The Clarendon Report

This is the report of a Royal Commission established by the Earl of Clarendon in 1861 to investigate the revenues, management, studies and instruction of the nine leading public schools. The prime motivation was to reform the management and finance of Eton College, but this was veiled by broadening the Commission's scope. The Report led to an Act of Parliament which laid down new rules for the governance of the schools. As is well known, secondary schooling in nineteenth-century England was, unlike that in France or Germany, provided by private enterprise and charitable endowment. The state typically did not intervene. This began to change only in the 1860s, the Clarendon Commission (1861) being followed by the Taunton Commission of 1864 on the endowed grammar schools. The Clarendon Report contains the verbatim record of interviews between the Commissioners and headmasters, masters and pupils. It also includes questionnaires and answers to them, written evidence, and a mass of supportive documentation.
The numbered questions and answers run into the thousands (9621 for Eton alone), and enable the reader to witness the interchanges between probing Commissioners and sometimes evasive witnesses. The Clarendon Report constitutes the single richest source for the curriculum, finances, management and social life of the nine leading schools: Eton, Winchester, Harrow, Rugby, Charterhouse, Westminster, Shrewsbury, St Pauls and Merchant Taylors. All of these were boarding schools except the last two. The Report is a basic resource for such topics as fagging and bullying, the dominance of Classics and attempts to introduce mathematics and science, and the abuse of charitable endowments by trustees. It is a fascinating socio-historical document that should be valuable to scholars of the history of education and 19th-century studies. To complete the picture, there are "Histories of the Nine Clarendon Schools" (1) and (2) are published by Thoemmes Continuum.