GREAT ENGLISH CHAPTER I WINCHESTER WINCHESTER's Ancient Benefactors-A MEDIEVAL Fleeced SheepFOLD-WHAT BEFELL THE FLEECERS-WYKEHAM BORN OF POOR PARENTS-RISE TO POWER-Experience of ContempoRARY FATHERLY PATRICIANS HIS CARDINAL ERROR-PUBLIC SCHOOL REALITIES TODAY-MEDIEVAL BISHOP AND PHILANTHROPIST -CHARTER AND STATUTES OF Winchester and New College, Oxford-The FAIR SEX AND THE Middle Ages-LUDICROUS "INJUNCTION "-ENDOWMENTS AND REFORMATION BANDITS-A WONDERFUL OCCURRENCE !-THE Stream of CORRUPTION-LAUD's Rebuke—“ Sacrilege OF GOLDWIN SMITH. We propose in this book to deal, in the first place, with Winchester College, as that is the prototype of the, to foreigners, incomprehensible and anomalous public school*; for from this establishment, founded by William of Wykeham, and from his statutes, was derived the inspiration creating and moulding the schools of other founders. William of Wykeham, the founder of the first "public school" in England, has been rightly styled the "father of the English public school system," although his colleges have long departed far from their original functions and his intention, which were to improve the learning and status of the priesthood by giving better education to poor scholars. By the irony of fate it has been brought about that, to quote Dr. G. W. Kitchin, Dean of Winchester, * Charlemagne is said to have endeavoured to convert monasteries into public schools, when he directed that schools of reading boys should be established in every monastery where psalms, music, arithmetic, grammar and MS. copying should be taught. At the Council of Aachen, on March 23rd, 789, he entreated the regular monks and the secular canons not only to get together the children of slaves, but the sons of freemen, and take them into their society." G.E.S. " those only, as a rule, eat Wykeham's bread whose parents are wealthy enough to be able to undertake the education of their own children," and he further says, that "it is much to be regretted that, over the gulf between the elements of society, Wykeham's colleges have failed to be a bridge." Before the Reformation for the rich, in the sixteenth century, Winchester, along with Gloucester and London, one of the three capital cities of England, bore an honourable record in regard to the education of the poor boy; for, going back to the end of the twelfth century, we find that the monks of the Winton Benedictine Priory of St. Swithun's had a boys' school, the predecessor of Wykeham's, which stood near the west end of the churchyard. There a certain Jordan Fantosma, or "The Spectre," the author of a metrical chronicle concerning Henry II.'s Scottish expedition, taught the Winchester citizens' sons, thirteen of the poorer of them being fed daily by the local Hospital of St. Cross. Then Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester, a man filling the dual rôle of prelate and feudal lord, a builder of some of those numerous robber castles under which the land groaned in dreadful misery in Stephen's anarchical reign; simultaneously a church benefactor and robber; a lover of art and a virtuoso collecting classical statuary, silver and jewels, and all things beautiful and curiousthis soldier-bishop of the twelfth century also commanded that thirteen of the poorest scholars of St. Swithun's should each have his daily portion of food from St. Cross-a hospital which he had founded by charter in 1136, and which stood in the meadows south of Winchester. But, in due course of time the shepherds of St. Swithun's Monastery commenced plundering their flock, and then there entered into the fleeced sheepfold William of Wykeham, who came with a sword of vengeance in his hand' which smote and spared not the monastic knaves. A refined, courtly, and upright man, presenting in his rise to power the type of medieval English churchman seen at his best, Wykeham was—and here some of our modern eugenists, with their theoretical balderdash concerning heredity in relation to genius or ability may frown impatiently—the son of a poor and unbrilliant man. Born in 1342, in a humble homestead near Winton, Wykeham, like the democratic churchman, Latimer, was the son of a freedman and his wife, named John Longe and Sybill Longe, according to an entry in a "Tractatus" in Winchester Cathedral library. His mother was a descendant of the Lord of Stratton, and according to contemporary notions of caste, had forfeited her rank by a mésalliance with a villein, or one holding under a servile tenure. He was sent to the St. Swithun's School by his patron, Sir John Scures, and had been through the regular curriculum of the contemporary grammar school, which signified reading and writing, geometry, French, a little Latin, arithmetic, and dialectic or the scholastic logic. Wykeham possessed ability divorced from genius, and a contemporary observes of him, "quod minus habuit litteraturæ laudabili compensavit liberalitate" (Ann. of Henry IV., p. 391), i.e., "what he lacked of letters was compensated for by his praiseworthy liberality"; and that real goodness of heart underlay his generosity there is ample proof. Wykeham was, in fact, a “natural gentleman," using the term in its best sense. On ascending the See of Winchester he was the most prominent head of the national clerical party, as opposed to the baronial oligarchy which, in the dotage of Edward III., predominated in the constitutional arena. Wykeham soon strained his relations with the prior and monks of St. Swithun's, who resented his attempts to reform them, and his zeal in correcting abuses and corruption in the religious and charitable houses in his diocese involved him in a protracted conflict with the two masters of the Hospital of St. Cross, previously adverted to, who were shamelessly plundering its eleemosynary property, and who denied his right of interference. Six years did this fine fellow struggle with the knaves and brigands of the conventual institutions, but, at last, the judgment of a Papal delegate in Wykeham's favour put a stop to the peculation. Such, indeed, had been Wykeham's experience with regard to the diversion of founders' intentions and the shameless robbery by the "governing classes" of the rightful recipients, that he tells us he was nearly induced to distribute his wealth among the poor with his own hands, when he bethought him that a society of learned men, "having God before their eyes" would observe his statutes. It may be observed here that, prior to the foundation of Winchester College, there had existed at Winchester an unbroken tradition of 230 years' free education and maintenance of poor boys. He decided to found a school at Winchester and college at Oxford in close connection, for the relief of poor scholars and the training of secular clergy to fill the gaps caused by pestilence and war. As early as 1369 he began buying lands for his Oxford college, and by 1376, seventy poor scholars, with Richard Toneworth, fellow of Merton, as warden, were lodged at his expense in various halls on the site of his future cloisters, under the title of "Pauperes Scholares Venerabilis Domini Wilhelmi de Wykeham, Wynton, Episcopi." ("Poor Scholars of the venerable lord, William of Wykeham, of Winton, bishop.") Three years before he had engaged Richard de Herton to instruct his indigent scholars at Winchester " in arte grammatica." But a storm arising out of an attack by the Duke of Lancaster and the Court party surrounding the dying king broke upon him in 1376, interrupted his plans, and dispersed his Oxford scholars. Previously, at Winchester, and the same applies with full force to the country in general, the old grammar school of the town had provided education for all, “even the poorest"; ; "the malign thought of classes, and of rich |