A HISTORY OF HAMPSHIRE 



once gave out three privileges : the remission of the evening declamation 

 called ' books,' the invention of which is credited to Thomas Chandler in 

 1450 ; the right to collect wood at pleasure for fire after supper in Hall 

 or chambers ; arrd first and foremost the use of braces or garters. 1 But 

 these privileges were on three conditions : that there was no swearing, 

 quarrelling, or abuse of the mother tongue, which, as he subsequently 

 explained, means talking English instead of Latin or Greek. Another 

 time he pictures to himself what Wykeham would say ' if he could come 

 to life again and see his scholars, some disorderly in manners, others in 

 clothes, hear them talking English, swearing, and boasting of their birth 

 rather than their learning, fighting, frequenting the town instead of 

 school, showing their pride in their cloaks, wearing frilled shirts which 

 they turned in when the headmaster forbad them, only to be brought out 

 again at the first opportunity ; if he could go and see the swelling loads 

 of breeches in chambers, or even hid under their gowns, Spanish furs, 

 foreign-dyed tunics, and other clothes, silk and velvet borders to their 

 doublets ; if he saw all this, would he not wonder whether they were 

 members of his family or a lot of armed and scented courtiers or 

 rascals ? ' Presumably the puffed hose which are familiar to us in the 

 Elizabethan fashions were just coming in. They must have looked 

 rather comic under the long clinging gown of the cleric. 



We must linger no longer with Johnson and his Boswell, Badger, 

 but conclude with Johnson's picture of himself. ' If your friends ask you 

 what I'm like,' he says, ' nothing extenuate or set down aught in malice. 

 Say that I am thin and weak, sleeping till daylight to avoid the cold, 

 delighting in poetry, not very industrious, but liking change of occupa- 

 tion : as far as you are concerned, quick to anger at your faults, yet easily 

 appeased, pardoning the multitude a multitude of sins ; but the worse 

 character anyone has the more sharply I am down on him.' His lying 

 in bed is a very modern touch. Indeed on one occasion he chaffed the 

 boys for not daring to ask him why he had not been in chapel. He 

 seems to have thought schoolmastering something of a servitude. He 

 told the boys to ask their fathers what they paid their servants of various 

 kinds, and they would find that teaching was worse paid than hedging and 

 ditching, let alone cooking or game-keeping. After his ten years of 

 office he betook himself to life in London and a lucrative medical 

 practice, became treasurer of the College of Physicians, and died in 1597. 

 Johnson was succeeded as headmaster in 1571 by Thomas Bilson, a 

 native of Winchester, who left it for New College in Johnson's first year, 

 and was twenty-eight years old at the time of his accession. He had not 

 been long in power before, in 1 573, 2 the College received the honour of a 

 state visit from Queen Elizabeth. The lucubrations of the boys at the 



1 Add. MS. 4379, f. 5. 'Primutn est ut subligaculis qui volet femoralibus, quas aut braccas aut 

 caligas appellatis, pro arbitrio quisque utatur.' Stanbridge's Fulgaria translates subRgacuR, garters. Does it 

 mean that they may use braces ' to the leg coverings, which you call breeches or hose,' or breeches 1 . 

 If the latter, did they before that time go bare like Highlanders ? 



* Not 1570 as in Walcott, p. 157, followed by Annals, p. 281, and my History, p. 291. For at 

 least five of the boys who took part in it were not admitted till 1573. 



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