Tonight I went back to school. Literally.
It has been almost a quarter of a century since I finished my education at a state grammar school in Buckingham called The Royal Latin School. This evening I returned, to attend the launch of a new book chronicling the lives and deeds of some of the alumni.
The school marks its 600th anniversary in 2023. Someone has worked out that this makes it among the oldest hundred schools in the world. It’s not grand or famous or wealthy. It hasn’t regularly churned out Prime Ministers or captains of industry.
But it’s an interesting place all the same, and I enjoyed returning. I saw a handful of teachers - some of whom had taught me. I met a group of ‘Old Latins’ from a 1970s cohort who remembered boarding at the school, and told a story of a famous bell that once hung in a courtyard but seems to have been stolen when the boarding-house was dissolved and is now lost.
And I bumped into a guy who was two years above me and played in the school rock/metal band, Dying Breed. We both remembered a gig the band played one lunchtime, around 1996, when an overexcited sixth-former stage-dived with the intention of crowd-surfing; the crowd parted and our hero crashed to the floor, breaking his arm.
The best days of our lives? I’m not sure. But for me they were happy times and I was glad to relive them.
Anyway. The editors of our new school history asked me to write the official foreword to the book. I was pleased and honoured to do so, since it was a chance for me to reflect on the teacher(s) that influenced my path to becoming a historian, and, more generally, to meditate on the importance of schools in fostering community across the ages.
As I drove home I reflected that some - even all - of this might be interesting to people who didn’t go to The Royal Latin School, and therefore would not have an interest in buying the book.
So I’m publishing it below for subscribers. Let me know what you think!
Cheers - dan
‘Latin Lives’ by EJ Hounslow
Foreword by Dan Jones
In 1423, the year from which we have the first secure reference to a grammar school in Buckingham, England was on the cusp of great change. In many ways, things were better than they had been for a long time. The worst effects of a global pandemic – the Black Death – had finally receded, and wealth was more equally shared around the country than at any time before. England’s military reputation was sky-high: eight years previously, in 1415, Henry V had triumphed at the battle of Agincourt, and English armies had gone on to occupy most of northern France.
Meanwhile, the dark days of Richard II’s tyrannical reign (1377-99) were a fading memory. Religious turmoil of the sort that was being reported in central Europe had not yet reached England’s shores. The English language had been revived as the language of serious poetry and storytelling, by writers such as William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer and John Lydgate. A sense of enlightened patriotic altruism was shared by (some of) the richest and most powerful in the land: when Sir Richard Whittington, today best known as the pantomime character Dick Whittington, died in 1423 he left vast sums for infrastructure repairs, social housing and poor relief in the City of London.
Yet there were problems looming, too. The previous year, Henry V had died of dysentery while on campaign in France, aged just 35. His heir, Henry VI, was only nine months old, so England faced the longest period of minority rule in its history, at a time when experienced government was urgently needed. Despite the re-emergence of English literature, the great artistic leaps forward of the Italian and Northern Renaissance would not seriously touch England for many decades. And ahead, unseen but inevitable, lay great political turmoil. Although little Henry VI would grow up to be a serious and thoughtful man who took a particular interest in education – in the 1440s he founded both Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge – he was a hopeless ruler, and his legacy to England was the Wars of the Roses, a series of disastrous civil wars, which would wrack England from the 1450s until the 1480s.
This, then, was the broad context for the year in which we see the first written reference to the existence of a schoolmaster – and therefore a grammar school – in Buckingham. We cannot say with any certainty when the medieval institution that became the modern Royal Latin School was founded, but since 1423 is the earliest date we have to work with, that is the date we mark as the beginnings of our school. We know where we stand today. We have a less secure idea of where we came from. That’s history for you. It isn’t neat and tidy. But you can always work with what you’ve got.
*
I joined The Royal Latin School – then known to teachers and parents as RLS, and to students as simply ‘The Latin’ – in the autumn of 1993. I was 12. I had no sense then that the school was nearly 600 years old and if you had told me I doubt I should have cared.
All I knew was that it was ‘big’ school: big in the sense that there were then about 700 pupils there, many times more than had attended the little village school I was coming up from; big in the sense that the grounds seemed to sprawl over a vast area, from the great playing fields around which we would run ‘cross country’ in the winter, to the main block, the Sixth Form centre and the ‘T-huts’, long-gone creaky portacabins where we went to learn languages, although, strangely, never Latin; big in the sense that this was, simply, secondary school, a place where I would see through the transition from childhood and adulthood, make friends, take exams, learn things, get in trouble and fall in love, before eventually stumbling out to face whatever lay ahead.
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