the benefit of the choristers, it was quite distinct from the choir school for teaching them singing, and from the Cathedral Grammar School open to all boys. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that the choir-boys, being lodged and boarded in the Almonry, had a tutor provided for them to see that they learnt grammar. For one can hardly call the teaching of eight or ten choristers a school.

There would not have been any need to insist on this school so much at length if the whole matter had not been thrown into confusion through the labours of a certain Miss Hackett who devoted herself in the first quarter of the 19th century to the interests of the choir-boys of St. Paul’s, who were then left without any proper schooling or care. She, with great energy, routed out all she could find in the records of St. Paul’s or elsewhere, relating to the choir-boys, and published it in a pamphlet misnamed Correspondence and Evidences respecting the Ancient Collegiate School attached to St. Paul’s Cathedral.^[83] She succeeded in establishing in Chancery the claim of the choir-boys on the revenues of the Almonry. But her zeal outran her discretion, as whenever she saw in any of the records of St. Paul’s anything about a school or school-boys, she at once attributed it to the choir school and choirboys, and attacked the Chancellor, as well as the Almoner, on the ground that the St. Paul’s Grammar School was for the choir-boys. In this she failed. But she did a great deal of harm to the Cathedral Grammar Schools in general by imbuing people with the notion that they were mere choir-schools. Mr. Lupton makes the Grammar School to have been in Sharmoveres (now Sermon) Lane. Sharmoveres is a name of naught. It is simply a misreading of “Sarmoners,” i.e. Sermoners’ Lane, from a house which is said in a document of Edward I.’s reign to have belonged to “Adam le sermoner.” Sermon Lane is the modern shortening. This was not the Grammar School nor even the Almonry school, but a house bequeathed to the Almonry. Sermon Lane is at the west end of St. Paul’s, some little way from the church. The Grammar School was at the opposite or east end, in the churchyard, and quite close to the church.

Having thus cleared away the confusion between the Grammar School and the choristers’ boarding-house we must leave the history of the Almonry without following it further, and for a little while turn from the history of St. Paul’s School to that of its two mediæval rivals.