Why RGS's ancient motto remains relevant today

‘Ripon Grammar School was, and still remains, an exceptional place,’ says former student and senior lecturer in early medieval history at the University of Edinburgh Dr Richard Sowerby, guest speaker at our annual prizegiving

Photographs by KARYN FEINGOLD

IT is lovely to be back at Ripon Grammar. It is more than twenty years since I sat where you are sitting now; and I have been extremely lucky to have spent the years since I left working at places that people tell me are some of the best educational establishments in the country. The headmaster has listed those places just now, and it is always a little embarrassing to say that you’ve had a career that has passed through places like Oxford, Cambridge and the rest. But I’m not sure that I can say that I learned more from any of those places than I did from Ripon. This school always was, and it still remains, an exceptional place – and many of the things that make it exceptional will become clear to you only when you have left it.

We are obviously here today for the important business of giving prizes. But those prizes are a result of many things: effort, perseverance, and above all teaching and learning; and since I’m a university lecturer myself, teaching and learning are two things that matter a great deal to me. So before we get to the prizes themselves, perhaps you’ll let me say some things about teaching and learning more broadly, as someone who was once in your position, and who never really left learning behind.

I should maybe also admit that I find it very strange to be back here. I had been warned about the strangeness, because I am actually the second member of my family to be invited back to their old school for an event like this. My dad was once invited back to his old school in Harrogate, to open a new canteen. He initially took this as a sign that he must have been very highly regarded at the school, probably for sport. (He competed for Great Britain in the 1984 Olympics, so this wasn’t totally unlikely.) But when he actually arrived at the school, he was told that he had only been invited to open the new canteen because they remembered him as the boy who ate the most food, and who went back most often for extra helpings at lunchtime.

Fortunately for me, there are very few of my old teachers who can tell you whether or not I also shared my dad’s reputation for enormous lunches. Of all your teachers, I think that perhaps Dr Grime and Mr Fell are the only ones who also taught me. I find it very difficult to believe that Mr Fell in particular is no longer to be regarded as ‘a new teacher’, because my first year here was also his first year at school: obviously this must still make him ‘a new teacher’, because it surely can’t be that long since I was here. Occasionally, even though I am a historian, I find myself teaching poetry to university students; and whenever I do, I often think about how much worse I am at it than Mr Fell. But the fact that I keep trying to do it also tells you something about the way that I was inspired to try by the people who taught me here. This is one of the ways in which you only recognize what a school has given you when you leave it: you find yourself many years later, pursuing interests that you can trace directly back to some first moment of inspiration in a classroom. I can think of many ways in which this has been true for me; and I hope that in years to come, you find it to be true for you too.

Inviting someone back to their old school is always a risky thing to do, because they always start reminiscing about the old days, just like I’m doing now. We become like the kind of relatives that you only see at occasional family gatherings. We walk around saying ‘oh look, hasn’t that grown?’ or ‘I remember when so-and-so was here’. But we do this because our memories of the place are still amazingly clear, even when the reality in front of us has changed. This must be true for any school; but it is especially true here, I think. My wife tells me that she is often a little bit jealous of the way that I talk about my time at Ripon, because the schools that she went to made much less of an impression on her. There are many things in my life that I was first shown at Ripon Grammar, and that remain important to me, twenty or more years later. Coming back to an old school is a strange experience, because so many parts of it never really leave you.

My memories of this place are clear, but they aren’t complete. I have no memory, for instance, of ever knowing that the school has a motto. Maybe this is news to you too, though I think the school motto has been used a bit more at Ripon in recent years. I cannot honestly say whether anyone ever mentioned it at all during the time that I was here. Now, schools having mottos seemed old-fashioned even when I was young. I suppose the point of a school motto is that they are meant to reflect something about the character and values of a school; but unfortunately, most school mottos are desperately boring. Ours, however, is much more unusual. It is written in a language which no-one has actually spoken for a thousand years, and which very few people these days can read any more; but because I’m a historian, and because I do work on things that happened a thousand years ago, I happen to know where it comes from, and why it might be relevant to what we’re doing today.

The school motto is Giorne ymb lare ymb ðiowotdomas. These words have been around for much longer than there was a grammar school in Ripon. They come from a letter written in Old English, which was the language spoken in the very earliest English kingdoms before the Norman Conquest in 1066; and our motto – Giorne ymb lare ymb ðiowotdomas– was written by one of the early English kings, Alfred the Great. He didn’t write it for the school, which didn’t yet exist; but in a letter written during the time that England was under attack by the vikings, and at some point centuries later, someone decided that what King Alfred had written would make for a good motto for a school.

What these words means in our language is usually translated by the school as ‘Eager to learn and to seek after righteousness’ – which is not a perfect translation, but let’s go with it: this is not the time for me to nitpick about how to translate dead languages. ‘Eager to learn and to seek after righteousness’ will do.

The reason why King Alfred was writing about learning and righteousness in this way is that he was worried that too few people cared about them any more. Alfred had read his history books and believed that England had once been full of people who cared deeply about learning and righteousness, but that something had gone wrong in more recent years. Alfred, I should point out, lived in the ninth century: clearly there is nothing new about the people in power thinking that they could pass judgement about educational standards.

Ok, so the school has a very old motto. So what? Just because something is old doesn’t actually mean that it is also worth our time. That might seem strange for me to say as a professional historian – but I’m a historian because I find the past interesting, not because I think that it dictates how we should live our lives in the present day. But the thousand-year-old words that the school has as its motto do, I think, have some relevance for what we’re doing today. I shall not pretend that I have anything useful to say about the part that talks about ‘seeking after righteousness’, which is definitely nothing that I am qualified to judge. But the part about being ‘eager to learn’ sounds like something that I might be expected to know something about, as someone who works at a university.

One of the things that feels significant to me about King Alfred wishing that more people were ‘eager to learn’ is that he wasn’t complaining that people weren’t good at learning. He was saying instead that people didn’t feel like they wanted to learn. The difference between those two things feels to me like something that is worth remembering on a day like today. We are here today, of course, to celebrate achievement: being good at what you have done. But achievements don’t happen by themselves; and the desire to achieve – that ‘eagerness to learn’ that they were talking about a thousand years ago – is in many ways as important as the achievement itself.

But being ‘eager to learn’ can also be hard. It can get lost when the learning gets difficult, or when other things in life get in the way. And when it goes, it can be hard to bring it back. Days like today can help with that. You are here today in the presence of your families, whose pride in you has been filling this room with applause; and your prizes have been conferred upon you by your teachers, whose delight in your achievements will continue even when you – like me – have left the school and gone your own way. Let their celebration of you today help you remain ‘eager to learn’ in the years ahead, as a memory that motivates you to continue to learn and to grow. Giorne ymb lare ymb ðiowatdomas: I hope that you do indeed remain ‘eager to learn’ for a long time to come, and that it will repay you continually for the rest of your lives. Thank you for allowing me to play a small part in that today.