Chapter 1 Wykehamical Foundations Winchester College Christopher Jonson was the most charismatic and influential teacher in England in the sixteenth century. Though he only occupied the position of schoolmaster at 1 Winchester College for a single decade – the 1560s – scholars he taught went on to such diverse academic positions as the Regius Professor of Physic [medicine] and the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, the King’s Professor of Civil and Canon Law at Douai, the Professor of Rhetoric at Perugia, and the Professor of Hebrew and Mathematics at the Italian College at Rome. Some went into academic administration: the Registrar of Oxford University, the first President of St John’s College, Oxford, the Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, the Rector of the English College at Rome, and the Principal of New Inn Hall, also in Oxford. Winchester scholars from this decade occupied the bishoprics of Oxford, Worcester and Winchester, together with many senior Church of England posts; and three, Thomas Bilson, Richard Fairclowe, and John Harmar, the subject of this biography, were among the translators of the King James Bible. There were three Roman Catholic martyrs, including Henry Garnet, who was hanged, drawn and quartered following the Gunpowder Plot, and whose evidence at his trial became a by-word for equivocation and provided material for the Porter’s Scene in Macbeth. A second would-be regicide, William Stafford – of the eponymous Stafford Plot – was only dissuaded, it is said, from blowing up Elizabeth I because it would have necessitated the demise of his own mother, who was the queen’s favourite lady-of- the-bedchamber. There were numerous barristers and several medics, one of whom was physician to the queen; there were poets and writers of poetical theory – Winchester College under Jonson has been described as ‘one of the centres generating an interest in poetic theory in Elizabethan England’. One scholar was 2 elected a member of the House of Commons; another became a newly ennobled member of the House of Lords; and a third was appointed a Privy Counsellor. Jonson also taught John Ley, an explorer who twice sailed with Frobisher in search of the North-West Passage, and who was the first Englishman to sail into the River Amazon, besides being a privateer.
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Chapter 1
Wykehamical Foundations
Winchester College
Christopher Jonson was the most charismatic and influential teacher in England in
the sixteenth century. Though he only occupied the position of schoolmaster at 1
Winchester College for a single decade – the 1560s – scholars he taught went on to
such diverse academic positions as the Regius Professor of Physic [medicine] and
the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, the King’s Professor of Civil and Canon
Law at Douai, the Professor of Rhetoric at Perugia, and the Professor of Hebrew
and Mathematics at the Italian College at Rome. Some went into academic
administration: the Registrar of Oxford University, the first President of St John’s
College, Oxford, the Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, the Rector of the English
College at Rome, and the Principal of New Inn Hall, also in Oxford. Winchester
scholars from this decade occupied the bishoprics of Oxford, Worcester and
Winchester, together with many senior Church of England posts; and three, Thomas
Bilson, Richard Fairclowe, and John Harmar, the subject of this biography, were
among the translators of the King James Bible. There were three Roman Catholic
martyrs, including Henry Garnet, who was hanged, drawn and quartered following
the Gunpowder Plot, and whose evidence at his trial became a by-word for
equivocation and provided material for the Porter’s Scene in Macbeth. A second
would-be regicide, William Stafford – of the eponymous Stafford Plot – was only
dissuaded, it is said, from blowing up Elizabeth I because it would have
necessitated the demise of his own mother, who was the queen’s favourite lady-of-
the-bedchamber. There were numerous barristers and several medics, one of
whom was physician to the queen; there were poets and writers of poetical theory
– Winchester College under Jonson has been described as ‘one of the centres
generating an interest in poetic theory in Elizabethan England’. One scholar was 2
elected a member of the House of Commons; another became a newly ennobled
member of the House of Lords; and a third was appointed a Privy Counsellor.
Jonson also taught John Ley, an explorer who twice sailed with Frobisher in search
of the North-West Passage, and who was the first Englishman to sail into the River
Amazon, besides being a privateer.
It was into this intellectually stimulating company that John Harmar arrived in
1569. Little is known of his life before this date, apart from the fact that he was a
poor boy from Newbury whose entry into Winchester was facilitated by Elizabeth I
and the Earl of Leicester. Because of this royal backing, on the election roll of 3
1569 John Harmar was listed in second place, the top of the roll being taken by
Richard Fiennes, whose parents had invoked a lapsed convention that descendants
of William of Wykeham’s family were entitled to free education at Winchester as
‘Founder’s Kin’. The revival of this claim was to cause problems for the college, as
not only were such entrants maintained at the institution’s expense, they were
entitled to remain at the college until the age of 25 if they were not sufficiently
intelligent to proceed to an automatic fellowship at New College, Oxford, where
they also had the right to claim free education and accommodation. 4
We do not know the names or occupations of John Harmar’s parents, nor the year
in which he was born: the register of scholars records he was 14 when he was
admitted on 23 August 1569, which would mean he had been born somewhere
between 24 August 1554 and 23 August 1555. We do not know who brought him to
the attention of Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, who had ensured
his scholarship. But from the moment he arrived at Winchester we know some
remarkable details of his life.
Christopher Jonson, the schoolmaster Harmar first encountered, had been a
scholar at Winchester, having been admitted in 1549; he had proceeded to New
College as a scholar and was elected a fellow there in 1555. Five years later he
returned to Winchester as the schoolmaster. He was not yet thirty. Extant 5
manuscript and printed material provide details of the location and furnishings of
the room in which Jonson taught; we have a reasonably good idea of what he
taught; and we have remarkably precise evidence of his teaching methods. There
is also additional manuscript evidence which tells us how John Harmar and his
fellow students were occupied throughout the day.
Perhaps the most unusual aspect, to twenty-first-century eyes, of school life at
Winchester at the beginning of the sixteenth century was that it was not only a
seven-days-a-week school – records of the Winchester curriculum in 1530 and 1655
make clear that, unlike at Eton, there was teaching on every day of the week,
including Sunday – Winchester was also initially a fifty-two-weeks-a-year school. As
the Victoria County History of Hampshire notes: ‘Of holidays, it may be said that
there were plenty of holy days, but no general holidays. The collegiate example
was directly followed. To the fellows of a college, the college was their home for
life. The collegiate schoolboy was regarded as under the much the same
conditions’. The first recorded occasion when not a single scholar was in 6
residence came in 1518, over one hundred and thirty years after the foundation,
when the college was empty for one week; and it was several years before this 7
happened again, which indicates that what we think of as holiday was an alien
notion in the early years of the sixteenth century. By the time of Jonson’s
appointment, however, there was at least one recognised holiday; though
Christmas and Easter both appear to have come into the category of holy days
rather than holidays. Whitsuntide was the generally accepted break, and even
then, according to the Victoria County History, ‘as late as 1682 it was not a
universal rule for every one to go home for the holidays’. 8
Boys rose at 5 o’clock, got dressed, chanted a Latin psalm, swept the chamber,
and made their beds. They had slept with up to 16 boys in a chamber, though as a 9
result of a benevolent bequest in 1540 each boy did have his own bed: a solid oak
construction with a tester at the head in which there was a single drawer in which
he kept what few individual possessions he may have had. The mattress was 10
straw in a canvas cover. At 5.30 they went to Chapel and said prayers. At 6.00 11
they proceeded to the schoolroom, and there were further prayers before teaching
started. The schoolroom was 46 feet long by 29 feet wide, and accommodated 70
scholars and up to 100 commoners. It was crowded and unpleasant: in one of his
dictations, Jonson declared: ‘no heat of summer, nor the fetid stench of school
which rises from your cramped quarters, will ever distract me’. There were four 12
oak posts to hold up the floor of Hall above, and three two-light windows on the
south side, with triple rows of stone seats in the windows for prefects, from which
they could overlook the other boys. There was a rostrum for declamations; and
there were elevated seats for the schoolmaster and his usher. On the north wall
was a map of the world, and on the east some quotations from Quintilian, while on
the west wall were painted emblematic representations of a boy’s choices in life: a
bishop’s mitre and crozier, the reward for scholarship; a sword, for those who join
the armed services; an ink-pot and book representing the commercial life; and the
apple twigs used for flogging those who choose not to work. 13
There was no fireplace: in winter the bodies crammed into the room would have
been self-preserving, in the same manner as a colony of male emperor penguins in
Antarctica; and in summer teaching took place outside in Cloister. It was not until
9.00 that the boys had their first food of the day, by which time they must have
been ravenous. It was a simple breakfast of bread and beer; followed by individual
study in chambers. At 11.00 back into the school-room for an hour before dinner in
Hall at noon, at which a prefect recited an initial grace; during the meal another
prefect read aloud a chapter from the Old Testament; and at the end of the meal a
grace and a psalm were sung. Then back to study, interrupted in summer at 3.00
for ‘bevers’ – more beer and possibly a little food, the records are not specific on
this detail – before having to show the schoolmaster their written work. At 5.00
there were communal thanks to God, followed by private prayer; the boys
proceeded to supper – always mutton – then back to chambers, where at 8.00 they
sang a Latin psalm and went to bed, when a prefect read a second psalm.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays after morning Chapel, weather permitting, the entire
school walked in pairs to the top of the nearby St Catherine’s Hill, where the boys
engaged in unspecified physical activities, before marching back down again for
breakfast at 9.00. This was repeated after the midday meal and boys were back in
the schoolroom at 3.00. If wet, these times for relaxation were spent in Hall,
which must have been somewhat rowdy.
In 1525 Joan Bradbury, a rich London widow, endowed a new school at Saffron
Walden in Essex and appointed William Dawson to be the chaplain-schoolmaster,
‘being a sufficient grammarian to teach children grammar after the order and use
of teaching grammar in the schools of Winchester or Eton’. In order to ensure this
requirement was met, the two named schools were approached and asked for
details of their curriculum. Somewhere between 1529 and 1531, two replies were
received, though, sadly, the Winchester document now lacks its first leaf, with loss
of some information about what was taught to the classes at the top of the school;
but the material which survives is still far more detailed than the Eton response.
Though the Saffron Walden document was written two decades before Jonson
became schoolmaster, a remarkably similar outline of the Winchester curriculum
written in 1655 suggests that there was continuity of educational practice
throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 14
What the Saffron Walden questionnaire does not reveal is any information about
the teaching of Greek, which may – or may not – have been recorded on the
missing leaf. Unfortunately, the most important source of information about
Jonson’s teaching, a manuscript held in the British Library, also lacks useful 15
information on this topic. William Badger became a scholar in 1561 at the age of
10 and Jonson was his schoolmaster for the entirety of his time at Winchester.
Badger kept a notebook – it is four hundred pages long and contains nearly 450
passages – in which he recorded Jonson’s dictations over several years. Though
there are occasional Greek words and phrases within the passages of Latin, there
are no Greek dictations. Nonetheless it is clear that Jonson was teaching Greek. At
one point he remarks: ‘I thought it worth including the lines because of those who
are studying Greek’; and elsewhere advises, ‘No effort must be spared in 16
collecting words and phrases, and searching for them everywhere, in choosing and
judging the quality and quantity of what you can include, and in comparing Greek
and Latin passages. . .’. There is even evidence of the performing of Greek plays: 17
‘. . . when you are dry old men, you will be able to recall your comedy, and you
will say, “I remember when I was a boy, I took part in what was a Greek play;
acting this character and that. I was an important part in it”, and this will be a
distinction which your forebears never achieved’. This final comment possibly 18
indicates that the absence of reference to Greek in the Saffron Walden document
was simply because it was not taught at Winchester College before Jonson arrived.
Alternatively, the absence of Greek dictations from Badger’s notebook may be
because Badger, who proceeded from Winchester to New College as a scholar and
then a fellow, and became a canon of Salisbury cathedral in 1579, may 19
nonetheless not have been one of the brighter Wykehamists and was not offered
the option of learning Greek. John Harmar, on the other hand, became Regius
Professor of Greek at Oxford, and it is reasonable to suppose he got a grounding in
the language at Winchester. Certainly, when Harmar in turn became schoolmaster
of Winchester Greek passages were regularly included in his dictations.
In each quarter of the year a fortnight was devoted to tests on the previous
quarter’s learning. This rigorous approach produced boys who were bilingual in
English and Latin. Indeed it could be argued that they were more fluent in Latin,
both on paper and orally, having been exposed to so much Latin literature and, it
is clear from the manuscript evidence, having been expected to converse with one
another in Latin rather than English throughout their school careers. Speaking
English, except in cases of dire necessity, was likely to incur severe punishment.
This injunction was a constant refrain in Jonson’s dictations:
The conversations of the young we want to be all in Latin, even of those
who lurk in the bottom classes, and the mother tongue never to be used
except in emergencies. This custom is to be maintained specially in the
upper divisions, and is to be practised and established by law, and upheld by
severe beating. When boys come to school and when they return home,
when they play together, when they walk together and when they meet,
they are to talk in Latin or Greek. Let there be no possibility of pardon for
anyone who intentionally breaks this law. 20
Though these appear to be the words of a martinet, in fact Jonson was a
remarkably lenient teacher, and flogging does not seem to have been much in
evidence at Winchester. This leniency contrasts with the situation at Eton where,
in 1563, it was reported during a dinner hosted by Sir William Cecil ‘that diverse
Scholers of Eaton, be runne awaie from the Schole, for fear of beating’. Jonson, 21
indeed, would have been regarded as, if anything, a little too lenient by
contemporary standards.
Richard Lyllington, a scholar admitted in 1565, was thought three years later at the
age of 16 to have been guilty of ‘pykery’ – petty theft – and is said to have
admitted the offence. Jonson’s account of the matter is revealing: ‘I happened to
chalenge him for the same; but he choesinge rather to be expelled, as he sayde,
then corrected for his falt, dreue his knyfe at me which he had for the purpose
provided, and standinge at ward agaynst me and our Subwarden, sho[w]ed such an
example of stubbernesse to my scholars as theis twenty yeares I have not h[e]ard
the lyke’. 22
Lyllington took himself off to Elizabeth I’s Secretary of State, Sir Robert Cecil,
who, having heard only one side of the story, wrote to Jonson in support of the
boy. In some despair, Jonson wrote to Cecil:
The next tyme I sawe him, he broughte your Honours Letters; upon the sight
whereof I received him agayne, though I perceived he had glosed [veiled
with specious comments] altogether with you. Synce that tyme hitherto, he
hath continued in such overthwartness, as (were it not for your Honoures
sake) nether I nor the College co[u]ld beare him. That which we doe in
sufferinge his evell rule, I feare will prove to the animating of others farder
then good order can abyde. This I beseke your Honour consyder of, and
pardon me if towarde such I discharge my vocation. 23
Boisterous behaviour was even evident in Chapel on occasion: from time to time
Jonson had cause to remind his students just how inappropriate this was. It has 24
to be remembered that for a school of 150 or more boys ranging from 10 to 18+,
there were only two teachers: Jonson himself, and the usher, a Mr Miller.
Winchester College was effectively boy-run – and continued to be organised and
policed by boys until the nineteenth century. The two adults taught: the prefects
were, in theory, the enforcers of discipline. At times they failed and the
schoolmaster had to intervene, but for the most part it was the prefects who ran
the school.
This system enabled Jonson to operate a remarkably humane and effective
teaching regime. Though the dictations were addressed to classes as a whole, the
subsequent written tasks were tailored to each individual boy: ‘it is therefore the
duty of each one of you, though I set and shall prescribe a task to you all
individually, to complete it, working on your own, so that it is not identical wares
which you bring to our market, but a variety of them’. There were clearly 25
sessions each week when all the written tasks were read aloud and compared, so
that the boys learned of the variety of ways in which a theme might be handled.
With a very bright cohort, as was evidently the case at Winchester under Jonson, a
boy like John Harmar would have been exposed to a stimulating range of variations
on themes. As is still the case, an intelligent and lively peer group can do as much,
if not more for an individual’s progress, than any amount of top-down teaching.
The importance of variation is constantly emphasised by Jonson, who supplied
examples from a whole range of classical authors to illustrate his point. Early in his
time at Winchester John Harmar would have encountered one of Jonson’s simpler
examples:
Apparently by Martial:
May the earth lie lightly upon you and the covering of sand be soft lest the
dogs be prevented from digging up your bones.
And by Alciat [Andrea Alciato]:
May the earth lie lightly upon you, not that you may rest in peace, you cruel
man, but that the dogs may have no difficulty in digging up your bones.
But Sleidan [Johannes Sleidanus] wrote:
May you have but a slight covering of dust, Nearchus, after your death, so
that a loathsome pack of dogs may easily dig you up.
I put it like this:
May you have a slight scraping of dust to cover you, cruel Nearchus, so that
the dogs will certainly dig you up very soon.
Try what you can do. 26
The reference here is to the tyrant Nearchus who ordered the torture of the
philosopher Zeno. Zeno’s response is recorded by Diodorus Siculus:
When Zeno's native city was being ground down by the tyranny of Nearchus,
Zeno formed a conspiracy against the tyrant. But he was found out, and
when he was asked by Nearchus, while suffering the agonies of the torture,
who his fellow conspirators were, he replied, "Would that I were as much
the master of my body as I am of my tongue!" And when the tyrant made the
torture more and more severe, Zeno still withstood it for a while; and then,
being eager to be rid at last of the agony and at the same time to be
revenged upon Nearchus, he devised the following plan. During the greatest
intensity of the torture, pretending that his spirit was yielding to his bodily
pains, he cried out, "Relax it! I will tell the whole truth." And when they did
so, he asked Nearchus to come near and listen to him privately, asserting
that many matters he was about to disclose would best be kept secret.
When the tyrant came up to him readily and placed his ear close to Zeno's
lips, Zeno took the tyrant's ear into his mouth and sank his teeth into it. And
when the attendants quickly approached and applied every torment to make
Zeno relax his hold, he held on all the tighter. Finally, being unable to shake
the fortitude of the man, they stabbed him to death that they might in this
way break the hold of his teeth. By this device Zeno got release from the
agonies he was suffering and exacted of the tyrant the only punishment
within his grasp. 27
What William Badger’s notebook reveals is that Christopher Jonson was well aware
of that most important of admonitions to prospective and practising teachers: if
you wish to instruct, you must first entertain – Horace’s ‘Omne tulit punctum qui
miscuit utile dulci’. Though there are many passages of formal classical Latin in
the four hundred pages, there is also a remarkable amount of levity. This takes
several forms. There are memorable word games: Jonson punned on ludus with its
alternative (and to a schoolboy, paradoxical) meanings of ‘game’ and ‘school’, 28
and engaged in untranslatable word-play on bifidum /perfidum and mendaces /
mendacia / mendas / mendacem. There is even a macaronic pun on the English 29
words ‘scholar’ and ‘choler’ which are spelled in Greek letters. There is an 30
acrostic, which, as it deals with the Whitsun holiday, would have particularly
appealed to the boys. And there is a poem purporting to be temporibus Nosnoi 31
regis [‘in the time of King Nosnoi’] which is a transparent reversal of his own
name. There is a poem addressed to the College dog, Willy, and another to the 32 33
scholars’ tame but nameless deer at Moundsmere. Such pets were a feature of 34
Winchester life: from the middle of the seventeenth century for the best part of
two hundred years there was a succession of pet foxes kept on a chain and fed on
sheep’s paunches; and in the eighteenth century the scholars kept a pet eagle in 35
College. There are some rather excruciating Latin puns and one macaronic pun in 36
Latin and Greek forming a nonce-expression pecunia quasi pecudis-νοια, punning
on the Latin pecunia [‘money’] to generate a portmanteau word meaning ‘the
brutish mentality induced by money in men’. The corrupting aspects of a love of 37
money were constantly denounced by Jonson. A former schoolmaster, one Clement
Smith, who taught for only two years, 1464-65, is the subject of an extended pun
on Smith – one who beats [iron on an anvil] – and Clement, which Smith certainly
was not. On one occasion the boys appear to have been scrumping grapes. Jonson 38
gave out a dictation which purported to be from the mouth of the vine. The vine
names the villains:
It is the truth I tell. Bull, Greenfield, the elder Barker, and Waters, White
from Chilcombe, and both wicked Graves, Oxenforth, another was the little
boy – if only I could remember his name. And Fox was there as well (but a
fox would not eat grapes) and Winter with his name cut in the middle;
another was Best, another Greenhill; and these they were who stripped me
of my grapes so nastily. 39
Winchester College has a comprehensive list of all scholars from the foundation:
for commoners the lists only start to be kept from 1653. In this dictation we can
identify the scholars: John Grenefylde, Edward Barker, John Waters, John Whyte,
Matthew Fox, Giles Best, and Nicholas Grenehyll. John Midwinter (‘Winter with his
name cut in the middle’) entered New College in 1567 and must have been a
commoner; and we can assume that Bull, the Graves brothers, Oxenforth and Little
(‘the little boy – if only I could remember his name’ must have raised at least a
smile from the boys) were also commoners. Even if they were subsequently
punished, there would have been a certain glory to have been derived from such
humorous public identification – and the tone of the dictation suggests that this
was another instance of Jonson’s leniency. Naming and shaming may have been
deemed sufficient.
To modern readers some of Jonson’s humour appears impious, arguably
blasphemous, and downright scatological – all forms of humour which appeal to the
adolescent mind and would have been remembered, not only for the content, but
also the vocabulary and the grammatical structures. In a discussion of the final
words of the Emperor Hadrian, the boys were told: ‘ “I find no piety here,” said
someone. True, but there isn’t much impiety either, especially considering he was
a pagan. However his last words were more proper than those of that worst of
two-footed creatures, the Emperor Claudius, which Seneca tells as a joke, “I’ve
dirtied myself”.’ In a dictation concerned with the impossibility of seeing God, 40
Jonson refers to St Paul’s claim that when in ecstasy he had seen things he dared
not describe. Alluding to Moses in Exodus, Jonson rather startlingly goes on to say:
‘But the hinder part of God all the holy fathers and many learned men see in a
certain way, just as I do too…’. Once the boys have digested this extraordinary
claim, Jonson proceeds to clarify his point:
--the hinder part of God, I say, that is, God in his creatures. Because of the
uninterrupted existence of his creatures the Creator is understood to be
eternal; from their vastness he is considered omnipotent; from his ordering
of them, wise; from his management of them, good. It is right, therefore,
for Christians to approach God from behind until they are allowed to go face
to face; for it is written, ‘Seek his face evermore’. 41
Having caught the boys’ attention with an apparently outrageous claim, Jonson
proceeds to a more reasoned and theologically conformist conclusion.
One passage is notably scatological:
Faustus is on a long walk from town with his dog (it is our custom to take
dogs along with us). He meets a stranger with another dog walking quickly
towards town. So the dogs, after each has had a good look at the other,
jump up and fight and growl loudly at each other. Then as dogs often do,
they sniff around, but the other one does it far more than Faustus’s, and
smells his rump and tail and other things too. Faustus says, “What are you
up to, you wicked, presumptuous foreigner, letting that dog of yours kiss
mine like that?” The other man calmly replies to this, “Don’t get so wound
up, whoever you are. You may kiss me like that if you want”. 42
It could be argued that if one imposes a rule requiring the constant use of a
language, then it is necessary to provide the means to communicate in that
language in a range of circumstances. Over an extended period Jonson dictated
parts of his own Latin translation of Batrachomyomachia, a Greek mock-heroic
epic at that time attributed to Homer, which describes a war between the frogs
and the mice. This translation was subsequently published in 1580 by Thomas 43
Purfoote in London as Batrachomyomachia. id est. Ranarum & murium pugna,
Moyse, autrement appelez le Decalogue: Recveillis svr le Champ, et Mot à mot de
ses Predications, lots qu’il preschoit le Deuteronome, sans que depuis y ait esté
rien adiouté ne diminué, published in Geneva by Conrad Badius in 1557. Harmar’s
translation was reprinted, again in London, and again with three variant
publication lines, in 1581. The work was dedicated to Robert Dudley, earl of
Leicester, and the preface pays testimony to Leicester’s patronage and influence
with the queen that had allowed John Harmar to study at Winchester and Oxford:
Your Honour’s good procurement of her Majesty’s gracious favour, whereby I
first became a Scholar in Winchester College, afterward to be removed to
the New College of Oxford, whereof at this present I am a poor member, I
could never since forget, or bury so good a benefit in such great oblivion. 123
This publication is revealing on many levels. It is the first public acknowledgement
of his indebtedness to Elizabeth I and Leicester for enabling his education at
Winchester and New College; it is the first of a number of books which Harmar
dedicated to powerful members of Elizabeth’s court, each publicly reinforcing this
sense of obligation to the queen for the favours, favours which were continued
throughout his life; it is a translation from French, a language he had not been
taught at Winchester, and presumably learned while at Oxford, though it was not a
part of the formal curriculum – it was the first of several modern European
languages in which he was to demonstrate fluency during his career; and that it is
a work of John Calvin he chose to translate shows Harmar’s awareness of the
necessity of proving religious conformity with the prevailing views of the court in
order to advance in life.
Rewards were soon to be bestowed: Elizabeth I sent the young scholar on a
European tour.
Information in this paragraph is derived from Thomas Frederick Kirby, Winchester Scholars. A list 1
of the Wardens, Fellows, and Scholars of Saint Mary College of Winchester, near Winchester, commonly called Winchester College, London: Henry Frowde, 1888, hereafter Kirby, Scholars; and comparing Kirby’s lists with the Dictionary of National Biography, hereafter DNB.
J.W. Binns, Intellectual culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, Leeds: Francis Cairns, 2
1990, p. 149.
Sermons of M. Iohn Calvin, upon the x. Commandements of the Lawe, giuen of God by Moses, 3
otherwise called the Decalogue, trans. John Harmar, London: John Harison, 1581, sig *3a; STC 4452.
T.F. Kirby, Annals of Winchester College from its Foundation in the year 1382 to the Present 4
Time, London: Henry Frowde, 1892, pp. 93-108, hereafter Kirby, Annals; A.F. Leach, ‘Schools’, in H. Arthur Doubleday and William Page (edd.), The Victoria County History of the Counties of England: Hampshire and The Isle of Wight, 5 vols., Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1900-1912, II. 316-19. Hereafter VCH.
Kirby, Scholars, p. 128.5
VCH, II. 276.6
Kirby, Annals, p. 139n.7
VCH, II. 295-96.8
Information in this and succeeding paragraphs from: VCH, II. 296-300; Thomas Wright, ‘Rules of 9
the Free School at Saffron Walden, in Essex, in the reign of Henry VIII’ , Archaeologia, XXXIV, 1851, 37-41.
These were the bequest of William Fleshmonger, scholar 1491, Dean of Chichester. One survives 10
and is preserved in the Fellows’ Library.
VCH, II. 274.11
CJ fol 161a. WCM P9/2/34 is a full transcription and translation by Richard Bass of the dictations 12
given by Jonson. The manuscript (discussed below) is now in the British Library, Add MS 4379. The Bass material was prepared 1992-94 and all quotations from Jonson’s dictations are in Bass’s translation, with silent corrections where appropriate. Subsequent references to this MS are indicated by CJ followed by folio number.
Kirby, Annals, p. 46.13
For details of the Winchester curriculum at this time, see Appendix C.14
BL Add MS 4379, see note 12 above.15
CJ fol 15a.16
CJ fol 174a.17
CJ fol 27b.18
Kirby, Scholars, p. 137.19
CJ fol 141b.20
Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, London: John Daye, 1571, sig Bia; STC 834.21
BL MS Lansdowne 10. art. 55, cited in Henry Ellis, Original letters, illustrative of English 22
history; including numerous royal letters: from autographs in the British Museum, and one or two other collections, Second series (4 vols), London: Harding and Lepard, 1827, II. 312.
Information derived from mutilated marginalia on fol 19b of an early copy on vellum of the 36
College statutes (WCM A5/131). Known as ‘Heete’s Statutes’, after Robert Heete who paid for the copy after being elected a fellow in 1422, this volume was used by the scholars as a doodling pad between the years 1770 and 1790. Several entries are dated.
CJ fol 70a, though the ‘discus’ may not have been the object now so-called: OED has an 47
example from 1614 which refers to ‘Casting or hurling the great stone called discus’.
CJ fols 90b, 145b, 193a.48
CJ fol 6a.49
CJ fol 20b.50
Ecphrasis Anglica in Comœdiam Acolasti. The Comedye of Acolastus translated into oure 51
englysshe tongue after suche manner as chylderne are taught in the grammer schole fyrst worde for worde ... and afterwarde accordynge to the sence ... with admonitions ... for the more perfyte instructynge of the lerners, and ... brefe introductory to ... the dyvers sortes of meters, etc. Interpreted by I. Palsgrave, London: Bethelet, 1540; STC 11470.
Acolastus. De filio prodigo comœdia, Antwerp, 1529, Paris and Cologne, 1554.52
CJ fol 88b.53
CJ fol 89a.54
Records of Early English Drama: Winchester College 1563-1575, Jane Cowling (ed.), p. 2, 55
http://reedprepub.org/browse-records/hampshire-2/winchester-college/; WCM 22215 fol 18b. That the plays were being performed ‘in the Christmas holidays’ indicates that the boys did not go home during the festive season.
REED, pp. 11-12; WCM 22216 fol 43b.56
REED, p. 11; WCM 22216 fol 43b; and see Jane Cowling, ‘Performance at Winchester College’, 57
ROMARD XLVI (2007), pp. 110-111.
Kirby, Scholars, p. 138.58
CJ fol 190a.59
CJ fol 100a.60
CJ fol 142a, first passage.61
CJ fol 142a, second passage.62
Information kindly provided by Stephen Anderson.63
REED, p. 10; WCM 22215, fol 178a.64
REED, p. 10; WCM 22215, fol 214a.65
Ascham, The Scholemaster, fol 20a.66
W. Fitzstephen, ‘Every year on the morning of Shrove-Tuesday, the school-boys of the city of 67
London bring game cocks to their masters, and in the fore part of the day, till dinner time, they are permitted to amuse themselves by seeing them fight’ quoted in Joseph Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, ed. and rev. J. Charles Cox, London: Methuen, [1903], p. 224. Fitzstephen, who died in 1191, was describing the reign of Henry II; see also OED sv cock-fight, where the citations refer to cock-fights in schools as early as 1565-66 and as late as 1815.
CJ fol 95b.68
VCH, II. 342. Commoners were charged one shilling and sixpence.69
CJ fol 128a.70
CJ fol 68a.71
Richard Bass, ‘Sixteenth Century nuts’, in ad familiares. The Journal of the Friends of Classics, 72
Non-juring bishop, 1637-1711; nineteenth-century novelist, 1815-82; candidate for Jack the 73
Ripper, 1857-88.
Discovered by Suzanne Foster, Winchester College Archivist, June 2015.74
CJ fol 146a.75
CJ fol 100a.76
CJ fol 135b.77
CJ fol 186a.78
CJ ibid.79
CJ ibid.80
CJ fol 186b.81
CJ fol 188b.82
CJ fol 45b.83
CJ fol 19b.84
CJ fol 24b.85
CJ fol 42b.86
CJ fol 111b.87
CJ fol 146b.88
CJ fol 92b.89
CJ fol 90a.90
CJ fol 183b.91
CJ fol 140a; I am most grateful to Phil Wexler of the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, 92
MA, and Alain Touwaide of the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions, for pointing out that though using animals in the testing of the strength of poisons is recorded in the second century C.E. in Galen’s De antidotis, those tests were carried out on cocks rather than mice. No reference to mice being used in this way has been located earlier than this dictation by Jonson.
Register of the University of Oxford, ed. Andrew Clark, Oxford: Oxford Historical Society, 100
1887, Vol. II, pt. 1, 125-28; hereafter Oxford Register.
Kirby, Scholars, p. 125.101
Oxford Register, pp. 125, 126-28.102
Gillian Lewis, ‘The Faculty of Medicine’, in The History of the University of Oxford, Volume III: 103
The Collegiate University, ed. James McConica, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, p.218.
‘There is a suggestion that [Jonson] had some sympathy with the Old Religion and that he and 104
Stempe were ‘Catholics at heart’ and may have influenced Henry Garnet. . . . [Jonson] resigned shortly after Bishop Horne had issued his injunctions in 1571 to stamp out all traces of Catholicism in the college, but we do not know whether this was because he disliked the injunctions or merely because he wanted to pursue his medical interests.’ Patrick McGrath, ‘Winchester College and the Old Religion in the Sixteenth Century’, in Roger Custance (ed.), Winchester College Sixth Centenary Essays, Oxford: OUP, 1982, p. 250.
24 April 1571, WCM 23441.105
Kirby, Scholars, p. 136; and DNB, William Richardson, ‘Thomas Bilson’.106
REED, pp. 11-12; WCM 22216, fols 43v and 78a.107
REED, p. 11; WCM 22215, fol 252a.108
The 1531 curriculum document had been compiled by Richard Twychener, who had been 109
admitted a scholar in 1518, and was schoolmaster from 1531 to 1535. He was succeeded by John White, who had been admitted a scholar in 1521, was schoolmaster from 1535 to 1541, and eventually became bishop of Lincoln. Twychener and White had both been taught by Thomas Erlisman. White was succeeded as schoolmaster by Thomas Baylie, who had entered as a scholar in 1528 under the mastership of Richard Twychener’s elder brother John. Baylie, in turn, was followed in 1546 by William Evered, who, though not recorded as a scholar of Winchester, became a fellow of New College in 1540, and thus is almost certain to have been a Winchester commoner under White. Evered taught until 1552, when Thomas Hyde was appointed. He had been a scholar under John White in 1537. Hyde was succeeded by Christopher Jonson, who had been a scholar under Evered and had, with Hyde, taught Bilson. See Kirby, Scholars, passim.
Sermons of M. Iohn Calvin, sig *3r.110
CJ fol 90a.111
Michael Bullen, John Crook, Rodney Hubbuck and Nikolaus Pevsner, Hampshire: Winchester and 112
the North [The Buildings of England], New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010, pp. 644-45, 647, 648, 649.
Jennifer Sherwood and Nikolaus Pevsner, Oxfordshire [The Buildings of England], 113
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974, pp. 84, 166, 168.
Michael Burden, ‘College Buildings’, in New College, ed. Christopher Tyerman, London: Third 114
Millenium, 2010, p. 14.
Sherwood and Pevsner, Oxfordshire, p. 168, re New College Gate Tower: ‘It has an archway 115
with four-centred arch and two big continuous hollow chamfers – the same moulding as appears frequently at Winchester College.’
Information kindly supplied by Jennifer Thorp, New College Archivist.116
John Newman, ‘New Building and Adaptation’, in McConica (ed.), The Collegiate University, 117
pp. 628, 653 n.5.
Strickland Gibson (ed.), Statuta antiqua universitatis Oxoniensis, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 118
1931, p. 410.
Gibson, Statuta, p. 343.119
Oxford Register, Vol. II, pt. 1, p.9.120
ibid., failure to escort lecturer, 2d; absence from lecture, 2d; failure to take notes, 2d.121
See Appendix A below, ‘John Harmar’s Publications’.122