Choir-boys had to be taught in the song-school as well, how to sing their services, and the music was just as difficult as the words and had also to be learned by heart. In the parish churches the priest and the parish clerk had boys whom they trained to help in the services. The services were much simpler and shorter than those in the monasteries; but they were in Latin, and had to be known by heart. In the grammar and other schools the boys were drilled in the works of old Latin scholars in much the same way, and in some cases in Greek authors as well, with a certain amount of arithmetic and science. [Illustration: _A School, Fourteenth Century_ _From an illuminated manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford._] There were no long weeks of holidays to look forward to at Christmas, Easter, Whitsuntide, and in the summer; but during the year there were many holy days kept, which were holidays, on which neither schoolboys nor villeins did their ordinary work. Thus, no doubt, schoolboys managed to get a fair amount of play, and found time for getting into mischief. For instance, at St. Alban's we read that in the year 1310 the boys were forbidden to wander or run about the streets and roads without reasonable cause. If a lad did so, he was to be sought for and punished by the master "in the accustomed way"; and every boy knows what that was. Then, too, the scholars must not bear arms, either in school or out of school. That was to prevent them from fighting with the townspeople. It is very curious to notice that even nowadays there is often no love lost between "grammar boys" and "town boys"; they can get up a quarrel almost as easily in the twentieth century as they did in the thirteenth. It shows itself whenever there happens to be a heavy fall of snow, and sometimes tempers get "lost, or mislaid". Boys took part in acting the earliest plays that were represented in England. At first the plays dealt with religious subjects, and were called "Mysteries" and "Miracles"; and these plays and shows became very popular in England. Geoffrey de Gorham, in early Norman days, taught a school at Dunstable, and wrote one of these plays called St. Catherine. He borrowed vestments from St. Alban's Abbey, in which to dress some of his characters; but on the following night his house somehow caught fire, and his books and the borrowed vestments were destroyed in the flames. In the cloisters of some of our old cathedral churches and colleges, such as Gloucester and Westminster, on some of the old stone benches, there are holes and scratches still to be seen where schoolboys of long ago played games with marbles and stones.