(1549-59); John Cook (1559-73); William Malim (1573-81); John Harrison (1581-96); Richard Mulcaster (1596-1608).
Masters of Choir School:—? Thomas Hikeman (c. 1521); John Redford (c. 1540); ? Thomas Mulliner (?); Sebastian Westcott (> 1557-1582); Thomas Giles (1584-1590 <); Edward Pearce (> 1600-1606 <).
[Bibliographical Note.—The documents bearing upon the early history
of the two cathedral schools, often confused, are printed and discussed
by A. F. Leach in St. Paul's School before Colet (Archaeologia, lxii. 1. 191)
and in Journal of Education (1909), 503. M. F. J. McDonnell, A History
of St. Paul's School (1909), carries on the narrative of the grammar school.
The official chroniclers of the cathedral, perhaps owing to the loss of
archives in the Great Fire, have given no connected account of the choir
school; with the material available on the dramatic side they appear
to be unfamiliar. Valuable contributions are W. H. G. Flood, Master
Sebastian, in Musical Antiquary, iii. 149; iv. 187; and H. N. Hillebrand,
Sebastian Westcote, Dramatist and Master of the Children of Paul's (1915,
J. G. P. xiv. 568). Little is added to the papers on Plays Acted by the
Children of Paul's and Music in St. Paul's Cathedral in W. S. Simpson,
Gleanings from Old St. Paul's (1889), 101, 155, by J. S. Bumpus, The
Organists and Composers of St. Paul's Cathedral (1891), and W. M. Sinclair,
Memorials of St. Paul's Cathedral (1909).]
Mr. Leach has succeeded in tracing the grammar school,
as part of the establishment of St. Paul's Cathedral, to the
beginning of the twelfth century. It was then located in
the south-east corner of the churchyard, near the bell-tower,
and here it remained to 1512, when it was rebuilt, endowed,
and reorganized on humanist lines by Dean Colet, and thereafter
to 1876, when it was transferred to Horsham in Sussex.
Originally the master was one of the canons; but by the
beginning of the thirteenth century this officer had taken on
the name of chancellor, and the general supervision of the
actual schoolmaster, a vicar choral, was only one of his
functions. Distinct from the grammar school was the choir
school, for which the responsible dignitary was not the
chancellor, but the precentor, in whose hands the appointment
of a master of the song school rested.[1] There was,
however, a third branch of the cathedral organization also
concerned with the training of boys. The almonry or hospital,
maintained by the chapter for the relief of the poor, seems
to have been established at the end of the twelfth century,
- ↑ Archaeologia, lxii. 1.[**I.? 216, from statutes collected in the decanate of Ralph of Baldock (1294-1304), 'Cantoris officium est . . . pueros introducendos in chorum et ad cantum intitulatos examinare . . . Magistrum Scolae Cantus in ecclesia Sancti Gregorii, salva Decano et Capitulo ipsius collacione, preficere'; Dugdale, St. Paul's (1818), 347, from fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century manuscript of statutes, 'Magistrum Scholae Cantus constituit Cantor. Ad eum pertinet eos qui canere nequeunt instruere, pueros diligenter docere, eis non solum magistrum Cantus, sed etiam bonorum morum esse.'
