Purpose Behind The Founding Of Winchester In The Nineteenth Century

The ‘great public schools’ also known as the ‘clarendon nine’ included the boarding schools of Winchester, Eton, Westminster, Charterhouse, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewbury and the two day schools which were not part of the original seven, St. Paul’s and Merchant Taylors’. The first of these schools to open was Winchester in 1382; the school was founded by William of Wykeham, a bishop, and it served as a model for the schools to come. The purpose behind the founding of Winchester was to provide poor scholars an opportunity for education and to provide the Church with recruits for priesthood. The founding of Winchester shows that the main purpose of founding the school was for charity and religious reasons. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
This shows that upper class society in the medieval era up to the nineteenth century took an interest in the formal education of their sons. Upper-class education before the public school, was based on the individual and lacked uniformity across England. It was during the latter half of the eighteenth century that sending your sons to one of the ‘great public schools’ became the fashionable thing to do. This demonstrates that the upper class of British society in the eighteenth century, set trends and precedents that ‘fashionable’ families would follow later on. It is important to understand that these schools were highly exclusive places reserved for the sons of the upper class
The tuition and board in 1888 at Eton and Harrow ranged from $800 to $1000 , an equivalent of about $20,000 to $25,000 in present-day value . These numbers are very similar to the yearly tuition at some public and private universities today, without board. The cost of these schools demonstrated that only the wealthiest could afford to pay the formal education of their sons at the ‘great public schools’. However, there were some cases of scholarships to these institutions based on merit. Within these schools there was a divide between the ‘scholars’ and the ‘commoners’; the ‘scholars’ were a small group of students whose families could not afford the school tuition, but were admitted to the schools based on merit. This shows that within British society in the nineteenth century there was some room for mobility based on merit, but there would still be a divide between those of the upper class, and those of lower classes. This example also shows the divisions between classes and how they were sometimes together, but did not mix. The ‘great public schools’ emulate society and politics in their own unique