Page:Sussex archaeological collections, volume 9.djvu/217

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Walter Gale, schoolmaster at Mayfield.
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use any potations, cock-fightings, or drinkings, with his or their wives, hostess or hostesses, more than twice a year. There were no "delectations" for the scholars, such as the barring out of the schoolmaster, which Sir John Deane, who founded the grammarschool at Witton, near Northleach, to prevent all quarrels between the teacher and the taught, determined should take place only twice a year, a week before Christmas and Easter, "as the custom was in other great schools." No unhappy ram was provided by the butcher, as used to be the case at Eton in days long, by, to be pursued and knocked on the head by the boys, till on one occasion the poor animal, being sorely pressed, swam across the Thames, and, rushing into the market-place at Windsor followed by its persecutors, did such mischief, that this sport was stopped, and instead thereof it was hamstrung, after the speech on Election Saturday, and clubbed to death. None of these humanizing influences were at work at Mayfield: there was not even the customary charge of 5s. to each boy for rods-a painful tax to the scholar who needed their reforming influence, but still more so to him who was too good ever to require it.

No such rules as those in force at the free grammar-school of Cuckfield prevailed at Mayfield. They were not taught "on every working day one of the eight parts of reason, with the word according to the same, that is to say, Nomen with Amo, Pronomen with Amor, to be said by heart; nor, as being a modern and a thoroughly Protestant school, were they called upon before breakfast upon a Friday to listen to a little piece of the Pater Noster or Ave Maria, the Credo or the verses of the Mariners, or the Ten Commandments, or the Five Evils, or some other proper saying in Latin meet for babyes." Still less, as in the case of the grammar-school at Stockport, did any founder will "that some cunning priest, with all his scholars, should, on Wednesday and Friday of every week, come to the church to the grave where the bodies of his father and mother lay buried, and there say the psalm of De Profundis, after the Salisbury use and pray especially for his soul, and for the souls of his father and mother, and for all Christian souls." Neither did the trustees, that they might sow the seeds of ambition in the minds of the scholars, ordain, as was done at Tunbridge and at Lewisham, "that the

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