The only place they never burn Guy Fawkes
You had to have been something of a forward thinker to open a school in AD 627 – these were the Dark Ages, after all. So hats off to St Paulinus, who founded St Peter’s School and still had time to open the first York Minster next door. Both landmarks looked very different from what we see today. The school’s own account describes them as “small wooden buildings in the middle of a compact, ramshackle town on the River Ouse.” But from that rude structure grew a school with a proud – and in the case of one pupil, notorious – history.
Now said to be the fourth-oldest school in the world, St Peter’s has only sketchy records of its early days. We do know that the distinguished scholar Alcuin was a teacher and librarian there, and became headmaster in 778. The pupils, all boys of course, studied such subjects as Latin, grammar, rhetoric, time-reckoning, logic, astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, and natural history, many of which still feature on the curriculum today.
Info
Address Clifton, York YO30 6AB, +44 (0)1904 527300, www.stpetersyork.org.uk, enquiries@stpetersyork.org.uk | Public Transport 8-minute walk from Bootham Row car park. Closest bus stop: St Peter’s School | Hours Visit the website for the schedule of public lectures.| Tip Just up the road on Clifton, try Café D’Licious, a vintage tearoom which serves fine homemade cakes.
Over the centuries the school has moved around the city. In 1289. it relocated from the nave of the present Minster to a house near the cathedral’s East End, and then, in 1557, to Horsefair, on the corner of Gillygate and Lord Mayor’s Walk – roughly where the Union Terrace coach park is now. This was the building that Guy Fawkes attended as a pupil in the 1570s. He went on to become Britain’s most notorious vanquished terrorist (see p. 104). While Guy effigies are put on top of bonfires around the country on fireworks night, the school doesn’t follow suit, considering it unseemly to burn an old boy. A portrait of him hangs close to the front entrance.
After a brief relocation to, bizarrely, a Turkish bath on Coney Street, St Peter’s School settled into its present home on Clifton in 1844. Today, as well as educating a new generation of scholars, it hosts a series of free public lectures featuring everyone from comedians to scientists.
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