Winchester College Publication Winchester College Classic Talks | Page 7

for imitation, and are a mix of excerpts from genuine texts, some translations
of his own and of others from, for example, Greek into Latin, and some of
his own compositions. Some are full of in-jokes and puns on pupils’ names,
such as a riff on ‘who is the tiniest boy in the school’ (not something one
could get away with now!). The boys would then be set their individual
compositions, to be handed in on fixed days of the week: Latin prose on
Tuesdays, Latin verse on Wednesdays, more Latin prose on Saturdays, and so
on. I gather that teaching at Eton still had a similar timetable in the 1960s.
University teaching may not have been very different, though the
concentration on specified authors implies that the professor would also take
the students through those texts. After all, university students need not have
been very much older; we know of many students who went up at the age of
about fifteen.
I shall pass quickly over his successor, Sir Henry Cuffe, who had the
distinction of being executed for treason. He was involved with the Earl of
Essex in his rebellion against the aged Elizabeth; Cuffe himself seems to have
deserved what he got, as he appears to have been particularly vigorous in
urging Essex to look for all sorts of support once he had fallen out of favour.
I was very proud of having an executed predecessor until I discovered that the
very first Regius Professor of Civil Law had got there first, being hanged,
drawn, and quartered at the very beginning of Elizabeth’s reign. It was
evidently a high-risk profession.
The next Wykehamist was John Harrys or Harris (Figure 11), professor from
1619 to 1622. His role as professor is little documented, although quite a bit
is known about his time as Warden of Winchester, which lasted up until the
Civil War. A particular hazard of the time was posed by a sequence
of visitations to the school, a sort of seventeenth-century equivalent of
Ofsted inspections but decidedly more threatening. John Harmar, indeed,
had been taken to task in 1608 by one Archbishop Bancroft for ‘living and
dining too well’. In 1635–6 Harrys was faced by Archbishop Laud, who
singled out a certain ‘George Jonson, one of your Fellows’, as one who was
‘to be more diligent to perform his duty therein than formerly he hath done’.
What is more, ‘if there be not more attendance and teaching, less charges
and whipping than is reported, the school will never thrive, nor the College
recover its power againe’. Still more threatening was a further visitation
during the Civil War, with three regicides who were unlikely to look with
favour on a college with such close associations with the crown. But Harrys
clearly put up a good defence, and he, and the school, emerged unscathed.
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A few tenures later came the fourth
and (so far!) final Wykehamist,
John Harmar junior, nephew of the
first. He would seem to have been
a rather credulous gentleman; at
least, a story was told of his being
taken in by an undergraduate who
posed as a visiting Greek Orthodox
priest and invited him to a
sermon. He might have suspected
something, one would think, as the
sermon took place in the bar of
The Mitre Hotel. I have felt close
to this John Harmar during the last
day or so, as I have been looking at
a very fine Greek poem that he
inscribed on a volume still in the
Figure 11 John Harrys or Harris; English
College’s
possession (Figure 12).
School, follower of Cornelius Johnson
The volume itself is a translation of
the Old Testament book of Jeremiah into Greek hexameters composed by an
old Winchester pupil. Harmar’s own inscription is also in hexameters, and he
clearly had tremendous fun writing it, scouring the Greek lexicon for a
wonderful collection of noise-
words, some of them extremely
rare. It translates as follows:
For John Ailmer, translator of
Jeremiah’s laments into Greek
hexameters
The prophet Jeremiah sat there
grieving in his heart as he
pondered terrible deeds and
viewed the ill-fated troubles of the
people of his Israel. Weighed down
by miseries, he bent his head this
way and that, indignant at the evil
ways that had by now grown old
among mortals. Dragging up pity
from his wearied heart with a
Figure 12 Flyleaf of John Ailmer,
Musae sacrae: seu Jonas, Jeremiae Threni, &
Daniel Graeco redditi carmine (1652)
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