Alright, fine, there are other things along the centuries that are to blame too. However, a bishop called William of Wykeham and the devastating impact of the Black Death most certainly played a pivotal role in the early creation of our public boarding school system in Britain.
As an aside, in Britain a public school is a fee-paying school. The idea was that it was public in the sense that anyone with the funds to pay the fees could go to the school as opposed to other schools which had restrictions on entry beyond money. Obviously we know that this concept of public is flawed in a multitude of ways, but that’s where the wording comes from. The same as public houses – pubs – if you can pay for the drink, you can go in. Schools without fees are state schools (though we now also have free schools, academies, and independent schools but that’s… for a later discussion).
Anyway. Our journey into the early days of public and boarding schools does not include female students for now. Girls who weren’t from wealthy families rarely got any education, though some might go to the “petty schools” discussed later and the occasional girl would defy the societal expectations or their family would. Girls who later became nuns also tended to receive education in reading and writing Latin along with basic numeracy skills. But up until the second half of the nineteenth century, even girls from the “broad elite” were generally only educated at academies focused on teaching “social graces” with little academic expectation. Again, there were exceptions with girls who defied societies expectations or rules, but this was the general picture for Britain before the later 1800s. (Which means the books by L.T. Meade, Angela Brazil, and their contemporaries were looking at the early days of a wider opportunity for girls’ education).
The 1300s is where we’re going back to for now. To when William of Wykeham really just stumbled into creating public boarding schools. William himself had attended a fee-paying grammar school, so the concept of paying for schooling wasn’t unusual. It was usually only the wealthy families who sent their boys to the relatively small network of grammar schools in the country; some would then go on to attend Oxford or Cambridge University. It would be 1920 before Oxford allowed female students and 1948 before Cambridge did – the Murder Most Unladylike series touches upon the sexism at the two universities in Mistletoe and Murder.
Most poor, working-class or middle class children in the 1300s were not getting any schooling at all or were getting sporadic teaching at “petty schools”. Petty schools were pretty much one teacher, a room, and lessons in basic reading, writing, and counting. The nobility were often taught at home by private tutors; men’s education usually had a military slant as they were expected to go into military or leadership roles of a sort upon adulthood.
Then came the Black Death between 1347 and 1353, which changed society in an enormous way, not least because it killed around 40-45% of Britain’s population and between 30-60% of the entirety of Europe’s population (to the best estimates of historians). Amongst the many other impacts it had, this resulted in an enormous shortage of people to fill working roles. What Wykeham was concerned with specifically was the lack of educated men ready to enter the priesthood. Labour shortages everywhere meant better wages and better opportunities, so men just weren’t becoming priests.
Determined to rectify this, Wykeham created two institutions to channel educated boys and young men into the priesthood: New College in Oxford which opened in 1378, and Winchester College in 1395.
These were extraordinarily strict, austere, and secluded educational institutions, where the boys (11 – 19) lived and were educated within the buildings with few reasons to leave. Contact with girls and women was strictly prohibited (though, when have rules ever stopped everyone…) and if a washerwoman was ever called upon for “unfortunate and extreme events” even the contact with her was highly regulated. There was as little contact as possible with only a single person appointed to the task, she was forbidden to enter the grounds and instead had to wait at the outer gate, and she had to be “of age and conditions” so as to be unlikely to excite the students…
Charming, hey?
And there we have it; these two early institutions were possible the earliest equivalent to the public boarding schools we know today, including the likes of Eton, Highgate, and Millfield, which spat out a number of our current government. It’s William of Wykeham’s fault, really.
Notes taken primarily from:
“The Old Boys” by David Turner
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