ON February 19, 1572, Elizabeth I issued a charter in favour of one John Lyon, a yeoman in the parish of Harrow on the Hill, Middlesex. By the terms of this splendidly presented document, authorised with the Great Seal of the Realm, Lyon was permitted to endow a school in his native town as a perpetual institution henceforth to be known—slightly cumbersomely—as the ‘Free Grammar School of John Lyon within the town of Harrow-on-the-Hill’. It could hold property up to the annual value of £100 and would be run by a schoolmaster and his deputy, an usher. In addition, Lyon was granted permission to sustain two students at both the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and also to improve the roads between Edgware and the nearby capital, London.
It is to this charter that Harrow School— the buildings of which now encircle the crown of the town’s distinctive hilltop site—ascribes its foundation almost exactly 450 years ago. That ascription is correct, but it overlooks an important complication. Christopher Tyerman in his authoritative A History of Harrow School (2000) points out that the royal charter describes the institution as being ‘re-endowed’; Lyon was not founding a school, but patronising one of unknown, earlier origin. This one certainly existed in the 1550s and attracted some well-connected pupils, including several Gerrards, members of a local gentry family. Indeed, Lyon himself might have been educated there. Whatever the case, his re-endowment of Harrow came at a watershed moment.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
