The schools and the Leathersellers

This is the longest-running thing the parish ever started, and the church has almost nothing to do with it any more. That is the point of it. Two vicars gave money away in such a way that it could outlast them, the institution they chose to hold it has held it for close on four hundred years, and the result is a federation of schools and an independent grammar school that between them teach more Lewisham children than the congregation has ever numbered.

St Mary’s does not run any of these schools and has no part in their admissions. The parish’s share in the story is two vicars, and some old parish charities that helped fund the last of the foundations in 1890.

Why a livery company?

It looks eccentric now and was shrewd then. A parish had no way to hold an endowment across generations: churchwardens change, vestries fall out, and money left to a parish had a way of quietly ceasing to exist. The Leathersellers were chartered in 1444, had a corporate existence that did not die with anybody, and were already known to Colfe — his clerk William Manby was also the Company’s clerk, and his wife’s first husband, Jasper Valentine, was a Lewisham tanner, a trade with obvious business in leather.

Whether Colfe reasoned it out or simply used the people he knew, the arrangement has worked for three hundred and sixty-nine years, which is a longer run than most institutions get.

Who Abraham Colfe was

His family came from Guines, near Calais. His grandfather Amandus died in 1603; his father, Richard Colfe, was a Prebendary of Canterbury Cathedral and is buried there. Abraham was baptised at Holy Cross by the Westgate — the building is now Canterbury’s Guildhall — in 1580. His mother died when he was an infant; his father married twice more and had twelve children.

He went to the King’s School, Canterbury, and to Christ Church, Oxford, graduating in 1599. And then, in 1601, he was arrested and locked up in Newgate for speaking in support of the Earl of Essex’s rebellion against Elizabeth I. He took his MA at Trinity College, Cambridge, two years later.

He came to Lewisham in 1604 as curate to Hadrian de Saravia — the vicar who was one of the translators of the King James Bible — through the influence of his uncle Joseph, a friend of Saravia’s. He married in 1611 at St Margaret’s, Lee: Margaret, widow of the tanner Jasper Valentine and daughter of a Lewisham blacksmith, and sixteen years his senior. They had no children.

Between 1605 and 1615 he fought a ten-year battle against Henry Newport, Robert Raynes and Innocent Lanier and saved five hundred acres of woodland for the people of Lewisham. Some of it is still there. He spent fifty-three years in this parish, six as curate and forty-seven as vicar, and no portrait or description of him survives.

The will, and the sixteen years he spent on it

A gift recorded under 1657 sounds like something done at the end. It was not. The Company still holds a letter in Colfe’s own hand, written from Lewisham on a Monday in January 1641 — January 1642 by modern reckoning, since the year then began in March — and addressed to Mr Manby, the Company’s clerk who was also his own.

He proposes to come over to London, if to morrow be a faire day, to the Company’s court, and to bring fifty pounds to leave with your Renter warden, to make up the former money seven hundred pounds. Seven hundred pounds, already lodged, sixteen years before the will that is supposed to be the beginning of all this.

He will not stay to eat. He must return home presently againe to my studies, for better preparation against the publike fast on the next thursday — a vicar of Lewisham declining dinner in the City to go home and write a sermon, in the first winter of the Civil War.

I desire also to bring with me my will, lately new made & altered, & to leave it in your court; & to take away the old one.

Then he goes shopping. He asks Manby to tell him of any good purchase, either in or neere about London, or anywhere the Company holds land, and says he will go to a thousand pounds for it if it be of a good tennre and a good title — offering tenne peeces for your paines & loving care therein.

And then the careful half of the same man. He has lent £160 to Mr George Edmonds of Lewisham on the mortgage of part of the manor of Sydenham, and he wants the bond altered: Edmonds has already settled a jointure of thirty pounds a year on his wife Frances, the land is not worth much above fifty a year, and if Edmonds should die inside the three years Colfe’s rent would rank behind hers. He wants a further clause. The man endowing a school for other people’s children was not sentimental about security.

How the will begins

The will itself opens with his whole identity in one breath:

I Abraham Colfe of Lewisham in the County of Kent neere Greenwich, Minister, and Sonne of Richard Colfe late Doctor of Divinity, And Prebendary of Christ Church in Canterbury, being above seventy six yeares olde, yet in good health and of sound and perfect memorie (thanks be to the Lord for it)…

He then leaves his body to the earth in assurance of A blessed Resurrection to Eternall Life, and tells his executors exactly where to put it: in the churchyard of Lewisham, by the wall under the little south window above the door, by the way out of the churchyard into the parish chancel. A man who had spent fifty-three years in this parish knew which stretch of wall he meant.

He signed it in 1656 in front of sixteen parishioners and relatives — which fits the words on the page, since a man born in 1580 is “above seventy six” in 1656 and not before. He died the next year of the ague, the marsh fever that went with living beside the Ravensbourne.

The letter and the will are at the Leathersellers’ Company, photographed for the parish in August 2016. Spelling and punctuation are Colfe’s.

And a public library, in 1652

The grammar school, the reading school and the almshouses are the famous three. The fourth was a free library, the first in Lewisham, set up over the school, with the first books given by the Leathersellers in 1652.

It still exists. The Colfe Library is over four hundred rare books kept in climate-controlled cases, mostly theology, philosophy, Latin and Greek. The earliest was printed in 1481 — four years before Bosworth, and within thirty years of the invention of printing. And two of them belonged to Thomas Cranmer, who was burned at the stake in 1556.

The people

John Glyn, vicar from 1545, gave the first £100. Abraham Colfe, vicar from 1610 to 1657 and curate here for six years before that, built on it and left the Company everything. Joseph Prendergast taught in Colfe’s school for twenty-six years and then left his own money to educate girls, which nobody had done here before.

Colfe is on the linked charities page as well, because the same will that founded the schools founded the almshouses that are still let today. His wife Margaret Colfe, the parish midwife, is on the monuments page — and her memorial has been set to music, which is on the music page.

Elsewhere on this site

Abraham Colfe was vicar here for forty-seven years before he was a founder of anything, and he is on the vicars of Lewisham; the house he lived in, described room by room in a terrier his own vestry took in 1634, is on the vicarage.

His wife Margaret is buried in the church, and her memorial records what she did rather than what he founded — forty years a nurse, midwife and surgeon to rich and poor alike, without expecting reward. It is on the monuments, and a composer set its words to music in this century: the music of St Mary’s.