Norwich School
Norwich School is a private selective day school in the close of Norwich Cathedral, Norwich. Among the oldest schools in the United Kingdom, it has a traceable history to 1096 as an episcopal grammar school established by Herbert de Losinga, first Bishop of Norwich. In the 16th century the school came under the control of the city of Norwich and moved to Blackfriars' Hall following a successful petition to Henry VIII. The school was refounded in 1547 in a royal charter granted by Edward VI and moved to its current site beside the cathedral in 1551. In the 19th century it became independent of the city and its classical curriculum was broadened in response to the declining demand for classical education following the Industrial Revolution.
Early statutes declared the school was to instruct 90 sons of Norwich citizens, though it has since grown to a total enrolment of approximately 1,020 pupils. For most of its history it was a boys' school, before becoming co-educational in the sixth form in 1994 and in every year group in 2010. The school is divided into the Senior School, which has around 850 pupils aged from 11 to 18 across eight houses, and the Lower School, which was established in 1946 and has around 250 pupils aged from 4 to 11. The school educates the choristers of the cathedral, with which the school has a close relationship and which is used for morning assemblies and events throughout the academic year. In league tables of British schools it is consistently ranked first in Norfolk and Suffolk and amongst the highest in the United Kingdom.
Former pupils are referred to as Old Norvicensians or ONs. The school has maintained a strong academic tradition and has educated a number of notable figures including Lord Nelson, Sir Edward Coke and 18 Fellows of the Royal Society among many others. Several members of the Norwich School of painters, the first provincial art movement in England, were educated at the school and the movement's founder, John Crome, also taught at the school. It is a founding member of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, a member of the Choir Schools' Association and has a historical connection with the Worshipful Company of Dyers, one of the Livery Companies of the City of London.
History
Establishment and early history
Norwich School traces its origins to the founding of an episcopal grammar school in 1096 by Herbert de Losinga, first Bishop of Norwich. The continuity of the current Norwich School with the 1096 school would make it one of the oldest surviving schools in the United Kingdom. The newly established school occupied a site on "Holmstrete" in the parish of St Matthew between the close of Norwich Cathedral and the River Wensum. Until the English Reformation the bishop would appoint the headteacher, though on several occasions this role had been fulfilled by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The earliest known headteacher is Vincent of Scarning, who is mentioned in 1240 regarding a financial dispute with a school in Rudham.In 1538, the school was separated from its cathedral foundation and placed under the control of the mayor, sheriffs, and commonalty of the city of Norwich following a successful petition to Henry VIII for the possession of Blackfriars' Hall, a Dominican friary which was surrendered to the Crown in the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Two prominent citizens of the city, Augustine Steward and Edward Rede, after consulting Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, promised on the city's behalf "to fynd a perpetual free-schole therein for the good erudicion and education of yought in lernyng and vertue". Following repairs, the school moved to the former friary in 1541, occupying part of the south-west cloister, where it educated 20 boys under a master and a sub-master.
16th and 17th centuries
The school was refounded as King Edward VI Grammar School in a royal charter granted by Edward VI dated 7 May 1547.Issued four months into the king's accession, the charter expressly implemented an arrangement designed by Henry VIII and was confirmed by Edward Seymour, Lord Protector. Unusually for a cathedral city Norwich did not receive a cathedral school following the Reformation, but an endowed city grammar school. Norwich Cathedral was the first of the eight cathedral priories to surrender to the Crown, formally being re-established as a secular cathedral with a dean and chapter on 2 May 1538. Consequently, negotiations over the refoundation charter were between the city, rather than the cathedral, and the Crown. Known as the Great Hospital Charter, it granted the city possession of St Giles' hospital, also called the Great Hospital, and merged the school with it in the hope of achieving an integrated system of education and poor relief. These plans were never realised, however, as the Great Hospital was partially stripped for building materials and later sacked during Kett's Rebellion in 1549. The school temporarily occupied St Luke's House, a building north-west of the cathedral.
In 1550 the city purchased the former chantry chapel and college of St John the Evangelist beside the cathedral for the use of the grammar school out of the £200 each year at their disposal in a licence in mortmain to purchase and add to the revenues of the Great Hospital. Founded in 1316 by John Salmon, Bishop of Norwich, the chapel, in addition to its role as a chantry dedicated to the souls of Salmon's parents and the predecessors and successors of the Bishops of Norwich had also been used as a charnel house and contained the Wodehouse chantry, founded by Henry V at the request of John Wodehous, a veteran of the Battle of Agincourt. The school moved to the site in the summer of 1551, where it has remained ever since. The chapel was used as the main schoolroom while the other buildings were used to provide a library and accommodation for the master and boarding pupils. The arrangement continued until the 19th century, and today the building is used as the school chapel.
Image:Carnary Chapel, Norwich.jpg|thumb|right|alt=Photograph of the school chapel and adjoining buildings from the Upper Close|The school chapel
A master and "usher" were to be appointed by the city out of the revenues assigned to them, who were required to have a good knowledge of classical languages, namely Latin and Greek. Additionally, the master was required to be a university graduate, of "sound religion", and not to take on additional work. The salary of the usher was £6. 13s. 4d. and the master a "handsome" sum of £10, which by 1636 had risen to £50. The 1566 statutes declared the school was to provide Greek and Latin instruction for 90 sons of Norwich citizens free of expense and up to ten fee-paying pupils. By the 19th century the city was observed to generally leave room for as many boarders and other day scholars to sufficiently remunerate the teachers. Admission was limited to boys thought to benefit from the education offered, and the school was highly selective as a result. The education was based on erudition, the eventual goal being that by the age of 18 the pupils would have learned "to vary one sentence diversely, to make a verse exactly, to endight an epistle eloquently and learnedly, to declaim of a theme simple, and last of all to attain some competent knowledge of the Greek tongue". Pupils were taught rhetoric based on the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and Greek centred around the works of Homer and Virgil. In addition to classical literature, etiquette was taught as both were deemed fundamental to a good education. Edward Coke studied at the school at the age of eight from 1560 until 1567, where he is said to have been taught to value the "forcefulness of freedom of speech", something he later applied as a judge.
As part of the annual Guild Day procession of the inauguration of the new mayor of Norwich it was tradition for the head boy to deliver a short speech in Latin from the school porch "commending justice and obedyence" to the mayor and corporation. Afterwards the orator would attend the guild dinner, historically riding in the procession on a white horse, but in later years taken in the mayor's carriage. When Elizabeth I visited Norwich on a separate occasion in 1578 the master at the time, Stephen Limbert, is said to have delivered an oration, which "so pleased Her Majesty that she said it had been the best she had heard, and gave him her hand to kiss, and afterwards sent back to enquire his name." The encounter has been said to characterise the public image of Elizabeth I as a monarch who indulged her subjects with goodwill and has been used for the interpretation of the character of Theseus in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Henry Mazey was Master of the school from 1665 to 1667, after four years at Holt School; the boys petitioned against him to the Mayor of Norwich, on the grounds that he was suffering from "chiragra, podagra, and desidia"; and that in the time of Mr Loveringe they had been "Minerva's darlings", but they were now "made Vulcan's servile bond slaves". Mazey made a getaway by gaining the post of Rector of Rockland.
18th and 19th centuries
The system of education remained largely unchanged until the late 18th century. Samuel Parr, master from 1778 to 1785 was noted for his use of corporal punishment, commonplace at the time. One pupil remarked:Parr's fame for severity spread a sort of panic through the city, especially among the mothers, who would sometimes interpose a remonstrance, which occasioned a ludicrous scene, but seldom availed the culprit, while the wiser were willing to leave their boys in his hands.Richard Twining, the tea merchant, however, was advised by his brother John to send his eldest son to Norwich, writing of Parr, "I have been told that he flogs too much, but I doubt those from whom I have heard it think any use of punishment too much". Parr's daily teaching was interrupted at midday when he sent a boy to the pastry-cook's across the road for a pie, which he ate by the schoolroom fire. On the resignation of his headship in 1785, historian Warren Derry comments, "an object of terror was gone, but the glory of the place had gone with it".
John Crome, the landscape painter and founder of the Norwich School of painters, became a drawing master at the school at the beginning of the 19th century, a position he held for many years. The Norwich School of painters was the first provincial art movement in England, and Crome has been described as one of the most prominent British landscape painters alongside Constable and Gainsborough. Several notable artists of the movement were educated at the school including John Sell Cotman, James Stark, George Vincent, John Berney Crome, and Edward Thomas Daniell. Frederick Sandys, the "Norwich Pre-Raphaelite", who also attended the school, had his roots in the movement. Some staff, such as Dr. Samuel Forster, were associated with the movement; Forster was headteacher when John Sell Cotman attended the school. Forster became vice president of the Norwich Society of Artists, the society established in 1803 for artists of the movement. Charles Hodgson who taught mathematics and art, and his son David who taught art, were also supporters of Crome.
The number of pupils fluctuated significantly at the beginning of the 19th century, with usual numbers between 100 and 150 pupils, but falling to eight pupils in 1811 and 30 in 1859. Under the headship of the classical scholar Edward Valpy pupil numbers increased and the school enjoyed a prosperous period, though its development was hindered by its charter whose trustees preferred to spend most of the £7,000 a year income on the Great Hospital, leaving £300 for the school. Valpy published a popular textbook on Latin style, Elegantiae Latinae, which went through ten editions in his lifetime and The Greek Testament, with English notes, selected and original in three volumes. In 1837, in the wake of the Municipal Reform Act the patronage of the governors went to twenty-one independent trustees appointed by the Lord Chancellor, separating the governance of the school from the city corporation. As a result of a later 1858 court case Attorney-General v. Hudson the school became independent of the Great Hospital, gaining an endowment of its own and a Board of Governors to administer it. The original objects of the school to provide education for poor boys was abolished and replaced with boarding fees of £60 a year for sons of laymen, £45 for sons of clergymen, and 12 guineas a year for day pupils. A separate school was established to provide training for boys to enter industry and trade called the King Edward VI Middle School or Commercial School. Opened in 1862 and located in the cloisters of Blackfriars' it had 200 pupils and charged a tuition fee of four guineas a year.
Image:View from the Upper Close.jpg|thumb|right|alt=Illustration of the school from the Upper Close|Illustration of the school from the Upper Close
By the mid-19th century the school failed to cater to the requirements of the new urban middle class due to its predominant focus on classical education and was perceived by the city's large Nonconformist community as too exclusively Anglican. The school, however, underwent dramatic reform under Augustus Jessopp, one of the great Victorian reforming headteachers, whose headship lasted from 1859 to 1879. Influenced by Thomas Arnold's reforms at Rugby and the new Victorian public schools, the school was remodelled into a public school. The curriculum was broadened to include non-classical subjects such as mathematics, drawing, German and French, as part of a trend seen in several schools including Marlborough College, Rossall, Wellington, Clifton and Richmond to establish modern departments where pupils would be allowed to omit learning Greek and follow a non-classical curriculum to fulfill the increasing demand for a "high" but less classical education. A strict moral code was instilled, the chapel becoming the focal point of school life, a prefectorial system was implemented to encourage leadership and responsibility, and there was a greater focus on sport which was thought to foster team spirit and individual initiative, reflecting the prevailing belief in muscular Christianity among educationalists.
The Schools Inquiry Commission, which examined endowed grammar schools under the chairmanship of Lord Taunton, reported that the school "gives the highest education in the county of Norfolk" and sent on average twice as many boys to university as all the other endowed schools in Norfolk each year. The commissioners also praised the Commercial School, despite it facing competition from similar schools: "the extent of its usefulness and the soundness of its practical teaching, is second to none". These reforms were accompanied by building expansion, such as the completion in 1860 of the Gothic Revival north wing of School House which contained a large dormitory for boarding pupils. By 1872 there were 127 pupils, 91 of whom were boarders who were drawn from all over the south-east of England. At the first meeting of the Headmasters' Conference in 1869 Jessopp represented Norwich School as one of the original thirteen members. Although successful his efforts were hindered by the effects of agricultural depression as four-fifths of endowment income came from land, and the school ultimately thrived as a city day school.