Revolutionary. That is the word that most sums
up Winchester for me. Revolutionary, with a
strong undercurrent of radical.
Arriving at Winchester in 1984, fired up on
adolescence, loud guitar music, and the Cold War,
I was amazed to be confronted by gothic evidence
that revolution had not been invented in the
twentieth century.
Winchester College, I quickly realised, was built
on radicalism. William of Wykeham, its Founder,
looked around at fourteenth-century education,
and concluded it was not fit for purpose. Like King
Alfred before him, he resolved to increase the learning
in the land. But instead of giving his money to the
country’s abbeys and cathedrals to enlarge their
schools, he decided to reinvent the system.
He founded an independent grammar school.
Winchester was therefore revolutionary from the
start. And it was part of a bold programme to train
scholars for his new college at Oxford, which was
equally radical in its admission of undergraduates,
its formalized tutorial system, and its quadrangular
architecture, all of which became standard across
Oxford and Cambridge.
Time has vindicated Wykeham’s extrao