hadde ben somtyme in chivachie, In Flaundres, in Artoys, and in Picardie, And born him wel, as in so litel space, In hope to stonden in his lady grace ... Syngynge he was, or flowtynge, al the day ... Wel cowde he sitte on hors, and wel cowde ryde. He cowde songes wel make and endite, Justne and eek daunce, and wel purtray and write ... Curteys he was, lowly, and servysable, And carf beforn his fadur at the table.[10] Which of these accomplishments would Cambridge or Oxford teach? Music alone.[[10a]] That, as Harrison says, was one of the Quadrivials, ‘arithmetike, musike, geometrie, and astronomie.’ The Trivium was grammar, rhetoric, and logic. [Headnote: HOUSES OF NOBLES AND CHANCELLORS WERE SCHOOLS.] 1. The chief places of education for the sons of our nobility and gentry were the houses of other nobles, and specially those of the Chancellors of our Kings, men not only able to read and write, talk Latin and French themselves, but in whose hands the Court patronage lay. As early as Henry the Second’s time (A.D. 1154-62), if not before[11], this system prevailed. A friend notes that Fitz-Stephen says of Becket: “The nobles of the realm of England and of neighbouring kingdoms used to send their sons to serve the Chancellor, whom he trained with honourable bringing-up and learning; and when they had received the knight’s belt, sent them back with honour to their fathers and kindred: some he used to keep. The king himself, his master, entrusted to him his son, the heir of the realm, to be brought up; whom he had with him, with many sons of nobles of the same age, and their proper retinue and masters and proper servants in the honour due.” --_Vita S. Thomæ_, pp. 189, 190, ed. Giles. Roger de Hoveden, a Yorkshireman, who was a clerk or secretary to Henry the Second, says of Richard the Lionheart’s unpopular chancellor, Longchamps the Bishop of Ely: “All the sons of the nobles acted as his servants, with downcast looks, nor dared they to look upward towards the heavens unless it so happened that they were addressing him; and if they attended to anything else they were pricked with a goad, which their lord held in his hand, fully mindful of his grandfather of pious memory, who, being of servile condition in the district of Beauvais, had, for his occupation, to guide the plough and whip up the oxen; and who at length, to gain his liberty, fled to the Norman territory.” (Riley’s _Hoveden_, ii. 232, quoted in _The Cornhill Magazine_, vol. xv. p. 165.)[12]