The Village School
The old school
There is mention in ecclesiastical records of an Englefield Parish School existing between 1540 and 1835 and in 1721 Michael Kirby, an ordained Minister, is listed as schoolmaster. Kirby was ordained on 13th October 1706 and became Rector of Tidmarsh on 2nd May 1707. He seems to have continued in this living until his death on 9th June 1730 despite also being at various times Curate and Rector of Sulham and Curate of Englefield as well as the schoolmaster.
At least by 1840, the school was at what is now No 11/12 the Street (below), part of which was also known as the “Mission Cottage” and which was the house of Thomas Horne in 1762. The schoolhouse was the part with the gable end shown in this picture and the schoolroom (probably the Mission Cottage) was the part to the left of this, then only a single storey. This had the upper storey added when the old school was later converted into two houses, when the part to the right was also added. Miss Winchcomb (whose mother Mary Elizabeth Horne was born in North Street in 1856) suggested that this was the school for the older children and the infant school was located a little further down The Street in one of a pair of cottages that stood opposite the present entrance to the estate yard and where in 1851 Elizabeth Horne (a cousin of Miss Winchcomb) was living in one of them with her parents and was described as an “Infant School Mistress”.
An interesting anomaly arises from the 1851 census, however. The schoolhouse of 1844 is now listed as “one house void” and the “Englefield School House” appears to be on the road to Theale, situated between the lodge that we know stood in the fork where Richard Benyon’s private coach road up to the front of Englefield House deviated from the public road just in front of the Old Rectory and the Fishery Cottage at the far end of Garrett’s Lane (nowadays Wigmore Lane).
There is no map or plan of this period to show if there was a building but there is a dip in the field close to the road and in the days when this field used to be cultivated the plough would turn up bricks in this dip. In 1861 the school is very clearly back in its old place.
By at least 1854 the Englefield school was a National School operated under the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church. This body, the name abbreviated to the National Society, was set up in 1811 by the Church of England and in 1833 the government began giving grants for new school buildings to the National Society and to the nonconformist British and Foreign School Society. It is possible, therefore, that a new National School was built between 1844 and 1851 but that after Richard Fellowes Benyon inherited the estate in 1854 he moved the school back to the old building as part of a plan to close the road to Theale to the public and retain it simply as a private drive to Englefield House. While the school was back in the old building by 1861 this was only temporary as Richard Benyon then built another new school.