OUR OLDEST PUBLIC SCHOOL.*
NOT only every Wykehamist, but every Public School man has incurred a debt of gratitude to Mr. Kirby, the Bursar of Win- chester College, for having brought back to knowledge the foundation and early history of the institution which has been the original and type, and not the least brilliant specimen, of our English Public Schools. Winchester College is about next year to celebrate its five-hundredth anniversary; and perhaps the year 1393, which saw the Warden and scholars take possession of the actually existing buildings, is the best date for the celebration. But if the beginning of the institu- tion, apart from its local habitation, love to be regarded, the date of the charter of foundation in 1382, the Papal Bull for the foundation in 1376, the first known engagement of a Head- Master in 1373, or the earliest known mention by William of Wykeham of "our scholars" in 1369, two years after he became Bishop of Winchester, might as legitimately have been chosen.
Undoubtedly, however, the real charm of antiquity which attaches to Winchester College arises from its continuance in one spot, from the secular worship in the same chapel, from five hundred years of life in the same buildings, and play in the same fields. If the mere antiquity of the institution were to be observed, Winchester and Eton are modern inventions compared with the Cathedral Schools, the so-called King's School at Canterbury, or St. Peter's School at York, which could celebrate their nine-hundredth or twelve-hundredth anniversary if they were so minded. For, after all, Winchester College was no Athene leaping full-armed from the creative brain of William of Wykeham. Brave men lived before Agamemnon, and other Bishops before Wykeham had founded or endowed schools, and even boarding-schools. He took, indeed, a new, and as it turned oat, a very significant and fruitful departure. But it was but a small innovation at the time. Other great schools were established and maintained
* Annali of Win:heater CoVege, 1359-1392. By T. P. Kirby. London : Henry Frowde. 1892. by Bishops, and Deans and Chapters, and Abbots. Others were maintained by Colleges in the Universities, to feed themselves as well as for the public good. It was a step forward, due in all probability to the fact that Winchester Cathedral had been handed over to monks, that William of Wykeham, instead of entrusting his Grammar School to the care of his Chapter, or placing it in his College at the University, created it a separate corporation, and so made it a self-governing institution, independent alike in its fortune and its fortunes. Had it been under the govern- ance of the Cathedral, it might, indeed, have been re- founded on the dissolution of the monastery, as was Canterbury, and have dragged on a half-starved existence like some Cathedral Schools. Had it been attached to New College, it would probably not have attained any larger state than Magdalen College School. It would never have attained the dignity of the doyen of Public Schools, and have enjoyed five centuries of continuous prosperity and educational usefulness.
if, indeed, Mr. Kirby were correct in one of his most important statements—(rather absurdly relegated to a foot-note)—William of Wykeham took a much more " ad- vanced " departure, by establishing for the first time an educational foundation which was not ecclesiastical. But Mr. Kirby's only reason for saying this is that the Letters Patent of Richard II. granting the usual exemptions from toll and tax, exempt the College from the burdens of purveyance, from which, he says, the Church was by statute exempt. How a College of "seventy poor scholars, clerks, to live together in common (collegialiter)," presided over by a Warden, a Bachelor in Theology, with ten Priest-Fellows, three hired chaplains (conducts), and sixteen choristers, whose scholars were to be tonsured at the earliest possible moment, and no small part of whose duties was to attend chapel and pray for the Founder's soul, could be any other than an ecclesiastical foundation, it is hard to see. The very charter of Wykeham founding the College is addressed, not to the world at large, but "to all the sons of holy Mother Church." The whole University of Oxford, and every College therein, was an ecclesiastical institution, every member of the University was an ecclesiastic:, enjoy- ing ecclesiastical privileges, and under direct ecclesiastical government, the Chancellor himself being no more than a com- missioner of the Chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral, who had the cognisance of all schools in the diocese. As for the exemption from purveyance, the value of a general statutable exemption of this sort may be gauged by a letter from no less an ecclesiastical personage than the Prior of Canterbury Cathedral to Queen Philippa, in almost the very year of the Winchester College charter of privileges, in which he accedes to her request to take into the Canterbury School as a boarder a scholar recom- mended by her, and hopes in return that she will prevent the King's purveyors from taking the provision made by the Prior for his own journey to the ensuing Parliament. Wykeham was a man in advance of his times, but he was not so far advanced as to regard education as a matter of lay concern, or to conceive of scholars who were not clerics. Until the seventeenth century, assuredly it never entered into any one's head to contend that "Saint Mary College of Winchester" was anything but an ecclesiastical foundation. Then, indeed, the Courts held that Universities and Colleges were lay foundations, even though presided over by, or composed of, spiritual persons ; but that was a convenient decision to give the lay Courts jurisdiction, not a. historical finding.
Mr. Kirby, is, we think, also wrong in holding that the scholars were not to be "charity boys." Had Wykeham con- tented himself with directing that they were to be pauperes, " poverty " being a comparative term, it might be so argued. But they were also to be indigentes, and " indigence " must. mean absolute poverty. Mr. Kirby says not so, because in the statutes Wykeham used the words charitatis intuitu, "with a view to charity," only when speaking of the choristers. Un- fortunately, however, for this argument, the charter itself says that it is to help "poor and indigent scholars suffering from want of money and indigence," that Wykeham "puts forth a helping hand and imparts the aid of charity (earitatis sub- sidium, impartiri)." Nay, more. In a kind of preamble at the end of the statutes (to use a somewhat Irish expression), Wyke- ham says that, seeing how foundations had been abused, he had seriously thought of distributing his money amongst the poor during his life, instead of leaving it in trust to fools as a permanent foundation, only he was so anxious for poor scholars. Therefore it was that he added the Priest-Fellows as an after- thought to his Warden and scholars, hoping that educated men would keep his statutes and observe his laws. It was a most unfortunate addition. These Priest-Fellows were drones in the hive, and drones who, until the Public Schools Act of 1867, consumed in the form of fines the whole unearned increment of the value of the estates, leaving the schoolmasters to depend on forced contributions levied on the scholars and commoners. Indeed, if it had not been for the almost casual introduction of commoners into the Founder's statutes, it is very questionable whether the College would ever have survived. The Founder provided for only ten commoners, or table-fellows (commensales), in the College, who were to be "sons of noble- men and great persons, special friends of the College." But it would appear from the tone of the statute in which they are mentioned, as well as from the experience of other founda- tions, that he contemplated commoners in the present sense —that is, boys from a distance residing in lodgings, but attending the school for teaching—and also ordinary day-boys. At all events, as early as 1412 there were eighty or one hundred commoners and day-boys, for Cardinal Beaufort, Wykeham's successor, directs the Warden in that year not to allow the Head-Master to teach more than the number prescribed in the statutes, as no master could teach so many. Mr. Kirby rightly says that the gist of this order is not to prohibit commoners, but to insist on additional masters to teach them. Mr. Kirby is also clearly right in his contention (supported by a letter of good traditionary, though not contemporary, authority) that the reason Henry VIII. did not, on the suppression of the Winchester Cathedral monks, re-found a Cathedral School as part of the re-foundation of the Cathedral, was that the College served as the local Grammar School for boys living in Winchester. In 1571, the Warden specifically makes an order affecting the " oppidan or commensal" as well as the scholar; clearly showing that the " town-boy " was at Winchester, and no doubt at Eton, originally a real town day-boy. Again, in 1629, the College petition the Archbishop against a Grammar School being kept in Winchester by an ex-Second-Master of the School —who had thrown up his office and New College fellowship to marry a Winchester citizen's widow—" to the great prejudice of the Collegiate School." Day-boys were only discontinued when what used to be known as "Old Commoners," on the site of the present Head-Master's house and school-buildings, were built by Dr. Burton, Head-Master in 1730, and at his death bequeathed by him to the College. Ever since then, it must be admitted that the citizens of Winchester have had a good grievance against the College which excludes them from its walls.
Bat it was through its scholars and commoners, not through its day-scholars, that Winchester was destined to fame. Through the influence of Archbishop Chichele, formerly a fellow of New College, and Beaufort, Wykeham's successor in the See, Henry VI. had set Winchester before his eyes as the model of a charitable foundation. In 1440, he stayed in college and attended mass ; in 1442, he came again, and gave a hundred nobles for altar ornaments, and distributed the mag- nificent sum of 26 13s. 4d., or something like 2120, among the boys. He came four times in 1445, the second time on his honeymoon. He took the Winchester Statutes bodily for Eton College; and in 1446 had even samples of the soil sent him for guidance in the buildings. Waynflete, the founder of Magdalen College and its school, who was Head-Master of Winchester, was made by Henry VI. the first Head-Master of Eton. The tradition is that he took half Winchester (five Fellows and thirty-five scholars) with him. Mr. Kirby, how- ever, says only six scholars can be traced from Winchester to Eton, and no Fellows ; but two Fellows of New College who had been Winchester scholars, went too. The thirty-five scholars may, however, have been made up, he thinks, of com- moners and day-boys. In the first century of Eton's existence, no less than three of its Head-Masters received promotion to the Head-Mastership of Winchester. In later days, Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, and his immediate predecessor, were both Wyke- hamlets ; and it is notorious that it was by the introduction of Winchester ideas that Arnold raised Rugby to the rank of a great Public School. So that, alike in ancient and in modern times, Winchester may claim to be the mother of Public Schools.
We have no space to follow Mr. Kirby into what perhaps interests him as Bursar more than the School, and that is the accounts of the College, and the odd lights they throw on prices, manners, and customs. Nor can we spare apace to point out many of his inaccuracies as a reader of ancient documents. We must, however, remonstrate against his making a Winchester tanner address Wykeham as his brother, instead of his father, in Christ; attributing heirs to the Prior and Convent of St. S withnn. (the Cathedral) ; making Wykeham himself ignorant of the genitive case of his own diocese, and call a Provost of St. Elizabeth's Chapel a purpose of it. He has advanced one most extraordinary theory founded on what must be a " howler " for which he ought to be "sixth- chambered : "—
" The names of the guests at breakfast at the High Table on June 4th, 1420, are mentioned below. One of them was the wife of a parish clergyman who would scarcely have been of the party, although her husband was an Uvedale, if the wives of parish clergymen had not been generally received in society at this
period In jantaclo fact. Joh. Ervedale, vicario de Hampton, uxori ejusdem. Ric Wallop,' &c."
He really ought not to take away the character of the clergy and the College in this way. If the date had been 1120 A.D., there might be something in it. But in 1420 a parish Vicar could
not have been married, still less his wife received into society. Mr. Kirby must have misread vie, for vice-comiti, into viectrio ; and the person the College really entertained, taking precedence of Wallop, a country gentleman, and no doubt one of Lord Portsmouth's ancestors, was not the Vicar of Hampton- on-Thames, but the Sheriff of Southampton, either town or county.
Previous page
