SCHOOLS 



through some of which he was passing ? Now the whole of the Dictata 

 in the book are entered as delivered by Johnson who was the headmaster, 

 except in the term called 'Election time,' when they were delivered by 'Mr. 

 Miller.' Mr. Miller was the hostiarius, though no one answering to the 

 name is to be found in the list of Winchester scholars, and no list of hostiarii 

 has yet been compiled. The Account Rolls show that he came as usher 

 in the fourth term (i.e. 24 June), 1563. It would thus appear that the 

 informator, except at Election time, when he went off to cloisters with 

 the eighteen prefects and those preparing for election, taught the whole 

 of the three upper books. Is not the inference to be drawn that the 

 hostiarius was teaching the lower school consisting of three lower books? 

 We know that there were no lower books than Fourth a century later, 

 when the work of the whole school is given in the pseudo-Johnson poem, 

 while Long Rolls or school lists are extant from 1652, which show that 

 there was nothing below Fourth Book then. But in the interval between 

 1563 and 1650, viz. in 1630, there was an incident to be hereafter 

 related which may very well have caused the disappearance of the lower 

 books. 



Another circumstance pointing in the same direction is the great 

 amount of attainment not only in Latin but in general mental capacity 

 shown in the themes themselves. They were infinitely beyond those 

 that would have been thought fitting food for the undeveloped 

 intelligences of Fourth Book in later days, passing as they do from 

 considerations suggested by the headmaster's anatomical experiments to 

 questions of constitutional government, dialectics and philosophy ; from 

 discussions on Lenten fasts to the use of cockfights. The range of 

 reading was wide. One day Johnson asks, ' What effect has Cicero, your 

 delight and mine ? what Livy ? what the poetic chorus ? Do they take 

 hold of you ? ' while at another time he refers to ' Plautus and Alcmena, 

 which you have sometimes read,' and engages in a critical comparison 

 between Plautus and Terence. When Badger was in Fifth Book one of 

 the themes refers to ' Juvenal's teaching in that satire which you have in 

 your hands,' another to ' Virgil's wonderful description of bees in the 

 volume you have in hand,' i.e. the Fourth Georgic. A running subject 

 covering many themes is a translation into Latin hexameters of Homer's 

 Battle of Frogs and Mice, afterwards published by Willis. Of Badger's 

 Sixth Book days we unfortunately possess only two themes, but they 

 include at least one copy of Greek verses with a Latin verse translation. 

 Every year there are references to the plays performed by the boys, 

 chiefly at Christmas, when they took the place of the old ' boy-bishop ' 

 performances. When Badger's notes began, Winchester was being 

 visited by an outbreak of plague, then endemic rather than epidemic, and 

 Johnson, a physician himself, in one of the first themes, invokes the 

 ' heavenly physician ' with quotations from the episode of the plague in 

 the Iliad. The school was at this time removed to Moundsmere, a 

 manor formerly belonging to Southwick Priory, acquired by the college 

 in 1541, and used as ' an asylum in the time of plague,' as it is phrased in 



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