Christopher Tolley, Director of Chapel Music at Winchester College, tells the story of the Winchester Quiristers.

The biggest dictionary I can find traces the word 'chorister' back to a legal document in the reign of Henry VIII, where it appears, badly spelt of course, in the phrase 'Chapeleines, Clerkes, Corusters'. Thirty years later, 'choristers' are found in their proper form, singing a 'ioyous antheme' in the poetry of Shakespeare's famous contemporary Edmund Spenser. After that, as one might expect, there are choristers everywhere. But, in the early days of the English language, another word was current, one that is recalled by the Book of Common Prayer's 'Quires and Places where they sing' and has now entirely passed out of use. Except, that is, at Winchester College. We call our boy trebles by the old name of Quirister, and we are proud of the fact that this word has survived the centuries to be applied to our choral foundation.

It must be admitted that the existence of quiristers at Winchester owes more, until recently, to the chances of geography and history then deliberate choice on our part. Because Winchester College and Winchester Cathedral are probably in closer proximity than any comparable choral foundations, it must always have been useful for their choirboys to be known by different titles. And, for more than two centuries after the Reformation, Winchester College was itself very much cut off from the world, secure behind its fortress-like exterior. In such an atmosphere, the old forms are more likely to linger. Be that as it may, today's quiristers are as fiercely attached to their name as to the blue jerseys, which mark them out at school. If occasionally - very occasionally, and always by accident - I call them choristers, there is an immediate outcry.

In 1382 William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester and twice Chancellor of England founded Winchester College, one of the leading independent secondary schools in Great Britain. In the medieval glass of the College chapel, Wykeham can be seen kneeling humbly at prayer before the Virgin Mary, our patron saint. It is a portrait that conjures up an image of monastic devotion and otherworldliness. In reality, like many bishops of his day, Wykeham was a tough, ambitious man who achieved power in dangerous times. One of his greatest ambitions was to see to the recruitment of a new educated class, which would reinforce Church and State in the dark and threatening years after the Black Death. Winchester College was intended as a nursery for the 'new college', which he had already established and endowed for this purpose at Oxford. It is a tribute to Wykeham's initial designs that New College, Oxford and Winchester College - and their choirs - continue to flourish. Wykeham's example was emulated several decades later when Henry VI founded Eton and King's College, Cambridge, choosing William Waynflete, Headmaster of Winchester, to be the first Headmaster of Eton.

The statutes of Winchester College provide for sixteen quiristers, as well as the seventy scholars, who today still live in the old chambers next to the Chapel and College Hall. The quiristers were to be poor and needy, under twelve years old when appointed, and 'of good condition and conversation'. And, of course, they had to be able to sing. Their schedule of duties looks fairly alarming. It has been calculated that, in Wykeham's time, there were thirteen chapel services each day, which works out at around four hundred every month. Not all these services would have involved music, but quiristers were called upon to act as servers in the chapel when they were not singing. It may be that they operated a shift system, since they also had lessons to attend and doubled up as college domestic staff. The statutes oblige the quiristers to make the priests' beds and wait at mealtimes. Their own food was to be 'fragments from the table of the priests and scholars, or otherwise if these do not suffice'. The quiristers' day, which began with mattins between 4 and 5 a.m., must have been long and exhausting. Almost their only privilege, except that of inheriting the cast-off gowns of the College masters, was eligibility for promotion to the rank of scholar, which numbers of them certainly achieved.

The music initially sung in Winchester College Chapel would have comprised great quantities of plainsong and elaborate polyphony of the sort found in that splendid late fifteenth-century manuscript, the Eton Choir book. The choir consisted of the quiristers, three lay clerks and, most probably, the three chaplains who assisted ten priest-fellows in the services. During the early days, one of the lay clerks would have played the organ. Our official list of organists begins in the sixteenth century, and goes on to include the great Elizabethan madrigalist Thomas Weelkes, Jeremiah Clarke of 'trumpet voluntary' fame, Samuel Sebastian Wesley, who educated his sons at the College and enjoyed fishing in the river Itchen, and Sir George Dyson, later Director of the Royal College of Music. In 1996, the quiristers recorded The Dyson Songbook (Proudsound PROU CD 146), a celebration of Dyson and his contribution to English music making. Other composers associated with Winchester College have been Cecil Armstrong Gibbs and Patrick Hadley, both pupils at the College, and Henry Balfour Gardiner, whose much-loved 'Evening Hymn' (Te lucis ante terminum) was written during a spell on the College music staff, and first performed in the College chapel.

The menial jobs, which were the lot of the medieval choirboy, became more and more prominent in the quiristers' lives as the centuries progressed, to the great detriment of their singing. Once the number of daily services had decreased after the Reformation, they seem to have been treated very much as College dogsbodies, and, in 1765, they were actually deprived of their academic gowns and put into servants' dress - leather breeches, chocolate-coloured tailcoats with metal buttons, and hobnailed boots. Their schooling became rudimentary, they clattered around the College running errands, and their musical activities dwindled almost to nothing. In his book, The Choral Service of the Church (1843), the Old Wykehamist John Jebb complained that most of the quiristers had been degraded into 'mere charity boys', leaving just four to keep the services going in the chapel. It is quite possible that these four were not quiristers at all, but cathedral choristers, who, from the eighteenth century, were often called in to shore up the college choir.

It was, in fact, shortly before Jebb published his criticisms that nineteenth-century reforms began to have an effect on the quiristers' status. In 1810, having for a time been ejected from their College quarters and expected to lodge in the town, the quiristers were given a house of their own immediately outside the College walls. And in 1842, they were put into the care of the young William Whiting, appointed both to teach the quiristers and to look after their welfare. Whiting's long reign as Quirister Master lasted until 1878: under him, the boys' routine became more stable than it had been for centuries, and their singing was once again taken seriously. Although it was 1906 before they were allowed a normal school uniform, and serving at meals in the College Hall was not formally abolished until 1936, the slow process of improvement was on its way. William Whiting was a keen amateur poet. Since he also suffered from a limp, the clever Wykehamists nicknamed him Tyrtaeus, after the Greek bard who was supposedly a lame schoolmaster. Whiting achieved one abiding success with his verses: his hymn 'Eternal Father, strong to save' became known to millions after its inclusion in the first edition of Hymns Ancient and Modem (1861). It takes its place with two other famous Winchester hymns, 'Awake, my soul, and with the sun' and 'Glory to Thee, my God, this night', both written (according to tradition) by Bishop Thomas Ken for the daily use of Winchester College Scholars.

In the late 1800's, the Quiristers moved into a new specially designed Quirister School, which has since become their boarding house. There they were taught for over eighty years. They weathered a financial crisis in the 1930s, but, as the twentieth century wore on, their small school itself seemed an increasing anomaly, as well as falling short of the rigorous academic standards demanded of boys entering Winchester College as pupils. Similar problems beset the choir school at Eton, which closed in 1968. The solution at Winchester, in a move that was perhaps as far-reaching as any since the quiristers' original foundation, was for their lessons to be taken over by the nearby Pilgrims' School, where the cathedral choristers are also educated. In 1966, when they became part of Pilgrims', the quiristers ceased to exist as a somewhat isolated group of boys within the larger College community. While they still perform their singing duties in the College, they now enjoy all the benefits of a first-rate prep school, where the College provides scholarships for them. The change has also enriched the Pilgrims' School: with about forty choral foundationers between them, the cathedral choristers and the college quiristers represent quite a galaxy of musical talent, instrumental as well as vocal. The two sets of boys have their own history and traditions, and there is inevitably some competition between them, which can only help to keep up standards. When they join forces to sing, as in their 1997 recording I sing of a maiden (Herald HAVP CD 211), the result can be very exciting indeed.

Is there anything special about Winchester College quiristers today, apart from their name? Quiristers certainly have all the advantages of cathedral and collegiate choristers. They are given the same intensive choral training, expected to perform regularly, to broadcast, record and go on tour. They experience the same variety of worship, too - although, because the quiristers keep College terms and spend Christmas and Easter at home, carol services usually fall early in December and music for Holy Week is sometimes given a premature outing. They sing a full range of choral services, accompanied by senior College boys, many of them former choristers or quiristers, who have replaced the ancient lay clerks in the choir.

But quiristers are different. Because Winchester College does not hold Choral evensong daily, there is a generous amount of time available for rehearsal. This enables new quiristers to join the choir immediately, without a probationary period on the touchline. It allows extra sessions to be provided for instrumental practice, with results that are reflected in the music scholarships that the boys go on to win. They are on call not only for our choral society, but also as actors in the large-scale productions of opera mounted by the College. And, in particular, the quiristers' extra time is used to develop a repertoire of secular music that takes its place alongside their liturgical singing and definitely adds a special dimension to their work, often in aid of charities. Their secular programmes, always sung from memory, include classical lieder, operatic arias and duets, and popular songs by the Beatles, George Gershwin, and Simon and Garfunkel. The memorising is a valuable discipline as well as a great boost to confidence. I find, too, that the audience contact at these concerts creates a spark, which the quiristers then apply to all their singing, sacred as well as secular. Now in their seventh century, Winchester College quiristers benefit from a broad musical training and a decidedly varied routine. Surely these special choristers are entitled to a name of their own.

This article was originally published in Church Music Quarterly, October 1998