It is as well to set out a few details like this, and they could be matched, as we know, from rolls of other large foundations; for those whose business it is to belittle English monasteries continuously assert that they educated no one but their own novices. Now at Durham we know that the training of the novices was a matter entirely apart from that of these boys, as narrated in the well-known _Rites of Durham_. There were always at least six novices under tuition, who went daily to their books in the cloister, and were under instruction for seven years. Their master was one of the older monks, whose duty it was not only to instruct them but to exercise a general supervision. If any of them showed marked capacity they were sent to Durham College, Oxford, which was one of the two exclusively Benedictine colleges. The rolls have various entries relative to their expenses in going to the University. Occasionally outside paid help was sought for their further instruction at Durham; thus one of the very rolls that names the stipend of the schoolmaster of the Almery boys, also mentions a smaller sum paid to one _pro erudicione juvenum monochorum_. At Norwich Priory fourteen boys were educated, and at Winchester eight. At St. Albans there was a school under secular masters, who were selected and paid by the abbot of the monastery; early in the fourteenth century there was a bequest made to this school to release sixteen of the poorest of the scholars from all payment. Even so remote a house as that of St. Benet, Holme, in the swamps of the Norfolk Broads, had boys under education, apart from the novices, who were probably the more promising children of the humbler tenants. Here, too, as at Durham, such boys formed part of the almoner’s charge. It would indeed be passing strange if no such records of schoolwork existed, for Benedictine and other custumals were not compiled for amusement or to satisfy hypothetical conditions. Such documents were practical directions for the times when they were drawn up. If they are consulted, it will be found that it was the ordinary part of an almoner’s duty to have control over any monastic school, apart from the claustral one for the novices. He was enjoined to keep the boys strictly, and had to provide the rods for their discipline. If they did not learn sufficiently they were to be discharged, and their places filled by those who were better disposed. It is also worth while to mention under this head, that in the highly interesting volume of fifteenth-century monastic visitations made by the Bishops of Norwich, edited a few years ago by Dr. Jessopp, there are various references to the schoolmasters and schoolrooms of small priories which could not possibly have referred to the cloister-taught novices. At Westacre Priory, Norfolk, there was a boarding school for the sons of the county gentlemen.