EARLY YORKSHIRE SCHOOLS. VOL. II. THIS HIS second volume of records of the ancient schools of Yorkshire, though it contains no such startling revelations of the extent of the education of our English ancestors long before the Norman Conquest as was contained in the first volume, yet continues the demonstration of the antiquity and ubiquity of secondary education in centuries long anterior to its hitherto reputed beginnings, whether we place them under Edward VI. and his reputed foundation of Free Grammar Schools, or with more knowledge under Edward III. with Winchester College and William of Wykeham. The first volume dealt with the three Grammar Schools attached to the three mother churches of Yorkshire, the three colleges of secular canons not monks, S. Peter's, York, S. John's, Beverley, and S. Wilfrid's, Ripon; and we saw the first flourishing in 735 and renewing its youth in 1090; the second an institution certainly not new in or about 1100; and the third bearing every mark of an ancient institution when the records first give us a glance at it in 1354. The pride of place in this volume is given to Pontefract Grammar School, which is also found connected with an ancient collegiate church of secular canons, on a less august scale indeed than the three already mentioned, but at a date which evidences its existence before the year 1100. The more modern collegiate churches, no longer of date "whereof memory of man runneth not to the contrary," but still of respectable antiquity, from the middle of the thirteenth century;-Howden, founded about 1265; S. Andrew's College of Nether Acaster, founded about 1470, and the Jesus College of Rotherham in 1480,-equally exhibit grammar schools part and parcel of their foundation. The two latter are very remarkable institutions |