R v Hopley (more commonly known as the Eastbourne manslaughter) was an 1860 legal case in Eastbourne, Sussex, England. The case concerned the death of 15-year-old Reginald Cancellor (some sources give his name as Chancellor and his age as 13 or 14) at the hands of his teacher, Thomas Hopley. Hopley used corporal punishment with the stated intention of overcoming what he perceived as stubbornness on Cancellor's part, but instead beat the boy to death. An inquest into Cancellor's death began when his brother requested an autopsy. As a result of the inquest Hopley was arrested and charged with manslaughter. He was found guilty at trial and sentenced to four years in prison, although he insisted that his actions were justifiable and that he was not guilty of any crime. The trial was sensationalised by the Victorian press and incited debate over the use of corporal punishment in schools. After Hopley's release and subsequent divorce trial, he largely disappeared from the public record. The case became an important legal precedent in the United Kingdom for discussions of corporal punishment in schools and reasonable limits on discipline. Background Thomas Hopley, aged 41 at the time of the incident, was a schoolmaster in Eastbourne who ran a private boarding school from his home at 22 Grand Parade. He was well educated and from a middle-class family, the youngest son of a Royal Navy surgeon and brother of artist Edward Hopley, author Catherine C. Hopley, and editor John Hopley. Hopley's own household was fairly well off, and he and his wife (Fanny) kept several servants. He had two children, the first of whom had brain damage – "popular rumour" blamed this on "his unconventionally bracing notions of neonatal care". Hopley was described by writer Algernon Charles Swinburne as "a person of high attainments and irreproachable character". He expressed "utopian" educational ideals shared by many Victorian educational theorists. He wrote pamphlets on education topics which included "Lectures on the Education of Man", "Help towards the physical, intellectual and moral elevation of all classes of society", and "Wrongs which cry out for redress" advocating the abolition of child labour. In October 1859, he was offered £180 a year () to teach Reginald Channell Cancellor, a "robust" boy who had been "given up as ineducable". Reginald was the son of John Henry Cancellor (1799–1860), a master of the Court of Common Pleas and a "man of