ILLUSTRATION BY FEMKE DE JONG
MICHAEL WOOD ON…THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S UNIVERSITIES
IN MY HOME TOWN OF MANCHESTER, THE university is celebrating its 200th anniversary this year, and preparations are well under way for events and talks including our annual Manchester Histories festival. This year I’m sure we will all be thinking, too, about the story of the university itself.
The idea of the university, as we understand it today, evolved in western Europe – in Bologna, Paris and Oxford. There were predecessors elsewhere in the world; the historian George Makdisi saw the Islamic university in 11th–12th‑century Spain as a direct inspiration. But, everywhere, higher education was developed to support power. Whether teaching in Latin, Arabic or Chinese, universities trained scholars, scribes and theologians to sustain the ideologies of the state.
What we might call the democratic revolution in education in Britain began in the 16th century with the spread of the grammar school. Perhaps as many as 160 were opened in Elizabeth I’s reign alone, helping create what the historian Lawrence Stone thought the most literate society that had yet existed in history. In the civil wars of the 17th century, the young men in the parliamentary armies were book readers, and for the first time in history the printing press became part of an army’s baggage train.
Though the English revolution failed, that impetus continued. In the 18th century, religious non‑conformists, who had been at the heart of radicalism, were barred from university. But across Britain, in the many private academies (in places such as Kibworth in Leicestershire) curricula of amazing width were taught with mechanics, algebra, physics, anatomy and even modern history.
Out of these movements, in the 19th century a different idea of the university arose for the first time in history. The impulse was essentially practical and democratic. The modern university arose in the industrial revolution as the hold of the ruling class on our intellectual and cultural life began to loosen. And Manchester was one of the earliest – if not the earliest – of modern British civic universities.
The time and place were no accident. Manchester was the shock city of the age. In the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 (when cavalry brutally attacked a crowd of protesters demanding political reform), change was in the air; people were demanding better representation – and universal education.
