Oundle School, which was to be the material of Sanderson's life work, which was to teach him so much and profit so richly by the reaction, was one of comparatively old standing¹. It was a pre-reformation foundation; a certain Joan Wyatt having endowed a schoolmaster in the place in 1485. Its main revenues, however, derived³ from Sir William Laxton, Lord Mayor of London and Master of the Grocers' Company, who in 1556 left considerable property to that body on condition that it supported a school in his native town of Oundle. The Grocers' Company took over the Joan Wyatt school and schoolmaster, and has discharged its obligations to Oundle with intermittent⁴ energy and honesty to this day.  
Oundle has always been a school of fluctuating[Pg 26] fortunes. The district round and about does not sustain a sufficient population to maintain full classes and an efficient staff, and only when the prestige of the school was great enough to attract boys from a distance had it any chance of flourishing. Time after time an energetic head with more or less support from the distant governing body would push it into prominence⁵ and prosperity only to pass away and leave it to an equally rapid decline. The London Grocers' Company is a very unsuitable body for educational work. It is not organised for any such work. It was originally a chartered association of city wholesalers, spice-dealers, and so forth⁶, who maintained a certain standard of honest trading and protected their common interests in the middle ages; it commended itself to the spiritual care of St. Anthony, and built a great hall and acted as almoner for its impoverished⁷ members and their widows and orphans⁸; its normal function to-day is the entertainment of princes and politicians. It is now a fortuitous collection of merchants, business-men, and prosperous persons, and it is only by chance that now and then a group of its members have had the conscience and intelligence to rise above[Pg 27] the normal indifference⁹ of such people to the full possibilities of the Laxton bequest¹⁰. Generally the Company's conduct of the school has varied¹¹ between half-hearted help and negligence¹² and the diversion of the funds to other ends; it has no tradition of competent governorship, and the ups and downs of Oundle have been dependent mainly upon the personal qualities of the masters who have chanced to be appointed.
 
There was a period of prosperity during the second quarter of the seventeenth century which was brought to an end by the plague, and by the impoverishment¹³ of the school through the fire of London in which various Laxton properties were destroyed. Throughout a large part of the eighteenth century the school was completely effaced¹⁴, and the entire revenues of the Laxton bequest were no doubt expended¹⁵ in hospitality. There was a revival¹⁶ in 1796. In the seventies of the nineteenth century the school was doing well in mathematics under a certain Dr. Stansbury, and in the eighties it had as many as two hundred boys under the Rev². H. St. J. Reade. Then it declined again until the numbers sank below a hundred. It was a time of quickened[Pg 28] consciences in educational matters, and some of the more energetic and able members of the Grocers' Company determined¹⁷ to make a drastic change of conditions at Oundle. They found Sanderson ready to their hands.