A HISTORY OF BUCKINGHAMSHIRE 



and the debt of Eton to Winchester is greater 

 than that of any one great school has ever been 

 to any other. Thcjilia pulchrior on the banks 

 of the Thames is in a far deeper sense a daughter 

 of the mater pulchra on the banks of the Itchen 

 than was imagined by those who on 19 October 

 1906 celebrated at New College the ancient 

 Amabilis Concordia between the two colleges of 

 Our Lady of Winchester and of Eton. Not 

 only was the foundation of Eton conceived and 

 executed by Wykehamists, but it was saved from 

 destruction and practically refounded by Wyke- 

 hamists, it was nursed by Wykehamists through 

 all its earlier troubles, and for 100 years drew the 

 majority and the most celebrated of its pastors 

 and masters from the ranks of those who were 

 sons of Wykeham in a double sense, as being 

 both scholars of Winchester and fellows of New 

 College. 



First as to the original idea of Eton. We 

 may put aside all that has been written about 

 learning being in the lowest state of depression 

 before its foundation, or of the school being part 

 of a movement inaugurated by William of 

 Wykeham to rescue learning from the monks, 

 or to substitute the secular for the regular clergy 

 as teachers. The monasteries never had been, 

 as asserted, ' the principal seats of education in 

 England ' ; the monks never had been the chief 

 educators or teachers. The monasteries had at 

 one time, and to some extent, been homes of 

 learning, but only for the benefit of their own 

 members, and they remained schools of history, 

 as a pastime for the dreary hours of cloister life, 

 till the middle of the I5th century. Public 

 schools they never were. Even when, in succes- 

 sion to secular colleges, they governed public 

 schools or maintained them, they never main- 

 tained them out of their own revenues, but out 

 of revenues held in trust ; and the schoolmasters 

 were not monks but seculars, sometimes priests, 

 sometimes laymen. Those who have read in 

 former volumes of the Victoria County History 

 the accounts of the grammar schools of Win- 

 chester and Durham, of St. Albans and Bury St. 

 Edmunds, of Reading, Gloucester, and Bristol, 

 of Derby, of Thetford and Dunwich, all connect- 

 ed with various orders of the regular clergy, will 

 have seen that where the monks or the regular 

 canons obtained control of the schools, it was in 

 supersession of the secular clergy, and that even 

 then the actual teachers in the grammar or 

 public schools remained secular clerks, while 

 those taught in them were always secular clerks. 

 When we come to deal with the universities of 

 Oxford and Cambridge, it will be seen that they 

 were purely a secular creation, as were the 

 colleges in them. Though the new regular 

 orders of the friars early pushed themselves into 

 the universities, and though the secular colleges 

 of Merton and Balliol were imitated by the 

 monks in the regular colleges of Gloucester and 



Durham, of St. Bernard and St. Mary, the 

 universities and colleges themselves, like the 

 cathedral and collegiate schools from which they 

 sprang, remained essentially secular. A good 

 deal of the illusion as to the schools being monastic 

 is due to the confusion of the term monastic 

 with the term ecclesiastic, of monks with clerics, 

 and of the seculars, i.e. secular clergy, with the 

 laity. Schools, colleges, and universities, were 

 matters of ecclesiastical cognizance and subject 

 to ecclesiastical law ; they were created by 

 clerics for clerics, and a layman by going to 

 school became pro tanto a cleric, in days when the 

 law, the treasury, the civil service, and diplomacy 

 were merely branches of the clerical service. 

 But to say that mediaeval schools were monastic 

 because they were ecclesiastical, or to confound 

 schoolmasters with monks, because they were 

 clerics, is much like confusing the modern clerk 

 with the modern cleric, or the modern learned 

 practitioners of law and medicine with the 

 modern clergy. When Eton was founded the 

 monastic ideal had long been on the wane. 

 Scarcely a single monastery had been founded in 

 the previous 100 years, while many old ones, in 

 the shape of alien priories, had been secularized 

 or converted into ecclesiastical establishments. 



The foundation of Eton College was no new 

 departure. Eton furnished no new model in 

 institutions, it inaugurated no new era in educa- 

 tion, it marked no important phase in the history 

 of learning. It was the expression of the enthu- 

 siasm of a pious youth who wore a crown, under 

 the guidance of his ecclesiastical pastors and 

 masters, to connect his own name with an ever- 

 lasting monument of munificence. Its founder 

 never claimed originality for his foundation. In 

 the foundation charter of 1 1 October I44O, 2 

 Henry VI says as plainly as possible that he was 

 imitating his ancestors' regard for the Church, 



Whose royal devotion founded not only in this our 

 Kingdom of England, but also in divers foreign 

 regions, monasteries, churches and other pious places 

 ... we also who . . . have now taken into our 

 hands the government of both our Kingdoms, have 

 from the very beginning of our riper age carefully 

 revolved in our mind how ... or by what royal 

 gift, according to the measure of our devotion and the 

 example of our ancestors, we could do fitting honour 

 to that Mistress and mother, to the pleasure of her 

 great Spouse, and at length ... it has become a 

 fixed purpose in our heart to found a college ... in 

 the parish church of Eton by Windsor not far from 

 our birth-place. 



He, accordingly, 



' to the praise honour and glory of the Crucified and 

 the exaltation of the most glorious Virgin Mary, His 

 mother, and the establishment of the most holy church,' 

 founded ' a college ... in and of the number of a 

 Provost and 10 priests, 4 clerks, 6 chorister boys, there 



2 Pat. 19 Hen. VI, pt. ii, m. 20. 



148 



