E. J. L. Scott in the Athenaeum, and extracts from others are given in the Observer for 7 Dec. 1919. A. F. Leach has fixed the dates of Udall's life in Encycl. Brit. s.v.]
There is no trace of any grammar school in the abbey
of Westminster until the fourteenth century. The Customary
of 1259-83 (ed. E. M. Thompson for Henry Bradshaw Soc.)
only contemplates education for the novices, and in the
earliest almoner's accounts, which begin with 1282, entries
of 1317 'in maintaining Nigel at school for the love of God'
(Leach, 80) and 1339-40, 'pro scholaribus inueniendis ad
scolas' (E. H. Pearce, The Monks of Westminster Abbey, 79),
need only refer to the support of scholars at a University.
But from 1354-5 there were almonry boys (pueri Elemosinariae)
under the charge of the Sub-Almoner, and these are traceable
up to the dissolution. To them we may assign the ludus
of the Boy Bishop on St. Nicholas' day, mentions of which
have been noted in 1369, 1388, 1413, and 1540 (Mediaeval
Stage, i. 360; Leach, 80). They had a school house near
'le Millebank', and from 1367 the Almoner paid a Magister
Puerorum. From 1387 he is often called Magister Scolarum
and in the fifteenth century Magister Scolarium. From
1510 the boys under the Magister become pueri grammatici,
and may be distinct from certain pueri cantantes for whom
since 1479-80 the Almoner had paid a separate teacher of
singing. The first of these song-masters was William Cornish,
doubtless of the family so closely connected with the Chapel
Royal (q.v.). In 1540 the pueri grammatici were re-organized
as the still existing College of St. Peter, Westminster, which is
therefore generally regarded as owing its origin to Henry VIII,
who on the surrender of the abbey in 1540 turned it into
a college of secular canons, and provided for a school of forty
scholars. This endured in some form through the reactionary
reign of Mary, whose favourite dramatist Nicholas Udall
became its Head Master, although the date of his appointment
on 16 December 1555 (A. F. Leach in Encycl. Brit., s.v. Udall)
makes it probable that, if he wrote his Ralph Roister Doister
for a school at all, it was for Eton (q.v.) rather than Westminster.
His predecessor Alexander Nowell is said by
Strype to have 'brought in the reading of Terence for the
better learning the pure Roman style', and, as the Sub-Almoner
paid 'xvid. for wryting of a play for the chyldren'
as early as 1521 (Observer), the performance of Latin comedies
by the boys may have been pre-Elizabethan. It is provided
for in the statutes drafted by Dean Bill (c. 1560) after the
restoration of her father's foundation by Elizabeth. These
statutes also contemplate a good deal of interrelation between
