SCHOOLS 



H 



AMPSHIRE and its capital may claim the first place in the 

 history of English education with even more assured title than 

 they claim it in the history of the English State. The cradle 

 and seat of the power which first made England a united kingdom 

 was also the centre in which was erected the school which became the 

 model of all the public schools, which have been of infinite value in the 

 political and social development of England, and are the one feature of 

 our educational system (if such it can be called) which provokes the 

 unfeigned admiration of other nations. While the political supremacy 

 of Hampshire had long disappeared and the political and commercial 

 greatness of its capital were already passing away when Winchester 

 College was founded, the school itself remains the Mecca of the public 

 school pilgrim, where he can still see the most vigorous and successful 

 exposition of its principles and practice. It is strange that in a county 

 of such ancient civilization there is, save at Winchester, an almost 

 absolute blank in the early history of its schools. Except, as we shall 

 see, for the merest scintilla of evidence at Alton, Basingstoke, Odiham 

 and Godshill, I. W., there is no evidence of the existence of any grammar 

 school before the Reformation, taking as the boundary date of that event 

 the Act for the Dissolution of Colleges, Chantries and Gilds in the first 

 year of King Edward VI., A.D. 1 547. Even in the four places named 

 the evidence is of the scantiest, consisting in the bare statement of the 

 fact that there was a grammar school. Yet it is impossible to doubt 

 that a great town like Southampton, which gave its name to the county, 

 a great seaport like Portsmouth, a great place of industry like Andover, 

 the records of whose merchant gild rank as among the oldest extant, as 

 well as Twyneham 1 with its collegiate church of Christ, dating from be- 

 fore the Conquest, the name of which has superseded the old place-name, 

 did maintain grammar schools, when we find them in such relatively 

 insignificant places as those named, while in the much less civilized 

 county of Yorkshire they existed by the score. 



WINCHESTER CITY GRAMMAR SCHOOL 



At Winchester we find sufficient proof of the existence of a general 

 grammar school many centuries before the present college was founded. 



At Christchurch there was a school as early as the middle of the twelfth century. Baldwin de 

 Redvers' charter printed in Dugdale's Monasticon, vi. 304, which continued till the reign of Henry VII. 

 (Letteri and Papers, Hen. Vlll. xiii. [i], No. 1117). 



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