Between 1849 and 1852 he was an assistant master and a Fellow of the Society of the College of St Nicolas, at Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, a college of 17 priests founded in 1848 by Nathaniel Woodard, a member of the Oxford Movement and curate of Shoreham-by-Sea, who in that year also founded "Shoreham Grammar School". This was a fellowship of priests formed with the vision of founding "one middle-class school in every diocese". The College of St Nicolas later became Lancing College. He left in 1852 having been rebuked by Woodard for "a flagrant piece of insubordination", whereupon he determined to found his own school where he could manage things according to his own more extreme Anglo-Catholic ideals, including the requirement for systematic and regular confession.
