The history of endowed schools carries us far away into the misty realms of the past, before ever the Conqueror set foot in England and put back the clock of civilisation a hundred years. The earliest schools of which we have any knowledge were attached to the chief collegiate churches, where one officer would be specially told off to teach the boys, just as another would conduct the singing. Convent and school or church and school were invariably allied. The first separable school endowments were merely assignments of a specific part of the general endowment for the support of the chancellor or his deputy, the grammar school master. Like the earliest colleges these schools were founded ‘for prayer and study.’ The first person to reverse this order, and endow an independent school, was William of Wykeham, when in 1393 he founded Winchester College, to give free instruction to seventy poor boys, and so help them to holy orders or the university. Thus the new school became ‘a sovereign and independent corporation existing of, by and for itself, self-centred, self-controlled.’ ‘To make education, and that education not the education of clerics in theology or the canon law, the paramount and pronounced object of an ecclesiastical institution, with all the paraphernalia of Papal bull and royal and episcopal license, was no small innovation. It was a new departure, which opened a new era in the world of education, and therefore of thought.’[13] Later founders, following in the steps of William of Wykeham, gave sums of money for the training of youth in ‘grammar and good manners.’ Grammar meant Latin and Greek, the ‘key to all the sciences’; the manners were to be those of a true gentleman, ‘trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie.’
Following on these came the schools of the Reformation age, of which the most familiar example is Dean Colet’s foundation of St. Paul’s. These were established or assisted by the gifts of ‘pious founders,’ or sometimes by diverting old funds originally destined for other purposes. Reading school was founded out of funds obtained by suppressing an almshouse for poor sisters, and under Elizabeth made into a grammar school ‘for educating the boys of the inhabitants of the said borough and others in literature.’ Such schools were often placed under lay control, but the clerical idea was still in the background. Not priests, but ministers of the reformed religion, were needed, and learning became even more essential for men who had to make knowledge take the place of tradition.