SCHOOLS 



honours to the Archbishop of Canterbury for the indulgence, 1 ' grates pro 

 gracia, pro carnibus carmina.' On Shrove Tuesday the play was seem- 

 ingly accompanied by an entertainment which appeals less forcibly to 

 modern ideas, a cockfight. Johnson's theme for the occasion was to the 

 effect that the spectacle of cocks fighting to the death merely for honour 

 made Iphicrates and Themistocles fight more bravely for their country 

 and induced the Athenians' to have annual cockfights, ' which custom you 

 are to know is allowed you for no other reason than that as spectators of 

 the fight you may with them eagerly find in it a spur to bravery.' This 

 appears to be the only allusion at Winchester to the cockfights on 

 Shrove Tuesday which were usually exhibited by schoolmasters, who in 

 free schools made them an opportunity for taking fees under the name of 

 presents from the boys or their parents. 



Johnson's themes being largely concerned with topics of school 

 interest preserve to us an extraordinary amount of information on the 

 school life. The great divisions of the school into scholars and com- 

 moners, prefects and inferiors clearly appear. Commoners he calls 

 ' Oppidans,' on one occasion complaining that they went off to the fair, 

 probably St. Giles' Fair, in spite of an express prohibition. At another 

 time he inveighs against their idling, after the great expense their parents 

 had incurred in sending them to school. 



Johnson's injunctions to prefects are frequent. He tells them that 

 they should pass over in silence what they decently can so as to obviate 

 censure ; but that they are the eyes of the headmaster and must not 

 omit to report serious delinquencies. He lectures the prefect ' who is 

 called Ostiarius or Diarius,' the door-keeper or day man (so-called 

 because he was ' in course ' for a day only, not like the Bible-clerk who 

 was on duty for a week), for not reporting those who offended. 



We have already noticed one of the most peculiar customs at 

 Winchester, that of ' Hills.' ' Hills' was precisely the same in 1563 as 

 it was in 1863. Johnson in one of his dictations pretends to wonder that 

 boys will go on doing wrong though invariably detected and punished. 

 * For it is no new thing for some to shirk Hills in play time (a montibus 

 abesse aliquos cum luditur), School in school time, Chapel in service 

 time, while still oftener, though it is never done with impunity, you 

 reverse the places, and play in School, idle on Hills, and are noisy in 

 Chapel.' Johnson does not tell us what games they played on ' Hills,' 

 but in some verses about himself he says that as a boy he ' cared much 

 more for balls, quoits and tops than he did for books or school.' The 

 references to hunting in the woods are frequent, and once a year the boys 

 went nutting in the woods, as did Eton. 



Various glimpses of the dress of the period are given. Johnson 



1 Add. MS. 4379, f. ioz, cf. Walcott, p. 157, from Strype's Parker I. ii. c. 25 : Letter from 

 William Cecil, Secretary of State, saying that ' the Queen's Majesty at the humble suit of the 

 Warden of Winchester is pleased to dispense with the scholars there, in like sort as she hath for the 

 Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, touching the observation of Wednesday made a fish day by politic 

 constitution,' and directing the archbishop to issue a dispensation accordingly. It was the queen they 

 should have thanked. 



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