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This chapter discusses the origins and development of the British public school movement. Bishop William of Wykeham is credited with accidentally founding the public school movement. The shortage of learned men suitable to fill the ranks of the priesthood prompted Wykeham to establish two huge institutions to educate men to be priests. The first to be set up was New College, Oxford, established in 1379 for the study of “Theology, Canon and Civil Law, and The Arts.” The second institution was Winchester College, set up in 1382 to act as a feeder school for New College. While Wykeham envisaged Winchester partly as an agent of social mobility, a place that would provide an education to children from humble backgrounds, the college also admitted students from families that were far above the “poor and needy.” Wykeham created, for the first time, a school where members of England's elite were educated together in large groups, with the aim of preparing a large proportion of them, at least, for a university education, thus signaling the start of Britain's public school movement. By the end of the sixteenth century there were six schools which might qualify as public schools: Winchester, Eton, St Paul's, Shrewsbury, Merchant Taylors', and Westminster.

This chapter reviews the changes that have occurred since the public school movement began with William of Wykeham's foundation for seventy poor scholars at Winchester College. It notes a continuous theme in public school history since the early nineteenth century, that of their ability to cast off the shackles of historical tradition. It argues that the greatest public school advances of the following century were to widen the syllabus beyond the Classics and some maths to include science, modern languages and more contemporary history and literature, to introduce sport as a successful solution to bullying and rioting, and to improve the quality of the relationship between master and pupil. The chapter also considers the centuries-old sense among public schools that they are educating leaders from among the country's elite.

This chapter details relations between Church and state in Richard Fox’s age. The break with Rome, the royal supremacy, and the dissolution of the monasteries irreversibly altered the way in which the early Tudor polity would be conceived. Already in the sixteenth century, accounts of this period were informed by the Reformation. Incidents such as Bishop Fox’s change of plan at Oxford—transforming a primarily monastic ‘Winchester College‘ into the secular Corpus Christi College—became overlaid with foreshadowed significance. Ultimately, Fox’s was the last great age of bishops founding university colleges, since the requisite mix of authority and wealth seldom coalesced so favourably thereafter and certainly could not during the assault on episcopal incomes later in the sixteenth century. Clerical dominance in Church and state made Corpus.

One way in which young refugees might gain the right of entry to Britain was by offering proof of their acceptance by a British school, although they still required a British sponsor who would guarantee to cover the costs. Britain's twelve Quaker boarding schools are said to have offered 100 scholarships to refugees. Winchester College offered five free places to refugees, which were advertised by the Earl Baldwin Fund. Amongst the prestigious private, fee-paying secondary schools in the Manchester region which offered places to refugees in 1938 and 1939 either at no cost or at a reduced rate, were Manchester High School for Girls, Kingsmoor School in Glossop, Culcheth Hall School in Bowdon and Bury Grammar School.