A History of Giggleswick School from its Foundation, 1499 to 1912

by Edward Allen Bell

The income of the Governors rose immediately, in 1766 their rent receipts amounted roughly to £208 and eleven years later to £347 while in 1780 £400 would be a closer estimate.

The Shute Exhibition rents had also increased steadily. In 1739 they were £9 4s. 6d., twenty-five years later £13 9s. and in 1786 over £15. The Masters' salaries were therefore increased. In 1768 the Archbishop had fixed the minimum of Master and Usher at £90 and £45. A few years later £96 was given and in 1776 the sums of £151 and £75, each with a few shillings. In 1784 a new scheme was evolved, William Paley received £180, John Moore's successor—Smith—£70, and a third Master who was apparently engaged to teach Writing and Accounts, and first appears in 1786, received £20 a year.

Expenditure in every direction increased, and an agent, William Iveson, had to be retained to look after the North Cave Estates, at a salary of £1 10s. Repairs to the School became more extensive, Vincent Hallpike was required to make a "box for the Charter," and the Governors made more frequent journeys to their estates, no doubt as a result of the increased facility and diminished expense of travelling, which was a notable feature of the latter part of the eighteenth century. Further they had engaged a third Master, but whether this was due to a slight decrease of attention paid to the School by the Master—and it is well to remember that he was still Curate of Giggleswick and Vicar of Helpston, Peterborough—or due to a real increase in the numbers and requirements of the School is not stated. Several indications point to an increase in the efficiency of the School. In 1783, an advertisement was drafted and published for the appointment of an Usher, whereas before this time they had been content as a rule to take the most promising of those who had recently left the School. Advertising now gave them a wider field of choice. A Lexicon and a Dictionary were bought in the following year for £1 8s. 6d., as well they might be, for the last occasion on which books are recorded to have been bought was in 1626, when the Governors had expended £3 7s.

The Exhibition fund, which came from the rents of the land given by Josias Shute together with the Burton rents and a rent-charge of 3s. 6d. on Thos. Paley's house in Langcliffe, had been gradually accumulating. Few Exhibitions were given and the surplus was put into the capital account. In 1780 the general fund borrowed £160 from the Exhibition money in order to enclose some new allotments in Walling Fen, in accordance with an Act of Parliament. The result was startling. The first year gave them a new rent-roll of £40, the second year saw this sum doubled.

For a hundred and seventy-five years James Carr's "low, small and irregular" building had sufficed for the needs of the School. "Deep in the shady sadness of a vale" it had witnessed the gradual change of the Reformation, it had inspired one of the leaders of Puritan Nonconformity, it had seen the child growth of a great theologian and, more than all, it had roused the imagination and fostered the mental growth of hundreds of the yeomen and cottagers of the North of England. But now its work was accomplished. Flushed with new-found wealth, full of a vague aspiration after progress, conscious perhaps of real deficiencies in the old building, these late eighteenth century Governors spoiled the "many glories of immortal stamp." Carelessly they destroyed the ancient building, without a line to record its glory or its age. It was left to a nameless "Investigator C," in the pages of the Gentleman's Magazine to tell the world what it was losing. Future dreams oversoared past deeds.

SECOND SCHOOL, 1790.

No minutes survive, but the accounts of the year 1787 describe the expenditure on a new building. Three years later the last item was paid for and a new school-house was standing on the site of the old. It was very solidly built and larger than its predecessor. Over the door was fixed the stone on which the Hexameter inscription "Alma dei mater, defende malis Jacobum Kar" etc., was written, and which had already adorned the face of the old building so long. The old division of an upper and lower school was retained, but otherwise details are few. The new School was built at a cost of £276 16s. 8¼d. and served its purpose for over sixty years, when it was then itself replaced in 1851.

With new school buildings, greatly increased revenues and a third Master—Mr. Saul—appointed in 1784 with the privity of the Archbishop of York but not licensed—the Governors were eager to get additional statutory power to increase the teaching staff and pay the surplus money away both in leaving Exhibitions and in gratuities to the Scholars at the School by way of encouragement. There is a letter extant addressed in November, 1794, by the Clerk to the Governors to Mr. Clough, who was requested to lay the whole matter before Mr. Withers and get his legal opinion.

The letter reads as follows, after first quoting the Charter and also the Statutes of 1592, which limited the stipend of the Master to £13 6s. 8d. and of the Usher to £6 13s. 4d.