Cathedral school

“ Then he saw the lad's sturdy figure bound across the valley to join friends in play on the thoroughfare that skirts the park alongside the row of houses.
He himself turned and went in the direction of the cathedral.
As he walked slowly along, one thing haunted him remorsefully—the upturned face of the lad and the look in his eyes as he asked the question which brought out the secret desire of a life: "Do you know how boys get into the cathedral choir school?" ”

“ In the cathedral school there was usually a song school, for elementary instruction, and a grammar school, for those who should want more advanced education. As assistants in the smaller churches needed instruction, parish schools were established, in which there was but little training given beyond that needed for participation in the church services. ”

“ The cathedral is the center for a large group of buildings whereof most are in the noble pointed (Gothic) style of architecture. As just explained, in the sacred close there is the bishop's palace and the houses of the canons; there are also a cloister for promenading, a school (much like that at the monastery) , a room for a library, and a synodal hall for meetings of the canons and where the bishop can conduct litigation. There is, in addition, a hospital for sick clerics. ”

“ The principal public buildings are the ancient castle—now appropriated to the uses of the university—the cathedral and other churches, the town hall, county prison, and grammar-school. The educational institutions comprise the university, opened in 1833, the grammar-school, a training-school for school-mistresses, and other schools. There are manufactures of carpeting and mustard. The cathedral occupies a height overlooking the Wear. ”

“ This almonry school for charity boys is the only school, other than the novices' school, which existed at Westminster Abbey before, on its conversion into a cathedral by Henry VIII., the present school with forty scholars and unlimited town boys was established on the model of the old cathedral grammar schools. ”

“ The contrast between the cathedral school of Chartres and the University of Paris illustrates the change from the twelfth to the thirteenth century. The former has been spoken of in a previous chapter, where its story was brought down to the times of its great teachers, Bernard and Thierry, of whom we shall have to speak in connection with the teaching of grammar and the reading of classical authors. ”

“ The Choir School (C. on Plan) has a special interest for everyone who goes to the Cathedral, for here are educated and trained the boys who sing in the Cathedral services. The school was founded by Bishop H. C. Potter in 1901 and was formerly located in the Old Synod House. The present building, erected in 1912 and built of the same kind of stone as the Bishop’s House and Deanery, is in the English Collegiate Gothic style of architecture; is three stories high, and has extreme outside dimensions of 83 by 150 feet. ”

“ The lions from the ancient cathedral doors are now in the atrium of the high-school. The ancient baptistery is close to the north side of the cathedral; it has suffered Renaissance alteration inside, but outside still shows the early arrangement of pilaster-strips and corbel-tables. It is circular in plan, and has several round-headed, unmoulded windows built up, as well as a pointed-arched door with fourteenth-century shields in the tympanum. ”

“ It must not be thought, however, that it was only in stained glass and painting and sculpture—the major arts—that these workmen attained their triumphs. Practically every detail of Cathedral construction is a monument to the artistic genius of the century, to the wonderful inspiration afforded the workmen and to the education provided by the Guilds which really maintained, as we shall see, a kind of Technical School with the approbation and the fostering care of the ecclesiastics connected with the Cathedrals. ”

“ Almost every cathedral had its school, and many of the abbeys as well, as for example, in France alone, Cluny, Citeaux and Bec, St. Martin of Tours, Laon, Chartres, Rheims and Paris. To these schools students poured in from all over the world in numbers mounting to many thousands for such as Paris for example, and the mutual rivalries were intense and sometimes disorderly. Groups of students would choose their own masters and follow them from place to place, even subjecting them to discipline if in their opinion they did not live up to the intellectual mark they had set as their standard. ”

“ And clerics so educated cannot pass to any other diocese, but owe canonical obedience to the bishop at whose charge they have been brought up. [15]
Here, then, is the cathedral seminary fairly established, and a few years later we find it expanding into a noble public school. It was St. Leander, of Seville, who first conceived the idea of establishing a staff of professors for teaching the liberal arts in connection with his cathedral. He directed their labours in person, and received among his first scholars his own brother Isidore, who afterwards succeeded him in his see. ”

“ Bernard, the Abbot of Clairvaux, it is learned that there was a school or seminary of physicians here as early as 1155, and the perfect establishment of a university was known to have existed just previous to the year 1200. This institution was held in great esteem, and in importance second only to Paris. To-day the present establishment merits like approbation, and, sheltered in part in the ancient episcopal palace, and partly enclosing the cathedral of St. ”

“ There are also twelve cathedral schools, one for each ecclesiastical diocese, which were founded in the middle ages, and are supported by large estates acquired from the early kings and by confiscation of church property after the Reformation. ”

“ EDUCATION; THE UNIVERSITIES COMMON SCHOOLS Not less important than the Gothic cathedrals for the understanding of medieval civilization were the universities. They grew out of the monastic and cathedral schools where boys were trained to become monks or priests. Such schools had been created or restored by Charlemagne. [18] The teaching, which lay entirely in the hands of the clergy, was elementary in character. Pupils learned enough Latin grammar to read religious books, if not always to understand them, and enough music to follow the services of the Church. ”

“ The universities became the great seats of learning, human and divine, and though the cathedral schools continued to exist, their students passed from them at an early age to finish their education in theology and canon law in Paris, Oxford, and Bologna ”

“ Across the block to the south is situated a shed-like two-story building with dormer-windows and a crumpled three-sided roof, the studios of the National Academy of Design; and under that low brittle skylight youth toils over the shapes and colors of the visible vanishing paradise of the earth in the shadow of the cathedral which promises an unseen, an eternal one. ”

“ All the colleges have chapels, but all have not organs; nor, amongst those which have, is the same large use made of the organ. Some preserve the full cathedral service; others do not. Christ Church, meantime, fulfilled all conditions: for the chapel here happens to be the cathedral of the diocese; the service, therefore, is full and ceremonial; the college, also, is far the most splendid, both in numbers, rank, wealth, and influence. ”

“ When every church becomes a school, every cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, and all their hearers brave and honest thinkers, then, and not until then, will the dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher, become a real and blessed truth. ”

“ Of our kin were the architects, masters of the living stone, who with inspiration conceived their shrines of Notre Dame and were trained soundly enough in mason craft to achieve their dreams; of our kin were the artisans who put up the serene images at cathedral doors for the edification of the people, and chiseled with warm, loving touches the running bramble of the roadside. Even botany is to be learned in mediæval cathedrals. Not a leaf that grows in Champagne to-day but was carved on the walls of Rheims seven hundred years ago. ”

“ Through dreamy distances of chequered light and tangled shadow, the glance travels under a sort of spell, and unconsciously the fancy grows that you are gazing through the aisles of a vast cathedral illuminated by myriad and wondrously stained windows—not a cathedral wrought by the hands of man, nor one whose stillness was ever broken by his feverish tread, but the ruins of a colossal judgment hall, or place of worship, created by some long-gone superhuman race, of whose existence we retain no record. ”

“ Seldom in France do we find the cathedral so regally free of surrounding buildings. No shabby structures lean unworthy heads against its old grey walls, and where, on the north side, the canons' library, with its crumbling timbers of the fifteenth century, nestles under the wing of the church, the effect is entirely pleasing. ”

“ To what base uses do we come at last! It was this same organisation that had erected the magnificent structure around and above me, and which had then seemed an image of generosity and benignant power. Such an edifice might at times make one feel tenderly sentimental toward the Catholic church—make one remember how many of the great achievements of the past we owe to her. To lapse gently into this state of mind seems indeed always, while one strolls about a great cathedral, a proper recognition of its hospitality ”

“ Not only is there built into a mediæval cathedral the accumulated thought of all the men who had occupied themselves with building during the preceding centuries, but you have the dream and aspiration of the bishop, abbot, or clergy for whom it was designed; the master mason’s skilled construction; the work of the carver, the painter, the glazier, the host of men who, each in his own craft, knew all that had been done before them, and had spent their lives in struggling to surpass the works of their forefathers. ”

“ Does not the work of such ones and their sustaining bishops,—of martyrs, by their faithfulness and sacrifices even of life itself,—do not these make our good conditions possible, which but for them would never have been? Cathedral is museum and library; it is shrine,—inspiring thought and evolving new good, and in no way inferior to picture-gallery or depository of mechanical production or of curious art. ”

“ We walked to the cathedral—a dark red heavy building, built almost entirely of brick, with one high tower; an open gallery surmounting its façade, which exhibits, one above the other, three ranges of porticoes, the pillars of the lowest and central one springing from the loins of guardian lions. Within, above the principal entrance, is some curious carving. The church is large without being handsome; 224 two thirds of the roof, glaring with fresh whitewash, contrast with the dark grey columns. The choir has its frescoes still ”

“ In 1100, when enthusiasm was fresh and faith in science was strong, the great mass of students came there to study, and, having no regular university organization or buildings, they thronged the cloister of Notre Dame—not our Notre Dame, which dates only from 1163, but the old Romanesque cathedral which stood on the same spot—and there they listened, and retained what they could remember, for they were not encouraged to take notes even if they were rich enough to buy notebooks, while manuscripts were far beyond their means. ”

“ The cathedral is surrounded by a high wall, the gates of which,--its eyelids,--are closed every night at a seasonable hour, at which the virtuous inhabitants are expected to be in their safe and sacred quarters. Houses within this hallowed precinct naturally bring a higher rent than those of the unsanctified and unprotected region outside of its walls. It is a realm of peace, glorified by the divine edifice, which lifts the least imaginative soul upward to the heavens its spire seems trying to reach; beautified by rows of noble elms which stretch high aloft, as if in emulation of the spire ”

“ It is a beautiful picture of mingled red and grey that lies before us. The Cathedral—a mass of grey stone—here presents its most interesting aspect to us: a mass of grey stone set with pinnacles and flying buttresses and heavy square tower. To its left lies the College, hidden partly behind the trees of the Close and the Deanery garden, the light, graceful ‘Two Wardens’ tower of its chapel contrasting strikingly with the solid tower of the Cathedral—a noticeable and attractive object. ”

“ These points are sufficient to indicate what I mean by saying that the cathedrals have in some respects had an unfavorable influence upon the doctrine and worship of the Church of England.
Presbyterians also have Felt the Effect of them.
If at the Reformation every cathedral in Great Britain had been pounded to pieces by the iconoclasts, it would have been an immeasurable calamity to art, but it might have been a real gain for religion. At any rate, it is ritualism rather than religion that is now promoted by the cathedrals. ”

“ It is really wonderful that the cathedral of an English diocese, and the chapel of one of our greatest colleges, should remain in a condition which would disgrace the meanest hamlet. In the first place, it will hardly be credited by those whose eyes have not witnessed the sacrilege, that a portion of the church is actually desecrated. In so vast a college the hire of a single room cannot be dispensed with, but the House of God must be defiled; a bay of the south transept and one of the adjoining chapels are blocked off to form a residence for the verger. ”