One last thing I've just remembered. Inside a covered gateway in Lewes is this portrait I've always admired. I took this snapshot because I thought it might interest one of my regular readers - Lori Scoog. It's of Thomas Payne, who lived in Lewes for some years. He eventually went to America, and I believe helped to draw up your constitution.
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It's a trompe l'oeil!
Like many left wing troublemakers, he also lived in Thetford for some time
I think it's the right hand resting negligently OVER the windowsill that does it Rog. It's in rather a dark passageway so I used flash and it came up better than I'd expected. Was he born in Thetford, do you know?
The radical propagandist and voice of the common man, Thomas Paine/Payne, was born in Thetford in Norfolk on January 29, 1737. His father, Joseph, was a poor Quaker corset maker (Quakers NEED corsets)who tried to provide his son with an education at the local grammar school but eventually was forced to apprentice him to his trade. Paine was unable to accept this occupation. After a short time at sea, Paine returned to his trade in Kent, but then served as an exciseman in Lincolnshire, followed by a stint as a school teacher in London, before he again settled down in 1768 as an excise officer in Lewes in East Sussex. For the next six years he combined his duties as excise officer with managing a small shop. His first wife had died in 1760, within a year of their marriage. In 1771 he married again. Both marriages were childless and neither brought Paine much in the way of happiness. He was legally separated from his second wife in 1774, just as he was about to embark for the American colonies.
My daughter went to that Grammar School. I had no idea it was that old.
Thetford Grammar School traces its origins to AD 631 when it is likely that Sigbert, King of the East Angles, provided a school for his court in Thetford. Less conjecturally, a document of 1114 under the seal of Herbert Losinga, by then Bishop of Norwich, records that:
"I have restored to Bund, the Dean, his schools at Thetford as completely and advantageously as he ever held them".
It is likely that those schools were run, possibly under the aegis of Losinga himself when he was still Bishop of Thetford, within the precincts of what was, at the end of the eleventh century, the East Anglian Cathedral. This cathedral occupied what is now the site of the Old School.
"The teacher should studiously govern his pupils by example, rather than teach by manner of words."
- Herbert Losinga
The school’s Roll of Headmasters, unbroken since Bund’s time, testifies to the school’s medieval history, with the Duke of Norfolk, victor at Flodden Field, among its pupils. Sir Richard Fulmerston was responsible for ensuring the school survived the Reformation. The refoundation was confirmed in 1610 with the ratification of Fulmerston’s will by Act of Parliament.
The school continued in its one-room Elizabethan building, the accommodation more or less unaltered for three hundred years. Its pupils included Pepys' contemporary Roger North – lawyer, historian and musician – and the radical polemicist Tom Paine.
"The world is my country; to do good is my religion".
- Tom Paine
The 1880s saw major developments in the fabric and philosophy of the school under Benjamin Reed and Reed’s school was known as the best in Norfolk.
"In all this work the Assistant Masters have taken great interest and worked hard to make the school life a joyous as well as prosperous one".
- Ben Reed
In 1888, it was joined by the Victorian Girls’ Grammar School, built across the road, in part with money left by Sir Joseph Williamson, Secretary of State to Charles II and a former Thetford MP. The two schools continued to grow and thrive through the twentieth century, adopting Voluntary Controlled Status in 1944 and forming a single co-educational establishment in 1975.
The school returned to independence in 1981, rebuilding itself as a small but academically ambitious school which at the same time pays attention to the "wider curriculum" – a contemporary orthodoxy which has clearly, however, always been part of its long tradition. This ethos is reflected in the continued development of the school into the C.21st. The Losinga building was redeveloped in 1998 to accommodate the growing technological needs of the modern age. But the school was reminded of its medieval roots during the construction of the Cloisters Sixth Form Centre in 2007 when extensive archaelogical work confirmed the last resting place of members of the Dominican Friary.
- from the Thetford grammar School's website
There's history in books where the history hides between the lines of polemic and propaganda, there's pompous and prideful history and there's the peoples' history that made us who and what we are. Thanks be to God for it.
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