Winchester College is no common place. If Winchester Cathedral, which enshrines the bones of Egbert, should be the Mecca of all pious lovers of the Empire, Winchester College should be the Mecca for all English public school men. Not that Wykeham was the first to found an English public school, whatever exactly the term ‘public school’ may mean. Schools had existed in the land for six or seven hundred years before Wykeham’s day. There were schools in Winchester itself, as, for instance, the ancient Winchester Grammar School, seven of the poor scholars of which received a meal daily in the Hundred Mennes Hall at St. Cross. Wykeham did not invent schools as public schools, but what he did was to give to public schools the special impetus and character which they have borne ever since, and in this sense he is rightly named and revered as the ‘Father of English public schools.’
Earlier schools had almost invariably been linked to collegiate churches—the communities of secular canons—and had occupied always a subordinate position. Wykeham gave an independent position to his school, strengthening it indeed by making it part of a collegiate body, and linking it with the University, through the sister foundation of New College—St. Marie College of Wynchester in Oxford, to give it its full name—which Wykeham had completed in 1386.
Before the college could be commenced many preliminaries were necessary,—bulls from the Pope, and other official sanctions, lawsuits and agreements with all kinds of bodies which had an interest in the site; but Wykeham began to organise his school before the permanent buildings were ready, and for some years his scholars were lodged in temporary quarters somewhere by St. Giles’s Hill. The site chosen for the buildings was just outside the city walls to the south, and when at last all was ready, on March 20, 1394, the opening ceremony was solemnized. The aged bishop received the Warden and seventy scholars in the presence chamber of his Episcopal palace of Wolvesey, and the whole body left Wolvesey in solemn procession, and entered and took possession of their new abode.
Wykeham’s immediate purpose in founding a school appears to have been to help to provide a body of educated clergy. Successive visitations of the ‘Black Death’ had depleted the land of clergy, just as it had of labourers, and there was pressing need for a supply of educated men to recruit their ranks. It was to be part of the object of the college to provide such recruits.
The scheme of the college and the statutes of the founders were carefully thought out and elaborated. The college was part of a wide educational scheme: a school and something more—a society, with roots in Oxford as well as in Winchester. The society was to comprise a school, a chantry, and a body of Fellows. The school was to consist of seventy scholars, a number chosen very possibly in symbolical allusion to the seventy ordained to teach and preach throughout the land of Galilee, just as Dean Colet afterwards chose ‘a hundred and fifty and three’ as the number of his scholars in the school he founded—St. Paul’s School, London. Over these were a master or Magister informator, and an usher or hostiarius: the chantry was equipped with three chaplains, three chapel clerks, and
TOWER OF AMBULATORY, HOSPITAL OF ST. CROSS, WINCHESTER
A picturesque red-brick corner of the domestic buildings of St. Cross Hospital, close to the magnificent grey-stone tower and archway known as Beaufort’s Tower.
sixteen choristers: the number of Fellows or Socii was ten. The supreme head over this varied community was the Warden.