education. But Mr. Hepple's seventh type, which he designates "Town school," was exceptional in being secular. It was also a late type, originating in the fifteenth century, or at earliest little before the year 1400. It is nevertheless this exceptional secular type of town school that is the original of the grammar school of to-day, for at the Reformation the ecclesiastical schools largely died out, leaving it a clear field. From Tudor times onwards these secular schools multiplied rapidly, being founded in town after town for the sons of the burgesses, sometimes by royalty, but more often by some wealthy local merchant. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and later these schools carried forward the tradition and even the curriculum of the medieval grammar school, but in the eighteenth century, owing to the increase in population and to changing conditions, private "academies" began to appear, offering a wider syllabus of studies; and in turn the grammar schools followed suit, substituting (for better or for worse) instruction in many subjects for training in a few. The name given to this modern curriculum is "secondary," first applied to schools in 1861. Until yesterday (Education Act of 1944) the curriculum, if we except technical schools, was approximately the same in all secondary schools, and the grammar school differed from the rest only by reason of its semi-official status of town school. Thus what has been carried down from medieval into modern times is not the curriculum of the grammar school, but its (originally exceptional) status of town school; and in this sense there is nothing extravagant in claiming that the Colchester school is the oldest English grammar school, but we must bear in mind that we are using the term in its modern specialised sense rather than in its true original meaning.
We must now turn to consider the other issues, still in connection with the document of 1206 and the others to be found in the Appendix. Actually our quest for information about the earlier Colchester school takes us back even farther than 1206, to Domesday Book, the Great Survey of England compiled in 1086 for King William I. According to this survey Colchester then contained 414 houses, of which 355 were held by 276 royal burgesses, and 59 by certain magnates of the realm. Of these one was the Bishop of London, who held two properties—one of four acres and fourteen houses exempt from all tax other than what the Bishop himself might impose; the other, doubtless an agricultural holding outside the town, more than 200 acres in area, which was sublet to a certain Hugh with liability to the usual taxation. This indicates that the first property was separate from the second, and in addition was a privileged holding.
Further, it seems possible to identify this privileged property with one mentioned in a fine of 1206.[1] This fine, published in Trinity Term, 1206, in the eighth year of the reign of King John, records a
- ↑ A fine was a document recording a transfer of property, it being customary in the Middle Ages in such a transfer for the ownership to be disputed in a (usually) mock legal action, with the recipient as "plaintiff" and the grantor as "defendant".
