Choral singing

I have been reading a book called 'The English Chorister' by Alan Mould,
which takes choirboys from the Jewish Temple to the present.

They didn't have choirboys in monasteries after they stopped taking
oblates (boys dedicated to the monastic life from early youth), but they
did have them at secular cathedrals. Numbers varied from about a dozen
at Exeter down to five at Hereford. But then William Wykeham founded
chantry chapels with educational establishments attached at New College,
Oxford and Winchester, with 16 boys each; he was copied by Henry VI at
Eton and King's, Cambridge, and Magdalen, Oxford was a similar idea
(Mould reckons that the annual Mayday sing from the top of the tower
commemorates the topping out ceremony for the original construction).
The 80 choirboys from these five nearly matched the 97 spread around the
nine cathedrals.

I was somewhat taken aback by his remark, in a section about nunneries,
that Bridget Plantagenet was sent to St Mary's, Winchester 'when her
parents were posted to France', but the family steward removed her after
a couple of years as she was 'very spare and hath need of cherishing'.
'The Lisle Letters' confirms that this was Edward IV's granddaughter
(grandmother obscure, but not Elizabeth Woodville), rather than his
daughter, whose time was spent at the nunnery in Dartford.

Best wishes
Christine