The Guilt of Innocents (38 page)

I’d earlier discovered Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran’s paper and book regarding education in York in Owen’s time, and had adopted the real-historical Ferriby family in the previous Owen Archer mystery,
The Cross-Legged Knight
, with an eye towards using Nicholas Ferriby’s struggle with the dean and chancellor regarding his grammar school in a future book. Happily, this controversy did not ruin Nicholas’s career, not by any means. In 1379 he was a canon of York Minster and in 1393 he was master of the grammar school at St Leonard’s Hospital in York. His brother John (see the note below) went on to become subtreasurer of the Minster. [Note: the name of Nicholas’s brother ‘William’ was actually John, but Master John de York, Dean John, and Archbishop John Thoresby made too many in the book so I chose the second most popular name of the time.]

I also thought it an excellent example of Archbishop Thoresby’s reasoned thinking that he had, in fact, condemned a song school five years earlier, but did not support the move to excommunicate Nicholas for his grammar school. The grammar schools taught children Latin grammar – the students might be destined for any walk of life; the song schools were for young men who
were training to sing in the choir and therefore learning to read portions of the liturgy, and so those schools were appropriately connected with a church.

Richard Barber,
Edward Prince of Wales and Aquitain: A Biography of the Black Prince
(The Boydell Press, 1978, reprint 1996)

Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran Cruz,
Education and Learning in the City of York 1300–1560
(Borthwick Paper No.
55
, 1979)

Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran Cruz,
The Growth of English Schooling 1340–1548: Learning, Literacy, and Laicization in Pre-Reformation York Diocese
(Princeton University Press, 1985)

Angelo Raine,
History of St Peter’s School: York, AD 627 to the present day
(London: G Bell and Sons, 1926)

Clifford Rogers,
The Wars of Edward III: Sources and Interpretations
(The Boydell Press, 1999)