Hannah Deasy
Page 326 | 2025
Pupils, Primers, and Potential: exploring a chorister’s lay education at Exeter Cathedral in the mid-eighteenth century
Abstract
This paper explores the lay education of Exeter Cathedral’s boy choristers between 1730 and 1760. It examines a crucial period in their education when the Dean and Chapter outsourced Latin teaching to a local schoolmaster, in contrast to the previous practice of the informator puerorum [Master of the Choristers] being the sole educator. This paper charts the appointment of John Bradford as schoolmaster in Exeter’s High School, and the decision by the Dean and Chapter to send choristers to him for tuition in Latin grammar. Utilising the Chapter Act books and financial records from the Cathedral’s archives, the paper highlights the integral relationship between the Dean & Chapter and John Bradford, and the balancing of the musical and lay educations offered by choristership.
The paper investigates the curriculum taught and demonstrates how the changing secular society of Exeter influenced the form and content of the choristers’ education. Through its discussion of Latin primers, the paper explores the ‘chorister experience’, defined as the recreation of the daily lives and actions of boy choristers, thereby addressing a gap in current scholarship relating to the lay education of Exeter Cathedral, and establishing the educational practice of a provincial cathedral in the eighteenth century.
