British Army
The British Army is the principal land warfare force of the United Kingdom, a part of British Armed Forces. As of 2018, the British Army comprises just over 81,500 trained regular personnel and just over 27,000 trained reserve personnel; the modern British Army traces back to 1707, with an antecedent in the English Army, created during the Restoration in 1660. The term British Army was adopted in 1707 after the Acts of Union between Scotland. Although all members of the British Army are expected to swear allegiance to Elizabeth II as their commander-in-chief, the Bill of Rights of 1689 requires parliamentary consent for the Crown to maintain a peacetime standing army. Therefore, Parliament approves the army by passing an Armed Forces Act at least once every five years; the army is commanded by the Chief of the General Staff. The British Army has seen action in major wars between the world's great powers, including the Seven Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War and the First and Second World Wars.
Britain's victories in these decisive wars allowed it to influence world events and establish itself as one of the world's leading military and economic powers. Since the end of the Cold War, the British Army has been deployed to a number of conflict zones as part of an expeditionary force, a coalition force or part of a United Nations peacekeeping operation; until the English Civil War, England never had a standing army with professional officers and careerist corporals and sergeants. It relied on militia organized by local officials, or private forces mobilized by the nobility, or on hired mercenaries from Europe. From the Middle Ages until the English Civil War, when a foreign expeditionary force was needed, such as the one that Henry V of England took to France and that fought at the Battle of Agincourt, the army, a professional one, was raised for the duration of the expedition. During the English Civil War, the members of the Long Parliament realised that the use of county militia organised into regional associations commanded by local members of parliament, while more than able to hold their own in the regions which Parliamentarians controlled, were unlikely to win the war.
So Parliament initiated two actions. The Self-denying Ordinance, with the notable exception of Oliver Cromwell, forbade members of parliament from serving as officers in the Parliamentary armies; this created a distinction between the civilians in Parliament, who tended to be Presbyterian and conciliatory to the Royalists in nature, a corps of professional officers, who tended to Independent politics, to whom they reported. The second action was legislation for the creation of a Parliamentary-funded army, commanded by Lord General Thomas Fairfax, which became known as the New Model Army. While this proved to be a war winning formula, the New Model Army, being organized and politically active, went on to dominate the politics of the Interregnum and by 1660 was disliked; the New Model Army was paid off and disbanded at the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. For many decades the excesses of the New Model Army under the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell was a horror story and the Whig element recoiled from allowing a standing army.
The militia acts of 1661 and 1662 prevented local authorities from calling up militia and oppressing their own local opponents. Calling up the militia was possible only if the king and local elites agreed to do so. Charles II and his Cavalier supporters favoured a new army under royal control; the first English Army regiments, including elements of the disbanded New Model Army, were formed between November 1660 and January 1661 and became a standing military force for Britain. The Royal Scots and Irish Armies were financed by the parliaments of Ireland. Parliamentary control was established by the Bill of Rights 1689 and Claim of Right Act 1689, although the monarch continued to influence aspects of army administration until at least the end of the nineteenth century. After the Restoration Charles II pulled together four regiments of infantry and cavalry, calling them his guards, at a cost of £122,000 from his general budget; this became the foundation of the permanent English Army. By 1685 it had grown to 7,500 soldiers in marching regiments, 1,400 men permanently stationed in garrisons.
A rebellion in 1685 allowed James II to raise the forces to 20,000 men. There were 37,000 in 1678. After William and Mary's accession to the throne England involved itself in the War of the Grand Alliance to prevent a French invasion restoring James II. In 1689, William III expanded the army to 74,000, to 94,000 in 1694. Parliament was nervous, reduced the cadre to 7000 in 1697. Scotland and Ireland had theoretically separate military establishments, but they were unofficially merged with the English force. By the time of the 1707 Acts of Union, many regiments of the English and Scottish armies were combined under one operational command and stationed in the Netherlands for the War of the Spanish Succession. Although all the regiments were now part of the new British military establishment, they remained under the old operational-command structure and retained much of the institutional ethos and traditions of the standing armies created shortly after the restoration of the monarchy 47 years earlier.
The order of seniority of the most-senior British Army line regiments is based on that of the English army
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph referred to as The Telegraph, is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally. It was founded by Arthur B. Sleigh in 1855 as Daily Telegraph & Courier; the Telegraph is regarded as a national "newspaper of record" and it maintains an international reputation for quality, having been described by the BBC as "one of the world's great titles". The paper's motto, "Was, is, will be", appears in the editorial pages and has featured in every edition of the newspaper since 19 April 1858; the paper had a circulation of 363,183 in December 2018, having declined following industry trends from 1.4 million in 1980. Its sister paper, The Sunday Telegraph, which started in 1961, had a circulation of 281,025 as of December 2018; the Daily Telegraph has the largest circulation for a broadsheet newspaper in the UK and the sixth largest circulation of any UK newspaper as of 2016. The two sister newspapers are run separately, with different editorial staff, but there is cross-usage of stories.
Articles published in either may be published on the Telegraph Media Group's www.telegraph.co.uk website, under the title of The Telegraph. Editorially, the paper is considered conservative; the Telegraph has been the first newspaper to report on a number of notable news scoops, including the 2009 MP expenses scandal, which led to a number of high-profile political resignations and for which it was named 2009 British Newspaper of the Year, its 2016 undercover investigation on the England football manager Sam Allardyce. However, including the paper's former chief political commentator Peter Oborne, accuse it of being unduly influenced by advertisers HSBC; the Daily Telegraph and Courier was founded by Colonel Arthur B. Sleigh in June 1855 to air a personal grievance against the future commander-in-chief of the British Army, Prince George, Duke of Cambridge. Joseph Moses Levy, the owner of The Sunday Times, agreed to print the newspaper, the first edition was published on 29 June 1855; the paper was four pages long.
The first edition stressed the quality and independence of its articles and journalists: We shall be guided by a high tone of independent action. However, the paper was not a success, Sleigh was unable to pay Levy the printing bill. Levy took over the newspaper, his aim being to produce a cheaper newspaper than his main competitors in London, the Daily News and The Morning Post, to expand the size of the overall market. Levy appointed his son, Edward Levy-Lawson, Lord Burnham, Thornton Leigh Hunt to edit the newspaper. Lord Burnham relaunched the paper as The Daily Telegraph, with the slogan "the largest and cheapest newspaper in the world". Hunt laid out the newspaper's principles in a memorandum sent to Levy: "We should report all striking events in science, so told that the intelligent public can understand what has happened and can see its bearing on our daily life and our future; the same principle should apply to all other events—to fashion, to new inventions, to new methods of conducting business".
In 1876, Jules Verne published his novel Michael Strogoff, whose plot takes place during a fictional uprising and war in Siberia. Verne included among the book's characters a war correspondent of The Daily Telegraph, named Harry Blount—who is depicted as an exceptionally dedicated and brave journalist, taking great personal risks to follow the ongoing war and bring accurate news of it to The Telegraph's readership, ahead of competing papers. In 1908, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany gave a controversial interview to The Daily Telegraph that damaged Anglo-German relations and added to international tensions in the build-up to World War I. In 1928 the son of Baron Burnham, Harry Lawson Webster Levy-Lawson, 2nd Baron Burnham, sold the paper to William Berry, 1st Viscount Camrose, in partnership with his brother Gomer Berry, 1st Viscount Kemsley and Edward Iliffe, 1st Baron Iliffe. In 1937, the newspaper absorbed The Morning Post, which traditionally espoused a conservative position and sold predominantly amongst the retired officer class.
William Ewart Berry, 1st Viscount Camrose, bought The Morning Post with the intention of publishing it alongside The Daily Telegraph, but poor sales of the former led him to merge the two. For some years the paper was retitled The Daily Telegraph and Morning Post before it reverted to just The Daily Telegraph. In the late 1930s Victor Gordon Lennox, The Telegraph's diplomatic editor, published an anti-appeasement private newspaper The Whitehall Letter that received much of its information from leaks from Sir Robert Vansittart, the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office, Rex Leeper, the Foreign Office's Press Secretary; as a result, Gordon Lennox was monitored by MI5. In 1939, The Telegraph published Clare Hollingworth's scoop. In November 1940, with Fleet Street subjected to daily bombing raids by the Luftwaffe, The Telegraph started printing in Manchester at Kemsley House, run by Camrose's brother Kemsley. Manchester quite printed the entire run of The Telegraph when its Fleet Street offices were under threat.
The name Kemsley House was changed to Thomson House in 1959. In 1986 printing of Northern editions of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph moved to Trafford Park and in 2008 to Newsprinters at Knowsley, Liverpool. During the Second World War, The Daily Telegraph covertly helped in the recruitment of code-breakers for Bletchley Park; the ability to solve The Telegraph's crossword in under 12 minutes was considered to be a recruitment test. The newspaper was asked to organise a crossword competition, after wh
Blue (university sport)
A blue is an award earned by athletes at a university and some schools for competition at the highest level. The awarding of blues began at Cambridge universities in England, it is awarded at British, some Canadian and New Zealand universities. The first sporting contest between the universities of Oxford and Cambridge was held on 4 June 1827, when a two-day cricket match at Lord's, organized by Charles Wordsworth, nephew of the poet William, resulted in a draw. There is no record of any university "colours" being worn during the game. At the first Boat Race in 1829, the Oxford crew was dominated by students of Christ Church, whose college colours were dark blue, they wore white shirts with dark blue stripes, while Cambridge wore white with a pink or scarlet sash. At the second race, in 1836, a light blue ribbon was attached to the front of the Cambridge boat, as it was the colour of Gonville & Caius College; these colours — light blue for Cambridge, dark blue for Oxford — became the official colours of the two boat clubs, through the rivalry of the Boat Race, the colours became inextricably linked with the universities and contests between the two.
Athletes at the University of Cambridge may be awarded a full blue, half blue, first team colours or second team colours for competing at the highest level of university sport, which must include being in a varsity match or race against the University of Oxford. A full blue is the highest honour that may be bestowed on a Cambridge athlete, is a much-coveted and prestigious prize. In general, the full blue standard is that of being successful at a national level of student competition, the half blue standard is that of being successful at county or regional level. Once light blue had been chosen as the colour of Cambridge's Boat Club, the other university sport clubs followed suit, though out of courtesy would request permission from the Boat Club before awarding such a "blue". In the 1860s the three senior sports — rowing and athletics — were awarding blues, the presidents of each formed an informal "Blues Committee" to oversee such awards. By 1880 a number of smaller clubs involved in varsity matches had requested the right to award "half blues".
The criteria for awarding blues are different for women. Awards are made at the discretion of women's Blues Committees; the Men's Blues Committee is formed from one representative of each of the full blue sports, the Women's from one representative of each of the full blue and half blue sports. Each committee meets to discuss issues relating to Cambridge sport. In some sports with full blue status, the varsity match; the awarding of a full blue requires a person to fulfill a number of requirements in the same academic year in sports with discretionary full blue status. If, for whatever reason, an exceptional athlete is of or above full blue standard but does not fulfill all the requirements for the'automatic' award of a full blue in any given year, the committee has the authority to grant an extraordinary full blue to that person subject to scrutiny of the particular case; the individual's case must be presented to the Blues Committee in person and must be backed up by substantial evidence and references.
The award is unlikely to be made unless the person is of world-class or at least international standard. Each sport has specific criteria for each award; the winner of a blue or half blue is entitled to wear a blues blazer, one of the most recognisable and distinctive garments associated with Cambridge University. Full blue blazers are coloured Cambridge Blue. Half blue blazers have a number of different designs, depending on the wearer's sport. There is a variety of other blue and half blue paraphernalia, including scarves, pullovers, bow ties and squares; such items are worn with pride. As of May 2011, the colour recognised by the University as Cambridge Blue has a slight green tint. In 2008 in Cambridge an alumnus launched Oxbridge Blues Jewellery for women's blues and half blues at the two Universities; these are the only blues item to have been licensed by the University of Cambridge. Men holding blues, half blues or second team colours in a Full blue sport are eligible to join the Hawks' Club.
Women holding any of these awards are eligible to join The Ospreys, founded in 1985. At the University of Oxford, the committees for awarding blues and half blues work on much the same principles as the Cambridge committees; the principal difference between the two men's committees is that, at Oxford, all captains, regardless of their status as full, discretionary, or half blue must attend meetings of the Committee. Until the voting was broken up according to blues status with full blue captains being allowed to vote on all matters while all the other captains could only vote on matters directly relating to half blue sports. In Michaelmas Term 2006, the committee allowed discretionary full blue captains the right to vote on matters directly relating to discretionary full blue sports; this has ended many years of inequality for discretionary full blue status captains and was welcomed by the committee. The committees are administered by an elected president and treasurer who serve one year. Unlike at Cambridge, where the president of Cambridge University Boat Club holds the position, at Oxford, any captain can be elected president, regardless of sport or status.
The role of the president is t
Surrey County Cricket Club
Surrey County Cricket Club is one of eighteen first-class county clubs within the domestic cricket structure of England and Wales. It represents the historic county of Surrey and South London; the club's limited overs team is called "Surrey". The club was founded in 1845 but teams representing the county have played top-class cricket since the early 18th century and the club has always held first-class status. Surrey have competed in the County Championship since the official start of the competition in 1890 and have played in every top-level domestic cricket competition in England. Home of the club since its foundation in 1845 has been The Oval, in the Kennington area of Lambeth in South London; the club has an'out ground' at Woodbridge Road, where some home games are played each season. Surrey have had three notable periods of great success in their history; the club was unofficially proclaimed as "Champion County" seven times during the 1850s. In 1955, Surrey won 23 of its 28 county matches, a record that still stands and can no longer be bettered as counties have played fewer than 23 matches each season since 1993.
To date, Surrey has won the official County Championship 19 times outright, more than any other county with the exception of Yorkshire, with the most recent win being 2018. The club's traditional badge is the Prince of Wales's feathers. In 1915, Lord Rosebery obtained permission to use this symbol from the Prince of Wales, hereditary owner of the land on which The Oval stands. Champion County – 1864, 1887, 1888, it is believed that cricket was invented by children living on the Weald in Saxon or Norman times and that the game soon reached neighbouring Surrey. Although not the game's birthplace, Surrey does claim the honour of being the location of its first definite mention in print. Evidence from a January 1597 court case confirms that creckett was played by schoolboys on a certain plot of land in Guildford around 1550. In 1611, King James I gave to his eldest son, Prince of Wales, the manors of Kennington and Vauxhall, where the home ground of Surrey – The Oval – is today. To this day, the Prince of Wales's feathers feature on the cricket club's badge.
Cricket became well established in Surrey during the 17th century and the earliest village matches took place before the English Civil War. It is believed that the earliest county teams were formed in the aftermath of the Restoration in 1660; the earliest known first-class match in Surrey was Croydon v London at Croydon on 1 July 1707. In 1709, the earliest known inter-county match took place between Kent and Surrey at Dartford Brent with £50 at stake. Surrey would continue to play cricket against other representative teams from that time onwards, its greatest players during the underarm era were the famous bowler Lumpy Stevens and the wicket-keeper/batsman William Yalden, who both belonged to the Chertsey club. Surrey CCC was founded on the evening of 22 August 1845 at the Horns Tavern in Kennington, South London, where around 100 representatives of various cricket clubs in Surrey agreed a motion put by William Denison "that a Surrey club be now formed". A further meeting at the Tavern on 18 October 1845 formally constituted the club, appointed officers and began enrolling members.
A lease on Kennington Oval, a former market garden, was obtained by a Mr Houghton from the Duchy of Cornwall. Mr Houghton was of the old Montpelier Cricket Club, 70 members of which formed the nucleus of the new Surrey County club; the Honourable Fred Ponsonby the Earl of Bessborough was the first vice-president. Surrey's inaugural first-class match was against the MCC at The Oval at the end of May, 1846; the club's first inter-county match, against Kent, was held at The Oval the following month and Surrey emerged victorious by ten wickets. However, the club did not do well that year, despite the extra public attractions at The Oval of a Walking Match and a Poultry Show. By the start of the 1847 season the club was £70 in debt and there was a motion to close. Ponsonby proposed, his motion was duly passed, the club survived. The threat of construction on The Oval was successfully dispelled in 1848 thanks to the intervention of Prince Albert. In 1854, Surrey secured a new 21-year lease on their home ground and Surrey went on to enjoy an exceptionally successful decade.
Being “Champion County” seven times from 1850 to 1859 and again in 1864. In 1857, all nine matches played by the county resulted in victory; this was the time of great players like William Caffyn, Julius Caesar, HH Stephenson and Tom Lockyer, a fine captain in Frederick Miller. An i
The London Gazette
The London Gazette is one of the official journals of record of the British government, the most important among such official journals in the United Kingdom, in which certain statutory notices are required to be published. The London Gazette claims to be the oldest surviving English newspaper and the oldest continuously published newspaper in the UK, having been first published on 7 November 1665 as The Oxford Gazette; this claim is made by the Stamford Mercury and Berrow's Worcester Journal, because The Gazette is not a conventional newspaper offering general news coverage. It does not have a large circulation. Other official newspapers of the UK government are The Edinburgh Gazette and The Belfast Gazette, apart from reproducing certain materials of nationwide interest published in The London Gazette contain publications specific to Scotland and Northern Ireland, respectively. In turn, The London Gazette carries not only notices of UK-wide interest, but those relating to entities or people in England and Wales.
However, certain notices that are only of specific interest to Scotland or Northern Ireland are required to be published in The London Gazette. The London and Belfast Gazettes are published by TSO on behalf of Her Majesty's Stationery Office, they are subject to Crown copyright. The London Gazette is published each weekday, except for bank holidays. Notices for the following, among others, are published: Granting of royal assent to bills of the Parliament of the United Kingdom or of the Scottish Parliament The issuance of writs of election when a vacancy occurs in the House of Commons Appointments to certain public offices Commissions in the Armed Forces and subsequent promotion of officers Corporate and personal insolvency Granting of awards of honours and military medals Changes of names or of coats of arms Royal Proclamations and other DeclarationsHer Majesty's Stationery Office has digitised all issues of the Gazette, these are available online; the official Gazettes are published by The Stationery Office.
The content, apart from insolvency notices, is available in a number of machine-readable formats, including XML and XML/RDFa via Atom feed. The London Gazette was first published as The Oxford Gazette on 7 November 1665. Charles II and the Royal Court had moved to Oxford to escape the Great Plague of London, courtiers were unwilling to touch London newspapers for fear of contagion; the Gazette was "Published by Authority" by Henry Muddiman, its first publication is noted by Samuel Pepys in his diary. The King returned to London as the plague dissipated, the Gazette moved too, with the first issue of The London Gazette being published on 5 February 1666; the Gazette was not a newspaper in the modern sense: it was sent by post to subscribers, not printed for sale to the general public. Her Majesty's Stationery Office took over the publication of the Gazette in 1889. Publication of the Gazette was transferred to the private sector, under government supervision, in the 1990s, when HMSO was sold and renamed The Stationery Office.
In time of war, despatches from the various conflicts are published in The London Gazette. People referred to are said to have been mentioned in despatches; when members of the armed forces are promoted, these promotions are published here, the person is said to have been "gazetted". Being "gazetted" sometimes meant having official notice of one's bankruptcy published, as in the classic ten-line poem comparing the stolid tenant farmer of 1722 to the lavishly spending faux-genteel farmers of 1822: Notices of engagement and marriage were formerly published in the Gazette. Gazettes, modelled on The London Gazette, were issued for most British colonial possessions. History of British newspapers Iris Oifigiúil The Dublin Gazette – in Ireland London Gazette index Official Journal of the European Union List of government gazettes London and Belfast Gazettes official site Great Fire of London 1666 – Facsimile and transcript of London Gazette report
Lord's
Lord's Cricket Ground known as Lord's, is a cricket venue in St John's Wood, London. Named after its founder, Thomas Lord, it is owned by Marylebone Cricket Club and is the home of Middlesex County Cricket Club, the England and Wales Cricket Board, the European Cricket Council and, until August 2005, the International Cricket Council. Lord's is referred to as the Home of Cricket and is home to the world's oldest sporting museum. Lord's today is not on its original site, being the third of three grounds that Lord established between 1787 and 1814, his first ground, now referred to as Lord's Old Ground, was. His second ground, Lord's Middle Ground, was used from 1811 to 1813 before being abandoned to make way for the construction through its outfield of the Regent's Canal; the present Lord's ground is about 250 yards north-west of the site of the Middle Ground. The ground can hold 28,000 spectators. Proposals are being developed to increase amenity; as of December 2013, it was proposed to redevelop the ground at a cost of around £200 million over a 14-year period.
The current ground celebrated its two hundredth anniversary in 2014. To mark the occasion, on 5 July an MCC XI captained by Sachin Tendulkar played a Rest of the World XI led by Shane Warne in a 50 overs match. Acting on behalf of the White Conduit Club and backed against any losses by George Finch, 9th Earl of Winchilsea and Colonel Charles Lennox, Thomas Lord opened his first ground in May 1787 on the site where Dorset Square now stands; the White Conduit moved there from Islington soon afterwards and reconstituted themselves as Marylebone Cricket Club. In 1811, feeling obliged to relocate because of a rise in rent, Lord removed his turf and relaid it at his second ground; this was short-lived. The "Middle Ground" was on the estate of the Eyre family; the new ground, on the present site, was opened in the 1814 season. The earliest known match was MCC v Hertfordshire on 22 June 1814; this is not rated a first-class match. MCC won by 27 runs; the next match known to have been played at Lord's, from 13 to 15 July 1814, was the earliest first-class one, between MCC and the neighbouring St John's Wood club, which had several guest players for the occasion, including five leading professionals.
MCC won by 4 wickets. The annual Eton v Harrow match was first played on the Old Ground in 1805. There is no record of the fixture being played again until 29 July 1818, when it was held at the present Lord's ground for the first time. From 1822, the fixture has been an annual event at Lord's; as of January 2015, the stands at Lord's are: Pavilion Warner Stand Grandstand Compton Stand Media Centre Edrich Stand Mound Stand Tavern Stand Allen StandMany of the stands were rebuilt in the late 20th century. In 1987 the new Mound Stand, designed by Michael Hopkins and Partners, was opened, followed by the Grandstand in 1996. Most notably, the Media Centre was added in 1998-9; the ground can hold up to 28,000 spectators. The two ends of the pitch are the Pavilion End, where the main members' pavilion is located, the Nursery End, dominated by the Media Centre; the main survivor from the Victorian era is the Pavilion, with its famous Long Room. This historic landmark— a Grade II*-listed building— underwent an £8 million refurbishment programme in 2004–05.
The pavilion is for members of MCC, who may use its amenities, which include seats for viewing the cricket, the Long Room and its Bar, the Bowlers Bar, a members' shop. At Middlesex matches the Pavilion is open to members of the Middlesex County Club; the Pavilion contains the dressing rooms where players change, each of which has a small balcony for players to watch the play. In each of the two main dressing rooms are honours boards which commemorate all the centuries scored in Test matches or One Day Internationals at Lord's, all instances of a bowler taking five wickets in a Test or ODI innings and all occurrences of a bowler taking ten wickets in a Test match; the only cricketer to hit a ball over the pavilion was Albert Trott, off Monty Noble on 31 July 1899. Another visible feature of the ground is Old Father Time, a weather vane in the shape of Father Time adorning a stand on the south-east side of the field; the Media Centre was commissioned in time for the 1999 Cricket World Cup, was the first all-aluminium, semi-monocoque building in the world.
It was fitted out in two boatyards, using boat-building technology. The centre stands 15 metres above the ground and its sole support comes from the structure around its two lift shafts— it is about the same height as the Pavilion directly opposite it on the other side of the ground; the lower tier of the centre provides accommodation for over 100 journalists, the top tier has radio and television commentary boxes. The centre's only opening window is in the broadcasting box used by BBC Test Match Special; the building was awarded the RIBA Stirling Prize for architecture in 1999. The Lord's Taverners, a charitable group comprising cricketers and cricket-lovers, take their name from the old Tavern pub at Lord's, where the organisation's founders used to congregate; the pub no longer exists, the Tavern Stand now stands on its former site. However, a new pub of the same name is open in the grounds, as well as the Members Bar, in the Pavilion. One
Winchester College
Winchester College is an independent boarding school for boys in the British public school tradition, situated in Winchester, Hampshire. It has existed in its present location for over 600 years, it is the oldest of the original seven English public schools defined by the Clarendon Commission and regulated by the Public Schools Act 1868. According to its statutes, the school is called in Latin Collegium Sanctae Mariae prope Wintoniam, or Collegium Beatae Mariae Wintoniensis prope Winton, which translates as St Mary's College, near Winchester, or The College of the Blessed Mary of Winchester, near Winchester, it is sometimes referred to by pupils, former pupils and others as "Win: Coll:", is more known as just "Winchester". Winchester College was founded in 1382 by William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester and Chancellor to both Edward III and Richard II, the first 70 poor scholars entered the school in 1394. In the early 15th century the specific requirements was that that scholars come from families where the income was less than five marks sterling per annum.
It was founded in conjunction with New College, for which it was designed to act as a feeder: the buildings of both colleges were designed by master mason William Wynford. This double foundation was the model for Eton College and King's College, some 50 years and for Westminster School, Christ Church and Trinity College, Cambridge, in Tudor times. In addition to the 70 scholars and 16 "Quiristers", the statutes provided for ten "noble Commoners"; these Commoners were paying guests of the Headmaster or Second Master in his official apartments in College. Other paying pupils, either guests of one of the Masters in his private house or living in lodgings in town, grew in numbers till the late 18th century, when they were all required to live in "Old Commoners" and town boarding was banned. In the 19th century this was replaced by "New Commoners", the numbers fluctuated between 70 and 130: the new building was compared unfavourably to a workhouse, as it was built over an underground stream, epidemics of typhus and malaria were common.
In the late 1850s four boarding houses were planned, to be headed by housemasters: the plan, since dropped, was to increase the number of scholars to 100 so that there would be "College", "Commoners" and "Houses" consisting of 100 pupils each. In the 1860s "New Commoners" was closed and converted to classrooms, its members were divided among four further boarding houses. At the same time two more houses were added to the "Houses" category. There are therefore now ten houses in addition to College, which continues to occupy the original 14th-century buildings, the total number of pupils is 700. From the late 1970s there has been a continual process of extension to and upgrading of College Chambers; the Scholars live in the original buildings, known as College. College is not referred to as a house: hence the terms'housemaster of College' and'College house' are not used; the housemaster of College is now known as the'Master in College', though these duties belonged to the Second Master. Within the school,'College' refers only to the body of scholars.
Every pupil at Winchester, apart from the Scholars, lives in a boarding house, chosen or allocated when applying to Winchester. It is here that he studies and sleeps; each house is presided over by a number of house tutors. Houses compete in school competitions in sporting competitions; each house has an official name based on the family name of the first housemaster, used as a postal address. Each house has an informal name, more used in speech based on the name or nickname of an early housemaster; each house has a letter assigned to it, in the order of their founding, to act as an abbreviation on laundry tags. A member of a house is described by the informal name of the house with "-ite" suffixed, as "a Furleyite", "a Toyeite", "a Cookite" and so on; the houses have been ordered by their year of founding. College does not have an informal name, although the abbreviation Coll is sometimes used on written work, it has a letter assigned to it, X, but it is considered bad form to use this except as a laundry mark or in lists of sporting fixtures.
Each house had a set of house colours, which adorned the ribbon worn around boys' "strats". The wearing of strats was abolished for Commoners in around 1984 – Collegemen had ceased to wear them years earlier, they can however still be seen being sported on Winchester Day. House colours are now used on socks and "pussies", scarves awarded for exceptional contribution to the house or society. Winchester has its own entrance examination, does not use Common Entrance like other major public schools; those wishing to enter a Commoner House make their arrangements with the relevant housemaster some two years before sitting the exam sitting
