rg1976 - Winchester and Eton

Winchester and Eton

Taken from The Trusty Servant Issue 107:

‘When in 1441 King Henry VI decided to found a school near Windsor to be a feeder for the Cambridge college which he had in mind, he knew where to look to see how it should be done! Win Coll’s records show that in the years just before and just after Eton was founded, the king visited Winchester, in all about ten times, to study carefully how the college worked. So impressed was he, that he actually had soil removed from our ground to form part of Eton’s foundation, ‘as if,’ as A F Leach writes, ‘it were a gold mine, and the secret of success lay in some subtle savour of it.’ The first Head Master of Eton, William Waynflete, was Headmaster here from 1430-1441, and, when he left Winchester, he took with him six scholars to form the nucleus of the new school. We print here two photographs of wall paintings that have recently come to light by the removal of panelling in Eton Chapel. On one side can be seen the Etonian crest along with some schoolboys. On the opposite side the wall is very damaged, but the arms of Win Coll are clearly visible. It is thought that there will also have been a group of Wykehamists, to balance the Etonians on the other side. The paintings seem to date from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, perhaps from the Head Mastership of William Horman, c.1485 - c.1495. Horman, himself a Wykehamist, was Headmaster of Win Coll from 1495 to 1501.’