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| ISBN-13: | 9780300189926 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/28/2015 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d) |
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The Old Boys
The Decline and Rise of the Public School
By David Turner
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 David TurnerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-21313-3
CHAPTER 1
An Idealistic Cynic and the Birth of a System
1382–1603
William of Wykeham was an idealist and a cynic; a man who strove to help the poor but worked hard to do favours for the rich and powerful; a servant of the Church and one of the richest men in England, taking rental income from green agricultural land and the grimy brothels of Southwark alike. He was a bishop but far from a saint. He transmitted the tensions and contradictions in his character and circumstance to the great British institution which he accidentally founded: the public school movement. The public schools would bear the mark of Wykeham for centuries.
Wykeham took his surname from the Hampshire village, ten miles from Winchester, where he entered the world in the mid-1320s into a family at the wealthier end of the peasantry. After a local education, probably at the grammar school at Winchester, in his twenties he somehow came to the attention of the powerful Bishop of Winchester, William Edington; through Edington and other powerful local figures he entered the world that revolved around King Edward III. By his mid-thirties he had become a close confidant of the king and the keeper of his signet seal, used to mark his royal approval to actions. By 1367 he was Chancellor of England, bishop of Edington's old see of Winchester and the most powerful commoner in the country. His income from the Bishop's lands – £4,000 a year (£3.6 million in 2012 prices) – made him immensely wealthy. 'Everything was done by him, and nothing was done without him', wrote the contemporary chronicler Jean Froissart, wryly imitating the description of God in St John's Gospel.
Wykeham was a likeable man, but in common with many powerful people he tended to be most likeable to those whose liking for him might pay dividends. He pressed, in a gently and compassionately worded letter, for the readmission to her convent of Isabella Gervays, a nun expelled for falling pregnant. Gervays came, perhaps not without coincidence, from a Hampshire gentry family with whom Wykeham had business dealings. He was harsher, however, towards another naughty nun, Marion de Rye, who lacked such connections, in this case simply agreeing to let the abbess do as she thought fit rather than intervening on Marion's behalf. Wykeham could also be ruthless: in 1388 he bought, for a fire-sale price, the London house of Robert Bealknap, which had been forfeited in the Merciless Parliament when many members of Richard Il's court were convicted of treason.
He seems, at first sight, to be the ultimate insider: a man constantly at the king's side, a man whose keeping of the signet seal meant that he could, literally, never be far from the monarch. In some ways, however, Wykeham remained an outsider. He did not come from an aristocratic family, like many of the court figures and some of the bishops. He had not even gone to university. By the mid-fourteenth century, the post of bishop was already rapidly becoming England's first graduate-only profession, some six-and-a-half centuries before government policy imposed the same fate on nursing, one of the last professions to remain open to non-graduates. When Wykeham had been promoted to the see of Winchester, he had faced accusations of a lack of learning because of the absence of a university background, even though he was a highly intelligent man with a particular gift for languages.
Wykeham did receive an education of sorts. The details are sketchy, but he probably attended the local grammar school in Winchester. The cost of the education would have been modest – perhaps 4d (£15) a quarter – but the additional necessary expense of boarding the child in the town would have been onerous. A further burden was the labour forgone in allowing him to attend school rather than work on the land. This sacrifice shows that Wykeham's parents were more ambitious for their child than most peasants, largely because they were richer. Most children in the poor and middling classes were either not schooled at all, or given a rudimentary education through sporadic attendance in what were known as 'petty schools': informal schools, run by a single teacher, imparting the basics of reading and perhaps writing and counting. The education of the bulk of the population would remain extremely deficient until well into the nineteenth century.
England was not a complete educational desert, however, during Wykeham's time. The country had a network of grammar schools, which aspired beyond simple literacy and numeracy to teach Latin to a high standard. Until the sixteenth century many jobs would have been impossible without a knowledge of Latin, the prevailing language not simply for church services, but also for legal documents, academic treatises, and communications between merchants of different countries requiring a lingua franca. It was the language of scholarship, the law and even international trade. These schools primarily taught children from relatively well-off families, who could afford the financial burden. The brighter or richer of these children sometimes went on to the two English universities, Oxford and Cambridge, for higher studies. The grammar schools also taught some boys from noble families, though many of these were educated, instead, in small groups in the palaces of bishops entrusted by parents with their care, in the houses of other nobles, or at home. The education of nobles outside the grammar schools often took on a more military bent, with the teaching of swordsmanship and other martial arts; they were, after all, still a warrior class.
By our standards, mediaeval education was cruel. In 1373 the bishop of Norwich forbade teaching in the churches of King's Lynn, on the grounds that the cries of beaten pupils distracted worshippers. In mediaeval iconography the Virgin Mary was often depicted wearing a mantle of soothing blue, St Dorothy with a rustic basket of flowers, and the schoolmaster with a whip in his hand. In 1301 the teacher John Newshom was found drowned in the River Cherwell. The cause of his misadventure was firmly job-related: he was so focused on cutting willow from the riverbank with which to beat his pupils that he fell in. One can almost hear cheers from the legions of schoolboys victimized over the centuries. However, education was not always something that was meted out; school textbooks of the time show attempts at rhyme, wit and humour designed to engage the interest of pupils.
This system had certainly been good enough to produce enough men with enough learning to fill the ranks of the priesthood, but the Black Death, which hit in England in 1348 during Wykeham's early adulthood, broke this system down. The population halved, although the number of church posts to be filled remained the same. The half of the population that was left, moreover, was less inclined to enter the priesthood because of the growing opportunities elsewhere: shortages of labour pushed up earnings and increased opportunities in the secular world. In 1346, just before the outbreak of the Black Death, 115 men were ordained in a single ceremony at St Mary's Church Southwark, in the diocese of Winchester. When Wykeham was ordained in 1362, he was one of only nineteen men ordained that year in the entire diocese. Wykeham realized he had to act.
His solution was to create two huge institutions to educate men to be priests. The first of these to be set up was New College, Oxford, established in 1379 for the study of 'Theology, Canon and Civil Law, and The Arts'. New College was to have seventy scholars, of whom fifty – the vast bulk – should study theology. The second institution was Winchester College, set up in 1382 to act as a feeder school for New College, with fellows at the Oxford college to come exclusively from Winchester once it had produced sufficient numbers to make this possible. After many years of construction, Winchester College took in its first pupils in 1394.
Winchester College was, in keeping with its purpose in educating boys to enter the clerical world, a very monastic institution, where boys led an austere and secluded life. They grew up in an all-male environment, enforced with a paranoid degree of strictness; the statutes decreed that 'every service to the said College' was to be done by males, before laying down the rules to be followed in the unfortunate and extreme event that a washerwoman must be used: 'She is to receive everything to be washed at the outer gate of the College from the hands of a servant appointed to the task by the College and bound by oath; and this washerwoman we wish to be of such age and condition as to be most unlikely to excite any sinister suspicion.' Furthermore, the boys were obliged to speak only Latin, the language of the Church, in school, and were commanded to 'wear a decent tonsure' – the haircut that distinguished the cleric from the lay person – 'under penalty of final expulsion'. The religious nature of the institution was reinforced at every level: the schoolroom followed an east-west axis, in imitation of churches. As late as the eighteenth century the old mediaeval fasts were still observed on Friday and Saturday at the school; Winchester and other boarding schools maintained some of the monastic characteristics established by Wykeham, such as the intensely male environment and ascetic conditions, into the twentieth century.
The education demanded of a Winchester scholar, entering the school most commonly at the age of eleven or twelve, would have been unusually long and rigorous by the standards of the time. Wykeham's statutes envisaged a schoolboy staying on until the age of eighteen or nineteen. By that point he would have been considerably better prepared for advanced study at Oxford than the many boys who went to the university at thirteen, fourteen or fifteen to use it as a substitute for an advanced education at school. Winchester's focus was, as the statutes make clear, on 'grammar', which at that time meant literacy in Latin, including speaking as well as writing. All the pupils were educated in a single large room, sitting on benches without desks.
This education yielded results. Winchester was highly successful, even in its first decades, at producing not merely satisfactory scholars but eminent churchmen. The first alumnus to achieve notable worldly success not founded on his own family connections was probably Thomas Beckington. Admitted as a scholar in 1403, he became a useful lawyer to Henry V, making his name with legal treatises in favour of Henry V's claim to the throne of France, before becoming Bishop of Bath and Wells. As the first distinguished public school old boy, Beckington represents a milestone in the history of a movement that would have died out had it not been seen to produce successful men of the world on a regular basis. The next century was, for a school that often fell to below a hundred pupils, to educate a disproportionately large number of senior bishops, most notably of all William Warham, scourge of monastic corruption, Lord Chancellor, and Winchester scholar in 1469.
It is in the admission of pupils that the conflict between Wykeham's ideals and his worldly life appear. He envisaged Winchester partly as an agent of social mobility, a place which could give to children of his humble background the rigorous education which he had never enjoyed. Winchester's charter laments the 'many poor scholars engaged in scholastic disciplines who, suffering from deficiency, penury, and indigence, lack and will lack in the future the proper means for continuing and advancing in the aforesaid art of grammar. Wykeham's solution: in order that 'poor and needy scholars' may 'be able to devote more time and leisure' to study, 'we propose ... to help and bestow our charity to support them'. The number of poor scholars to be educated and boarded for free at the college was fixed at seventy – the tally of disciples sent out by Jesus to spread the word of God according to the Gospel of Luke. Wykeham's definition of poverty was not limited to below-the-breadline pauperism. His statutes specified that a scholar could not, unless a blood relation of Wykeham's, come from a family with an income of more than 5 marks (£3 6s 8d, equivalent to £3,500 in 2012 prices) a year. This was more than the earnings of many clergymen in the diocese of Winchester, or of a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, for example. Nevertheless, this stipulation would have excluded genuinely wealthy families.
From the start the college attracted families far above the 'poor and needy', however liberally defined. The lands given to it by Wykeham made it one of the richest religious foundations in the country. Its size and wealth generated an endless stream of curious visitors, ranging from Oxford academics to the Duke of Brittany. The twin institutions of Winchester and New College constituted an ambitious undertaking, which made the ruling classes take notice. They also wanted their children to attend.
Wykeham accommodated the rich and powerful by inserting an escape clause in the statutes: in addition to the scholars, 'we allow, however, sons of noble and influential persons, special friends of the said College, up to the number of ten to be instructed and informed in grammar within the same College, without burden upon the aforesaid College'. They would, in other words, have to pay fees to the college for their upkeep. From the very beginning the school attracted these fee-payers from towards the top of society – known as commoners, to distinguish them from the scholars who were educated for free. By 1412 there were as many as a hundred of them, often sons of the local Hampshire gentry. For most of Winchester's history these commoners would outnumber the scholars.
The most eye-catching names, however – the names of rich and powerful families – are often to be found not among the commoners but among the scholars. Although the lists of scholars do not show members of the high aristocracy at the beginning, they reveal a range of families from England's upper economic echelons. Mixed in with well-known local gentry families were upper-class families from much further afield, thus showing that from the start Winchester was more than a mere local school. Early scholars included John, son of Sir Robert Cherlton, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, Thomas, son of Philip Walwayn, Usher of the King's Chamber, and the sons of Robert Bealknap, the exiled former Chief Justice, and of John Cassy, Chief Baron of the Exchequer. Scholars were not only excused any fees; they also had the chance of entering New College, which was barred to commoners.
Given Wykeham's requirement of relative poverty for scholars, the appearance of these names poses a riddle. The answer to this conundrum is that Wykeham appears to have broken his own rules. He did not die until 1404, leaving him many years to oversee the college's administration – and to receive visits from powerful figures lobbying for their sons' entry. The records show that Sir Robert Cherlton visited in 1392, and his son entered the following year. Cassy's son entered the college shortly after his father's 1393 visit, as did Walwayn's son. Wykeham, who remained an active politician and major player in the affairs of state after the college's founding, seems to have used Winchester as a way of dispensing patronage – a standard method for politicians to increase and retain power. In doing so he ignored, at least to an extent, his own pious protestation that the school was for the 'poor and needy'. There were, certainly, still some genuinely needy boys among the scholars, but there were many who were not.
The entry of large numbers of children of the elite clearly broke the college's rules; it was far from Wykeham's original stated intention. It is, however, a highly important historical moment. Wykehams competing motives of idealism and cynicism had created, for the first time, a school where members of England's elite were educated together in large groups, with the aim of preparing a large proportion of them, at least, for a university education. Britain's public school movement had begun.
A connection with the monarch might today confer social cachet on a family or institution, or a certain competitive advantage for a manufacturer of oatmeal cakes. In the fifteenth century, long before parliament had clipped the wings of the Stuarts, monarchical favour was the route to all political power and a good deal of economic power to boot. It is not, therefore, hard to see why The College of Our Lady Mary at Eton, founded by King Henry VI in 1440 close to his favoured home of Windsor Castle, was an instant success.
Henry modelled Eton College very directly on Winchester; he visited the college in 1441 on a recce mission to see how the school was run. He poached its headmaster, William Waynfleet, to organize the newly born school, although there is some debate about whether or not Waynfleet formally became Eton's first headmaster. The religiously significant figure of seventy 'poor and needy' scholars was also borrowed, as was the provision for commoners to board with the college at their expense – though in this case the maximum theoretical limit of commoners was raised to twenty, perhaps bearing the precedent of the high demand for Winchester commoner places in mind. By creating a sister college at Cambridge for Eton scholars – King's College – Henry also imitated Winchester's attempt to fashion a process by which young boys could be set on a comprehensive course of education that ended perhaps a decade later.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Old Boys by David Turner. Copyright © 2015 David Turner. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations vi
Note on Pricing viii
Introduction ix
1 An Idealistic Cynic and the Birth of a System 1382-1603 1
2 Earls and Shoemakers 1611-1767 30
3 Of Frogs and Men 1768-1827 54
4 'First-Character. Second-Physique. Third-Intelligence.' 1828-1869 91
5 'The Monastic System is Getting on My Nerves.' 1870-1902 134
6 Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts 1902-1945 164
7 Embracing the Examination Incubus 1945-1979 193
8 A Golden Age At Last 1980-2014 220
9 Beautiful Natures, Overpriced Products and Self-Destruction 248
10 The Pauline and the Pasty 259
Epilogue 282
Notes 287
Select Bibliography 318
Index 327
Acknowledgements 336
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