INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM AND DISCOVERY
W inchester has always been a significant classical school. William of Wykeham’ s principal purpose in founding the College in 1382 was to provide a regular stream of young men with sufficient Latin to study Theology at New College, prior to their ordination to the priesthood. It was, however, only in Latin that these earliest Wykehamists acquired a skill, as by the end of the Middle Ages, not only in England but throughout Europe, Greek was pretty much a dead letter. It was its rediscovery in Florence at the beginning of the fifteenth century which was to ignite the spark of intellectual curiosity, freedom and discovery which spread across the continent like wildfire for the next two hundred years in the movement which we know as the Renaissance.
No small part in this movement as it affected this country was played by William Grocyn( c. 1446- 1519), reputedly the first man to give public Greek lectures in England, and a friend of such other humanist worthies as Thomas Linacre, John Colet, Thomas More and Erasmus.
Grocyn, a native of Colerne in Wiltshire, was Sen on the Roll at Winchester in 1463 and after only two years progressed to New College where he was elected a Fellow in 1467. Resident there at that time, as Praelector, was the Italian Greek scholar, Cornelio Vitelli, and it is probable that Grocyn began his study of Greek with him.
After ordination he was appointed, in 1481, to the living of Newton Longville in Buckinghamshire, a post which he held concurrently with a Readership in Divinity at Magdalen College, but then, in 1488, having additionally become a Prebendary of Lincoln Cathedral in 1485, he left England for Italy and spent the next two years travelling there, in particular studying Greek in Florence with two of the greatest scholars of the age, Demetrius Chalcondyles and Angelo Poliziano.
Returning to Oxford in 1491, Grocyn rented rooms in Exeter College, daily giving public lectures on the‘ new’ Greek learning, and remaining there probably until 1499 when, having been appointed Rector of St Lawrence Jewry some three years previously, he moved to London. The metropolis was by now the main hub in England of the‘ new learning’, and here Grocyn profited from his regular association with the other principal thinkers of the day, Linacre, Colet, More and Erasmus.
Grocyn’ s final preferment in the church, granted in 1506 by his sometime New College pupil, William Warham, also a Wykehamist and by then Archbishop of Canterbury, was as Master of All Hallows’ College, Maidstone, a post which he occupied at the same time as retaining the living of St. Lawrence Jewry. Eventually succumbing in 1518 to what was termed paralysis and was probably a stroke, he died the next year and was buried at Maidstone. He left virtually no writings at all; his legacy lies rather in the brilliance of those whose minds he helped to train, and in their lasting civilised influence across the ages – not least in his own school.
Stephen Anderson teaching Greek to a group of First Year students in New College’ s Red Room. William of Wykeham looks on from behind( right)
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