Saluting Edmund Coote
Saluting Edmund Coote
Saluting Edmund Coote
My column for the East Anglian Daily Times:
When I was appointed as headteacher at King Edward VI School in Bury St Edmunds, some eleven years ago, my Uncle Joe phoned me breathlessly from his home in Prestatyn, North Wales. He was brimming with pride. ‘Geoffrey,” he said – “you’ve got one of those King Edward schools”.
‘One of those King Edward schools’: it was a funny way of putting it. He made it sound as if I had been appointed as branch manager within the Laura Ashley chain.
Which, in a way, I had.
After all, there are many King Edward VI Schools, all established by the earnest son of Henry VIII. Edward was a short-lived adolescent king who tightened the grip of the Protestant faith after his father’s severing of links with Rome.
And, notably, he established a chain of grammar schools across England. Today some remain selective, some independent, some (like ours) proudly comprehensive, some for girls and some for boys.
So, yes, in a funny way my appointment was like becoming branch manager in a retail chain.
The night after my interview I work up thinking of the school’s long tradition and the sense of responsibility that went with it. On the honours board in the assembly hall there was, and still is, a long list of names – all male – going back to the foundation of the school in 1550 and its first headmaster, John King.
Then, last year, when I was doing some research into the history of the English language, I spotted a name that was oddly familiar – one Edmund Coote, another of my predecessors.
As a record from the time says, Coote was appointed Headmaster of the Bury St Edmunds Grammar School in June 1596 at the "will and pleasure of the governors”. He seemed just the man for the job.
Which makes it hard to see why he then mysteriously disappears from the school records after nine months. Most other headmasters stayed ten years or more. Was Coote a man of driving ambition (not something always associated with schoolteachers) or had he done something to offend the governors?
After all, the rules of employment back in the sixteenth century were fairly clear-cut: "The masters are not to keep a family under the school roofs, nor have beds there; let women, as deadly pests, be kept away."
So did Coote leave after nine months because he became romantically entangled?
We think not. The clue to his sudden resignation, or possibly his sacking, comes from a different rule: ‘Let our masters give nothing but the rules of grammar and the learning of the Latin and Greek tongue’.
Coote did something he shouldn’t have done. He wrote one of the first English textbooks. It was called The English Schoole-Maister and is a work of great significance, showing us how the English language was gaining status in its own right.
Coote provides advice and drills in spelling and grammar help students to improve their English. It was a project that lost him his job. At this time English was the poor relation in the family of classical languages. It was Latin and Greek and Hebrew that carried clout.
Writing his grammar book at just the time when Shakespeare was making English the richest and most expressive language of them all, Coote was part of an unwitting movement. English was gaining its own sense of liberating self-confidence.
But the Governors didn’t see it like this. Coote was a rule-breaker, perhaps perceived as a trouble-maker. And one way or another he had to go. He re-surfaces as a master in Hertfordshire, and was buried in the church at Sawbridgeworth in 1610, towards the time of Shakespeare’s final plays.
This Easter I’m going to travel to that Hertfordshire church to pay my respects to a predecessor who didn’t last long at our school, but who made an impact that he cannot have contemplated. He helped us to see English emerging from decades of cowering inferiority to a proud world language in its own right.
And, in the great tradition of English headteachers, he was also something of a rebel.
Yes, I’d like to pay him my respects.
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Sixth Form joke:
A shepherd once told me to count his 37 sheep and then round them up. So I told him there were 40.
Geoff Barton
Wednesday 20 March 2013
Wednesday, 20 March 2013