Chapter 1

Wykehamical Foundations

Winchester College

Christopher Jonson was the most charismatic and influential teacher in England in

the sixteenth century. Though he only occupied the position of schoolmaster at 1

Winchester College for a single decade – the 1560s – scholars he taught went on to

such diverse academic positions as the Regius Professor of Physic [medicine] and

the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, the King’s Professor of Civil and Canon

Law at Douai, the Professor of Rhetoric at Perugia, and the Professor of Hebrew

and Mathematics at the Italian College at Rome. Some went into academic

administration: the Registrar of Oxford University, the first President of St John’s

College, Oxford, the Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, the Rector of the English

College at Rome, and the Principal of New Inn Hall, also in Oxford. Winchester

scholars from this decade occupied the bishoprics of Oxford, Worcester and

Winchester, together with many senior Church of England posts; and three, Thomas

Bilson, Richard Fairclowe, and John Harmar, the subject of this biography, were

among the translators of the King James Bible. There were three Roman Catholic

martyrs, including Henry Garnet, who was hanged, drawn and quartered following

the Gunpowder Plot, and whose evidence at his trial became a by-word for

equivocation and provided material for the Porter’s Scene in Macbeth. A second

would-be regicide, William Stafford – of the eponymous Stafford Plot – was only

dissuaded, it is said, from blowing up Elizabeth I because it would have

necessitated the demise of his own mother, who was the queen’s favourite lady-of-

the-bedchamber. There were numerous barristers and several medics, one of

whom was physician to the queen; there were poets and writers of poetical theory

– Winchester College under Jonson has been described as ‘one of the centres

generating an interest in poetic theory in Elizabethan England’. One scholar was 2

elected a member of the House of Commons; another became a newly ennobled

member of the House of Lords; and a third was appointed a Privy Counsellor.

Jonson also taught John Ley, an explorer who twice sailed with Frobisher in search

of the North-West Passage, and who was the first Englishman to sail into the River

Amazon, besides being a privateer.

It was into this intellectually stimulating company that John Harmar arrived in

1569. Little is known of his life before this date, apart from the fact that he was a

poor boy from Newbury whose entry into Winchester was facilitated by Elizabeth I

and the Earl of Leicester. Because of this royal backing, on the election roll of 3

1569 John Harmar was listed in second place, the top of the roll being taken by

Richard Fiennes, whose parents had invoked a lapsed convention that descendants

of William of Wykeham’s family were entitled to free education at Winchester as

‘Founder’s Kin’. The revival of this claim was to cause problems for the college, as

not only were such entrants maintained at the institution’s expense, they were

entitled to remain at the college until the age of 25 if they were not sufficiently

intelligent to proceed to an automatic fellowship at New College, Oxford, where

they also had the right to claim free education and accommodation. 4

We do not know the names or occupations of John Harmar’s parents, nor the year

in which he was born: the register of scholars records he was 14 when he was

admitted on 23 August 1569, which would mean he had been born somewhere

between 24 August 1554 and 23 August 1555. We do not know who brought him to

the attention of Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, who had ensured

his scholarship. But from the moment he arrived at Winchester we know some

remarkable details of his life.

Christopher Jonson, the schoolmaster Harmar first encountered, had been a

scholar at Winchester, having been admitted in 1549; he had proceeded to New

College as a scholar and was elected a fellow there in 1555. Five years later he

returned to Winchester as the schoolmaster. He was not yet thirty. Extant 5

manuscript and printed material provide details of the location and furnishings of

the room in which Jonson taught; we have a reasonably good idea of what he

taught; and we have remarkably precise evidence of his teaching methods. There

is also additional manuscript evidence which tells us how John Harmar and his

fellow students were occupied throughout the day.

Perhaps the most unusual aspect, to twenty-first-century eyes, of school life at

Winchester at the beginning of the sixteenth century was that it was not only a

seven-days-a-week school – records of the Winchester curriculum in 1530 and 1655

make clear that, unlike at Eton, there was teaching on every day of the week,

including Sunday – Winchester was also initially a fifty-two-weeks-a-year school. As

the Victoria County History of Hampshire notes: ‘Of holidays, it may be said that

there were plenty of holy days, but no general holidays. The collegiate example

was directly followed. To the fellows of a college, the college was their home for

life. The collegiate schoolboy was regarded as under the much the same

conditions’. The first recorded occasion when not a single scholar was in 6

residence came in 1518, over one hundred and thirty years after the foundation,

when the college was empty for one week; and it was several years before this 7

happened again, which indicates that what we think of as holiday was an alien

notion in the early years of the sixteenth century. By the time of Jonson’s

appointment, however, there was at least one recognised holiday; though

Christmas and Easter both appear to have come into the category of holy days

rather than holidays. Whitsuntide was the generally accepted break, and even

then, according to the Victoria County History, ‘as late as 1682 it was not a

universal rule for every one to go home for the holidays’. 8

Boys rose at 5 o’clock, got dressed, chanted a Latin psalm, swept the chamber,

and made their beds. They had slept with up to 16 boys in a chamber, though as a 9

result of a benevolent bequest in 1540 each boy did have his own bed: a solid oak

construction with a tester at the head in which there was a single drawer in which

he kept what few individual possessions he may have had. The mattress was 10

straw in a canvas cover. At 5.30 they went to Chapel and said prayers. At 6.00 11

they proceeded to the schoolroom, and there were further prayers before teaching

started. The schoolroom was 46 feet long by 29 feet wide, and accommodated 70

scholars and up to 100 commoners. It was crowded and unpleasant: in one of his

dictations, Jonson declared: ‘no heat of summer, nor the fetid stench of school

which rises from your cramped quarters, will ever distract me’. There were four 12

oak posts to hold up the floor of Hall above, and three two-light windows on the

south side, with triple rows of stone seats in the windows for prefects, from which

they could overlook the other boys. There was a rostrum for declamations; and

there were elevated seats for the schoolmaster and his usher. On the north wall

was a map of the world, and on the east some quotations from Quintilian, while on

the west wall were painted emblematic representations of a boy’s choices in life: a

bishop’s mitre and crozier, the reward for scholarship; a sword, for those who join

the armed services; an ink-pot and book representing the commercial life; and the

apple twigs used for flogging those who choose not to work. 13

There was no fireplace: in winter the bodies crammed into the room would have

been self-preserving, in the same manner as a colony of male emperor penguins in

Antarctica; and in summer teaching took place outside in Cloister. It was not until

9.00 that the boys had their first food of the day, by which time they must have

been ravenous. It was a simple breakfast of bread and beer; followed by individual

study in chambers. At 11.00 back into the school-room for an hour before dinner in

Hall at noon, at which a prefect recited an initial grace; during the meal another

prefect read aloud a chapter from the Old Testament; and at the end of the meal a

grace and a psalm were sung. Then back to study, interrupted in summer at 3.00

for ‘bevers’ – more beer and possibly a little food, the records are not specific on

this detail – before having to show the schoolmaster their written work. At 5.00

there were communal thanks to God, followed by private prayer; the boys

proceeded to supper – always mutton – then back to chambers, where at 8.00 they

sang a Latin psalm and went to bed, when a prefect read a second psalm.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays after morning Chapel, weather permitting, the entire

school walked in pairs to the top of the nearby St Catherine’s Hill, where the boys

engaged in unspecified physical activities, before marching back down again for

breakfast at 9.00. This was repeated after the midday meal and boys were back in

the schoolroom at 3.00. If wet, these times for relaxation were spent in Hall,

which must have been somewhat rowdy.

In 1525 Joan Bradbury, a rich London widow, endowed a new school at Saffron

Walden in Essex and appointed William Dawson to be the chaplain-schoolmaster,

‘being a sufficient grammarian to teach children grammar after the order and use

of teaching grammar in the schools of Winchester or Eton’. In order to ensure this

requirement was met, the two named schools were approached and asked for

details of their curriculum. Somewhere between 1529 and 1531, two replies were

received, though, sadly, the Winchester document now lacks its first leaf, with loss

of some information about what was taught to the classes at the top of the school;

but the material which survives is still far more detailed than the Eton response.

Though the Saffron Walden document was written two decades before Jonson

became schoolmaster, a remarkably similar outline of the Winchester curriculum

written in 1655 suggests that there was continuity of educational practice

throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 14

What the Saffron Walden questionnaire does not reveal is any information about

the teaching of Greek, which may – or may not – have been recorded on the

missing leaf. Unfortunately, the most important source of information about

Jonson’s teaching, a manuscript held in the British Library, also lacks useful 15

information on this topic. William Badger became a scholar in 1561 at the age of

10 and Jonson was his schoolmaster for the entirety of his time at Winchester.

Badger kept a notebook – it is four hundred pages long and contains nearly 450

passages – in which he recorded Jonson’s dictations over several years. Though

there are occasional Greek words and phrases within the passages of Latin, there

are no Greek dictations. Nonetheless it is clear that Jonson was teaching Greek. At

one point he remarks: ‘I thought it worth including the lines because of those who

are studying Greek’; and elsewhere advises, ‘No effort must be spared in 16

collecting words and phrases, and searching for them everywhere, in choosing and

judging the quality and quantity of what you can include, and in comparing Greek

and Latin passages. . .’. There is even evidence of the performing of Greek plays: 17

‘. . . when you are dry old men, you will be able to recall your comedy, and you

will say, “I remember when I was a boy, I took part in what was a Greek play;

acting this character and that. I was an important part in it”, and this will be a

distinction which your forebears never achieved’. This final comment possibly 18

indicates that the absence of reference to Greek in the Saffron Walden document

was simply because it was not taught at Winchester College before Jonson arrived.

Alternatively, the absence of Greek dictations from Badger’s notebook may be

because Badger, who proceeded from Winchester to New College as a scholar and

then a fellow, and became a canon of Salisbury cathedral in 1579, may 19

nonetheless not have been one of the brighter Wykehamists and was not offered

the option of learning Greek. John Harmar, on the other hand, became Regius

Professor of Greek at Oxford, and it is reasonable to suppose he got a grounding in

the language at Winchester. Certainly, when Harmar in turn became schoolmaster

of Winchester Greek passages were regularly included in his dictations.

In each quarter of the year a fortnight was devoted to tests on the previous

quarter’s learning. This rigorous approach produced boys who were bilingual in

English and Latin. Indeed it could be argued that they were more fluent in Latin,

both on paper and orally, having been exposed to so much Latin literature and, it

is clear from the manuscript evidence, having been expected to converse with one

another in Latin rather than English throughout their school careers. Speaking

English, except in cases of dire necessity, was likely to incur severe punishment.

This injunction was a constant refrain in Jonson’s dictations:

The conversations of the young we want to be all in Latin, even of those

who lurk in the bottom classes, and the mother tongue never to be used

except in emergencies. This custom is to be maintained specially in the

upper divisions, and is to be practised and established by law, and upheld by

severe beating. When boys come to school and when they return home,

when they play together, when they walk together and when they meet,

they are to talk in Latin or Greek. Let there be no possibility of pardon for

anyone who intentionally breaks this law. 20

Though these appear to be the words of a martinet, in fact Jonson was a

remarkably lenient teacher, and flogging does not seem to have been much in

evidence at Winchester. This leniency contrasts with the situation at Eton where,

in 1563, it was reported during a dinner hosted by Sir William Cecil ‘that diverse

Scholers of Eaton, be runne awaie from the Schole, for fear of beating’. Jonson, 21

indeed, would have been regarded as, if anything, a little too lenient by

contemporary standards.

Richard Lyllington, a scholar admitted in 1565, was thought three years later at the

age of 16 to have been guilty of ‘pykery’ – petty theft – and is said to have

admitted the offence. Jonson’s account of the matter is revealing: ‘I happened to

chalenge him for the same; but he choesinge rather to be expelled, as he sayde,

then corrected for his falt, dreue his knyfe at me which he had for the purpose

provided, and standinge at ward agaynst me and our Subwarden, sho[w]ed such an

example of stubbernesse to my scholars as theis twenty yeares I have not h[e]ard

the lyke’. 22

Lyllington took himself off to Elizabeth I’s Secretary of State, Sir Robert Cecil,

who, having heard only one side of the story, wrote to Jonson in support of the

boy. In some despair, Jonson wrote to Cecil:

The next tyme I sawe him, he broughte your Honours Letters; upon the sight

whereof I received him agayne, though I perceived he had glosed [veiled

with specious comments] altogether with you. Synce that tyme hitherto, he

hath continued in such overthwartness, as (were it not for your Honoures

sake) nether I nor the College co[u]ld beare him. That which we doe in

sufferinge his evell rule, I feare will prove to the animating of others farder

then good order can abyde. This I beseke your Honour consyder of, and

pardon me if towarde such I discharge my vocation. 23

Boisterous behaviour was even evident in Chapel on occasion: from time to time

Jonson had cause to remind his students just how inappropriate this was. It has 24

to be remembered that for a school of 150 or more boys ranging from 10 to 18+,

there were only two teachers: Jonson himself, and the usher, a Mr Miller.

Winchester College was effectively boy-run – and continued to be organised and

policed by boys until the nineteenth century. The two adults taught: the prefects

were, in theory, the enforcers of discipline. At times they failed and the

schoolmaster had to intervene, but for the most part it was the prefects who ran

the school.

This system enabled Jonson to operate a remarkably humane and effective

teaching regime. Though the dictations were addressed to classes as a whole, the

subsequent written tasks were tailored to each individual boy: ‘it is therefore the

duty of each one of you, though I set and shall prescribe a task to you all

individually, to complete it, working on your own, so that it is not identical wares

which you bring to our market, but a variety of them’. There were clearly 25

sessions each week when all the written tasks were read aloud and compared, so

that the boys learned of the variety of ways in which a theme might be handled.

With a very bright cohort, as was evidently the case at Winchester under Jonson, a

boy like John Harmar would have been exposed to a stimulating range of variations

on themes. As is still the case, an intelligent and lively peer group can do as much,

if not more for an individual’s progress, than any amount of top-down teaching.

The importance of variation is constantly emphasised by Jonson, who supplied

examples from a whole range of classical authors to illustrate his point. Early in his

time at Winchester John Harmar would have encountered one of Jonson’s simpler

examples:

Apparently by Martial:

May the earth lie lightly upon you and the covering of sand be soft lest the

dogs be prevented from digging up your bones.

And by Alciat [Andrea Alciato]:

May the earth lie lightly upon you, not that you may rest in peace, you cruel

man, but that the dogs may have no difficulty in digging up your bones.

But Sleidan [Johannes Sleidanus] wrote:

May you have but a slight covering of dust, Nearchus, after your death, so

that a loathsome pack of dogs may easily dig you up.

I put it like this:

May you have a slight scraping of dust to cover you, cruel Nearchus, so that

the dogs will certainly dig you up very soon.

Try what you can do. 26

The reference here is to the tyrant Nearchus who ordered the torture of the

philosopher Zeno. Zeno’s response is recorded by Diodorus Siculus:

When Zeno's native city was being ground down by the tyranny of Nearchus,

Zeno formed a conspiracy against the tyrant. But he was found out, and

when he was asked by Nearchus, while suffering the agonies of the torture,

who his fellow conspirators were, he replied, "Would that I were as much

the master of my body as I am of my tongue!" And when the tyrant made the

torture more and more severe, Zeno still withstood it for a while; and then,

being eager to be rid at last of the agony and at the same time to be

revenged upon Nearchus, he devised the following plan. During the greatest

intensity of the torture, pretending that his spirit was yielding to his bodily

pains, he cried out, "Relax it! I will tell the whole truth." And when they did

so, he asked Nearchus to come near and listen to him privately, asserting

that many matters he was about to disclose would best be kept secret.

When the tyrant came up to him readily and placed his ear close to Zeno's

lips, Zeno took the tyrant's ear into his mouth and sank his teeth into it. And

when the attendants quickly approached and applied every torment to make

Zeno relax his hold, he held on all the tighter. Finally, being unable to shake

the fortitude of the man, they stabbed him to death that they might in this

way break the hold of his teeth. By this device Zeno got release from the

agonies he was suffering and exacted of the tyrant the only punishment

within his grasp. 27

What William Badger’s notebook reveals is that Christopher Jonson was well aware

of that most important of admonitions to prospective and practising teachers: if

you wish to instruct, you must first entertain – Horace’s ‘Omne tulit punctum qui

miscuit utile dulci’. Though there are many passages of formal classical Latin in

the four hundred pages, there is also a remarkable amount of levity. This takes

several forms. There are memorable word games: Jonson punned on ludus with its

alternative (and to a schoolboy, paradoxical) meanings of ‘game’ and ‘school’, 28

and engaged in untranslatable word-play on bifidum /perfidum and mendaces /

mendacia / mendas / mendacem. There is even a macaronic pun on the English 29

words ‘scholar’ and ‘choler’ which are spelled in Greek letters. There is an 30

acrostic, which, as it deals with the Whitsun holiday, would have particularly

appealed to the boys. And there is a poem purporting to be temporibus Nosnoi 31

regis [‘in the time of King Nosnoi’] which is a transparent reversal of his own

name. There is a poem addressed to the College dog, Willy, and another to the 32 33

scholars’ tame but nameless deer at Moundsmere. Such pets were a feature of 34

Winchester life: from the middle of the seventeenth century for the best part of

two hundred years there was a succession of pet foxes kept on a chain and fed on

sheep’s paunches; and in the eighteenth century the scholars kept a pet eagle in 35

College. There are some rather excruciating Latin puns and one macaronic pun in 36

Latin and Greek forming a nonce-expression pecunia quasi pecudis-νοια, punning

on the Latin pecunia [‘money’] to generate a portmanteau word meaning ‘the

brutish mentality induced by money in men’. The corrupting aspects of a love of 37

money were constantly denounced by Jonson. A former schoolmaster, one Clement

Smith, who taught for only two years, 1464-65, is the subject of an extended pun

on Smith – one who beats [iron on an anvil] – and Clement, which Smith certainly

was not. On one occasion the boys appear to have been scrumping grapes. Jonson 38

gave out a dictation which purported to be from the mouth of the vine. The vine

names the villains:

It is the truth I tell. Bull, Greenfield, the elder Barker, and Waters, White

from Chilcombe, and both wicked Graves, Oxenforth, another was the little

boy – if only I could remember his name. And Fox was there as well (but a

fox would not eat grapes) and Winter with his name cut in the middle;

another was Best, another Greenhill; and these they were who stripped me

of my grapes so nastily. 39

Winchester College has a comprehensive list of all scholars from the foundation:

for commoners the lists only start to be kept from 1653. In this dictation we can

identify the scholars: John Grenefylde, Edward Barker, John Waters, John Whyte,

Matthew Fox, Giles Best, and Nicholas Grenehyll. John Midwinter (‘Winter with his

name cut in the middle’) entered New College in 1567 and must have been a

commoner; and we can assume that Bull, the Graves brothers, Oxenforth and Little

(‘the little boy – if only I could remember his name’ must have raised at least a

smile from the boys) were also commoners. Even if they were subsequently

punished, there would have been a certain glory to have been derived from such

humorous public identification – and the tone of the dictation suggests that this

was another instance of Jonson’s leniency. Naming and shaming may have been

deemed sufficient.

To modern readers some of Jonson’s humour appears impious, arguably

blasphemous, and downright scatological – all forms of humour which appeal to the

adolescent mind and would have been remembered, not only for the content, but

also the vocabulary and the grammatical structures. In a discussion of the final

words of the Emperor Hadrian, the boys were told: ‘ “I find no piety here,” said

someone. True, but there isn’t much impiety either, especially considering he was

a pagan. However his last words were more proper than those of that worst of

two-footed creatures, the Emperor Claudius, which Seneca tells as a joke, “I’ve

dirtied myself”.’ In a dictation concerned with the impossibility of seeing God, 40

Jonson refers to St Paul’s claim that when in ecstasy he had seen things he dared

not describe. Alluding to Moses in Exodus, Jonson rather startlingly goes on to say:

‘But the hinder part of God all the holy fathers and many learned men see in a

certain way, just as I do too…’. Once the boys have digested this extraordinary

claim, Jonson proceeds to clarify his point:

--the hinder part of God, I say, that is, God in his creatures. Because of the

uninterrupted existence of his creatures the Creator is understood to be

eternal; from their vastness he is considered omnipotent; from his ordering

of them, wise; from his management of them, good. It is right, therefore,

for Christians to approach God from behind until they are allowed to go face

to face; for it is written, ‘Seek his face evermore’. 41

Having caught the boys’ attention with an apparently outrageous claim, Jonson

proceeds to a more reasoned and theologically conformist conclusion.

One passage is notably scatological:

Faustus is on a long walk from town with his dog (it is our custom to take

dogs along with us). He meets a stranger with another dog walking quickly

towards town. So the dogs, after each has had a good look at the other,

jump up and fight and growl loudly at each other. Then as dogs often do,

they sniff around, but the other one does it far more than Faustus’s, and

smells his rump and tail and other things too. Faustus says, “What are you

up to, you wicked, presumptuous foreigner, letting that dog of yours kiss

mine like that?” The other man calmly replies to this, “Don’t get so wound

up, whoever you are. You may kiss me like that if you want”. 42

It could be argued that if one imposes a rule requiring the constant use of a

language, then it is necessary to provide the means to communicate in that

language in a range of circumstances. Over an extended period Jonson dictated

parts of his own Latin translation of Batrachomyomachia, a Greek mock-heroic

epic at that time attributed to Homer, which describes a war between the frogs

and the mice. This translation was subsequently published in 1580 by Thomas 43

Purfoote in London as Batrachomyomachia. id est. Ranarum & murium pugna,

latino versu donata ex Homero. Christophero Ionsono medico Londinensi

interprete. The content and format of this comic work allowed Jonson to teach 44

the boys a good deal of everyday Latin vocabulary:

. . . No sooner had he spoken thus than the frogs armed their bodies and

limbs with weapons and soft leaves; beet made strong breast-plates which

gave wide protection; their round shields were made of cabbage; their

spears were smooth bulrushes and marsh moss, and helmets made of snail-

shells covered their heads. . . . 45

The dictations also provide information about how boys such as John Harmar

occupied themselves outside the schoolroom: in their spare time the boys played

chess and draughts, and with balls and hoops, and threw the discus. They went 46 47

hunting, though the passages do not identify the game pursued. A dictation 48

already cited refers to the performance of a Greek play. It was not a unique

occurrence. Jonson was clearly a believer in the importance of drama in

education. One of the earliest of the dictations in the manuscript instructs boys

how best to convey the notion of ‘regal greatness’ on stage, and this may have 49

been partly in preparation for a performance of Acolastus. This play had been 50

designed with the express purpose of teaching good grammar and had been

translated and edited by John Palsgrave, who was a chaplain to Henry VIII and

tutor to Henry Fitzroy, one of the king’s illegitimate sons. Despite the existence 51

of this translation, we can be fairly certain that Jonson’s students were performing

the original Latin of Gulielmus Gnapheus [the classicized name of Willem de

Volder], first published in Antwerp in 1529 and issued in a revised edition in 1554. 52

This was performed at Christmas 1563. The Greek drama mentioned above was the

next to be staged, followed by a number of unidentified plays which led to Jonson

praising his actors:

As a result of the plays which we have recently produced for the public to

see, I think that you have received one particular advantage besides others:

that you not only yourselves understand, but can teach others, if need be,

what facial expressions and what gestures should be used to accompany the

spoken word. You had to learn to raise or lower or change the tone of your

voice, and how to move properly without exhibitionism, sometimes very

relaxed, at others very violently, with a stamping of the feet suited to the

occasion. I remember teaching you all this, and you proved yourselves

excellent actors. It only remains for you to remember what you have

learned, so that if we attempt anything similar again in future, I shall not

obviously have wasted my labours, nor you the fruits of them. 53

‘Plays’ in the plural, and ‘for the public to see’. These were evidently important

occasions when the school was contributing to the cultural life of the city of

Winchester. The scale of the productions was impressive. One dictation includes

the observation that ‘The purchase of curtains is almost unavoidable, the

construction of the theatre [is] expensive’, and the Bursar’s accounts for 1565 54

record ‘for expenses made regarding the plays in the Christmas holidays as shown

by bill 11s 6d’ where, again, ‘plays’ is in the plural. The expense of the plays is 55

best illustrated by an entry in the account for Christmas 1573, shortly after Jonson

had left the college, which shows his successor carrying on the tradition:

Likewise for sundry expenses for the putting up and taking down of the

scaffold and for the little houses newly made, with carriage and carriage

back of the joists and of other things borrowed for the same scaffold, with 7

links [torches made of tow and pitch or wax or tallow] and 1 dozen candles

for light being expenses for 3 nights on plays of comedies and tragedies 25s

8d

3rd Quarter

Likewise to Roger Darneley for 7 links delivered for the children of the

Schoolmaster for the plays 3s

4th Quarter

Likewise to Roger Lyme for one rope for suspending the ship in the Hall 12d

Likewise to John Chappingeton for his work in removing the organ from the

chapel to the Hall and for preparing the same for the plays 5s. 56

It has been argued that the ship here referred to ‘was almost certainly used as a

prop in a performance of Plautus's Rudens and was evidently used on more than

one occasion, hence the need for repairs to it’. The ship was repaired again in 57

1574 in the quarter of the year in which Easter and Whit fell, so this notable stage

prop was not restricted to Christmas plays. The level of professionalism to which

these performances aspired is also shown by the erection of the scaffolding for the

stage and the clearly complex set with its ‘little houses newly made’, together

with the various forms of lighting and the transportation of the organ. The

expression ‘children of the schoolmaster’ here is used to designate scholars, rather

than commoners, and it was the more academically able boys, such as John

Harmar, who were the most active in these dramas. The one boy who is named in

association with acting is Giles Best, a scholar who arrived in 1562 at the age of 12

from St Mary Woolchurch, London, who was named among the grape-stealing 58

offenders, and was also commemorated in one of Johnson’s dictations after a

performance: ‘Just think what Best is feeling. What use does he now have for a

pair of quilted stocking or of the clever guitar tunes, or of the trumpets and

drums?’ Music was clearly an essential element of Winchester drama. 59

Besides producing plays written by others, Jonson wrote scripts himself. One

Shrove Tuesday was marked by a morality play which included the character of

‘Chastity, the daughter of Abstinence (whom I introduced as such in the play)’. A 60

dictation which refers to a subsequent Christmas play, possibly in 1565, afforded

Jonson the opportunity of providing a series of analogies for the better

understanding of the basic structure of dramatic works:

Plays can be divided into three parts: prothesis, epitasis and catastrophe.

Plays are said to be imitative of things which happen in real life, so that no

one can doubt that these same parts exist in real life too. You may note that

there are three periods in diseases: growth, condition and decline. The

same thing has long proved true about your holidays: they also have a

beginning, a middle and an end; so that you can understand that what

Cicero says is true, that nothing should appear to be lasting for ever

because it is going to have an end. 61

What shall I say is the reason that I keep dreaming about our play every

night? It is not strange that the trickster Mitio upsets my sleep, nor Nero;

Cambyses is on the stage all the time; he and his satraps and his wife and all

the players, whether priests or fierce monsters, keep flitting by. Sometimes

I seem to be upset by the rowdy crowds or the noise or the too confined

space; sometimes I seem to hear voices from the furthest corners of the Hall

and my actors don’t keep their proper places. I’m still in doubt what this

means; perhaps I pleased the spectators on that day; I certainly haven’t

pleased myself. 62

This too appears to be a reference to a script which Jonson wrote himself, as there

is no extant play in either Latin or Greek in which Cambyses appears. 63

Not only were there plays directed and written by Jonson, there were also visiting

companies. One of the first theatrical experiences to which the young John Harmar

was exposed in 1569 was a performance by the queen’s own company, for which,

the accounts record, there were ‘gratuities given to the Lady Queen's performers

at the command of the Lord Warden 5s’. Unfortunately there are no further 64

details of the performance. Towards the end of that same first year of John

Harmar’s Winchester education there was another royal entertainment, this time

as part of a visit by the queen herself, for which there were ‘gratuities given to

the Lady Queen's pipers with wine at the order of the sub-Warden 7s 4d.’ 65

Winchester College was a culturally thriving institution at this time.

On a slightly less intellectually-elevated plane, on Shrove Tuesday every year there

was a cock-fight to mark the last day before Lent. Roger Ascham, whose influential

work The Scholemaster was published in 1571, was so much in favour of this

activity that he wrote of ‘all kinde of pastimes, fitte for a Jentleman, [which] I

will, God willing, in fitter place, more at large, declare fullie, in my booke of the

Cockpitte’. Sadly, this promised volume never saw the light of day. The practice 66

of having annual cock-fights in schools is recorded as early as the twelfth century

and went on into the nineteenth century. This tradition was justified on the 67

grounds that it had been an annual event in ancient Athens, and that attendance

by the boys was ‘with the sole intention that by being spectators of such a battle,

however inattentive, you will as a result enjoy a strong urge to behave as

virtuously as Iphicrates and the Athenians’. John Ley’s piratical career may have 68

been inspired, though admittedly not very virtuously, by watching such martial

displays.

There were, of course, boys’ amusements which were not organised by the adults.

Nutting was a particularly popular pastime, which took place each September and

was encouraged by the schoolmaster. In time even this boys’ activity was

formalised into a school event, and a document of 1709 records that the ‘poor and

needy’ scholars were charged ninepence each year after Whitsuntide towards the

expenses of the nutting expedition. In the 1560s Jonson saw it more as an 69

educational opportunity when he could make use of Nux, an elegiac poem in 91

couplets, then thought to have been written by Ovid. The poem, narrated by the

walnut tree, asks boys not to throw stones at the tree in an effort to dislodge the

nuts. Jonson neatly adapts the original to make it applicable to his audience:

. . . Three or four times a day the wind roars through our ears and brings in

its train the chattering words of droves of Wykehamists. Semele, Cadmus’

daughter, gave birth before her time to Bacchus, terrified by Zeus’

thunderbolt; so I, being frightened by this fearful sound year in year out,

shall perhaps be forced to bear my fruit prematurely. Stop your shouting,

stop your shrieking. The wind you make is shaking all the nuts down. 70

Another rather complicated dictation records some of the games the boys played

with their acquisitions from these nutting expeditions:

Set three nuts in a row at the bottom and add a fourth above; the shape of

the nuts, my friends, will be pyramidal. Drill through a nut, fill it with pitch,

hang it on a string; the shape of the nut will be an instrument of war. Let

one hand hold some nuts and the other be empty; close each to prevent the

guesser carrying off the spoil if he gets it right. In this hand even, in that

odd; let the balance be in doubt; “Even, odd”, let the boy guess which pile

is which. Let a boy turn one hand to catch whatever his other cupped hand

throws. The trick is if possible for what is thrown to stay caught. If no one

wants to play the game, break the nut and you will certainly have some

excellent food from it. 71

There are four different games described here. Pyramids is a simple construction 72

game which is found in antiquity. The second game is notable for being the first

recorded reference to conkers. The Oxford English Dictionary, rather surprisingly,

defines ‘conkers’ as ‘A boys' game, played originally with snail-shells . . . but now

with horse-chestnuts, in which each boy has a chestnut on a string which he

alternately strikes against that of his opponent and holds to be struck until one of

the two is broken.’ The first example listed is dated 1847 from a dictionary of

provincial words, where ‘conkers’ simply means snail-shells. The game, as Jonson’s

dictation makes clear, pre-dates its modern name by several centuries, and, pace

the Oxford English Dictionary, has been played with nuts for a considerable period

– snail-shells would have been broken far too rapidly. What is slightly disconcerting

is that Jonson appears to have been advocating a method of preparing the conker

by filling it with pitch, which would both harden the nut and reduce its frangibility,

a practice which nowadays would be regarded as, at the very least, reprehensible.

The third game, odds and evens, is to be found described in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, a

work which was not translated into English until over half a century after Jonson’s

dictation. The fourth game appears to involve throwing nuts from hand to hand

and catching as many as possible, which seems to be a primitive version of the

game now called knuckle-bones. These are all simple but timeless activities which

have been played by children for centuries and, in some cases, millennia. John

Harmar clearly paid particular attention to this dictation, for when he became the

schoolmaster this was among the dictations which he gave, albeit with an

interesting extra element, as will be seen in chapter 3.

There was one activity which was both illicit and dangerous. Boys like graffiti, and

generations of Wykehamists have carved, caused to be carved, or have scratched

their names on the stonework or woodwork. It is a form of immortality, and at

Winchester the names of the famous and infamous are preserved, including Bishop

Thomas Ken, Anthony Trollope, and Montague Druitt. John Harmar evidently 73

wished to be memorialised in this way and two examples of his graffiti have been

located. One of these examples is adjacent to the names of Thomas Wygmore 74

who, though four years senior to John Harmar, was only two years older, and of

John Favor who was two years junior to Harmar and three years younger. It was

evidently a recognised place for this particular activity. Other graffiti on this same

piece of stone are dated: one name was carved in 1731, and three were carved in

1941 when the boys were supposed to be on fire-watch during the Second World

War. These carvings are in a location which is very difficult to access. Wygmore

and Favor are unlikely to have been in the school at the same time, so it would

appear that they and Harmar made individual expeditions. First Harmar would

have had to get onto the chapel roof. There were two routes: up a 99-step spiral

staircase in the Muniment Tower, which was lit by five unglazed slit-windows

varying from three and a half to four inches wide and thirty-four to forty-eight

inches high fitted with oak shutters with leather edgings to keep out the weather –

and, of course, any light – and which would have necessitated first going through

chapel to get to the foot of the stairs in the vestry. The other route was via the

equally dark Chapel Tower spiral stairs, which were accessed via an external door

on the south side of the building. Once up on the roof it was necessary to climb

across the lead slope and lift a hatch, through which the boy dropped onto the

upper side of the timber ceiling of chapel, which was constructed of wood panels

nailed from below; thus there was a constant danger of crashing through. It is

more likely that the graffiti artists took the Muniment Tower stairs, as the hatch is

on the north slope of the roof, and the Chapel Tower route would have

necessitated a crawl up and over the roof ridge. The roof-space would have been

in almost total darkness: such light as there was would have been admitted by the

newly-opened hatch, and two small trefoil windows at the east end. This could

only have been ventured on moonlit nights in the summer months, and even so

might have required a candle. The young Harmar would then have to make his way

carefully across the upper side of the ceiling. He needed to negotiate the narrow

spaces between the tie-beams and the king-posts and their diagonal struts until he

got to the east end where there was a massive tie-beam just in front of the

windows. This was the one moment of relative comfort as it is possible to sit on

this beam while carving. The first example of his name is in a scratched rectangle

on the upper left spandrel of the left-hand window and is rather sketchily incised,

suggesting that it may have been a first attempt. John Harmar then elected to

carve his name on the right-hand splayed reveal of the same window. The window

is small and unglazed. There are iron bars. John Harmar scratched a straight line

on which he inscribed his surname in capital letters. In view of the difficulty of

carving into stone, this exercise will have required more than one expedition up

onto the roof and down onto the top of the chapel ceiling. This shows the young

John Harmar to have been both physically active and rather courageous. Not only

was the location a dangerous one to access, it would have required time away

from his chamber and the possibility of being caught.

* * * *

Though dictations were used by Jonson, and subsequently by Harmar, to provide

the boys with an everyday vocabulary, so that they could keep to the school rule

about only speaking in one of the classical languages, the principal function of the

exercises was educational. And the education Winchester boys received was

notably wide-ranging. A certain amount of the teaching covered expected topics.

There are perceptive observations on the nature of the establishment in which the

boys found themselves, expressed in terms which are still applicable:

There is a variety among those who go to public schools, not only in their

ability, but also in their objectives and ways of organizing themselves. Some

who are born with great expectations of power and influence, come not so

much to get an education as to get acquainted with those who seem likely

to be the educated elite of the future. Others who have equal distinction of

birth, but being younger sons will inherit less, study to make up that

deficiency and more by the help of education; and there are some few too

who have already contemplated their fathers’ dislike of them and so work

all the harder in order to take their revenge by becoming pre-eminently

distinguished. Some of humble origin can find no other way of bettering

themselves than by education. We shall also find some who have no

thoughts of distinction in the world, but plod on day after day like Parisian

donkeys, and reckon up the number of years they have lived here rather

than what they have learned during that time; these I cannot call pupils,

but visitors. 75

Why Parisian donkeys should be singled out for obloquy at this point is something

of a mystery. The reference to those of humble origins bettering themselves by

education would have had a particular resonance for John Harmar, and several

others of the ‘poor and needy scholars’ for whom William of Wykeham had founded

the college.

Moral topics also recur, sometimes, though not always, from a specifically religious

viewpoint, and occasionally, in view of Jonson’s audience, with an unexpectedly

adult twist:

No one who is just about to enter upon the holy covenant of marriage with

his lawful wife, first has intercourse with a common prostitute, but keeps

himself chaste that he may enjoy even more fully the union to which he has

been looking forward. The object of my saying this is to make you

understand how disgraceful it would be for you who are just entering upon

Lent to defile your bodies beforehand with bouts of excessive eating and

drinking. 76

There are two topics to which Jonson frequently recurs: war, and the love of

money. He anathematizes both.

Among the evils which afflict humanity—and these are neither small nor few

—I find none more harmful and destructive than war, both because the

outcome of wars cannot be predicted and because it causes people to have

not a single experience only, but countless experiences, of pain and

catastrophe, as the destruction of many cities and the annihilation and ruin

of both men and states can not only attest but prove. 77

One of the ways in which Jonson teaches the inappropriateness of the love of

money neatly demonstrates his ability to combine a number of pedagogic ends. A

series of dictations illustrates how to write an essay on a specified theme. Jonson

includes rhetorical terms, methodology and illustrative content. He starts by

explaining that there are two basic forms of argument: enthymema and

syllogism. Interestingly, he does not explain what these two terms mean: he 78

clearly expects the boys to know that enthymema is an argument formulated on

merely probable terms, as opposed to one which is demonstrative and can be

proven. He goes on to provide an example of this method: ‘The parts of

enthymema are proposition, reason, support of reason, embellishment, and

conclusion. The point of the proposition and the conclusion is bound to be the

same as the topic itself. The establishment provides ornament rather than proof.

The support of the reason is not part of the framework of the enthymema, but

proves its assumption’. The boys are then given a simple example of this 79

argumentative method in action: ‘ Let this be our theme: Virtue grows when

practised. Everything is attracted by love of praise, and is particularly inspired by

it; therefore virtue is too. No animal is so wild that it won’t allow itself to be

stroked; no human being is so barbarous that he will not allow himself to be

praised; therefore everything is attracted . . . etc. At that point your composition

should go off into analogies, examples, apophthegms and other embellishments,

and then the conclusion’. 80

The subsequent dictation provides a detailed example of the second of the two

forms of argument: the syllogism:

In a rhetorical syllogism, which is the second part of explaining a theme,

there are numbered six parts: proposition, major argument, proof of major

argument, minor argument, proof of minor argument, and conclusion.

Take the theme: “A philosopher ought not to be in any way avaricious.”

Proposition: I think than no one is in doubt how particularly disgraceful greed for

money, which we call avarice, is in a philosopher.

Major: For avarice (to put it in a single word), just as it is the opposite of

virtue, so it directly militates against wisdom.

Proof of major: For wisdom is the disciplined condition of mind which is always

straining towards things heavenly and eternal; but what is avarice but

a corrupting power, debasing what would otherwise be immortal mind

into a weak tool of money, that is, earthly dross? So that everyone

can clearly see the difference between avarice and wisdom.

Minor: Moreover, will not a philosopher, since he teaches others wisdom,

himself be bound to adopt the same wisdom in his life?

Proof of minor: What is the good of his proud boast of the name of philosopher,

unless, just as he professes to love wisdom, he can both attain it

himself and also live according to its principles.

Conclusion: Therefore, since it is now clear that there can be no agreement

between wisdom and avarice, but that the philosopher is wise both in

reality and name, how shameful it would be for there to be even the

slightest suspicion of avarice in a man following that profession. Let

those about whom I speak see to it themselves—the wise. 81

As repetition is the basis of education, Jonson further reinforces both methodology

and the importance of the moral message in the next dictation in this series, in

which he affects to be providing some omitted information:

I must here put in what I omitted about the proof of a theme, so that there

are no gaps. Some propositions are so general and universal that they can

never be proved a priori, as they say. These are provable by enumeration,

which the philosophers call induction, and depend upon a large number of

examples for certainty. Let us take a proposition from Aristophanes,

“Everything is the slave of money”. But what enthymema, what syllogism

will establish this theme as aptly as if someone were to run through all

classes of men, all arts, inventions and works, and show, with Chremulus,

that nothing is done, except for money? So all themes must be organised in

these three ways: by enthymema, syllogism and enumeration. 82

The reference to Chremulus here may be more evidence of the plays which Jonson

directed. Chremulus (aka Chremylus or Chremylos or Khremylos) is a character in

Aristophanes’ Plutus. Chremulus is a poor man who befriends the blind Plutus (god

of Wealth) and encourages him to distribute his riches more widely. The name is

connected to the Greek word for money (Khremata). That he is introduced into

this dictation with no explanation suggests that the boys would have been

expected to recognise the reference, and having seen or performed in Plutus

would have provided this knowledge. It is also further evidence for a knowledge of

Greek rather than Latin literature.

Use of technical rhetorical terms without explanation reaches a peak in a most

complex quasi-acrostic on the Feast of Pentecost, in which the acrostic quality of

the composition relies on syllables rather than initials, with couplets starting ‘fes .

. . Tum . . . Pen . . . Te . . . Cos . . . Tes’ and, to add to the complexity, each

couplet has a covert meaning, the understanding of which depends on an

appreciation of epenthesis, apocope, paragoge, prothesis, aphaeresis, metathesis

and syncope, respectively, each of which technical terms is employed within the

relevant couplet, but without explication. It is perhaps worth observing that, 83

according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first four of these words had not,

at this date, been recorded in written English. An understanding of the acrostic

depends on the boy apprehending that fes, by epenthesis (the insertion of a letter,

and a word not found in English until nearly a hundred years later, in 1656),

becomes fles (‘downhearted’), and so throughout the verses. Even the brightest of

scholars might have found this a trifle daunting. It is not made easier by the

anagrammatising of tes to form ‘ste’ – a combination of letters meaningless in

Latin which requires the reader to pronounce it as if Latin in order to vocalize the

English word ‘stay’.

There were scientific topics. Jonson explained to the boys the relative sizes of

land-based and water-based animals; he told them the latest theories about 84

comets, acoustics, why the sea is salty, the causes of blushing and of 85 86 87 88

tears, and described the digestive system. He set out the various ideas about 89 90

the origin of the world:

Writers have had many different views about the origin of the world, some

believing that it existed from eternity, others asserting it was indeed made,

but that it came into being either from the clash of atoms in the void, and

that it was by chance that they came together into this particular shape, or

from that formless confusion which they called Chaos. Some choose water

as the matter from which everything consists, some fire, some air, some an

intermediate element between air and water. Democritus suggested that

just as there was an immense space of void and an innumerable number of

atoms, so there was an infinity of worlds. 91

The notion of an ‘infinity of worlds’ foreshadows current discussions about

quantum mechanics and multi-verses. A passage on the relative efficacy of poisons

observes that those which are thought to endanger life in even small quantities are

‘often tested on mice’, a notably early reference to toxicological experimentation

on animals in England and, apparently, the earliest known reference to mice being

used in this way. One scientific passage opens with a striking remark: 92

While we were doing anatomy yesterday, I noticed so many miracles, that

apart from the all-pervading power of God which I seemed to see, I thought

that no more pertinent statement had been made by the philosophers than

when they called a man a microcosmos. 93

When one looks at what Christopher Jonson was doing as the schoolmaster at

Winchester, one can only be impressed by his energy: teaching seven days a week

for more than eleven months of the year, with a single assistant, well over one

hundred boys and setting individual tasks to each boy; putting on plays with

complex scenery; reading round the various subjects which provided material for

the dictations; arranging for the entire college to be transferred to Moundsmere,

the rural location thirteen miles north-west of Winchester, which was used

whenever there was a threat of the plague in the city – an event occurring twice in

the decade of his mastership; and being involved in the organisation of royal visits.

In his spare time he wrote Latin poetry and liminary verses for publications by two

of his former students, Richard Willes and Henry Dethick . In 1564 Jonson 94 95

produced a Latin verse life of the founder, William of Wykeham, which Willes

published as an appendix to his own Latin poems in 1573 under the title ‘Carmina

C. Johnsoni, poetae eximii, scholae Winton. Informatoris.’

But what is truly extraordinary is that, as Anthony Wood records: ‘All the time that

he could get at vacant hours he spent upon his beloved study of physic, which he

practiced in the city of Winchester, but not to the neglect of his school’. So 96

successful was Jonson in this practice that he was awarded the degree of Bachelor

of Medicine by Oxford University on 14 December 1570. He was indeed so far

advanced in his medical studies that he proceeded to the degree of Doctor of

Medicine on 23 June 1571. According to Wood, it was shortly after this distinction

that he resigned the schoolmastership and ‘repairing to London, practiced with

good success in the parish of St. Dunstan’s in the West’; though other sources

suggest that Jonson had resigned the previous year. In 1577, according to the

Dictionary of National Biography, he published A Counsel Against the Plague, or

any other Infectious Disease and Munk’s Roll of the Royal College of Physicians 97

records that Jonson was admitted a fellow of that college about the year 1580 and

held a number of senior positions. He died at the beginning of July, 1597, in St.

Dunstan’s parish, and was buried there on the 7th of July. By the time of his 98

death he had accumulated ‘a considerable fortune.’ 99

That Jonson proceeded from M.B. to M.D. in just over six months suggests that he

had satisfied most of the requirements for the higher degree before supplicating

for the first – and he must have done all this while still at Winchester. The statutes

in operation at the time demanded that a bachelor waited four years before

supplicating for his doctoral degree, but it is clear that in practice the sole arbiter

of when a candidate was to be permitted to proceed to an M.D. was the Regius

Professor of Physic, who was required to testify to the applicant’s suitability. The 100

Regius Professor in 1570 was, as luck would have it, Walter Bayley, who had

entered Winchester as a scholar in 1544, and may have overlapped with Jonson 101

who entered in 1549. They had both been fellows of New College between 1555

and 1560. When Jonson started his medical studies he would have been aware of

the requirement in the Oxford University statutes of 1549 that students for the

degree of M.B. had to have viewed two anatomies in addition to studying for six

years and disputing twice before they could supplicate for the degree. In addition,

they had to have performed two anatomies and have cured three patients before

being admitted to surgical practice. For the M.D. degree a candidate had to have

viewed two or three more anatomies, heard lectures, engaged in formal public

disputation, and have been M.B. for four or five years. In the middle of Jonson’s 102

studies the Oxford statutes were revised. Those of 1564/5 make no reference to

anatomy. William Badger arrived in Winchester aged 10 in 1561 and went up to 103

New College in 1569, and it is frustrating that the precise date of this dictation

cannot be established in relation to the change in the university statutes. When

Jonson opens this dictation with the claim ‘While we were doing anatomy

yesterday’, it is not clear whether the boys have been acquiring book-learning or

practical experience. This ambiguity is not the result of translation into English: it

is similarly ambiguous in the original Latin. Whatever the truth of the matter, John

Harmar and his fellow students were certainly getting the most up-to-date

knowledge from a practising physician.

Christopher Jonson left Winchester College in 1570/71. There have been

suggestions that he was eased out because he was thought to favour the Church of

Rome – and one must recall that in his time the college produced three Catholic 104

martyrs, though the occupancy of three Anglican bishoprics might neatly balance

the ledger. In view of the timing of his gaining of his medical degrees, it might be

just as reasonable to suppose that this was a career change which he had been

planning for some time.

His successor was Thomas Bilson, who will reappear with some frequency in this

narrative. When Jonson resigned the schoolmastership, no less a figure than

Matthew Parker, the archbishop of Canterbury, wrote to the fellows of the college

claiming that only the appointment of Bilson to the vacancy ‘would satisfie our

expectation’. This letter was countersigned by four bishops: Edwin Sandys of 105

London, Richard Cox of Ely, Edmund Cheast of Rochester, and Richard Curteis of

Chichester. Other signatories included William Day, the provost of Eton; Thomas

Watts, a canon of Westminster who established seven scholarships in Greek at

Pembroke College, Cambridge; William Overton, subsequently bishop of Coventry

and Lichfield; and Thomas Godwyn, dean of Canterbury and subsequently bishop of

Bath and Wells. That Bilson was the first protestant schoolmaster of Winchester

College may have led to the theory that Jonson was ousted for his religious views.

Christopher Jonson may have been thought quite young when he was appointed to

the schoolmastership at 29 in 1560. Thomas Bilson was only 23 when he took over

in 1571, and this list of distinguished supporters shows both how effective he was

at networking and how academically precocious he was. He had been admitted as

a scholar to Winchester in 1559 at the age of 11, and had been elected a fellow of

New College, Oxford, by the end of 1562, when he was only 15. 106

From the point of view of John Harmar, the change of schoolmaster would have

caused relatively little observable disruption to daily life. We know from the

manuscript accounts of the Winchester curriculum in 1531 and 1655 that there was

little essential change either to the material being taught or to the organisation of

the school day. Though there is no extant manuscript evidence from Bilson’s

schoolmastership, we can be certain that the method of teaching – dictation –

would have continued; and we know there continued to be performances of Greek

and Latin plays, and there was at least one royal visit from Elizabeth I. 107 108

Continuity was a key element in the successful longevity of Winchester College as

an institution. In the sixteenth century there is a line of schoolmasters who had

been scholars themselves, a line broken only by a single Winchester commoner.

This ensured that the teaching practices were consistent and that the master was

constantly encouraging those who might be successors. Bilson was to prove 109

invaluable to John Harmar in the latter’s early career, supporting him on a number

of key occasions. The two initially clearly got on very well

Just as the advent of Bilson would have had little immediate effect upon Harmar’s

education at Winchester, so too, there would have been little observable change in

everyday life when Harmar proceeded to New College as a scholar, once again with

the explicit backing of both Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley, first Earl of Leicester,

who at the time was the chancellor of Oxford University and well placed to exert

pressure on a college. Jonson has a very interesting dictation which provides an 110

extended metaphor of the progress of a Wykehamist, and is most apt in view of his

own change of career:

I want to make a comparison between the human body and Wykeham’s

college. The taste of food which is often deceptive, is in the mouth; that is

like the taste of scholars in election. The first digestion is in the stomach:

the useless filth is discarded through the bowels; what is nutritious is

separated and carried down through a hollow vein as far as the liver.

Similarly the first digestion of scholars takes place in the school; useless

intellects disappear from the school to be wasted in the hell of slavery,

while those who produce some good fruit pass on to Oxford by competition.

The second digestion is in the liver: whey-like matter is separated off

through the urinary channels to the bladder, the bilious to the gall-bladder,

the melancholic to the spleen; what is suitable for blood is distributed

though the veins to the whole body. In my comparison I call the years of

probation at Oxford the second digestion; the idle, the lazy, the immoral,

are the discarded matter; the rest, like blood, are admitted into the society

of the college. The third digestion is in the veins: the watery part seeps out

through the pores; what is more wholesome is applied to making flesh. It is

the same with this digestion in the society at Oxford: those who use their

freedom to avoid working any more, pass away in vapour and sweat; the

rest become masters and doctors. The fourth digestion is in flesh: that

natural outflow which provides for the preservation of the species is set

apart for the creation of children; the rest is transformed and becomes an

inseparable part of the limbs. So it is with those who become masters; some

come here to Winchester to teach others, as it were procreating their own

children, others remain at Oxford, until like the body in old age, in the

passage of time they pass away. That is all. 111

This is a particularly apt and memorable extended metaphor from one who was to

enter the medical profession. John Harmar was about to enter the second

digestion.

* * * *

New College, Oxford

At the beginning of March 1572 John Harmar was a scholar at St Mary College of

Winchester, near Winchester, founded by William of Wykeham in 1382. He lived

and was taught in buildings which had been constructed under the leadership of

the master mason William Wynford. Harmar prayed in the Chapel, with its

magnificent East Window depicting the Tree of Jesse, which had been installed by

Thomas Glazier of Oxford . 112

By the end of March 1572 John Harmar was a scholar at St Mary College of

Winchester at Oxford, founded by William of Wykeham in 1379. He lived and was

taught in buildings which had been constructed under the leadership of William

Wynford, and he prayed in the Chapel, with its magnificent West Window depicting

the Tree of Jesse, which had been made by Thomas Glazier. 113

Just as there would have been little or no disruption to Harmar’s life when Thomas

Bilson succeeded Christopher Jonson at Winchester, so there would have been little

disruption caused by the young man’s progress from one Wykehamical foundation

to the next. This was just as William of Wykeham had intended. Walking down New

College Lane, Harmar’s first sight of the entrance to New College would have been

reassuring: a three storey tower, with large oak gates and a wicket entrance set

into the left-hand leaf. The first floor has two four-light windows, and the top

floor has a central statue of the Virgin Mary with a narrow window on either side

and flanked by a statue of an angel to the left and a statue of William of Wykeham

to the right. This is also the design of Middle Gate at Winchester, except that the

wicket gate is in the right-hand leaf. In each tower the warden of the college lived

on the first floor from whence he could see the comings and goings of all the

students through the main entrance to the great quadrangle round which the

college offices were ranged. An observant student might have noticed that the

flanking statues at Winchester are set into ornate niches only slightly smaller than

that housing St Mary, where the niches at Oxford are both plainer and much

smaller. A particularly observant student might have registered that the upper

string-course at Oxford is more ornate than that at Winchester.

Once inside the quadrangle, the similarities would have continued to be evident.

One of William of Wykeham’s great contributions to architecture was the concept

of the large central collegiate quadrangle. Oxford and Cambridge colleges founded

prior to New College had been built as a series of small quadrangles, as at Merton.

Subsequent colleges imitated the Wykehamical innovation.The chapel and hall

form one side, there is a kitchen range, and accommodation for scholars and

fellows on two floors completed the square – the third storey now visible at Oxford

is an seventeenth-century extension. To the south of the chapel at Winchester is 114

a cloister: the Oxford cloister is to the west. The Muniment Tower at Winchester is

in the south-west corner, and entered through the chapel: the Muniment Tower at

Oxford is in the north-east corner and shares a staircase with the hall. These are

topographical differences: entering through Middle Gate, which was in the north

side of the quadrangle at Winchester, Harmar was faced by the south range with

the chapel to the east and the hall to the west. In Oxford, the entrance lodge was

the centre of the west range, so that on entering the quadrangle, Harmar found

the chapel and hall to his left, with the chapel at the west end of that range,

which explains why there is a great west window at Oxford, where its counterpart

at Winchester is an east window. The differences are not as striking as the

similarities, which are to be found in such details as the window tracery. Even the

most experienced Wykehamist might find it somewhat puzzling to ascribe with

certainty an architectural detail to one college rather than the other. For a 115

student moving from one foundation to the other, there is a comforting sense of

security provided by the familiarity. John Harmar would have felt at home.

Even more important than the architecture to this comfortable sensation would

have been the faces. Of the twelve boys who entered Winchester College as

scholars with John Harmar in 1569, six went up to New College as scholars, and all

six subsequently became fellows. Seven of the boys from the 1568 Winchester

entry and ten of those from the previous year went up to New College as scholars.

Kirby’s Winchester Scholars records that in 1572, the year Harmar arrived in

Oxford, there were 60 identifiable fellows of New College who had been scholars

at Winchester – though not all would have been in post for the whole of that year,

as some would have resigned their fellowships to take up a Church of England

living – or to get married – and would have been replaced from among the Oxford

scholars who, in their turn, would have been replaced by scholars from Winchester.

The vast majority of those New College fellows who had not been scholars at

Winchester would have been commoners there, as Wykeham’s statutes restricted

entry to candidates from Winchester, though by this date New College had

occasionally admitted scholars from Westminster or Eton. 116

In some areas of life John Harmar might have noticed a change: at Winchester

scholars slept with up to 16 in a large chamber; at Oxford he would have found

himself sharing a chamber with two or three others. But many of the rules 117

remained the same. At Winchester boys were only permitted to to go out of the

college in pairs and had to have specific permission to leave the site. At Oxford,

the university statutes laid down: ‘no Pupil or Scholler shale goe into the towne

without the leaue of his Tutor and Principall, Deane, or Censor of the House, nor

without a fellow of his owne qualitye vppon correction accordinge to the iudgment

of the Vicechancelor or Proctors’. 118

It was the perdagogic rather than the domestic aspects of life which would have

been noticeably different. The young Harmar had had his life controlled by the

timetable at Winchester, and there were set hours in Oxford for lectures and study

of the various subjects: medicine, logic, and rhetoric were taught from seven

o’clock until eight o’clock in the morning; Hebrew, civil law, philosophy, and Greek

were taught from eight till nine; and mathematics from noon till one. Each 119

subject was taught by one of the regius professors, by college lecturers or by

regent-masters – those M.A.s who were continuing their studies either with a view

to a doctoral degree or before acquiring a church living. As Harmar was an

undergraduate at New College, the college lecturers and most of the regent-

masters would have been Wykehamists, reinforcing yet again the seamlessness of

the Winchester-Oxford transfer. At Winchester all teaching took place in a single

schoolroom and was based upon the encyclopaedic knowledge of the schoolmaster.

At Oxford lectures took place both within the college and in university lecture

rooms and for the latter the students were required to wait upon the lecturer at

his lodgings and accompany him in procession to the place where the lecture was

to be delivered. At these lectures a master or bachelor of arts read out one of 120

the prescribed texts sentence by sentence, and provided an explanation of and

commentary to each one. New College had its own tutorial system: their

undergraduates were required to dispute once a week during term-time in addition

to their attendance at lectures. Being in the Winchester schoolroom all day would

have made it difficult to be absent for a lesson, but that such absences occurred in

Oxford may be deduced from the system of fines for those who failed to attend. 121

John Harmar’s time as an undergraduate at New College is the one period of his

life for which there is no real individual detail. It is possible to surmise from the

university statutes how he might have spent his days but it would be superfluous to

expand on the previous paragraph. Having completed his probationary fellowship

satisfactorily, he became a perpetual fellow of New College in 1574, but it was not

until after he had taken his B.A. on the fifteenth of January 1577 (N.S.), that he

began to differentiate himself from his peer group. As a newly qualified bachelor,

he was required to attend daily lectures and engage in disputations during the

course of a further three years to prepare for the master’s degree. Though he does

not appear to have entirely satisfied these requirements, in one academic area he

did make his mark. In 1579 Sermons of M. Iohn Caluine, vpon the x.

Commandementes of the Lawe, giuen of God by Moses, otherwise called the

Decalogue. Gathered word for word, presently at his Sermons, when he preached

on Deuteronomie, without adding vnto, or diminishing from them any thing

afterward. Translated out of Frenche into English, by I,H., first appeared in 1579

in London and is recorded with three variant publication lines, indicating a group

of printers had taken on the work in partnership. This is a translation of Sermons 122

de M. Iehan Calvin svr les Dix Commandemens de la Loy, donnee de Dieu par

Moyse, autrement appelez le Decalogue: Recveillis svr le Champ, et Mot à mot de

ses Predications, lots qu’il preschoit le Deuteronome, sans que depuis y ait esté

rien adiouté ne diminué, published in Geneva by Conrad Badius in 1557. Harmar’s

translation was reprinted, again in London, and again with three variant

publication lines, in 1581. The work was dedicated to Robert Dudley, earl of

Leicester, and the preface pays testimony to Leicester’s patronage and influence

with the queen that had allowed John Harmar to study at Winchester and Oxford:

Your Honour’s good procurement of her Majesty’s gracious favour, whereby I

first became a Scholar in Winchester College, afterward to be removed to

the New College of Oxford, whereof at this present I am a poor member, I

could never since forget, or bury so good a benefit in such great oblivion.   123

This publication is revealing on many levels. It is the first public acknowledgement

of his indebtedness to Elizabeth I and Leicester for enabling his education at

Winchester and New College; it is the first of a number of books which Harmar

dedicated to powerful members of Elizabeth’s court, each publicly reinforcing this

sense of obligation to the queen for the favours, favours which were continued

throughout his life; it is a translation from French, a language he had not been

taught at Winchester, and presumably learned while at Oxford, though it was not a

part of the formal curriculum – it was the first of several modern European

languages in which he was to demonstrate fluency during his career; and that it is

a work of John Calvin he chose to translate shows Harmar’s awareness of the

necessity of proving religious conformity with the prevailing views of the court in

order to advance in life.

Rewards were soon to be bestowed: Elizabeth I sent the young scholar on a

European tour.

Information in this paragraph is derived from Thomas Frederick Kirby, Winchester Scholars. A list 1

of the Wardens, Fellows, and Scholars of Saint Mary College of Winchester, near Winchester, commonly called Winchester College, London: Henry Frowde, 1888, hereafter Kirby, Scholars; and comparing Kirby’s lists with the Dictionary of National Biography, hereafter DNB.

J.W. Binns, Intellectual culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, Leeds: Francis Cairns, 2

1990, p. 149.

Sermons of M. Iohn Calvin, upon the x. Commandements of the Lawe, giuen of God by Moses, 3

otherwise called the Decalogue, trans. John Harmar, London: John Harison, 1581, sig *3a; STC 4452.

T.F. Kirby, Annals of Winchester College from its Foundation in the year 1382 to the Present 4

Time, London: Henry Frowde, 1892, pp. 93-108, hereafter Kirby, Annals; A.F. Leach, ‘Schools’, in H. Arthur Doubleday and William Page (edd.), The Victoria County History of the Counties of England: Hampshire and The Isle of Wight, 5 vols., Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1900-1912, II. 316-19. Hereafter VCH.

Kirby, Scholars, p. 128.5

VCH, II. 276.6

Kirby, Annals, p. 139n.7

VCH, II. 295-96.8

Information in this and succeeding paragraphs from: VCH, II. 296-300; Thomas Wright, ‘Rules of 9

the Free School at Saffron Walden, in Essex, in the reign of Henry VIII’ , Archaeologia, XXXIV, 1851, 37-41.

These were the bequest of William Fleshmonger, scholar 1491, Dean of Chichester. One survives 10

and is preserved in the Fellows’ Library.

VCH, II. 274.11

CJ fol 161a. WCM P9/2/34 is a full transcription and translation by Richard Bass of the dictations 12

given by Jonson. The manuscript (discussed below) is now in the British Library, Add MS 4379. The Bass material was prepared 1992-94 and all quotations from Jonson’s dictations are in Bass’s translation, with silent corrections where appropriate. Subsequent references to this MS are indicated by CJ followed by folio number.

Kirby, Annals, p. 46.13

For details of the Winchester curriculum at this time, see Appendix C.14

BL Add MS 4379, see note 12 above.15

CJ fol 15a.16

CJ fol 174a.17

CJ fol 27b.18

Kirby, Scholars, p. 137.19

CJ fol 141b.20

Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, London: John Daye, 1571, sig Bia; STC 834.21

BL MS Lansdowne 10. art. 55, cited in Henry Ellis, Original letters, illustrative of English 22

history; including numerous royal letters: from autographs in the British Museum, and one or two other collections, Second series (4 vols), London: Harding and Lepard, 1827, II. 312.

ibid., II. 312-13.23

CJ fols 34b, 138b.24

CJ 139b.25

CJ fol 7b.26

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/xmlchunk?doc=Perseus:text:27

1999.01.0084:book=10:chapter=18

CJ fols 66a, 201b.28

all in CJ fol 41a.29

CJ fol 195b.30

CJ fol 45b.31

CJ fol 22a.32

CJ fol 43b.33

CJ fol 47b.34

Kirby, Annals, pp. 346-47; VCH, II. 329.35

Information derived from mutilated marginalia on fol 19b of an early copy on vellum of the 36

College statutes (WCM A5/131). Known as ‘Heete’s Statutes’, after Robert Heete who paid for the copy after being elected a fellow in 1422, this volume was used by the scholars as a doodling pad between the years 1770 and 1790. Several entries are dated.

CJ fol 69b.37

CJ fol 85a.38

CJ fol 181b.39

CJ fol 76a.40

CJ fol 191b.41

CJ fol 49a.42

CJ fols 81a, 82a-b, 86a, 89b, 91a-b, 97a, 98b, 102a, 103b, 107a-b, 110a-b.43

London, 1580; STC 13625.44

CJ fol 98b.45

CJ fol 37b.46

CJ fol 70a, though the ‘discus’ may not have been the object now so-called: OED has an 47

example from 1614 which refers to ‘Casting or hurling the great stone called discus’.

CJ fols 90b, 145b, 193a.48

CJ fol 6a.49

CJ fol 20b.50

Ecphrasis Anglica in Comœdiam Acolasti. The Comedye of Acolastus translated into oure 51

englysshe tongue after suche manner as chylderne are taught in the grammer schole fyrst worde for worde ... and afterwarde accordynge to the sence ... with admonitions ... for the more perfyte instructynge of the lerners, and ... brefe introductory to ... the dyvers sortes of meters, etc. Interpreted by I. Palsgrave, London: Bethelet, 1540; STC 11470.

Acolastus. De filio prodigo comœdia, Antwerp, 1529, Paris and Cologne, 1554.52

CJ fol 88b.53

CJ fol 89a.54

Records of Early English Drama: Winchester College 1563-1575, Jane Cowling (ed.), p. 2, 55

http://reedprepub.org/browse-records/hampshire-2/winchester-college/; WCM 22215 fol 18b. That the plays were being performed ‘in the Christmas holidays’ indicates that the boys did not go home during the festive season.

REED, pp. 11-12; WCM 22216 fol 43b.56

REED, p. 11; WCM 22216 fol 43b; and see Jane Cowling, ‘Performance at Winchester College’, 57

ROMARD XLVI (2007), pp. 110-111.

Kirby, Scholars, p. 138.58

CJ fol 190a.59

CJ fol 100a.60

CJ fol 142a, first passage.61

CJ fol 142a, second passage.62

Information kindly provided by Stephen Anderson.63

REED, p. 10; WCM 22215, fol 178a.64

REED, p. 10; WCM 22215, fol 214a.65

Ascham, The Scholemaster, fol 20a.66

W. Fitzstephen, ‘Every year on the morning of Shrove-Tuesday, the school-boys of the city of 67

London bring game cocks to their masters, and in the fore part of the day, till dinner time, they are permitted to amuse themselves by seeing them fight’ quoted in Joseph Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, ed. and rev. J. Charles Cox, London: Methuen, [1903], p. 224. Fitzstephen, who died in 1191, was describing the reign of Henry II; see also OED sv cock-fight, where the citations refer to cock-fights in schools as early as 1565-66 and as late as 1815.

CJ fol 95b.68

VCH, II. 342. Commoners were charged one shilling and sixpence.69

CJ fol 128a.70

CJ fol 68a.71

Richard Bass, ‘Sixteenth Century nuts’, in ad familiares. The Journal of the Friends of Classics, 72

Spring, 1998, pp. xii-xiii.

Non-juring bishop, 1637-1711; nineteenth-century novelist, 1815-82; candidate for Jack the 73

Ripper, 1857-88.

Discovered by Suzanne Foster, Winchester College Archivist, June 2015.74

CJ fol 146a.75

CJ fol 100a.76

CJ fol 135b.77

CJ fol 186a.78

CJ ibid.79

CJ ibid.80

CJ fol 186b.81

CJ fol 188b.82

CJ fol 45b.83

CJ fol 19b.84

CJ fol 24b.85

CJ fol 42b.86

CJ fol 111b.87

CJ fol 146b.88

CJ fol 92b.89

CJ fol 90a.90

CJ fol 183b.91

CJ fol 140a; I am most grateful to Phil Wexler of the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, 92

MA, and Alain Touwaide of the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions, for pointing out that though using animals in the testing of the strength of poisons is recorded in the second century C.E. in Galen’s De antidotis, those tests were carried out on cocks rather than mice. No reference to mice being used in this way has been located earlier than this dictation by Jonson.

CJ fol 95a.93

Ricardi Willeii Poematum Liber, London: Totttel, 1573; STC 25671.94

Feriæ sacræ octo libris comprehensæ, in quibus, naturae, tabularum, & gratie leges 95

exprimuntur, London: Toy, 1577; STC 6787.

Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 2nd edn, 2 vols., London: Knaplock, Midwinter and Tonson, 96

1721, I. pt. 1, 289.

I have been unable to locate a copy of this work, or any reference to it other than that found in 97

the DNB.

He was censor in 1581-83, 1587, and 1589-93; elect, 28th May, 1594; consiliarius and treasurer, 98

1594-96; http://munksroll.rcplondon.ac.uk/Biography/Details/2437

DNB, D.K. Money, ‘Christopher Johnson’.99

Register of the University of Oxford, ed. Andrew Clark, Oxford: Oxford Historical Society, 100

1887, Vol. II, pt. 1, 125-28; hereafter Oxford Register.

Kirby, Scholars, p. 125.101

Oxford Register, pp. 125, 126-28.102

Gillian Lewis, ‘The Faculty of Medicine’, in The History of the University of Oxford, Volume III: 103

The Collegiate University, ed. James McConica, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, p.218.

‘There is a suggestion that [Jonson] had some sympathy with the Old Religion and that he and 104

Stempe were ‘Catholics at heart’ and may have influenced Henry Garnet. . . . [Jonson] resigned shortly after Bishop Horne had issued his injunctions in 1571 to stamp out all traces of Catholicism in the college, but we do not know whether this was because he disliked the injunctions or merely because he wanted to pursue his medical interests.’ Patrick McGrath, ‘Winchester College and the Old Religion in the Sixteenth Century’, in Roger Custance (ed.), Winchester College Sixth Centenary Essays, Oxford: OUP, 1982, p. 250.

24 April 1571, WCM 23441.105

Kirby, Scholars, p. 136; and DNB, William Richardson, ‘Thomas Bilson’.106

REED, pp. 11-12; WCM 22216, fols 43v and 78a.107

REED, p. 11; WCM 22215, fol 252a.108

The 1531 curriculum document had been compiled by Richard Twychener, who had been 109

admitted a scholar in 1518, and was schoolmaster from 1531 to 1535. He was succeeded by John White, who had been admitted a scholar in 1521, was schoolmaster from 1535 to 1541, and eventually became bishop of Lincoln. Twychener and White had both been taught by Thomas Erlisman. White was succeeded as schoolmaster by Thomas Baylie, who had entered as a scholar in 1528 under the mastership of Richard Twychener’s elder brother John. Baylie, in turn, was followed in 1546 by William Evered, who, though not recorded as a scholar of Winchester, became a fellow of New College in 1540, and thus is almost certain to have been a Winchester commoner under White. Evered taught until 1552, when Thomas Hyde was appointed. He had been a scholar under John White in 1537. Hyde was succeeded by Christopher Jonson, who had been a scholar under Evered and had, with Hyde, taught Bilson. See Kirby, Scholars, passim.

Sermons of M. Iohn Calvin, sig *3r.110

CJ fol 90a.111

Michael Bullen, John Crook, Rodney Hubbuck and Nikolaus Pevsner, Hampshire: Winchester and 112

the North [The Buildings of England], New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010, pp. 644-45, 647, 648, 649.

Jennifer Sherwood and Nikolaus Pevsner, Oxfordshire [The Buildings of England], 113

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974, pp. 84, 166, 168.

Michael Burden, ‘College Buildings’, in New College, ed. Christopher Tyerman, London: Third 114

Millenium, 2010, p. 14.

Sherwood and Pevsner, Oxfordshire, p. 168, re New College Gate Tower: ‘It has an archway 115

with four-centred arch and two big continuous hollow chamfers – the same moulding as appears frequently at Winchester College.’

Information kindly supplied by Jennifer Thorp, New College Archivist.116

John Newman, ‘New Building and Adaptation’, in McConica (ed.), The Collegiate University, 117

pp. 628, 653 n.5.

Strickland Gibson (ed.), Statuta antiqua universitatis Oxoniensis, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 118

1931, p. 410.

Gibson, Statuta, p. 343.119

Oxford Register, Vol. II, pt. 1, p.9.120

ibid., failure to escort lecturer, 2d; absence from lecture, 2d; failure to take notes, 2d.121

See Appendix A below, ‘John Harmar’s Publications’.122

Sermons of M. Iohn Calvin, sig *3r.123