The Rest Is History - 368. The History Behind Hogwarts: Ancient Schools and Revolting Students

Episode Date: September 13, 2023

“To be a boy at one of these schools was to be alternately tyrant and slave.” More gruesome even than the Battle of Hogwarts, 18th century British Public schools were hotbeds for violence and uproar, despite their deeply Christian origins. From raucous rebellions featuring students fighting militias and building barricades, hostage-taking and pistol-firing, to animal assassinations, abysmal teaching and gruesome hazing rituals, their organised brutality was mis-sold as “character-building”. Join Tom and Dominic in the second part of our series, as they explore the schools which inspired Hogwarts, their pupils, stories and legacies. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Research: William Finlator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. In times of old, when I was new and Hogwarts barely started, the founders of our noble school thought never to be parted. United by a common goal, they had the selfsame yearning to make the world's best magic school and pass along their learning. Together we will build and teach, the four good friends decided. And never did they dream that they might someday be divided.

So that, Dominic, was Leslie Phillips, aka The Sorting Hat in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, written by J.K. Rowling, of course. It came out in 2003. We continue with our look at the origins of Harry Potter, but today we're looking more specifically, aren't we, at the origins of Hogwarts itself, the great school for wizards and witches up in the Scottish Highlands. We ended the last episode with you being very, very sneery and finickety. I don't think sneery. I think you were definitely being sneery. I think wryly sceptical, Tom.

Sneery, pointing out that there were no castles in Scotland before 1200. Yeah. So therefore Hogwarts couldn't have been built there. Well, why did they need a castle, Tom? I don't know. If you're going to build a school, a castle wouldn't be the obvious, maybe like the medievalists of the Victorian period, they wanted to... Or like the Earl of Cornwall in Henry III's brother, who built Tintagel Castle in Cornwall

as a kind of ersatz version of what he thought King Arthur would look like, King Arthur's castle. So Hogwarts is meant to have been built in the 9th or 10th century. I think it's a bit vague. And the four founders, Tom, do you know the four founders' names? Slytherin, Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and whatever the other one is. Ravenclaw. That's just, I mean, you're just naming the houses.

So it's Rowena Ravenclaw, Salazar Slytherin, Helga Hufflepuff, and Godric Gryffindor. Very implausible mix of names, I think. Again, the searching historical skepticism that you're bringing. From the 10th century. But now there are schools, aren't there, that claim to be that old. So Warwick School is one of them. I think it claims from the 10th century. But now there are schools, aren't there, that claim to be that old. So Warwick School is one of them. I think it claims to be 10th century. I think King's School in Canterbury is claimed to be the oldest. It claims to have been founded by St. Augustine himself in 597. That's right. But these schools have been through,

I mean, they're making slightly spurious claims, I think it's fair to say. And also they were not regarded as real public schools for a long time. And also they were not true. They were not regarded as real public schools for a long time. Well, they're cathedral schools, aren't they? Exactly, which is slightly different. So they're schools that are set up as part of the infrastructure of cathedral. So when I went to Rochester, which has the second oldest cathedral in England, founded in 604, I think. So a few years after Augustine founded Canterbury, that also claimed to have a very, very old school dating back to the founding of the cathedral. Oh, and there's one in York, isn't there?

St. Peter's. That's right. But none of these are purpose-built public schools. And some listeners, particularly after we utterly failed to explain this in the last episode, may be wondering, what is a public school? Especially if you're overseas listeners, the fact that a public school is also a private school. A lot of people find that very typically English, i.e. utterly baffling and incomprehensible. So the point of a public school is it's public because it's usually a

charitable trust and it's open to anybody as long as they will pay. It's not a private tutor. Well, except that, as we will see, the initial idea is that it be open to poor students who couldn't afford to pay. And it's very, very much rooted in the ideal of Christian charity. And that sense that public schools are simultaneously there to serve people who can pay enormous amounts of money to receive the benefits of the education they offer, while simultaneously laying claim to a moral purpose. I mean, it's there now and it's there right from the very beginning. Well, exactly.

That tension has been there from the beginning. So sometimes the critics of public schools will say they've lost sight of their original charitable. The charitable stuff is nonsense. They've lost sight of that. But the truth of the matter is- It was there from the beginning. There has always been a tension and it goes right back to the 14th century.

So you mentioned in the last podcast, Tom, an excellent book called The Old Boys by David Turner, which is probably the best sort of short, single volume history of the public schools. And he says in that, what most historians say, the starting point is really this chap, William of Wycombe. He's born in the mid 1320s and he's a very big figure, isn't he, in 14th century England. So he is part of the court of Edward III. And we talked in the episode we did on the Hundred Years War, how Edward III's reign is a crucial turning point in English history. And so much of what will

bear fruit, I mean, even down to the use of the English language at the heart of the court, dates back to this period. And he is very an expression of that, because he's not from an aristocratic background. His parents are wealthy peasants. Yes. Actually, the kind of striving, upwardly mobile people who throughout the history of public schools have scrimped and saved to send their sons and occasionally their daughters to these establishments. That's the world that he comes from. He is a very, very academically gifted son of peasants who goes right the way up to the top. He becomes Lord Chancellor, he becomes Bishop of Winchester. And as you say, he comes from this village called Wickham,

which is about 10 miles outside Winchester. And anyone who is familiar with public school slang will know that the name that old boys of Winchester school give to themselves is Wickhamists. And I assume it comes from William of Wickham. William of Wickham. Yeah. So he himself probably went to a grammar school in Winchester. I mean, again, to explain the terminology, there were in the 14th century a network of grammar schools across England, and they taught you to read and write, but they also taught you Latin. And if you wanted a job as kind of a bureaucrat, a clergyman, if you wanted to move up through the sort of the literate bureaucracies of England.

Or to get to Oxford and Cambridge. Yeah. He makes a splendid comment that a bishop was the first graduate profession in English history. By this point, you could only become a bishop if you'd been to Oxford or Cambridge. And you could only go to Oxford or Cambridge if you'd got the necessary Latin that enabled you to do it. Exactly.

Exactly. So I know we'll be talking a little bit about Latin in this episode. So right from the start, obviously, Latin is essential to the project. And in those days, it's not what we talked about last time, which is a kind of magic, a secret code just for public schoolboys. It's more than that. It's a crucial vocational tool. Well, it's what English is today for, say, international science. To be a scientist,

you have to speak English because that's the language that is carried out in. But most people in England obviously did not go to grammar schools. A lot went to what were called petty schools, which are kind of amateur, informal, run by one teacher, usually one room. They might teach you to count count to read and write um but but no more than that william of wickham obviously is looking at something a bit bigger and actually that why does england have public schools one answer would just be the black death wouldn't it tom the black death strikes when william of wickham is what 28 30 around about then 1348 and as many as half of the population of England,

you know, historians disagree about this, but a vast proportion of the population is wiped out. I mean, it does seem to have disproportionately hit England, I think, is the thinking now. Yeah. And basically, the number of parishes remains the same. So you need just as many priests as you had before, but there are far fewer people to fill them. And William of Wickham is very anxious that there aren't enough recruits coming through. And he would be very sensitive to this, wouldn't he? Being from a less wealthy background himself. So the founding charter of Winchester, which he found, many poor scholars engaged in scholastic disciplines who suffering from deficiency, penury and indigence lack and will lack in the future, the proper means for continuing and

advancing in the aforesaid art of grammar.." He's not just complaining about that. You think about the portrayal of scholars, say, in Chaucer, who's writing later in the century. Again, there is this assumption that to be a scholar is to be poor, and this is something that William of Wickham is trying to solve. Exactly. He wants to set up an academy, basically, that will produce people for the church and presumably for the very small royal bureaucracy as well. And he sets up two institutions. So one of them is New College Oxford and New Oxford College, which is formally established for the study of theology, canon and civil law and the arts. And the other is he wants to create a feeder school for New College.

And this is Winchester. He sets it up in 1382. It takes its first pupils in 1394. And the sort of religious side of it is there right from the beginning. It's very monastic, isn't it, Tom? It's very austere. It's not just that they didn't have girls, but the only woman, a washerwoman, it's specified in the constitution that she has to be old and ugly. So no beastliness there. Well, the boys have to have a decent what's called a decent tonsure so they have to have a monastic haircut they are told

they are in school they are only allowed to speak in latin this is rishi sunak's old school by the way for our overseas listeners um the school room is is based on a church that follows an east west axis they follow all the the religious feasts and And the sort of the Spartan aspect of schools, I'm using Spartan, Tom, before you get excited, in its most debased sense. Right, right. But the kind of slightly Freudian slip there, because the issue of whether the asceticism of these schools, which has been a kind of enduring feature of them right the way up, really until about, what, 30 or 40 years ago. The question of whether they are Spartan, i.e. whether they are emulating the example set by the ancient Greeks and Romans in their days of manly heroism, or whether they are following the monastic example,

is actually very, very interesting and important. But at this stage, though, you've got to... I mean, they're completely monastic, yeah. Completely. It's not Spartan. I mean, it's monastic. Yeah. Absolutely. And indeed, the school is open for 70 poor scholars, and it's 70 because Christ in one of the Gospels specifies that 70 apostles will be sent out into the world. But not just poor scholars, though, is it? No, it's not. Right from the start, there is what I think David Turner calls an escape clause in the Winchester Constitution. He says, which runs as follows, we will allow, however, the sons of noble and influential persons, special friends of the said college, up to the number of 10 to be instructed and

informed in grammar within the same college. In other words, there will be some people who are not poor. And right from the beginning, almost every public school tries to sort of, I was going to say wrestle with, but they're not really wrestling with it, are they? They're gleefully exploiting this loophole because rich and powerful people want their sons to be well-educated as well. And of course, William of Wycombe, because he's the Lord, he's Chancellor, he knows lots of... Yeah, he's got favours, hasn he he's got backs to scratch and exactly exactly so he probably is breaking the rules his own rules himself and allowing in uh churchmen

sons or whatever or noble sons or whatever it might be and then a generation or so later winchester gets a competitor that is i think it's fair to say more glamorous would you agree with that tom because it has royal patronage notorious perhaps i mean it's notorious today think it's fair to say, more glamorous. Would you agree with that, Tom? Because it has royal patronage. Notorious, perhaps. I mean, it's notorious today, but it's glamorous in, yes, because it's near Windsor, which of course, Edward III's great castle has been built there. So again, this goes back to the reign of Edward. And so this is founded by Henry VI in 1440. It is the College of Our Lady Mary at Eton. So Eton, the most famous of all British public schools. Henry VI, useless king, would you agree, Tom? Completely, yes. Totally useless, spends too much time praying and thinking about God, not enough time

hammering rivals or what kings should be doing. So he sets this up in direct imitation of Winchester. He actually poaches Winchester's headmaster, William Wainfleet, to come and basically set up Eton for him. I mean, it's such a copy, isn't it? Because just as Wickham had set up New College in Oxford to be the place that Winchester feeds, so Henry VI sets up King's College in Cambridge to fulfill the same role. Yes, exactly. And because of the royal patronage, that means that Eton from the start has an extra layer of glamour and sort of prestige. I mean, Winchester was prestigious in its own way, but Eton goes one step beyond that because it's the king. And you get very aspirational kind of members of the gentry who are keen.

So a good example is the Catesby family from Northamptonshire. People who are interested in Richard III will know that William Catesby was one of his kind of chief cronies. So the Catesbys are very keen to send their boys to Eton because they think it's obviously a way up and a way to get the attention of the king. The detail that I loved about the forms in Eton is that, and I'm quoting here from David Turner's book, each form at Eton had an official dunce known as the custos, an unenviable title given to the weakest boy in the class who was singled out for testing in front of his peers until he improved and the ignominy passed to another boy. So I can't imagine that would be good for his mental health to be an official form dunce.

Do you know how long that went on for? Is that something that's going on in Greyfriars? To this day. Because they have dunces caps don't they surely prince harry would have been the costos wouldn't he no no because people would have been doing his work for him of course so um lots of sort of uh interesting people go to eat and the earl of the future earl of essex and the civil war he went to eat and sir francis fernie who became a barbary pirate yes he did didn't he went to captain hook of course goes to what, who became a Barbary pirate. Yes, he did, didn't he? Captain Hook, of course, goes to Eton. Well, I was about to say, piracy is a big thing for Eton because Captain Hook went to Eton. Captain Hook, well, you probably do if you read the same book, Captain Hook's last words when he's being swallowed by the crocodile in Peter Pan, a floriat etona.

So no wonder people hate Eton, this sense of a mighty elite going to this glamorous school founded by a king. There have been periodic demands that the whole system be closed down and Eton be abolished. But again, I was amused to see that the very first person who wanted to abolish Eton was actually Edward IV, who deposed Henry VI and became king. In 1463, he sent in a petition to the Pope to close it down because, of course, Eton was a religious foundation. And he was foiled by backstairs lobbying by old Etonians. So there really is nothing new under the sun. Yeah, Warwick the Kingmaker's brother, George Neville, who was Archbishop of York.

Eton had been bribing him. They'd been sending him gifts and he lobbied. He was able to lobby for Eton to be spared. They, therefore, did confiscate a lot of Eton's lands. So I think it's fair to say that the Yorkists are not highly regarded even now. God, imagine how much richer they'd be if they'd kept all those lands. I know. I know. Those are the two most famous schools, but they're not the only schools. So by the 16th century, there are other kind of prototypical public schools being founded. Probably the most influential is a school

called Merchant Taylor School, which is set up by most influential is a school called Merchant Taylor School, which is set up by a livery company, the Merchant Taylors, one of a guild. And the Merchant Taylors is the first school that had the idea. We talked a lot about Dr. Arnold and the Victorian kind of sport and all that stuff in the last podcast. Merchant Taylors is the first school in Britain that has the idea of actually having a vaguely rounded education. And that includes sport, doesn't it? So he'd be massively in favour of Quidditch. They would be in favour of Quidditch.

So they were copying that from a school in Italy, in Mantua, where the boys were encouraged to do exercise and to play music and so on. This is the beginnings of, I guess, Renaissance humanism, isn't it? You want to be a Renaissance man. So teach Sprezzatura, the art of being a dashing figure who can speak Greek, but also joust. So the archetypal figure of that is Philip Sidney, isn't it? Who's an old boy of Shrewsbury, which has been founded in 1560. Your neck of the woods vaguely. Yes. Yeah. I grew up not far from Shrewsbury. And Shrewsbury was one of the great public schools of England. But going back to Merchant Taylor, so Merchant Taylor,

they would do an awful lot of dancing, wrestling, football, and drama, particularly big on drama. So they did a school play for the Royal Court four times. God, imagine that, having to go and watch that. Oh, yeah. Well, Thomas Kidd, Elizabethan kind of actor, dramatist, he was a Merchant Taylor's old boy. So this tradition, Tom, endured and maybe still endures because do you know who else went to Merchant Taylor's? Boris Karloff, Frankenstein, the totemic

Frankenstein of the 20th century was a Merchant Taylor's old boy. Well, it's kind of interesting, isn't it? Because there's another school that is also a feeder for great dramatists, which is Westminster, a school founded right next to the palace of Westminster. And it's still there to this day. And a boy who goes there is called Ben Johnson. And he's the son of a builder, a manufacturer of bricks. So again, this kind of recognizable, the upwardly mobile man who's self-made, wants to improve his son. Ben Johnson goes to Westminster and he goes on to become Shakespeare's great peer, rival, companion. So actually, when you look at the famous names of Elizabethan and 17th century literature, a lot of them have gone to public

school. So we mentioned Sir Philip Sidney, who was a famous poet. Edmund Spencer, who wrote The Fairy Queen. Ben Johnson, we've mentioned. And John Milton, who went to the sixth of the public schools that existed by the 17th century, which is St. Paul's. So that, again, had been a cathedral school that gets kind of converted into a public day school. The first school not to have borders. Well, six of the translators of the King James Bible went to Merchant Taylor's, Tom. So the schools, even at this day, they're very rudimentary. They're educating a tiny, tiny proportion of the population, but already they have an outsized influence. So you mentioned Westminster. Westminster is the big school of the 17th century.

So the list of alumni, extraordinary. John Dryden, Robert Hook, John Locke, composer Henry Purcell, the blood transfusion pioneer Richard Lauer, the headmaster of Westminster, Richard Busby. He also taught Sir Christopher Wren privately. And he's an astonishing figure, isn't he? Because he is very much a vicar of Bray figure, that he moves with the changing currents of the time. So he is appointed headmaster of Winchester in 1638, just before the convulsive decade that will see England collapse into civil war. He remains in post throughout the civil war, throughout the Commonwealth, and well into the restoration. And he finally dies in 1695.

Yeah, incredible, incredible record. Now, one thing people may be wondering is what about girls? Typical Reston's history, they haven't mentioned the girls. The truth of the matter is we haven't really talked about girls because there weren't really many girls' schools. There were nunneries that had schools attached, school rooms where they would teach rich people's daughters, but there was far less emphasis on the education of girls in this point, obviously, than education of boys. Dominic, I know you're a big fan of the Reformation, but the Reformation was terrible for girls' education. So among the religious institutions that were closed down in the Reformation was Barking Abbey,

which reached right the way back to the beginnings of Christianity in England, and has been described by Eleanor Parker, who writes a brilliant blog called Clark of Oxford, as the leading centre of female scholarship in the Middle Ages. Continuous tradition of female scholarship going right the way back to the early middle ages all closed down by henry the eighth yeah so from that point onwards what girls schools there are tend to emphasize what they see as kind of wifely arts you know needlework music if they teach a language it's not latin it's french and obviously french for long for centuries seen as an

important part of kind of being a lady and that tradition lasts right through into the 20th century actually so even in the mid-20th century girls schools are generally much less academically high-powered than or not even i mean frankly the boys public schools are not very academically high-powered in the 20th century but the girls schools make far less effort to teach what we'd call the traditional subjects because they're emphasising particularly music. And you talked about ladies, and of course the counterpoint of a lady is a gentleman. But I think one of the things that I hadn't properly appreciated until I read David Turner's book is that actually the social class of these public schools, it's not aristocratic throughout the 16th into the 17th century. And it's really only the star

power of Westminster under Richard Busby that changes that. But again, I guess that Westminster becomes a place where even the leading members of the aristocracy are happy to send their sons because of its proximity to the royal residence in Westminster. Yeah. You do have some signs of public schools being a gateway to success. So, for example, when Walpole becomes prime minister at the beginning of the 18th century, of his 11-man cabinet, three of them have been to Westminster, seven of them in total have been to public school. So Theo, our producer in the chat, is saying,

would aristocrats homeschool their children? And he's right. By and large, you would, if you could, get a private tutor. And for a lot of people in the 17th, early 18th century, the public schools are a bit of a failure option. If you can afford it, it'd be much better to get a private tutor. So the things that people say about these schools are, one, they are much too quick to beat the children. The governors of the schools and whatnot are often telling off the headmasters for being far too enthusiastic with the cane or with the birch. The second thing is that all these schools are very, very corrupt.

So they are always doing things like... So the amount that the headmaster is... The headmaster is out to make a profit. So quite often what the headmaster will do is they will move out of their own house so they can stuff the house with boys and make a profit, and they'll sack as many of the staff as they can because they don't want to pay them the money. So there's that. And the other thing is actually the education is quite bad. You mentioned Milton. Milton, he said he spent seven or eight years merely in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek as might be learned otherwise easily and delightfully in one year.

Peeps, Samuel Peeps, he went to St. Paul's. His education at St. Paul's was so bad. I found this a staggering fact that Pepys, even though he worked as a senior civil servant in the admiralty, he didn't learn how to multiply until he was 29. But that's true of Richard Busby as well, the headmaster of Westminster. He introduces mathematics into the curriculum and modern oriental languages and all kinds of things, but he couldn't multiply either. So no wonder the accounts for the school were so bad. Yeah. So the schools were actually, as you enter the 18th century, these schools, which are now to this day regarded as kind of pillars of British aristocratic upper-class identity. They are bywords for corruption, incompetence.

And one other thing, which we should get into in the second half, Tom, which I find enormously entertaining, is how unbelievably violent they are. They are. So we will take a break now. And when we come back, we will look at the astonishing story of the violence in these public schools. And when I say violent, this isn't just pupil on pupil action. It's pupil on teacher action and occasionally pupil on militia action. So we will see you after the break.

I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com.

That's therestisentertainment.com. Kingsley had stepped forward on the raised platform to address those who had remained behind. We've only got half an hour until midnight, so we need to act fast. A battle plan has been agreed between the teachers of Hogwarts and the Order of the Phoenix. Professors Flitwick, Sprout and McGonagall are going to take groups of fighters up to the three highest towers, Ravenclaw, Astronomy, and Gryffindor, where they'll have a good overview, excellent positions from which to work spells. Meanwhile, Remus, Arthur, and I will take groups into the grounds. We'll need somebody to organise defence of the entrances of the passageways into the school. Sounds like a job for us, called Fred, indicating himself and George. And Kingsley nodded his approval. All right, leaders up here, and we'll divide up the troops.

So that is from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling, of course, published in 2007. And it describes the onset of the Battle of Hogwarts, Dominic. It does. An account of extreme violence in a public school. It does indeed. And this is a bit that, so children reading this, certainly in my experience with Sandbrook Jr., children reading Harry Potter love the idea of a battle taking place in school and the boys and girls kind of building barricades and preparing their defences and the great showdown. And they like it because of the incongruity.

You know, the idea that a school would be a battleground seems extraordinary to them. But the truth of the matter is that in the 18th century, schools were very often battlegrounds. And I'll give you an example before we kind of pull back and talk about the reasons for it. So Winchester College, the oldest school that we talked about last time, the kind of foundational public school, the Richard Sunak School. In the spring of 1793, the warden of Winchester College, who was a man called Joseph Wharton, he forbade the boys from attending a performance by the Buckinghamshire Militia Band in the Cathedral Close in Winchester. He was trying to reform the school and clamp down on undiscipline, and this was a way of doing it. And he discovered that one of the boys, a prefect no less, Tom,

had ignored this rule and had gone to hear the band play. And as a punishment, the warden did that thing that public school headmasters love to do, that he punished everybody collectively for the misdeed of this one boy. Now, after he did this, the boys went ballistic. They were told that they weren't going to be allowed out for Easter, for the Easter holiday. They went ballistic and they wrote a letter in Latin to the warden demanding redress and saying he must apologise to them. The warden basically ignored their entreaties. So they launched a rebellion. They armed themselves in the first instance with marbles and they attacked an usher of the school, marbles and clubs. I mustn't forget the clubs.

So marbles kind of like using like sling, slingshot. Yes, exactly. Sort of heavy. Not to bring down cavalry. Well, it would bring down cavalry if necessary. They roll them. You either throw them or roll them. So they threw them at the usher, who was a man called Mr. Goddard. Often the schools would have what were called sergeants or ushers or porters who wouldn't teach, but would be there to enforce discipline. So they were hated figures.

Mr. Goddard is one of these people. Then the boys rampaged through the school, smashing windows. They dragged all the desks into the courtyard and set them on fire. The warden sent them a note. Even at this point, he was a bit livid, Mr. Warden, I have to say, Tom. He asked for a truce, and the boys refused. They occupied the second master's house and blockaded it with chairs and desks, very Battle of Hogwarts. The warden arrived. He was trying to negotiate with the boys. The boys

seized him and imprisoned him and held him as a hostage. The next day, the high sheriff of Hampshire arrived and read the riot act. Now, if you read the riot act to a crowd, ordering them to disperse, if they refuse to disperse, they're effectively guilty of treason and you can use the riot act to a crowd ordering them to disperse if they refuse to disperse they're effectively guilty of treason and you can use the militia to fire on them when the high sheriff arrived to read the riot act he found that the boys had blockaded the gates of the school they had armed themselves with swords six sticks stones and clubs some boys now at this point had loaded pistols and were on the kind of ramparts he had to retreat. They'd also torn up the parapet of the building to use as stones to bombard attackers. So he returned the next day

with the North Hampshire militia, three companies of the militia. And by this point, several days had gone by and the boys were actually running out of supplies. So they agreed a truce. But the truce only lasted a day because the warden broke the truce by demanding the return of the stolen pistols, which the boys regarded as absolutely outrageous. There was yet another confrontation. And in the end, lots of the boys walked out of the school. And as was so often the case, the governors of the school decided that the headmaster had to go. It was his fault. Yeah. So he ended up losing. And the amazing thing is, because we know the names of the school decided that the headmaster had to go. It was his fault. Yeah. So he ended up losing. And the amazing thing is, because we know the names of the people who led this rebellion,

I looked up what happened to them. John Colborne, he became the governor general of Canada. Sir Lionel Smith, he became the governor of Jamaica. Sir James Charles Dalbiak, he became one of Britain's leading commanders in the Peninsular War. Thomas Silver, another of the boys, he became professor of Anglo-Saxon at St John's College, Cambridge. And Richard Mart, the other leader of the rebels, he became the Bishop of Down. Did you come across Lieutenant General Sir Willoughby Cotton? Oh, he led, was that Marlborough? No, he was a part of the rugby revolt, but he put

down a slave uprising in Jamaica. And so that, I think, does kind of open up all kinds of interesting questions about the impact of these kinds of institutions being enrolled in these schools, the organized brutality, the sense that... So Sidney Smith, who was a writer, a priest who had been head boy at Winchester, like Rishi Sunak in the 1780s. And he says that to be a boy at one of these schools is to be alternately tyrant and slave. And you can see these guys are going on and they're dealing with literal slaves. What is the impact of all this on the fabric of British society and the empire that is starting to merge overseas? Well, I think there obviously is a low-level

violence that runs through the whole 18th century at these schools. They are extraordinarily violent institutions, not least because they're actually abysmal institutions. They are extraordinarily ill-funded. The boys have very little to do. So at Eton, for example, you would only have four hours of lessons a day. And in what lessons there are at the schools, they're often taught in freezing cold rooms at Eton. The head of Eton, John Keaton, we talked about them trying to make money by cutting down on staffing costs. He would teach classes of 190 boys, Tom. Yeah. Yeah, because now public schools boast about, you know, it'll be seven students for a teacher. That's the opposite extreme. But the violence of it, so obviously the beatings,

and it's not just, you know, teachers flogging boys, it's also prefects flogging fags, you know, the boys who- The junior boys, yeah. Have to serve as kind of servants to the senior boys. Oh my God. These stories are mind-boggling. I mean, the sense that you arrive at these schools and you get broken in very hard. So we talked about rugby and Tom Brown arriving and the process of being initiated into these schools. But the hazing rituals that you have in the 18th century at rugby are astonishing. So new boys are made to stand on a table, they have to sing. And if the singing isn't good enough, so this would

be very worrying for me, you have to swallow a pail of muddy water that has been mixed with salt, which unsurprisingly, you're vomiting for days afterwards and everyone's having a jolly good laugh about it. I mean, it's kind of eye-bopping. You think that's bad? That is nothing. Listen to this. At Winchester, junior boys were forced to wear what people called tin gloves. And what that was, was that was to toughen up your hands for carrying the frying pans with the older boys' breakfast. So to toughen your hands, you'd be forced to hold a scorching white hot branding stick and to like hold it for as long as possible to give you calluses on your hands

or eaten eaten tom if you were at start had started at eaten you were taken out into the countryside by the older boys in a big group you were given a 10 yard head start and then pursued by prefects who took pot shots at you with pistols. Yeah. I mean, it's all very eye-opening stuff. And I think it's not surprising that these rebellions that you have, I mean, these are going through the 1790s, which is obviously in France. It's the age of the French Revolution. And there are occasional signs that the boys are influenced by that. So there's 1796, a boy from Merchant Taylor's flies the tricolour over the Tower of London. And there's a rebellion in Winchester and they fly the red cap. That's the rebellion that I was just talking about in 1793. They flew the red revolutionary cap.

But I mean, it's not really revolutionary, is it? Because it's about prefects wanting to uphold their power. And again and again, in most of them, it's about boys feeling that their dignity is being infringed. So if a headmaster is brought in who is not of sufficient social standing, they'll rise in rebellion. If prefects feel that their dignity is being infringed by the teachers, again, they'll rise in rebellion. So these are very, very, I mean, one might almost say Tory rebellions rather than Jacobin rebellions. They are, absolutely. So these schools have a very, I mean, one might almost say Tory rebellions rather than Jacobin rebellions. They are absolutely. So these schools have a very, very Tory ethos. I mean, Tory in the old sense. A good way of thinking about the Toryism of the schools or the low level violence is how the boys entertain themselves. So even once you've been accepted

at one of these schools, what do you do to entertain yourself? Mainly you murder animals. Well, in Harrow, that's the school sport is killing the cats of the town. Well, not just that. They would have a thing called twosling. And twosling meant you would equip yourself with a club or stick or something, and you would go out into the countryside and you would beat to death any wildlife that you found. A maubra, the boys would carry what was called a squalor, which was a wooden stick weighted with lead, to kill game, to sort of tramp through the fields. Which presumably shades into poaching. Yes, exactly.

Now, what that suggests is the lack of discipline at these places, which is true to an extent. So the teachers don't have any discipline. What discipline there is, is enforced, as you said, by the boys themselves. So there's a wonderful line, isn't there? I think it's in the David Turner book. It was said that there are only three absolute rulers in the world. The great mogul, the captain of a man of war, and the prefect of hall at Winchester.

And so these boys are used to almost kind of self-government. Lord of the flies. It is very Lord of the flies. Because you said earlier in the first half that the head teachers are always looking to economize because they'll make more money that way. And so obviously you cram as many boys in, but you also cut back the number of staff who are looking after them. So you mentioned that the rebellions often happen. They happen at the point where there are kind of reforming headmasters brought in to try

and sort all this out because they regard this, they're almost kind of proto-Dr. Arnold's who are coming in to try and clean up the schools and stamp out the sort of Tory libertarian violence that has governed the school in the 18th century. So a good example is rugby, 1797. This is another tremendous revolt. So there's a new headmaster called Henry Ingalls, and he wants to sort of clean up the school. He discovers that a boy called Astley has been firing pistols at people. He confiscates the pistol from Astley. Astley regards this as an absolutely disgraceful intrusion on his personal liberty. He reacts to this, Tom. As an English boy.

Yeah, as an English boy, but also with the fervor of a fan of the Second Amendment in the United States, resisting the intrusions of the federal government. So Astley goes and rounds up his mates. They go and smash the windows of the headmaster. The headmaster says, you'll have to pay to replace these windows. Again, the boys regard this as a disgraceful thing for the headmasters. Any decent headmaster should pay for his own smashed windows.

So they then get gunpowder and blow up the headmaster's office, which again, they regard as a tremendous jape. Interestingly, you mentioned the French Revolution. They nailed the Declaration of the Rights of Man

to the notice board. But I mean, this is the ultimate kind of Tory rebellion. They occupy then a place that rugby was called the Island, which was, please you Tom,

a Bronze Age burial ground. Oh, I like that. And they fortified it. Once again, the riot act is read. And once again, soldiers had to be called in, the local militia, to basically surround the boys, besiege them, and eventually the boys had to give up. And this was the thing that you mentioned, Willoughby Cotton. So Willoughby Cotton, he also served in the Peninsular War and in the first Anglo-Afghan

War. And he's basically a real-life flashman, a sort of prototype of a flashman. So these are really quite serious, these revolts. They're not... I just want to throw in another thing. I know that you disagree with me on this, but I think that there is also an element in which the curriculum is influencing this. I know you do.

These are boys who are almost exclusively studying classical texts. It's often said that it's mindless rote learning. To a degree, it is, but you are studying texts that privilege the right of the strong over the weak. And that often, most notoriously, you mentioned Spartan conditions. You'll be reading about Sparta as a kind of ideal in which boys are sent away to houses and brutalized. In the late 19th century, this will be very overt, particularly actually in Scotland where Hogwarts is. So Fetty's school, which Tony Blair went to, was very, very conscious in its emulation of Sparta. It was deliberately set up to be modelled on Sparta. The Edinburgh Academy in the 1800s prefects were renamed Ephors after the boy herds of ancient Sparta. It's not as deliberate as that

in the 18th century, but I do think the experience of reading texts like Thucydides, the famous line in the Melian Dialogue, that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer as they must. I think the impact of reading this in a kind of Lord of the Flies situation, it must have had an effect. What the impact of that is then when you were going off, say, to subdue a slave revolt. If you yourself know what it's like to be chased by people carrying pistols and shot at, if you know what it's like to be beaten with rods that are tipped with lead, it must, I would have thought, psychologically diminish your capacity to feel pity, sympathy, empathy

with the people in distant parts of the world that you were being sent to dominate and subdue. Do you think or not? Well, I agree with you that these are incredibly violent institutions, so they will probably produce- Brutalized people. People who are decent. So Pitt the Elder said, I never knew a boy who was not broken by Eton. It's Pitt the Elder, and he refused to send his son, Pitt the Younger, so he had him homeschooled because he said, I would never put my son through that. The poet Shelley, when he was at Eton. Oh yeah, Shelley baiting. He was, I mean, mobs of hundreds of boys would pursue him through the town shouting,

the Shelley, the Shelley, the Shelley, kicking things at him and hurling stuff at him because he was interested in science, which they regarded as illegitimate and depraved. He loved a hot air balloon, Shelley. He did. He did. But your point about the classics. So people did read the classics, but they only read very selected, often Virgil. So the Edinburgh Review in 1830 said of Eton's education, it said, the typical Eton boy has not read a single book of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Livy, Polybius, or Tacitus. He has not read a single Greek tragedy or comedy. So actually, they weren't reading some of these things. They were just being given bits of Virgil to do again and again. I mean, it depends on the school, but I think at Winchester,

definitely they are. And I think at rugby, they are. So I cannot but believe that this is having some kind of an impact. See, I think at rugby, they are. So I cannot but believe that this is having some kind of an impact. See, I think you're overestimating how much they're teaching. I don't think they're doing kind of ancient history or even what we might call literary criticism. But I think the impact of living in a kind of essentially a brutalized institution and reading texts that might provide a degree of legitimacy might kind of clothe it in the sense that you are in a society where this is seen as raising you to be a better soldier, to be someone who can defend the patria or whatever.

I can't help but believe that that must have some impact. Maybe. I personally think the context for this is the general violence of 18th century England, which is a very violent place, a place of mobs and of... I'm not in any way disputing that. I think that the violence is the precondition, but I think that the classics could provide a kind of intellectual garb for it that would then, when you have left school and you are thinking about how life is organized how empires are organized how the strong should behave with regard to the weak that it might provide a kind of kind of intellectual gloss for it that is part of what

arnold is is campaigning against maybe tom i'm i don't know. My favourite school revolt, by the way, is Marlborough, 1851. Because that's late, isn't it? This is the last great revolt. So Marlborough was only about eight years old. It was that classic thing where it had taken on loads and loads of pupils, but didn't really have many teachers. So the description I read, I can't remember whether it was in James Brooke Smith's book or David Turner's, it describes basically for the first eight years, Marlborough just consists of low-level guerrilla warfare. This is, by the way- Like Vietnam. Yeah, like Vietnam or Afghanistan or something. And basically, this all culminates on the 5th

of November, 1851. The headmaster had banned fireworks, bonfire night, because he knew what would happen. But the boys got gunpowder and, according to the thing I read, munitions anyway. Huge explosions racked the school. The school recruited a mob from the town to come and help them attack the teachers. And they destroyed the headmaster's study. And the culminating moment, Tom, which you would not enjoy but I found very amusing, was the headmaster had literally just finished a long handwritten manuscript, a discussion of the plays of Sophocles. No, it didn't go up in smoke. Of course, they dragged it out and set it on fire.

They literally set it on fire. And of course, what happens in all these stories, the governor's then sacked the headmaster. So he loses his essay on Sophocles and he loses his job. He does indeed. And at this point, the public schools, you would think, so this is very early 19th century, the Marlborough one is very late, but by and large,

in the early 19th century, you would think the public schools were going to go out of business. So their roles had completely and utterly collapsed. If you take Harrow as an example, Harrow, half the school had burned down because the maths master

had tried to set up his own DIY heating system, which exploded. They were down to like a few dozen boys who would presumably be roaming the land, beating to death badgers or whatever they were doing. And that is the context, what we talked about in the last episode, which is the emergence of Dumbledore, aka Dr. Arnold, who comes in at rugby and says, okay, let's ditch a lot of what happened before. Let's have a completely new ethos. We are going to make these pious, these are academies for Christian gentlemen, which of course, if he tried to do that in the 1790s, people would have laughed at him because the moral codes of kind of Regency England were so different.

Well, should I tell you what Sheridan said in the 90s about public schools? That nothing short of despotism can establish their government. No principle but fear can support it. Thus, the torturer's rod is introduced. The torturer's rod. It's like the Marky Desai episode all over again, Tom. But as you say, that is the measure of what Arnold achieves. And I suppose in a sense, he's taking it back, isn't he, to its monastic

foundations. The reason that the blurring between the Spartan and the monastic is easy to make when describing public schools is that the monastic becomes Spartan, returns to its Christian foundations, and so on. Obviously, public schools now are a lot less overtly Christian than they were i mean i think they still have chapels don't they and they do they do yeah they're still christian lots of christian foundations but i i mean i would say that what what is happening now to public schools is just a further reiteration of what arnold was doing that they're repackaging moral values in a 21st century garb tom if you were to look at any public school

prospectus or a public school website, they will stress, of course, the facilities, the academic results, and so on. But a key part of the appeal is building character, which is exactly what Arnold was talking about. And actually, you're always being lectured about in the Harry Potter stories, what Dumbledore is always lecturing the children, or indeed what the narrator is lecturing you about, the stories are meant to demonstrate, which is it's about being a team player. It is about a citizen who works for the greater good, all of these kinds of things. That has been part of the ethos of the schools since the 19th century, and it certainly was not the case at all in the 18th century. But it's interesting, isn't it, that one of the gauges of how far cutting-edge

public morality, elite notions of public morality, have changed is that now even Hogwarts is seen as being regressive, that it's not diverse or inclusive enough. Yeah, JK Rowling's critics say in writing it in the 1990s, she didn't go as far as she should have done. Right, so Dumbledore retrospectively has become gay. Yeah, in the most recent film she should have. And she didn't go as far as she should have done. So Dumbledore retrospectively has become gay. Yeah. In the most recent film, I believe. Fantastic Beasts. And obviously there is a sense that JK Rowling's position on trans issues has disappointed many people who read Harry Potter as a child. Theo is writing in the chat.

Murky Waters. I mean, it's not to make a comment on whether it's right or wrong, but it's to say that if public schools are to stay on the cutting edge of morality, even Hogwarts now has been left behind. And so you have, I think it's at St. Paul's, a girls' school at St. Paul's, that they've abolished the post of head girl because it's too binary. Well, the interesting thing is that the schools, which are often perceived, for example, by their critics as being somehow outside, as being escapist kind of redoubts, actually through all their history, they've changed enormously because they're always mirroring society. No, but more than that, establishing the moral parameters for society. That's what Thomas Arnold is doing. He is ahead of the game. He is making England more Christian. It does seem now when you read

Eton College, the most exclusive of all public schools, decolonizing its curriculum and emphasizing equity, I don't really see how a school that is as exclusive as Eton, where you have to pay an absolute fortune to get in there. I mean, to a degree, trumpeting its commitment to equity, there's a measure of hypocrisy to that. And I'm sure they believe it, but the headmaster of Eton sees it as his role to raise students who will be morally better. And because they will go on to become the elites, not just in Britain, but around the world because it's an international school now, he sees Eton's mission rather in the sense that Henry VI did when he founded it as improving society, despite the fact that as it was back in the 15th century when Eton was founded, it's absolutely interlarded

with hypocrisy and ambivalence that these are schools that are committed to the virtues of poverty and equality and whatever. But simultaneously, it's all about the prestige and the money and the status. Well, I'm sure if the head of Eton were here, he'd say it's not all about the prestige and the money and the status. Kind of is, though. You could also say, of course, that tension has run right through from the days of William of Wickham, Tom. But actually, that tension is the tension between idealism and worldliness that lies at the heart of any institution, not just at the heart of the Catholic Church, of the Church of England, of all these kinds of things, which they have great, sweeping, soaring ideals, but also they live in a real world that is governed

by more prosaic mercenary concerns. Yes, but I think that just as when William Wickham founds Winchester and it's couched in terms, I mean, he's modelling it on the disciples who were sent out by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. I mean, that's a very, very high aspiration. But at the same time, he's taking bungs from supporters. You know, he's putting in wealthy pupils. I mean, that's a deliberate attempt to kind of go behind the show of moral behavior.

And I would say that Eton today is no different. I don't think that you can separate out claims to support equity while also trousering however many tens of thousands the fees cost, thereby making it impossible for most people to go to that school without there being a massive tension at the heart of it. Well, I think what you just do is you dish all the equity stuff, Tom. That's what I'd do. Well, I know. You know what I would do. I'd just go full reactionary. Sandbrook Towers. What about Harry Potter? So we have done Sherlock Holmes, James Bond. We must have done other cultural things. We did Agatha Christie. We did the Beatles, sort of avatars of Britishness by and large. So do you think that, I mean, I suppose the question about Harry Potter is how long... I would not have expected Harry Potter to

have endured as successfully as it has. I marvel at the extraordinary power those stories have over children's imagination. I think it's a brilliant synthesis of all kinds of traditions that have a global resonance, British traditions. In that sense, it is absolutely a legacy from the age of British imperialism when the British Empire expanded a familiarity with concepts like King Arthur, public school stories, all that kind of stuff. And there are brilliant blendings of that to create something new. Yeah.

So I was always very skeptical. As you know, I've dissed them a little bit in my book, The Great British Dream Factory. And then when The Sun and Air started reading them, I just was staggered. By that point, they were, what, 20 years old or something? I mean, I think it works as powerfully as it does because the theme of the novels is magic. And I think there is a kind of magic about what J.K. Rowling does in the Harry Potter stories. But it wouldn't work if it wasn't a school story. As you said in the last episode, the beauty of a school story is it gives you an institution, a closed environment,

a set of rules, an unchanging cast, all of those things, which are true of children's own lives. Of course. But also, as you said, I mean, you listed all the other, the kind of precursors of Hogwarts, Worst Witch and In the Light and whatever, but none of those have had the global resonance that Harry Potter has. And so I think that that's what I mean by the kind of the magic of it. There's a kind of indefinable quality that has made it unbelievably globally successful, and which enables it to retain its popularity in an age when often there are lots of people who are quite ideologically opposed to it. I mean, it doesn't seem to have had any impact on its sales or popularity at all.

Well, I saw this clip on YouTube or Twitter or something a couple of days ago. So at the beginning of September every year, people assemble at King's Cross Station. Do you know this? And King's Cross Station do an announcement that the Hogwarts Express will be leaving from platform nine and three quarters, the beginning of the school year, Tom. And the King's Cross was rammed. There were hundreds of people. Were they all dressed in their school uniforms and broomsticks? I think some people were probably dressed. They were all filming the information boards,

recording the announcement. Hundreds and hundreds of people for whom clearly this is, dare I say, Tom, a sacral moment. But that must have been a day when there was a strike, I think. So it really was magic if a train was leaving King's Cross. Surely there are never strikes. There are never strikes on the Hogwarts Express. Right. Let's talk about what we have coming up next week.

We are doing something very different, two very different subjects. So you, Tom, will be talking about gladiators. Yes, the Coliseum. So actually rather public school, people fighting each other and inflicting violence. And in a very different episode this time next week, we will be talking about the coup in Chile in 1973 that saw the end of the Allende government and the rise of General Pinochet. And on that, Bombshell Tom, thank you very much to everybody for listening. Bye-bye.

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