A HISTORY OF HAMPSHIRE 



Having finished the day and landed the boys in bed, our poet 

 gives no more details, though he whets our curiosity, only to baulk 

 it, by such questions as : ' What am I to say, Cleopatra, of your noble 

 kitchen ? ' We .should like to know more of the good lady cook or 

 was it a male ? who rejoiced in the name of Egypt's queen of love. 

 We resent the poet's ' passing by ' ' the garden of Alcinous and the 

 green isles of Tempe.' Was the Tempe of 1550 the same as that 

 of 1860 the ditch passed on the way to Hills, just beyond Black- 

 bridge ? We strongly object to his abstinence from water ' No hand 

 shall be dipped in the descending stream, though Conduit has just had a 

 new roof and pillars' (Ductus aqua quam-uis sit plumbo et paste novatus) 

 and still more to his Muse's abstinence from beer : ' My muse shall 

 drink no flagons in the cellar.' 



While we regret that the poet did not tell us more, we must be 

 thankful that he has told us so much. His word picture is character- 

 istically like the paintings of the contemporary Dutch school, with its 

 quaint realism and careful, yet easy, reproduction of life. Its value is 

 the greater in that it is undoubtedly a picture which must in the main 

 have been true of the school life 150 years before, as it undoubtedly was 

 of the school life 150 years afterwards. 



In Dr. Moberly's school days 1816-22 the hours and arrange- 

 ments, as he used to tell them to his pupils in 1865, were almost exactly 

 the same as in Johnson's poem, particularly in the terrible interval 

 between getting up at 5 and breakfast at 9, and in the curious relic of 

 Roman Catholic times in ' going circum,' of which no satisfactory ex- 

 planation is forthcoming. 



One point on which Johnson's and the elder days seem to have 

 been infinitely superior to the latter days is the marked absence of 

 fagging and tunding. There is not a word to suggest that such a thing 

 existed. Prefects' duty appears to have been to report delinquents and 

 rebels to the master, not to punish them themselves. The ground-ash 

 does not whistle through these pages ! In early nineteenth century 

 descriptions of Winchester, fagging and tunding occupy the most promi- 

 nent place of all. If they had existed to anything like the same extent 

 in the sixteenth century, our poet could scarcely have failed to mention 

 them. The boys clearly had to make their own beds and to sweep out 

 their own chambers, and no doubt the juniors had to do most of the 

 work. But there was not room for much other fagging. Fagging is 

 connected chiefly with games or with meals of supererogation. Organ- 

 ized games hardly existed, and seemingly only took place on Hills. 

 Additional meals were almost impossible when merenda or supper was 

 provided by college, when the boys went to bed at eight, and no boy 

 ever went outside Middle Gate except to go on Hills or by special leave. 

 It is also extremely probable that flogging was not nearly so frequent 

 as afterwards. A punishment reserved for a single day in the week, 

 and so judicially inflicted, could not have been so often inflicted as 

 when it went on every day. 



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