A HISTORY OF HAMPSHIRE 



beds as * a servile and foul office' in 1708, and college, through fees to 

 servants and payments to headmasters, became an expensive place, the 

 class of choristers became marked off from that of scholars, and only very 

 extreme poverty .could induce parents of the professional classes to send a 

 boy as a chorister on the chance of admission to college. 



The lists of commoners during the seventeenth century shows how 

 gilded was the youth that then flocked to Winchester. Thus in 1674 

 Lord Powlett, Worsley and Wyndham, senior, headed commoners out of 

 college, and in 1675 'Mr. Pierepont ' headed commoners in college, and 

 the ' Erie of Wiltshire ' and ' Mr. Nowell ' were at the top of commoners 

 out of college, whose rear was brought up by ' Ashly,' who is pretty cer- 

 tainly one of the Ashley Coopers. Ten years later, in 1685, the latter 

 family appear in force, the gentleman commoners being Lord Ashley, 

 afterwards the Lord Shaftesbury who wrote ' the Characteristics ' Lord 

 Shaftesbury complained l that after seven years at school given up to 

 Latin and Greek he could neither make nor construe a sentence ; but as 

 he never got beyond Fourth Book that was perhaps more his fault than 

 the school's Lord Guilford, Mr. Ashley, med. (in these days he would 

 be called secundus), Mr. Ashley, junior, and Mr. Fiennes (Lord Saye 

 and Sele). 



A complaint was that there were ' scarce any ' at Winchester ' that 

 escape the mother vice of drinking,' but as Shaftesbury reprobates a 

 dictum of the Bishop of Oxford ' that Palmer was the only sober man ' 

 in New College, saying that ' the numbers were little more than propor- 

 tionable through most of the Colledges,' we may perhaps discount this 

 charge also. Drinking was the fashion of the day, and while boys were 

 brought up on beer morning, noon and night it is not surprising if they 

 sometimes took too much. Against this attack of one of its alumni we 

 may set the evidence of the father of another, Ralph Verney, who, 

 writing in 1682 to the headmaster, Dr. Harris, said, 2 ' William of Wick- 

 ham's Foundation is, I believe, the best nursery of learning for young 

 children in the world, and perhaps never was better provided with abler 

 teachers than now at this present, yourself for a master, Mr. Home for an 

 usher and Mr. Terry for a tutor.' The remark has some interest in 

 another connection as showing the existence of a commoner tutor at this 

 date who was practically an assistant master, though so little recognized 

 by the foundation as not to appear on the Long Roll for the period. 3 In- 

 deed the school was certainly in great repute for the period from 1 679 to 

 1696. In the former year there had been a double change in the heads 

 of affairs. The warden of New College, John Nicholas,* succeeded 

 Dr. Burt 4 as warden of Winchester ; while the headmaster, Henry 

 Beeston,* succeeded Nicholas as warden of New College. It was a strange 



1 Shaftesbury Papers, P.R.O., quoted in History of New College (1901), by H. Rashdale and R. S. 

 Rait. 



3 Verney ^ Memoirs, iv. 219 (1899), quoted in Winchester Long Rolls, p. Ixxiii. 

 3 That is for 1681 and 1683, there being no roll yet discovered for 1681. 

 * All Hampshire men. 



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