A Tudor headmaster who championed English, games and educating girls
In 1561, when Latin ruled every classroom, the first head of Merchant Taylors' School argued that English deserved equal standing. Richard Mulcaster wrote one of the earliest English dictionaries, taught the young poet Edmund Spenser, and urged that children needed play, fresh air and fields. His school went on to survive plague and fire.
The school was set up by Sir Thomas White and three fellow founders from the Merchant Taylors' Company, a City livery guild, in an old manor house in St Lawrence Pountney, a City parish. Mulcaster set out his thinking in The Positions of 1581 and The Elementarie of 1582, the second a partial dictionary. His famous line, that he honoured Latin but worshipped English, sums up his mission. He also wanted schools built on the edge of towns beside open fields, and he backed education for women, though within the limits of their expected station.
The seventeenth century tested the school badly. Plague struck repeatedly, including in 1592, 1603, 1626 and 1630, and each time classes broke up, parents kept sons home and boarders were recalled. The company handed headmaster Nicholas Gray £20 in 1626 to keep things running, and £40 more in 1630. Then in 1666 the Great Fire, which began near Suffolk Lane, burned the buildings to the ground. Lessons carried on in makeshift rooms until a rebuild was finished by 1675.
Standards were policed with unusual rigour. From 1606, at the urging of a company member named Robert Dow, inspectors visited three times a year. Sixth formers heard a random passage of Cicero, wrote it down, then turned it into English, Greek and Latin verse before composing Latin of their own; the afternoon repeated the drill in Greek. Mathematics and science had no place in the timetable.
The school left the City in 1875 and since 1933 has occupied Sandy Lodge, a 285 acre site near Northwood in Hertfordshire. It now teaches about 1100 boys aged 11 to 18 and, after a 2015 merger with Northwood Prep, takes pupils from age 3.
Source: Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood
