Ancient learning

Although the exact origins of St Peter's School are shrouded in mystery, there is no doubt that the school is older than the House of Commons, older than Oxford and Cambridge universities, older than the House of Lords and older than the nation of England itself.

According to the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History, the first three schools in England were Canterbury in AD 598 and London and Rochester in AD 604. There is little dispute, according to Bede, that the School of St Peter in York filled the fourth position.

The favoured date for the foundation of St Peter's is AD 627, even though one commentator contentiously describes this as "the stuff of legend". Certainly 627 was the year when the first wooden church of St Peter was built on the site of the present York Minster and the city became the headquarters of the Roman Mission in Northumbria.

The driving force behind the establishment of the new church was St Paulinus, a great Christian missionary from Rome and the very first Archbishop of York. There is strong evidence of a song school next to the wooden church during St Paulinus's reign (AD 627-633) and it is generally accepted that its headmaster was James the Deacon, a leading member of the Roman Mission. Bede called James a man of "great zeal and renown".

It is most likely that a grammar school co-existed with the song school, as they did in Canterbury, Rochester and London.

The new Christian dawn of St Paulinus and James the Deacon in York came to an abrupt end only six years after St Paulinus's arrival in the city. In AD 633 the heathen King Cadwalla of Wales defeated and killed Edwin, the Christian King of Northumbria, and the song school closed.

But the foundations of the school, both literally and metaphorically, were strong enough to survive this heathen interregnum and within 15 years it was nurturing the intellectual genius of Alcuin, one of the very greatest men of his age.

Alcuin was both a pupil and a master at St Peter's. Even when he left, he remained deeply interested in the welfare of the school. In one letter, written from Aix-la-Chapelle in France, he advised pupils to "avoid fine clothes, and to tread the holy threshold of the church instead of gadding about the streets of a dirty town". Good advice still!

As a pupil, Alcuin was taught grammar, rhetoric and song by two Archbishops of York, Egbert and Albert. Albert is the hero of Alcuin's celebrated poem about the Archbishops of York and together the two men did much to promote and enhance the reputation of St Peter's in the early days. Specifically they created a library which attracted scholars from all over Europe to York. Today, appropriately, the school library is named after Alcuin.

In another letter, addressed to the new Archbishop of York Eanbald II, a former pupil of the school, Alcuin urged Eanbald to "prepare the scholars after the manner of the Gauls. Those who read the books, those who serve chanting, and those who are assigned to writing, and for each class their own master".

This proved to be a template for the development of education at St Peter's and in the city of York itself.

Alcuin's own report on his schooldays at St Peter's, in his Letter to York (AD 793), makes fascinating reading: "You cherished the tender years of my infancy with a mother's affection, and with holy patience put up with the frolics of my youth; you brought me to full age with the floggings of fatherly discipline and you made me strong by the learning of sacred rules".

St Peter's owes a significant debt to Alcuin, because he established a centre of scholastic excellence in York which set the highest of standards for succeeding generations.

The city of York underwent a seismic change with the invasion of the Vikings in AD 867, but St Peter's was now sufficiently well established to survive and thrive under the new regime. Little is known specifically about the school until the Norman Conquest, but it clearly progressed during a time of relative stability and prosperity in the north of England.

The modernising tendencies of William the Conqueror and his ministers proved to be most beneficial for the school. William's chaplain, Thomas of Bayeux, remodelled the constitution of the Minster and established a Chancellor, one of whose duties was to act as a schoolmaster for St Peter's. This helped to place the school on a sound administrative footing and equip it for the testing times ahead.

In 1289 the nave of York Minster was widened and the school was forced to move to a new home at the south side of the Minster. Boarders, meanwhile, were housed at nearby St Mary's Abbey - and continued to be so until the abbey was destroyed during the Reformation in the 16th century.

The boys themselves seemed happy enough. In a report dated 1411, it was stated that "an occupation of the boys at St Peter's was the visiting of taverns", which clearly upset the Dean and Chapter. The boys loved playing football, too, and one, Christopher Dobson, was put in the stocks for practising his skills too close to the Minister.

Following the destruction of St Mary's Abbey, the Dean and Chapter of York converted an old hospital outside Bootham Bar, known as Bootham or Horsefair Hospital, into a new school "called the School of the Cathedral Church of St Peter of York". Its first headmaster was appointed in 1575 - and St Peter's entered a new era.

Although the new school site was badly damaged by the siege of York in 1644, and had to move to Bedern, it continued to flourish and to provide a first-class education for the city's sons.

In 1833, the school moved again - this time to new buildings in the Minster Yard on the site of the Old Deanery. This was short-lived. Just 11 years later St Peter's moved to its present site in Clifton, where it now co-exists with its sister schools, St Olave's and Clifton Prep on one of the prettiest school campuses in the country.

Since 1844 St Peter's has blossomed into one of the finest independent schools in the country. Its famous old boys include Guy Fawkes, Oscar winning musician John Barry and Yorkshire cricket captains Norman Yardley and Brian Sellers, while the most renowned headmaster since Alcuin was probably John Dronfield, who presided over the school between 1937 and 1967 and ushered it through the Second World War into the difficult modern world.