CE Winchester College 15.xii.X

[Magnificat]

Catching the plane tomorrow to egalitarian but achieving Norway!

Ardcarp,

You timed your departure date well. You may just be lucky and get off the ground. Hope you find some snow!!

Happy Christmas.

VCC

[Quilisma]

Goddag, ardcarp! Hvordan går det? Jeg håper du får en være hyggelig opphold i Norge! (I hope that's vaguely right! Norway is wonderful; I went there for a couple of weeks fifteen years ago and loved every minute.)

Don't worry, you didn't come over as anything of the sort! I quite agree with you, and I think that is what William of Wykeham was expressly trying to change in his own small way. The fourteenth century was a very turbulent time, in many ways not dissimilar to our own but far more vividly horrific. A period of prosperity and growth came to an abrupt and catastrophic end, with several successive years of extremely inclement weather causing the almost total ruination of one harvest after another, which brought about critical shortages not just in luxuries but in the things necessary for life. Then there were pandemics killing livestock and people. Many communities found it virtually impossible to continue; the serfs were dying in their thousands, with subsistence farming no longer guaranteeing their survival, while opportunists exploited their plight by hoarding commodities and putting prices up and up. Even the church showed little compassion, with taxes and fines often strictly enforced as if the serfs had brought their poverty on themselves. In the years and decades after this, with the decimated rural population struggling to recover, it was hard to forget how some had used this protracted tragedy as an excuse to exploit those who had the least and were least free to do anything about it. And then came the second wave of tragedy, the Black Death. But this time it was clear that the rich and powerful were not immune: this disease was blind to status, rank, power and favour, and, so the thinking went, so was God. When everything was stripped away, the rulers were seen to be no "better" than the peasants, and therefore the peasants were no "worse" than the rulers. There were many different responses to this idea in the following decades as the old feudal hierarchies continued, most famously the Peasants' Revolt and the Lollards. But William of Wykeham's reponse was one of the more productive and enlightened.

He was born in the small Hampshire town of Wickham in the early 1320s, in the direct aftermath of the Great Famine. As rural life for peasants was extremely harsh, he moved to Winchester to get an education from the Benedictine monks at the Cathedral Priory of St Swithun. He obviously proved to be very gifted because he came to the attention of Edward III, and in the vacuum of skilled people after the Black Death he was thought to be "the man for the job". In 1361, jointly with Peter atte Wood, he was appointed Justice-in-Eyre for England south of the Trent. He was also variously secretary to the Constable of Winchester Castle, King's Commissioner in charge of rebuilding Windsor Castle, Clerk of all the King's Works in the Manors of Henley-on-Thames and Easthampstead, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal (1363-1367), and Lord Chancellor (1367-1371, and 1389-1391 under Richard II). Meanwhile, he was ordained in 1362 and served as Bishop of Winchester from 1366 until his death in 1404, completing the reconstruction of the Cathedral nave in the Perpendicular Gothic style. But he never forgot his humble origins, and I daresay he was a pivotal advisor to Richard II during crises such as the Peasants' Revolt because he actually understood their complaints.

This was a time when the number of academic colleges was expanding enormously, and it's not surprising that William of Wykeham wanted to do his bit to further the cause of education, given the role it had played in his own life. In 1369 he started buying land in Oxford, and in 1380 work began on building his College of St Mary of Winchester in Oxford, better known as New College. Meanwhile, he also wanted to improve the educational prospects for poor people in the Hampshire area, so by 1373 he was already planning a preparatory college in Winchester itself. So the College of St Mary of Winchester by Winchester was finally "launched" (as we might now say) in 1382 and opened in 1394. Of course, provision for seventy poor scholars was a drop in the ocean, but rather than being a solution to the problem of the nation's poor having extremely limited opportunities it was a pioneering prototype model which he would have wished to see repeated in every major town: that people with power, influence and money, in church and in state, should use it to establish institutions which would nurture and develop the talents and aspirations of those less fortunate than themselves, so that one's background should no longer present an obstacle to success. Unfortunately, those with power, influence and money were often more interested in fighting each other and glorifying themselves than being benefactors of institutions for the poor, so this didn't happen on a widespread scale until much later, and many of the later foundations had a rather more specific bias in what they wanted their students to do with their learning.

Another issue is that in the eighteenth century the trappings of culture and learning became rather more fashionable among the aristocracy, so venerable old institutions like Win Coll found the balance of their social demographic changing somewhat as they expanded their fee-paying numbers to accommodate the new demand. It's interesting to note that the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were particularly horrific there (and probably in similar places too), with gambling, violence, bullying and rioting virtually endemic, and, as I said, with the Quiristers used as child labour and often not even provided with accommodation. Life for those low down the pecking order was unremittingly grim. Lord Brougham's Commission of 1818 was horrified to find that "considerable unauthorised deviations" had been made from the original plans of the founder, "dictated more by a regard to the interests of the Fellows than of the scholars, who were the main object of the [foundation] and of the founder's bounty". Very few Fellows actually lived in College anyway, and even those who did rarely cared to make themselves useful. Home-grown reforms were eventually enacted in the late 1830s: they took their time in realising that Lord Brougham wasn't just some ghastly do-gooder and probably did have a point. And so ended the REALLY dark years, although the Quiristers still kept some of their servant duties until 1936.

So, William of Wykeham didn't envisage Wykehamists as getting a special leg-up, of getting advantages and access and preferential treatment that others could only dream of. He seems to have been hoping for a time when no doors would be hidden and locked to the poor, nor held open for special cases to walk straight through, but that each person should be able to find a suitable door and get through it on personal merit alone. That is what all schools should be working towards, but as you point out some do it far better than others. And we have a situation where it is widely assumed that those whose education worked well for them have had an unfair advantage, that they assume it's their automatic right to have not just suitable doors but all doors opened for them, that they feel inherently superior and that this invalidates any genuine talent they may have, and that therefore they must have doors hidden and locked to them to take them down a peg or two. In reality, the vast majority of those of us who have been privileged enough to get a good and encouraging education hate the very idea that we might ever have been given preferential treatment or the benefit of the doubt, and we're not always very good at fighting back when people mumble about "jobs for the boys" and "done deals" and all that sort of thing.

[Quilisma]

A case in point. When I was back teaching there it was on a two-year non-renewable and non-extendable contract. But I was reassured that I would surely be a very strong candidate for an official teacher training course after that. The trouble is that, being a Russian specialist, there are very few teacher training institutions that would even consider dealing with me, ironically because finding a placement is so difficult. But each of those very few institutions has been unable to accommodate me because I don't have a degree in French or German, which are the languages they care about. Given that my first degree was in Russian and Ancient Greek, I am also told that I wouldn't be considered for a Classics PGCE because I don't (officially) have a degree in Latin, which again is the bit of Classics that they actually care about. The more diplomatic places have said "sorry, we realise you already have seven years' teaching experience overall, and you're probably a very good teacher already, but technically you don't have the right qualifications for our course at the moment". People from the less diplomatic places are a bit more blunt, sometimes (off the record) mumbling something about stupid arrogant elitist public school Oxbridge types thinking they have a birthright to waltz straight into teaching when in fact they couldn't teach an alcoholic to drink White Lightning. Pity. I'd have loved to do French and German A Levels, but I was already doing Latin, Greek, Russian and Music and it wasn't possible to squeeze any more in to the timetable. And I'd have loved to read all six of those subjects at university, plus English, History and everything else too really, but doing lots of practical music with a choral scholarship while reading Russian and Ancient Greek seemed to be the best fit. And then, as someone generally fascinated by all languages, I went on to do many years of postgraduate Linguistics. But no, as I'm officially underqualified for PGCE courses that door is closed again. And in these straitened times there are very few vacancies across the board in "fringe" areas like mine, so, despite the alleged special advantage that being a Wykehamist and a Cantabrigian is supposed to bring, I have been unemployed for well over a year now. (I haven't given up hope, and something will turn up soon, I'm sure.)

What I miss most is the opportunity to enthuse, excite, encourage and help inspire others. And I can't help thinking that these are the kind of people sorely lacking in a lot of schools. I'm not saying I know better, but I certainly know what works and what doesn't, and a lot of what goes on in a lot of places, frankly, doesn't.

Ah well, nearly Christmas. Have a good one, everybody!

[Lizzie]

A case in point. When I was back teaching there it was on a two-year non-renewable and non-extendable contract. But I was reassured that I would surely be a very strong candidate for an official teacher training course after that. The trouble is that, being a Russian specialist, there are very few teacher training institutions that would even consider dealing with me, ironically because finding a placement is so difficult. But each of those very few institutions has been unable to accommodate me because I don't have a degree in French or German, which are the languages they care about. Given that my first degree was in Russian and Ancient Greek, I am also told that I wouldn't be considered for a Classics PGCE because I don't (officially) have a degree in Latin, which again is the bit of Classics that they actually care about. The more diplomatic places have said "sorry, we realise you already have seven years' teaching experience overall, and you're probably a very good teacher already, but technically you don't have the right qualifications for our course at the moment". People from the less diplomatic places are a bit more blunt, sometimes (off the record) mumbling something about stupid arrogant elitist public school Oxbridge types thinking they have a birthright to waltz straight into teaching when in fact they couldn't teach an alcoholic to drink White Lightning. Pity. I'd have loved to do French and German A Levels, but I was already doing Latin, Greek, Russian and Music and it wasn't possible to squeeze any more in to the timetable. And I'd have loved to read all six of those subjects at university, plus English, History and everything else too really, but doing lots of practical music with a choral scholarship while reading Russian and Ancient Greek seemed to be the best fit. And then, as someone generally fascinated by all languages, I went on to do many years of postgraduate Linguistics. But no, as I'm officially underqualified for PGCE courses that door is closed again. And in these straitened times there are very few vacancies across the board in "fringe" areas like mine, so, despite the alleged special advantage that being a Wykehamist and a Cantabrigian is supposed to bring, I have been unemployed for well over a year now. (I haven't given up hope, and something will turn up soon, I'm sure.)

What I miss most is the opportunity to enthuse, excite, encourage and help inspire others. And I can't help thinking that these are the kind of people sorely lacking in a lot of schools. I'm not saying I know better, but I certainly know what works and what doesn't, and a lot of what goes on in a lot of places, frankly, doesn't.

Ah well, nearly Christmas. Have a good one, everybody!

It WILL work out Q as I've said to you many times! Your amazing talents WILL be recognised and used properly. Just don't lose heart whatever you do and keep being positive and enthusiastic in all you do. Talk to you soon via our usual other routes. God bless. Liz