Part 224

What is a public school in England? "The question is one of considerable difficulty. To some extent, however, the answer has been furnished by the Royal Commission appointed in 1861 to inquire into the nature and application of the endowments and revenues, and into the administration and management of certain specified colleges and schools commonly known as the Public Schools Commission. Nine are named in the Queen's letter of appointment, viz., Eton, Winchester, Westminster, the Charterhouse, St. Paul's, Merchant Taylors', Harrow, Rugby, and Shrewsbury. The reasons probably which suggested this selection were, that the nine named foundations had in the course of centuries emerged from the mass of endowed grammar-schools, and had made for themselves a position which justified their being placed in a distinct category, and classed as 'public schools.' It will be seen as we proceed that all these nine have certain features in common, distinguishing them from the ordinary grammar-schools which exist in almost every country town in England. Many of these latter are now waking up to the requirements of the new time and following the example of their more illustrious sisters. The most notable examples of this revival are such schools as those at Sherborne, Giggleswick, and Tunbridge Wells, which, while remodelling themselves on the lines laid down by the Public Schools Commissioners, are to some extent providing a training more adapted to the means and requirements of our middle classes in the nineteenth century than can be found at any of the nine public schools. {711} But twenty years ago the movement which has since made such astonishing progress was scarcely felt in quiet country places like these, and the old endowments were allowed to run to waste in a fashion which is now scarcely credible. The same impulse which has put new life into the endowed grammar-schools throughout England has worked even more remarkably in another direction. The Victorian age bids fair to rival the Elizabethan in the number and importance of the new schools which it has founded and will hand on to the coming generation. Marlborough, Haileybury, Uppingham, Rossall, Clifton, Cheltenham, Radley, Malvern, and Wellington College, are nine schools which have taken their place in the first rank. … In order, then, to get clear ideas on the general question, we must keep these three classes of schools in mind—the nine old foundations recognized in the first instance by the Royal Commission of 1861; the old foundations which have remained local grammar-schools until within the last few years, but are now enlarging their bounds, conforming more or less to the public-school system, and becoming national institutions; and, lastly, the modern foundations which started from the first as public schools, professing to adapt themselves to the new circumstances and requirements of modern English life. The public schools of England fall under one or other of these categories. … We may now turn to the historic side of the question, dealing first, as is due to their importance, with the nine schools of our first category. The oldest, and in some respects most famous of these, is Winchester School, or, as it was named by its founder William of Wykeham, the College of St. Mary of Winchester, founded in 1382. Its constitution still retains much of the impress left on it by the great Bishop of the greatest Plantagenet King, five centuries ago. Toward the end of the fourteenth century Oxford was already the center of English education, but from the want of grammar-schools boys went up by hundreds untaught in the simplest rudiments of learning, and when there lived in private hostels or lodging-houses, in a vast throng, under no discipline, and exposed to many hardships and temptations. In view of this state of things, William of Wykeham founded his grammar-school at Winchester and his college at Oxford, binding the two together, so that the school might send up properly trained scholars to the university, where they would be received at New College, in a suitable academical home, which should in its turn furnish governors and masters for the school. … Next in date comes the royal foundation of Eton, or 'The College of the Blessed Mary of Eton, near Windsor.' It was founded by Henry VI., A. D. 1446, upon the model of Winchester, with a collegiate establishment of a provost, ten fellows (reduced to seven in the reign of Edward IV.), seventy scholars, and ten chaplains (now reduced to two; who are called 'conducts'), and a head and lower master, ten lay clerks, and twelve choristers. The provost and fellows are the governing body, who appoint the head master. … Around this center the great school, numbering now a thousand boys, has gathered, the college, however, still retaining its own separate organization and traditions. Besides the splendid buildings and playing-fields at Eton, the college holds real property of the yearly value of upward of £20,000, and forty' livings ranging from £100 to £1,200 of yearly value. … The school next in date stands out in sharp contrast to Winchester and Eton. It is St. Paul's School, founded by Dean Colet. … Shrewsbury School, which follows next in order of seniority, claims a royal foundation, but is in reality the true child of the town's folk. The dissolution of the monasteries destroyed also the seminaries attached to many of them, to the great injury of popular education. This was specially the case in Shropshire, so in 1551 the bailiffs, burgesses, and inhabitants of Shrewsbury and the neighborhood petitioned Edward VI. for a grant of some portion of the estates of the dissolved collegiate churches for the purpose of founding a free school. The King consented, and granted to the petitioners the appropriated tithes of several livings and a charter, but died before the school was organized. It was in abeyance during Mary's reign, but opened in the fourth year of Elizabeth, 1562, by Thomas Aston. … We have now reached the great group of Elizabethan schools, to which indeed Shrewsbury may also be said to belong, as it was not opened until the Queen had been three years on the throne. The two metropolitan schools of Westminster and Merchant Taylors' were in fact founded in 1560, two years before the opening of Shrewsbury. Westminster as a royal foundation must take precedence. It is a grammar-school attached by the Queen to the collegiate church of St. Peter, commonly called Westminster Abbey, and founded for the free education of forty scholars in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The Queen, with characteristic thriftiness, provided no endowment for her school, leaving the cost of maintenance as a charge on the general revenues of the dean and chapter, which indeed were, then as now, fully competent to sustain the burden. … Merchant Taylors', the other metropolitan school founded in 1560, owes its origin to Sir Thomas White, a member of the Court of Assistants of the company, and founder of St. John's College, Oxford. It was probably his promise to connect the school with his college which induced the Company to undertake the task. … Sir Thomas White redeemed his promise by endowing the school with thirty-seven fellowships at St. John's College. … Rugby, or the free school of Lawrence Sheriff, follows next in order, having been founded in 1567 by Lawrence Sheriff, grocer, and citizen of London. His 'intent' (as the document expressing his wishes is called) declares that his lands in Rugby and Brownsover, and his 'third of a pasture-ground in Gray's Inn Fields, called Conduit Close,' shall be applied to maintain a free grammar school for the children of Rugby and Brownsover, and the places adjoining, and four poor almsmen of the same parishes. These estates, after providing a fair schoolhouse and residences for the master and almsmen, at first produced a rental of only £24 13s. 4d. In due time, however, Conduit Close became a part of central London, and Rugby School the owner of eight acres of houses in and about the present Lamb's Conduit Street. The income of the whole trust property amounts now to about £6,000, of which £255 is expended on the maintenance of the twelve almsmen. … Harrow School was founded in 1571, four years later than Rugby, by John Lyon, a yeoman of the parish. {712} He was owner of certain small estates in and about Harrow and Barnet, and of others at Paddington and Kilburn. All these he devoted to public purposes, but unfortunately gave the former for the perpetual education of the children and youth of the parish, and the latter for the maintenance and repair of the highways from Harrow and Edgeware to London. The present yearly revenue of the school estates is barely over £1,000, while that of the highway trust is nearly £4,000. But, though the poorest in endowments, Harrow, from its nearness to London, and consequent attractions for the classes who spend a large portion of their year in the metropolis either in attendance in Parliament, or for pleasure, has become the rival of Eton as a fashionable school. … Last on the list of the nine schools comes the Charterhouse (the Whitefriars of Thackeray's novels). It may be fairly classed with the Elizabethan schools, though actually founded in 1609, after the accession of James I. In that year a substantial yeoman, Thomas Sutton by name, purchased from Lord Suffolk the lately dissolved Charterhouse, by Smithfield, and obtained letters patent empowering him to found a hospital and school on the old site."

_T. Hughes, The Public Schools of England (North American Review, April, 1879)._

EDUCATION: England Fagging.

"In rougher days it was found, that in large schools the stronger and larger boys reduced the smaller and weaker to the condition of Helots. Here the authorities stepped in, and despairing of eradicating the evil, took the power which mere strength had won, and conferred it upon the seniors of the school—the members, that is, of the highest form or forms. As in those days, promotion was pretty much a matter of rotation, everyone who remained his full time at the school, was pretty sure to reach in time the dominant class, and the humblest fag looked forward to the day when he would join the ranks of the ruling aristocracy. Meantime he was no longer at the beck of any stronger or ruder classfellow. His 'master' was in theory, and often in practice, his best protector: he imposed upon him very likely what may be called menial offices—made him carry home his 'Musæ'—field for him at cricket—brush his coat; if we are to believe school myths and traditions, black his shoes, and even take the chill off his sheets. The boy, how-ever, saw the son of a Howard or a Percy similarly employed by his side, and in cheerfully submitting to an ancient custom, he was but following out the tendencies of the age and class to which he belonged. … The mere abolition of the right of fagging, vague and undefined as were the duties attached to it, would have been a loss rather than a gain to the oppressed as a class. It would merely have substituted for the existing law, imperfect and anomalous as that law might be, the licence of brute force and the dominion of boyish truculence. … Such was, more or less, the state of things when he to whom English education owes so incalculable a debt, was placed at the head of Rugby School. … It was hoped that he who braved the anger of his order by his pamphlet on Church Reform—at whose bold and uncompromising language bishops stood aghast and courtly nobles remonstrated in vain—would make short work of ancient saws and mediæval traditions—that a revolution in school life was at hand. And they were not mistaken. … What he did was to seize on the really valuable part of the existing system—to inspire it with that new life, and those loftier purposes, without which mere institutions, great or small, must, sooner or later, wither away and perish. His first step was to effect an important change in the actual machinery of the school—one which, in itself, amounted to a revolution. The highest form in the school was no longer open to all whom a routine promotion might raise in course of time to its level. Industry and talent as tested by careful examinations (in the additional labour of which he himself bore the heaviest burden), were the only qualifications recognised. The new-modelled 'sixth form' were told, that the privileges and powers which their predecessors had enjoyed for ages were not to be wrested from them; but that they were to be held for the common good, as the badges and instruments of duties and responsibilities, such as anyone with less confidence in those whom he addressed would have hesitated to impose. They were told plainly that without their co-operation there was no hope of keeping in check the evils inherent in a society of boys. Tyranny, falsehood, drinking, party-spirit, coarseness, selfishness—the evil spirits that infest schools—these they heard Sunday after Sunday put in their true light by a majestic voice and a manly presence, with words, accents, and manner which would live in their memory for years; but they were warned that, to exercise such spirits, something more was needed than the watchfulness of masters and the energy of their chief. They themselves must use their large powers, entrusted to them in recognition of the principle, or rather of the fact, that in a large society of boys some must of necessity hold sway, to keep down, in themselves and those about them, principles and practices which are ever ready, like hideous weeds, to choke the growth of all that is fair and noble in such institutions. Dr. Arnold persevered in spite of opposition, obloquy, and misrepresentation. … But he firmly established his system, and his successors, men differing in training and temperament from himself and from each other, have agreed in cordially sustaining it. His pupils and theirs, men in very different walks of life, filling honourable posts at the universities and public schools, or ruling the millions of India, or working among the blind and toiling multitudes of our great towns, feel daily how much of their usefulness and power they owe to the sense of high trust and high duty which they imbibed at school."

_Our Public Schools—Their Discipline and Instruction (Fraser's Magazine, volume 1, pages 407-409)._

EDUCATION: England: A. D. 1699-1870. The rise of Elementary Schools.