This idea of civic or community responsibility for education which began to manifest itself in a tentative manner, was not the outcome of any opposition to the Church, or due to a feeling that the Church had not been sufficiently alive to its responsibilities. On the contrary, the provision for education which was made was, generally speaking, entrusted to the care of the Church, and the teachers of the schools continued to be the priests of the Church. In fact, we may go so far as to assert that the consciousness of social responsibility which now developed was, to a great extent, the outgrowth of religious teaching. At the same time that we emphasise this general statement, we must admit that there existed certain signs of a tendency to assert independence of the Church, and various symptoms began to manifest themselves which were indicative of the fact that school-keeping was ceasing to be regarded as exclusively a function of the priesthood. The tendency to independence of the Church showed itself, among other places, at Coventry, where the corporation sent a deputation to the Prior of Coventry "wyllyng hym to occupye a skole of Gramer, fyye he like to teche hys Brederon and Childerom of the aumbry, and that he wolnot gruche ne meve the contrai, but that euery mon off this Cite be at hys ffre chosse to sette hys chylde to skole to what techer off Gramer that he likyth, as reson askyth"[366]; and at Bridgenorth, where an ordinance was passed in 1503, that no priest should keep a school after a schoolmaster had come to town.[367] As illustrating the tendency to place schools under the control of organisations other than the Church may be mentioned the school founded at Farthinghoe in 1443 by John Abbot, a mercer of London, who placed the school under the control of the Mercers' Company,[368] and the school founded by Sir Edmund Sha in 1487, which was put in mortmain "unto his felliship of the craft of goldsmythes."[369] Two other instances are available. In 1502, Sir John Percyvale founded a "Fre Gramer Scole" at Macclesfield[370] for "gentil mennes sonnes and other good menses children in Maxfiled and the Countre thereabouts." The government of the school was entrusted to seventeen local laymen who were to act as trustees. In 1505, Sir Bartholomew Read, who founded a school at Cromer, made the Goldsmith's Company the governing body.[371] That school-keeping was ceasing to be regarded as the exclusive function of the priesthood is indicated by the will of the founder of Sevenoaks Grammar School in 1432, which specified that the schoolmaster was not to be a priest "in sacris ordinibus minime constitutus,"[372] and by the fact that the names of schoolmasters are to be found on the rolls of the Freemen of the city of York.[373]