A School in England: A History of Repton

By Hugh Brogan and John Plowright

A School in England: The History of Repton is the last book by the respected historian and Old Reptonian Hugh Brogan. This final masterwork is the fruit of twenty-five years' research, completed shortly before Brogan's death in 2019, using hitherto untapped sources (such as the Fisher family papers) and delivered with his trademark acid wit and astute observation.

Here is a clear and invaluable account of how Repton evolved from grammar school to major public school, acquiring a national reputation and sending out boys across the globe in quest of fortune or adventure, as well as producing such sporting greats as C. B. Fry, Harold Abrahams and 'Bunny' Austin.

Woven through with strands of drama, humour and pathos, A School in England is the first scholarly history of Repton for many years and the first by an award-winning historian.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Profile Editions
• Release date: Mar 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781782837374

Hugh Brogan

Hugh Brogan worked for The Economist and was then a Harkness Fellow in the United States. He has held a chair in American history at the University of Essex and now has a research professorship there. His books include the magnificent Penguin History of the United States and biographies of J. F. Kennedy and Arthur Ransome.

Book preview

BOOK ONE

THE OLD SCHOOL, 1557–1854

She is not any common earth,

Water or wood or air,

But Merlin’s isle of Gramarye,

Where you and I will fare.

Rudyard Kipling

1

A NEW SCHOOL

Portus ab accessu ventorum immotus et ingens.

Virgil

Outwardly, Sir John Port of Etwall was every inch the son of his father, the first Sir John. As with so many Tudor worthies, it is difficult to make definite statements about the personal character of the Ports. There is simply not enough evidence, beyond the palpable fact that they were good at getting and keeping riches.

We know much more about what may be called their social personality: it seems to have been absolutely typical of the rising men of their time, the late Middle Ages. The family is first heard of in Chester, where Henry Port, a silk merchant, was mayor in 1486–87. His son, John the elder, was born in about 1472, so his childhood coincided with the last phase of the Wars of the Roses: he was twelve or thirteen in 1485, the year of Richard III’s defeat at Bosworth, and fourteen or fifteen when Henry VII crushed the rebellion of Lambert Simnel at the battle of Stoke, near Nottingham, in 1487. Memories of civil war may partly explain John’s lifelong attitude of unswerving obedience to the Tudor kings.

He was intelligent and hard-working, and seems to have been adroit at exploiting all the means then available to ambitious young men. He began with county loyalties and connections.¹ With several other boys from Cheshire he was admitted, in 1493 or thereabouts, to study law at the Cheshire men’s favourite Inn of Court, the Inner Temple. His pious countryman Richard Sutton was a prominent figure there. Two decades later Port was to be one of Sutton’s chief agents in the foundation of Brasenose College, Oxford, and he himself made various benefactions to it, among them a closed scholarship for members of the Port family. In 1495 he married advantageously Jane Pole, a young widow. The Poles were, and long remained, a leading gentry family in Derbyshire, and Jane’s large and lively birth family, the Fitzherberts, were another, full of distinguished lawyers. Jane’s father, John, was one of them, and a senior financial official – he was styled the King’s Remembrancer in Exchequer. On marrying, the bridegroom bought from his father-in-law an estate at Etwall, near Derby, which he made his country home: Henry Port probably supplied the money.² Thus the Ports too became Derbyshire gentlemen. In 1506 they invested in a coat-of-arms showing three eaglets ‘each holding in its beak a cross formy fitchy or’,³ which would one day become the arms of Repton School, though there the eaglets have always been taken for pigeons (as carved and painted they could be anything except ducks). Henry Port died in Cheshire in 1512; his son saw to it that he was buried in the church at Etwall, with a suitable memorial brass.

John Port’s legal and administrative career prospered. He was Henry VIII’s first Solicitor-General. He was an able man, but perhaps his promotion owed something to his readiness to do the Crown’s dirty work: he was involved in the manufactured prosecution of the Duke of Buckingham for treason in 1521 – the year in which he was appointed serjeant-at-law and an assize judge – and later in the prosecutions of Sir Thomas More and Queen Anne Boleyn. Surviving letters show him to have been a decidedly servile follower of Thomas Cromwell. He was knighted in 1525.

He became a great man in southern Derbyshire, and never ceased to buy land both there and in Nottinghamshire. He was well placed to take advantage of the dissolution of the monasteries. He seems to have had no religious scruples: he cut his cloth according to the day’s fashion. The will that he made in 1528 was full of traditional Catholic piety: ‘I bequeath my soul to Almighty God, iii persons in Trinity, humbly beseeching our most blessed Lady Saint Mary, Saint John the Evangelist and all the holy company of heaven to be means for me to our Lord Jesu’;⁴ in it, among other bequests to religious houses, he left ten shillings to the Prior of Repton to sing or say an Obit for his soul. In the next decade he enforced Henrician anti-papal laws – plundered a couple of monasteries – and on his deathbed made a final will in which he explicitly acknowledged the King as ‘supreme head of the Church of England immediately under God’ and left out all mention of interceding saints.⁵

But he does not seem to have lent himself to the attack on Repton Priory, which was less than five miles away from Etwall, due south.⁶ He had once acted as arbitrator in a dispute involving the Priory,⁷ and it was soon afterwards that, as we have seen, he remembered the Prior in his will: perhaps he regarded himself, and was regarded, as a friend of the place. At any rate, when in 1536 the Priory was threatened with suppression unless it paid a huge fine (£266 13s. 4d.), Judge Port was one of those who lent it the necessary cash in return for some of its lands.⁸ It was a ruinous transaction for the Priory and bought it no more than a brief postponement: in 1538 the house was definitively suppressed, leaving Port in full possession of the lands yielded to him. He thus profited from an event that he had apparently tried to prevent, but we may be sure that he did not collude with Thomas Legh and Richard Layton, the notorious government commissioners who visited and dissolved the monasteries, giving the monks’ alleged uselessness and sinfulness as the reason: they reported that four of the Repton canons were sodomites. Like Port, they were in Thomas Cromwell’s following, but they did not need the assistance of local bigwigs as they bullied, cajoled or bamboozled the inmates of religious houses.⁹ The judge may genuinely have hoped to be the saviour of an ancient Derbyshire institution, or he may simply have had an eye to his own profit. All that can definitely be said is that the business established his family at Repton. The judge’s death, in March 1540,¹⁰ was sudden, which, as Dr Baker points out, might have been seen by his contemporaries as divine punishment for sacrilege.¹¹

His son and heir, John Port the younger, was probably born in Cheshire, in the first decade of the sixteenth century. He enjoyed the benefits of the Port scholarship at Brasenose and was admitted to the Inner Temple without fee ‘because the son of a judge’.¹² His father was no doubt ambitious for him: like many others in this story, he entered the service of Thomas Cromwell, and in 1539 sat as a member for Derbyshire in the House of Commons. He was enough of a lawyer to serve for a few years as clerk of assize on the Oxford circuit,¹³ but he did not otherwise emulate his father, and probably was not expected to. Both John Ports made a cult of the family reputation, as their ostentatious tombs in Etwall church demonstrate to this day, and their chief concern came to be their establishment among the leaders of the county community.

John the younger was in his thirties when the judge died, and for the next thirteen years continued on his father’s lines, combining local grandeur with conscientious service to the Tudor regime. He acquired yet more land: for instance, his first wife, Elizabeth Giffard, brought him the manor of Cubley, and in 1544 he bought the manor of the dissolved Dale Abbey. Elizabeth bore him five children and died young. He took a second wife, one of his Fitzherbert cousins, Dorothy, the widow of Sir Ralph Longford. It was a suitable alliance: they were old friends and could help to bring up each other’s offspring.

John Port had inherited his father’s status as well as his name and extensive property, and in 1547 was made Knight of the Bath at the coronation of Edward VI (he will have had to pay handsomely for the distinction). In 1552 he was a member of the Derbyshire commission (one of many set up by Parliament) reporting on the state of the pensions awarded to former monks – ‘which pensions were in arrears, which pensioners had died, and who had alienated their pensions’, the last being, in the eyes of the government, an abuse.¹⁴ He played a part in the continuing despoliation of the Church: he was one of the commissioners for south Derbyshire who, as part of the Protestant policy of Edward’s reign, and because of the royal government’s eagerness to lay its hands on as much treasure as possible, visited the parish churches to strip them of all the goods and ornaments that could be deemed superfluous by the new religion: one chalice, one surplice and one bell each were all that were thought necessary. The Derbyshire commissioners sent 684 oz. of precious metal to the Royal Jewel House but, as J. C. Cox would one day point out, they were strikingly merciful to Repton church, which was allowed to keep two chalices, a paten and four bells, ‘until His Majesty’s pleasure should be more fully known’.¹⁵ Then King Edward died, Lady Jane Grey’s usurpation failed and Mary Tudor mounted the throne. She promptly undertook a Catholic restoration.

This seems to have been the turning-point in Sir John Port’s life. Nobody can be surprised that the judge’s son accepted the latest twist of royal policy, but it went deeper than that: until his death he was always to behave as a deeply committed Catholic. It seems likely that at last he felt free to show his true colours. Both his mother and his second wife were Fitzherberts, and it is perhaps significant that his father-in-law, Sir Anthony Fitzherbert, a judge and famous legal writer, disliked the dissolution of the monasteries and is said to have commanded his children, on his deathbed, ‘not to acquire any monastic land’.¹⁶ Sir Anthony’s descendants in the male line were staunch Catholics, recusants, described in the 1580s as ‘traitors’, ‘dangerous’ and ‘very bad’ by a government spy; Sir Thomas Fitzherbert died a prisoner in the Tower of London, and his brother John, after being stripped of all his possessions, died of jail fever (typhus) in the Fleet prison.¹⁷ The family of John Port’s first wife, the Giffards, were equally firm Catholics, and his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, married Sir Thomas Gerard, a conspicuous Derbyshire recusant who was twice sent to the Tower for his involvement with Mary, Queen of Scots (he once tried to rescue her from confinement at Chatsworth). Their second son, John, born at Etwall, became a conspicuous Jesuit, who was involved with the Gunpowder Plotters, if not with the plot itself.¹⁸ It would not be surprising if Port sincerely shared the beliefs of the women in his family, even if he did not choose to exhibit them publicly until Mary I’s accession, and even if, as we shall see, he remained something of a Mr Facing-Both-Ways until his death, and beyond it.

At any rate, he sat again as a member for the county in Mary’s first Parliament, in 1553, and was High Sheriff for Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire in the following year. But his most conspicuous appearance on behalf of the new order came in 1556, when he was one of the magistrates sitting at a heresy trial in Derby. The sorry tale is recounted in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of these Latter and Perilous Days, better known as his Book of Martyrs.

The defendant was ‘a certain poor honest godly woman, being blind from birth, and unmarried, about the age of 22, named Joan Waste’.¹⁹ Her father ‘was by his Science a Barber, who sometimes also used to make ropes’. Joan clearly had a strong character, for by the age of twelve or so she had learned how to knit, thereby earning a little money, and she soon started to help her father at his rope-work. She seems to have been determined not to be defeated by her blindness, and took to going to church every day, ‘to hear the divine service read in the vulgar tongue’. She saved enough out of her earnings to buy an English New Testament (presumably Tyndale’s), which she got her friends to read to her, a chapter or two a day, sometimes for a small payment. She became famous in Derby for being able to find her way about town without a guide, and went to every sermon that she could. By the time of Edward VI’s death she was a thoroughly instructed Protestant, and firmly refused to ‘communicate in religion with those which taught contrary doctrine’: in other words, she would not go to Mass. Naturally she attracted the notice of the Marian authorities, and in the summer of 1556 she was publicly examined by the bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, Robert Baynes, and his chancellor, Dr Anthony Draycot, ‘with divers others called to bear witness’.²⁰ The first named of those witnesses was Sir John Port.

The work of interrogation was carried out by the bishop and the chancellor. Joan Waste was vigorous and unyielding in her answers. She rejected the Mass and its central doctrine, the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine; she trusted rather to what she had heard preached by learned men, ‘whereof some suffered imprisonment, and others some suffered death for the same doctrine’. She begged her inquisitors ‘for God’s sake not to trouble her, being a blind, poor, and unlearned woman, with any further talk, saying (by God’s assistance) that she was ready to yield up her life in that faith, in such sort as they should appoint’. Inevitably, she was condemned, and on 1 August, after the writ de haeretico comburendo had arrived from London, she was burned at the stake at a place just outside Derby called Windmill Pit. As was required by authority on such occasions,²¹ Dr Draycot preached a ferocious sermon beforehand, saying among other things that she was not only blind in her body but also blind in the eyes of her soul, and that she was going to burn in Hell for all eternity; but, somewhat like Stogumber in Saint Joan, he could not bear to watch the actual burning, and ‘for great sorrow of her death’ hid in the inn where he was staying, sleeping, or pretending to sleep. Joan Waste died calling upon Christ.

If Foxe’s record is to be trusted, Sir John Port was not present at the execution. Too much should not be made of this: the bishop did not turn up either. Port may have been squeamish, like Draycot, or disgusted, or busy, or he may have been unwell (he would be dead within the year). Whatever the case, his Catholicism seems to have been unshaken by the atrocity, judging from his will. He died on 6 June 1557. He was in his early fifties at most: no great age even for a Tudor Englishman (his father lived to be sixty-nine), but not particularly young either. He may have been a victim of the ‘English Sweat’, probably influenza, the most fatal epidemic in England since the Black Death, which in the late 1550s took off perhaps a fifth of the population; it killed its victims very quickly. Like other wills, Port’s was probably prepared well in advance, so complex and detailed were its provisions; it was dated 9 March, so perhaps, Sweat or no Sweat, Sir John’s health had been perceptibly failing for some time and he knew that death was near. In the will we hear his personal voice for the first and last time: ‘Considering how certain I am to die and the much uncertainty of the time thereof and preparing myself so to depart from this world that by the merits of Christ’s passion I may ever live.’²²

He was taking stock of his position, both material and spiritual. As to this world, the ambition that had guided the last three generations of his family had finally been defeated, for his two sons had not survived childhood, and although his three daughters were all of marriageable age (and seem to have rushed into wedlock as soon as their father was gone), the name of Port would die with him. Then there was the matter of his eternal destiny. Nothing could better demonstrate his profound spiritual conservatism than the pious provisions he made for his soul’s welfare. Sir John did not fear that he would go to Hell, like poor Joan Waste, since he was a true Catholic who expected to receive the last rites of the Church and could confidently invoke both Christ’s passion and ‘the intercession of his Holy and blessed Mother Mary and of all the holy Saints in Heaven’; but he was a sinner, certain to spend a long, long time suffering the pains of Purgatory unless the prayers of living Christians got him out. So running through his will is a preoccupation with such prayers, and a desire to make sure of as many of them as possible:

ALSO I will that thirteen of the poorest and impotent Persons as well men as women in Dalbury & Lees, Hilton & Repton shall have by the hands of my Executors or their Assigns every Friday at the Church of Etwall after the High Mass is said during three years to pray for my Father and Mother, me, and my Wives and children and all Christian Souls, as more plainly shall appear in a Schedule, every of the said poor folks a penny a-piece […] the poor prisoners lying in the common Gaol for Nottingham & Derbyshire twelve pence to relieve and comfort them withal, and to pray as afore is said per me superdictum Johannes Porte […] to every of the parish churches of Repton, Hilton, Dalbury, Sutton every of them a vestment of silk with my arms and my wife’s thereupon embroidered, to pray for me and my parents as afore is remembered.

Sir Robert Otway, clerk, was left five marks ‘to pray for me’, and John Port’s cousin, Sir Richard Port, Priest,²³ was left a ‘black Gown, to pray for me’; his tenants were left black coats, ‘to pray for me’.

Prayers of the poor were thought to be especially potent, so the climax of these purposeful benefactions came with the legacies to establish an alms-house:

And also I will six of the poorest of Etwall parish shall have weekly for ever twenty pence a piece, over and beside such lodging as I or my Executors shall provide for them in an alms house which God willing shall be builded in or near the church yard of Etwall.

and a school:

Also in like manner, I will, give and devise to Sir Thomas Giffard, knight, and my nephew Richard Harpur Esquire, Thomas Brewster vicar of Etwall, John Harker and Simon Starkey and to their heirs all my lands, tenements and hereditaments in Mosley, Abram and Brock-hurst within the county of Lancaster, upon condition that they shall find or cause to be found a priest well learned and graduate and of honest and virtuous conversation freely to keep a Grammar School in Etwall or Repton from time to time for ever, and also to say Mass or minister Divine Service [Prudent Sir John! He could not be sure how long the Marian restoration would last] at the altar in my Chapel there, or in Repton church at such altar as my Executors shall appoint thrice every week. And I will there be also an Usher associate to and with the said master to keep the School, and for their travail in such behalf I will that the said School master have yearly twenty pounds and the Usher ten pounds. And I will that the Scholars of the said School every morning at their coming to the said School, and also at the after noon at and upon their departing from the School to pray for my parents’ souls, my soul, the soul of Elizabeth Port my late wife, the souls of Walter Port and Thomas Port my children and the souls of my Brethren and sisters.

There was nothing remotely bold or new about these plans for an alms-house and a school. Sir John’s will, in this respect as in as in most others, breathes entirely of the later Middle Ages. That period was characterised, among other things, by a passion for chantries: that is, foundations for saying Masses for the souls of pious benefactors, and offering up prayers for their souls, all in order to shorten their time in Purgatory. Chantries could be simple or elaborate. Some were no more than beautiful pinnacled tombs in churches or cathedrals at which prayers were offered; some were alms-houses (‘hospitals’); some were schools. By 1547 there were more than 2,000 chantry schools.²⁴ But in that year all the chantries, whatever their functions, were abolished as being monuments of popish superstition. Besides, the government in London, in its usual fashion, wanted to get its hands on their endowments. This was a major educational crisis. Fortunately prosperous clergy and laymen – bishops, merchants, lawyers, gentry – were still willing to found schools, as Sir John Port demonstrated.

Yet he exhibited his conservatism by designing his new school to be as much like an old chantry as the times would permit; and his former chaplain, William Perryn, if living, was to be offered the mastership. Perryn, originally a Dominican friar, who in the 1540s published a pamphlet defending the Catholic doctrine of the Mass, had later been a chantry priest at St Paul’s Cathedral. He could have brought news of Colet’s school at St Paul’s (originally a chantry); for that matter, he may have put the whole idea of the charity into Sir John’s head. More probably Port needed no instruction. He knew London, and his father’s support of Brasenose College was a telling example: in his will he himself left money to Brasenose. He must have known that Church and State needed men well trained in Latin and all clerkly skills, that boys could profit society as well as themselves if they got an education and that the founder of a school was therefore sure of respectful mention. His reputation was nearly as dear to him as his immortal soul; he wished to show himself a worthy son and heir of the father near whom he was soon to be buried; and there was no other way of keeping the Port name alive. To found a school and an alms-house in south Derbyshire would keep his memory green in his own county (and green, indeed, it is).

‘Upon Trent, so soon as he hath taken to him the River Dove, is Repandunum, now Repton; once a great town, but now a poor village.’²⁵ How did it become the home of Sir John Port’s school? The other villages mentioned in the will – Dalbury, Lees, Etwall, Sutton and Hilton – are close neighbours to each other, several miles north of the River Trent, and Etwall was Port’s home and domain. He would be buried in the church there; he had built a chapel onto the chancel (originally, perhaps, intending it for a chantry); it was wholly suitable to give the village an alms-house. Perhaps the school should be there? But then there was all the land belonging to him in Repton… The will seems to show him hesitating between the two neighbourhoods.

Prudently, he left funds for the building ‘of Stone and brick a substantial Schoolhouse together with convenient chambers and lodgings for the Schoolmaster and usher in the place and precinct of the north side of the Churchyard of Etwall, or at Repton’. His executors sensibly decided that the two charities should not be in the same place. They may have been unhappy at the thought of thrusting young boys and elderly bedesmen close together (the almshouse stands north of Etwall churchyard to this day); or they may have decided that the site was not big enough for both establishments, or that it was easiest, quickest and cheapest to buy a suitable building in Repton that happened to be on the market. At any rate, two years almost to the day after Sir John’s death, on 12 June 1559, in the first year of Queen Elizabeth, they completed the purchase of ‘one large great and high house’ at Repton for the use of the grammar school.²⁶

The vendor of the building was the local squire, Gilbert, the son of Thomas Thacker. The Thackers, as much as the Ports, were Tudor types, if of somewhat more genteel origin: according to Alec Macdonald, one Sir Gilbert Thacker fought beside Henry V at Agincourt, and one died for Richard III at Bosworth. Thomas Thacker, an energetic agent of Thomas Cromwell, was another of the vultures who hovered round the abbeys as they died. At first he applied to Cromwell to be granted Breadsall Priory, then Calke, an outlying ‘cell’ of Repton Priory; but the day after Repton Priory itself was surrendered to Thomas Legh, on 26 October 1539, it was granted to Thacker, at first on a lease but then, in 1540, ‘in fee’ (effectively, as freehold), for £648 11s. 8d. down, and an annual rent of £2 15s. 6d. He moved into the handsome brick tower built a century previously by Prior Overton and began to sell the stone of the priory’s other buildings. As soon as he was installed, he applied for, and was granted, a coat-of-arms.²⁷ He died in 1548, and was succeeded by his son.

We know even less of Gilbert Thacker than we do of John Port, but two closely related incidents in his career seem to bring out his character vividly. Repton Priory stood to the east of the parish church; it too was perched on the long ridge that marked the southern limit of the Trent’s flood plain. Below lay the Old Trent, a former channel of the big river. The main buildings were well away from the water, but Overton’s Tower stood on the very brink. Here Gilbert, like his father, resided. He had little use for the rest of the priory. Repton was not to be one of the famous country houses of England, like Newstead Abbey (or Northanger). Perhaps Thacker could not afford the upkeep, or perhaps he was unimaginative. What did occur to him in 1553 was that the accession of Mary I and her reconciliation with Rome might threaten his title. So, according to a famous passage in Fuller’s Church History, he

upon a Sunday (belike the better day, the better deed) called together the carpenters and masons of that country, and plucked down in one day (church work is a cripple in going up, but rides post in coming down) a most beautiful church belonging thereunto, adding, ‘he would destroy the nest, for fear the birds should build there again’.²⁸

He and the villagers continued to use the priory buildings as a quarry, and he had demolished most of them when in 1559 Sir John Port’s executors arrived: big grey stones that look as if they came from the Priory may still be seen in walls all over Repton, and near by. The executors bought most of what remained (always excepting Overton’s Tower) for what seems a bargain price of £37 10s. 0d. and set to work to make it suitable for the school, which opened for business that autumn, whereupon Gilbert Thacker discovered that his impulsiveness (or what looks like it) had landed him with the noisiest possible neighbour, at his very front door: a school playground. The result was to be a feud that lasted for over a hundred years.

2

THACKERAGE

Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain,

Where health and plenty cheer’d the labouring swain,

Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid,

And parting summer’s lingering blooms delay’d –

Dear lively bowers of innocence and ease,

Seats of my youth, where every sport could please …

Oliver Goldsmith

Repton High Street ran south to north. At its northern end it opened out in front of the parish church and what was left of the Priory, and there stood the large great and high house, the Priory’s western range. It cannot have been very conspicuous from the street, for to reach it visitors had to go through a massive gateway, part of an equally substantial gate-house, almost imposing enough for the entry to an Oxford college.¹ The gate-house has since disappeared, but recent scholarship has unearthed an early eighteenth-century drawing of the edifice, which seems to have been some fifty feet high, from ground-level to the summit of the gable, and as many feet in length and width. The gates were not, perhaps, very strong: in 1364 they were closed against a riotous crowd which had come to attack the bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, who was visiting the abbey, but the rioters broke through and besieged the bishop and the canons in the Priory house. Fortunately the local gentry rode to the rescue, and the bishop put the village under an interdict (for how long we do not know).² There were no such stirring incidents after the dissolution. The Thackers decorated the outer gable of the gate-house with their coat-of-arms: thus improved, it dignified the approach to their mansion; but after the family died out (in 1727) it was demolished, like so much before it, or fell down. Nothing now remains to give majesty to the school entrance but the empty southern arch of the gate-house, twenty feet wide and fifteen high, which has stood alone for almost three centuries, re-buttressed, restored and occasionally buried in ivy. As ‘The Arch’ it is generally recognised as the symbol of the school.

In 1559 the Port executors were not interested in the gate-house, since the Thackers kept possession. Their concern was with the tall grey building a hundred feet beyond it. Perhaps they felt that it turned its back on them, for only a few blank windows and two small doors in the western wall were visible as they approached. The Augustinian canons had not been an enclosed order of monks; they were priests whose job was to minister to Repton and the parishes near by; but when not out at work or taking part in religious services and ceremonies in their Priory church they lived communally, observing the so-called Rule of St Augustine, and shut out the profane world as much as possible. Only the doors of the church, which stood south-east of the western range, at right angles to it, had offered any architectural welcome to pilgrims or visitors. This would not do for the school. Inside, on the building’s first floor, was the great hall of the Priory; it would serve excellently as a schoolroom (it was to be known as ‘Big School’ for centuries), but it had no direct access to the outside world. So the executors cut a new doorway in the southern façade, at first-floor level, and built a walled, cobbled causeway (the Causey) up to it, apparently using some of the stone still available from the church ruins. Inside a short passage led to the door of the hall.

This building of a new entrance shows that the executors, or some of them, were men of prompt and practical judgement. Who were they? We know next to nothing of John Harker and Simon Starkey; Thomas Brewster, as vicar of Etwall, was presumably more concerned with Sir John Port’s hospital than with his school, and anyway died in 1558. Sir Thomas Giffard had been Sir John’s father-in-law, but he lived at Chillington, near the western border of Staffordshire; he was a firm Catholic, which might create difficulties now that the Protestant Queen Elizabeth was on the throne; and he died in 1561. In practice the only one of the executors who mattered, and that increasingly, was Richard Harpur. It was he, more than anyone else, who saw to the realisation of Sir John’s designs.

Harpur was born of a Staffordshire family, in 1520 or thereabouts. In him the first Sir John Port, the judge, seems to have come again. As a young man he came to know the judge, who took him up and got him into the Inner Temple, though Harpur seems to have acquired Cheshire connections only later in life, when he became an alderman of Chester. He was an able and hard-working young lawyer, as the judge had been: he became well respected as a law reporter. John Port the younger regarded him as a good friend and, as we have seen, referred to him in his will as ‘my nephew’, for Harpur, like the judge, married into the Derbyshire gentry, into the Port family itself: his wife, Jane Findern of Findern (a village between Repton and Derby, north of the Trent), was the judge’s granddaughter. She brought Harpur estates at Swarkestone and manorial rights in Repton itself. He was appointed a serjeant-at-law in 1559 and a judge of the common pleas in 1567. Like Justice Port, he had no rigid religious convictions, or if he had, they were conveniently Protestant. The qualities that carried him forward were exactly what were needed to launch the new school, which he dominated until his death in 1577.³ It is wholly proper that his arms have been carved in stone and set up next to the Port ‘pigeons’ over the entrance that he built to the Old Priory.⁴

Harpur’s building work did not stop with the completion of the causeway. One of the constant problems confronting the historian of early Repton is that of finding out where the boys were stowed to sleep, eat and wash. Harpur was rather more concerned with the problem of accommodating their teachers. The schoolhouse was large, certainly: three storeys high, 115 feet long and 50 feet wide; but it was not large enough for all that was required of it. Had the other buildings of the Priory been spared, there need only have been minimal adaptation to make them suitable for the school; but as well as the church all the other buildings surrounding the cloister – the chapter house, the canons’ sleeping quarters, their dining hall and their necessarium (latrines) – had been more or less completely demolished. (Gilbert Thacker was at work again: at about this time he built a huge stone wall to separate his grounds from the former cloister, which was now to be the school garden.) Harpur had to provide quarters for the Master, the usher and their families, which would include several servants, for in that age of cheap labour before mechanisation no household except the very poorest could manage without menials. Since the mastership was fairly well paid (£20 a year, it will be remembered), and since the return of Protestantism put an end to the requirement for the clergy to be celibate, it was to be expected that those holding the office would usually be married. To be sure, John Port had wanted William Perryn to be the first Master, and Perryn was celibate; but he died in 1558, before he could take up his post, if he ever meant to do so. Later Masters would be husbands, and probably fathers: family men. Harpur decided to build an extension on to the north end of the Old Priory, adding bedrooms, a kitchen and the usual offices to the schoolhouse; the work was so skilfully carried out that it was not until the twentieth century that later generations realised that the north end was not part of the original building. The stone used was the same; perhaps it too came from the ruins. (Once there had been two quarries near Repton, but they seem to have disappeared during the Middle Ages.) There remained only the fitting-out of the school with benches and beds for the boys, desks for the teachers; nothing whatever is known about this. What was once Big School (now the library) is still dominated by the Master’s dais, with its high wooden canopy, its massive desk and chair, all black with the candle smoke and beeswax of centuries; but the canopy bears the date 1650. Perhaps the Masters made do with less imposing furnishings during the first ninety years of the school. Presumably everything was made locally, and it was certainly paid for out of the funds provided by John Port in his will (prompting the thought that the whole business of setting up the school must have given a welcome stimulus to the village economy); but all is guesswork. We know nothing for certain about the school in its earliest years: not the names of the teachers, or those of the boys, or their numbers. The curtain only lifts slightly in 1568, when two Reptonians, Roger Spencer and Thomas Jeffries, were admitted to Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge.⁵ But for what it is worth, Macdonald records that, if a now vanished inscription on a wall in the Old Priory may be believed, the name of the first Master was Wightman, about whom nothing is known but something may be guessed: he was perhaps John Wightman, previously the master of the grammar school at Burton upon Trent (and father of the last man to be burned alive for heresy in England, in 1612).⁶

According to the inscription, Wightman’s immediate successors were Steward, Starkey, Moreton, Radcliff and Pollard. Starkey was perhaps a relation of Sir John Port’s executor of that name. Moreton (or Morton) figures in the parish register for 1581, when his daughter was christened. The register also records the burial of Richard Pollard, ‘Master of the school’, on 11 May 1592, followed a month later by the christening and burial of his daughter Elizabeth. There was plague that year at Derby, but we can only guess what family tragedy lies behind these two bleak entries.⁷

Gaps in our knowledge are opportunities as well as problems. If the school archive during its first hundred years or so is scanty, that of the village is rich and almost abundant. Indeed, it is through the parish records that we can begin to discern the story of the school. Let us look at Repton village.

Physically it was (and is) dominated by its tall church spire, the slenderest, and to true Reptonian hearts the most beautiful, in England, which the returning native or visitor, coming from any distance or direction, cannot help looking out for eagerly. Built in the early fourteenth century, it was perhaps intended to signal unmistakably the primacy of God and his Church in the world, and of the Augustinian canons, ministers to the parish, in Repton. If so, it seems to have had some success. Repton was a thriving place in the later Middle Ages, a place of pilgrimage and sacred relics and two holy wells, St Ann’s and St Thomas’s (St Thomas cured bad eyes). Bigsby tells us that the water abounded with vitriolic acid and possessed ‘no small portion of calcareous gas’. In the seventeenth century the villagers still dressed the wells annually. ‘Plough Monday’, or ‘Plough Bullocking’, took place on the Monday nearest Christmas Day: ‘Four strong young men harnessed to a plough, accompanied by a Fool dressed in a calfskin and carrying a bladder on a stick, and also his wife Bessy, used to go from farm to farm asking for money and ale; if this was refused, the bullocks ploughed up the doorstep.’⁸ At Christmas Repton’s ‘merry bells’, which Sir John Port had spared, rang out; waits (musicians) and guisers (masked actors) went round with carols and a mummers’ play about St George. On May Day there was dancing round a maypole.⁹ All these frolics seem to have survived the civil wars and the Puritan revolution; but there is much evidence that Puritanism had a strong appeal to many in the village. Burton upon Trent, near by, became a Calvinist stronghold after the disgrace of the local grandee, Lord Paget, a Catholic, who was suspected of involvement with Mary, Queen of Scots. His influence was replaced by that of the Stanhopes of Ashby de la Zouch and the Earls of Huntingdon, stout Protestants all, in spite of their marriages into the Port family. Puritans took the lead in the whole region round Burton, including Repton, where, after 1610 or thereabouts, when George Ward took office, the parsons described themselves as ‘ministers’ rather than ‘curates’, and certainly not as priests.¹⁰

The Repton boys’ religious needs, of paramount importance in that age, were to be met by daily public prayer and a close partnership between the school and the parish church. Boys were required to attend the church services in a body every week, which must have exposed them regularly to strict Calvinist doctrines. Sometimes the vicar (George Ward, for example) was also one of their ushers; no doubt he wished to augment the paltry income allowed him by the lay rector, Mr Thacker. This was not an invariably successful arrangement. In 1602 the vicar was Thomas Blandey, BA Oxon., a Fellow of All Souls and usher at the school; but he vanished hastily after fathering an illegitimate daughter with a village woman. (Twenty years later the daughter herself bore a baby out of wedlock.¹¹)

Repton was no large market town like Derby or Shrewsbury, both of which acquired grammar schools in the 1550s; it was a village deep in the countryside, in a quiet world of small woods and village commons. However, Tudor families apparently made no more difficulty than their descendants about sending their sons away for long periods over long distances, and Repton was well placed to serve the whole Trent valley – indeed, all the Midlands. It was no sort of dead end. Its battered market cross, a stone shaft atop over half a dozen steps, with the village stocks near by,¹² stood at the junction of four roads directed approximately to the points of the compass. The road north ran for a hundred yards along the Abbey wall, so-called, to turn left at the Arch and then, after skirting the churchyard, headed down a lane to the Willington ferry over the Trent to Etwall. The road east found its way through the hamlets of Milton and Foremark to Swarkestone bridge and Derby. The road south went to Ashby de la Zouch and Leicester; the road west climbed uphill to Newton Solney and then down to Staffordshire – to Burton upon Trent and Lichfield. The cross may thus be said to have symbolised the vital connections to the wider world that were essential to the school’s prosperity. To its south stood the Mitre inn, which not only served traders, but was for long the chief meeting-place for village business and social jollity of all kinds. On Michaelmas Day, or the nearest Tuesday, ‘Hiring Statutes’ day was held at the cross.

Farm servants were hired on that day for the year, to live in. A shilling was always given as a pledge between the farmer and boy or girl hired. Anyone who got a place immediately sported a bunch of coloured ribbons and then started to enjoy the fun of the fair. Stalls for gingerbread and sweets, and various shows, were set out by the old Cross, a levy being made for the Lord of the Manor.¹³

It was not always, or over time ceased to be, a simply innocent occasion. It made a dismal impression on a particularly respectable visitor in 1843. He observed brawling and drunkenness, wondered where the police were and concluded that ‘the Statute Fairs are a great evil, both as regards the hiring of servants in rendering them unsettled and capricious, and – it is fair to conclude – their masters and mistresses also’.¹⁴ At the same period, we are told by another witness:

I once saw a woman sold by [mock] auction at the Cross. It must have been as late as ’48 or ’49 […] I happened to be passing and, seeing a crowd, went up, and this is what occurred. A navvy led out of the Mitre Inn a woman who had a halter round her waist. He stood her on the Cross steps and gave out that she was for sale. Another navvy bid a shilling for the ‘lot’, and, there being no advance, she was knocked down and the purchaser led her off, and the parties returned to the Mitre to have a drink. I believe there was an impression that this sort of thing was legal.¹⁵

It might be interesting to know which Lord of the Manor was levying on the fair in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, because according to various historians there were at least two manors: one that had come to the Thackers with the Priory, the other to Richard Harpur by his marriage. Manors were of steadily declining importance – their judicial functions, for instance, had largely been superseded by the Justices of the Peace and petty sessions – but the duality reinforced the likelihood of rivalry between the two leading families of the neighbourhood. Justice Harpur might congratulate himself on a job well done: the choice of Repton as the place for Sir John Port’s school was more and more evidently a wise one; yet the school, like the Justice himself, was inevitably caught up in the fine-meshed net of local realities. Thus, relations with the Thackers were bound to be difficult, partly because the school and Repton Hall (as Overton’s Tower and whatever additions the Thackers made to it came to be known) were so close together, partly because of the quarrelsome propensities of the Thacker race and partly because of Thacker–Harpur rivalry. But these tensions seem to have been more or less controlled during Richard Harpur’s lifetime. He and his son John, who succeeded him as administrator of the Port foundations, were more concerned with challenges from what may have been an unexpected quarter: the children of Sir John Port and their descendants.

For this Port’s will was responsible, and it is hard to see how, given the testator’s wishes, trouble could have been avoided. Sir John had left certain lands and leases for the establishment and funding of his school and hospital. Repton was to be a free school: that is, its endowments were to pay the wages of a Master and usher (this was to be a very important point) and to build a schoolhouse. Harpur and the other executors were to be responsible for the school during their lifetime: after that it was to be governed by ‘my right heirs for ever’: that is, his daughters, their husbands and their descendants. It was clear, in short, that the Port heirs had a reversionary interest in the school and its estate; and towards the end of Harpur’s life (it is not known exactly when), the annual income of the estate having risen to £71,¹⁶ and the charges on it amounting only to £56 (including the stipend of the bedesmen at Etwall), they claimed the residue. Fifteen pounds, to be divided between three families, does not seem very much to sue over, even in Tudor times, but the families were probably trying to establish the nature of Sir John’s legacy, and their own rightful interest in it.

Richard Harpur, as a senior lawyer, must have accepted their reasoning, for he settled out of court, granting some lands outright to Dorothy Port’s husband, George Hastings, who later became the fourth Earl of Huntingdon, and Margaret Port’s husband, Sir Thomas Stanhope; the third son-in-law, Sir Thomas Gerard, got a favourable fifty-year lease on property in Lancashire. But that was not the end of dispute. Richard Harpur died in 1577. His son John proved to be just as able and conscientious as his father, but towards the end of his life his position was challenged by the Port heirs. The three families concerned – Hastings, Stanhope and Gerard – seem to have felt that it no longer made any sense to leave their interest in the Port estates, not to mention their responsibilities to the Port foundations, in the hands of their distant cousins (and the Gerards wanted to renew their privileged tenancy in Lancashire). They brought a suit in Chancery, which found in their favour in 1620; and next year, in 1621, a royal charter was issued to put the rights and government of the school and the hospital on a permanent footing. A corporation was formed, consisting of the Master of the hospital, the Master of the school, two ushers and three of the oldest pensioners at Etwall. After the death of John Harpur the heads of the three families would act as a board of Governors, with the privilege of nominating the pensioners and the poor scholars as vacancies occurred, and with the duty of overall supervision of the foundations. The Corporation, meeting quarterly, would have responsibility for such day-to-day business as could not be settled by the Masters on their own. This arrangement lasted until the late nineteenth century.

The Gerard lease was not renewed, to the great vexation of that family, but otherwise the business seems to have been concluded amicably. Matters did not go so tranquilly with the Thackers.

Gilbert Thacker the First died in 1563 and was buried in Repton church beneath a marble slab engraved with a representation of him and his lady which in style looks like one of Hugh Lofting’s illustrations to his Dr Dolittle books. His son and heir, Gilbert II, seems to have been as impulsive as his father, and perhaps worse-tempered. In 1593 he quarrelled with the Sheriff of Derby; the sources do not say why, but as it was the Sheriff’s business to extract tax payments for the war with Spain, it was probably over money. The war was forcing England to muster all her resources: at Repton in 1590 there was an assize of arms, and an unimpressive array of weapons was handed over to the village constable for safe-keeping: a sheaf of arrows, a quiver and a bow ‘for the Train Band [militia] soldier’ were the most interesting items.¹⁷ Money might be a more effective contribution to the defence of the realm, but perhaps Thacker thought that he was being required to pay more than was fair (although the rolls of assessment no toriously understated the wealth of the Queen’s subjects). There had been great resentment in Derbyshire two years previously, when the government exacted a forced loan from the nobility and gentry, and a surviving list of Derbyshire gentlemen who paid up at the time of the Armada includes various well-known names – Harpur, Gell, Sitwell, Kendall – but not Thacker.¹⁸ At any rate, on the feast of St Stephen (26 December) 1593, the Sheriff, Edward Cokayne, sent two special bailiffs, Henry Alcocke and John Herod, to arrest Thacker and three associates in church.¹⁹ It was presumably the only way they could be sure of reaching their man, but the attempt was rash and unsuccessful. According to Ralph Cantrell, a churchwarden, ‘one William George did spurn, hale and punch the said special bailiffs and did also with force and ridicule tear the shirt-band of the said John Herod from about his neck and take the said Mr. Thacker away from under the arrest.’ George also snatched Alcocke’s dagger from its sheath, wounding him in the hand, and with a friend’s help violently expelled the bailiff from the church. When Cantrell demanded that the assailants keep the Queen’s peace ‘in the church and the churchyard’, one of them, John Armefield, ‘took this deponent by the bosom in the church and struck him upon the side of his head with his fist and withal said thou churl thou bearest my Master no goodwill wherefore didst thou charge us to keep the Queen’s peace?’ And Gilbert Thacker ‘did charge his son and heir apparent upon his blessing saying if I chance to die by any sudden death before I have done the feat then I charge thee to reply upon him and never suffer him to live in quiet till thou hast made an end of him and willed his neighbours to bear witness what charge he had given to his son and heir’. (The said son and heir, Godfrey, was at most five years old.)

Someone who bore not very courageous witness was ‘Rafe Watson of Repton schoolmaster aged about 41 years’ (few ages are ever given as precise and certain in these documents, unless they are wrong). He admitted that he had been present in the church when Thacker was arrested, but would add only that the arrest took place after the service ended. It is easy to surmise that Master Watson had no wish to get on the wrong side of his tigerish neighbour, and later events were to demonstrate that he had good reason. He must have been devoutly thankful that the affair happened during the Christmas holidays, so that he had no boys with him. But his restraint demonstrates his social insignificance: it was not for him to challenge the squire of Repton Hall. The parson may have been just as prudent: we do not hear that he spoke up for his churchwarden, let alone the law.

There seems to have been no immediate further action against Thacker, but the affair was far from over. Thacker was furious, and his anger seems to have been turned not towards the sheriff but towards the bailiffs, who were both inhabitants of Repton. (Cokayne may have felt that only men who knew the ground could catch the quarry.) Herod was only Alcocke’s employee, so that it was Alcocke whom Thacker particularly persecuted. The behaviour of others was not overlooked: in order to frighten the parish clerk, Thacker laid a train of gunpowder through the church and put a match to it. The resulting explosion does not seem to have done much damage to the building, but was effectively intimidating. Alcocke was so mistreated that he was eventually driven to bring a suit in the Court of Requests, alleging that ‘through the undeserved malice of one Gilbert Thacker of Repton co. Derby Esq. and by sending his servants and followers (he being a man of very great hability)’ he had not only been despoiled of all his goods and substance

in very violent and riotous manner, as by killing his cattle, cutting his sacks of corn as he travelleth on the highway and letting the corn be spilt, digging up the floodgates and groundworks of his mill and other intolerable injuries but also endangered and grievously beaten and still travelleth in great danger of his life (being sundry times laid wait for to be killed).

John Herod testified that ‘Mr Thacker meeting this deponent at the abbey wall in Repton did maliciously wring his fingers and his staff together so that the veins of his hands did swell therewith at such time as the deponent did serve the said Henry Alcocke’. And Alcocke’s wife, Margery (‘aged about 60 years’), said that one of Thacker’s men, Thomas Littlewood, had physically assaulted her and later tried to do it again: Littlewood

did strike beat and ill entreat this deponent in the house of one Chetyll in Repton and pursued her towards the parlour door and then struck her. That she fell over a chair unto the ground and her hat flew into the parlour. That she was not able to go abroad for a month after.²⁰

The geography