Chapter 1. A History of Hogwarts.
We have been told stories of the founders of our wonderful Hogwarts, but nobody quite knows the true stories of the men and women who created the greatest school of Witchcraft and Wizardry. After doing vast research, I have found manuscripts in the deepest parts of the castle telling the stories of our beloved founders. The stories are quite intriguing, and a lot of thing happened a lot differently than we have been told. To start with, how about a brief history of the founding of Hogwarts itself.
Hogwarts was founded in the year 985 A.D. by Godric Gryffindor, Salazar Slytherin, Rowena Ravenclaw, and Helga Hufflepuff. The castle originally belonged to a family of warriors, who faced off with a clan of Goblins, and were slain for their lack of, shall we say, manners. They offended the Goblins, and each one of them was slain brutally. No Goblins died in this war. Now, you may be wondering why these warriors manners mattered. Well, it was because they didn't show proper deference to the king of the Goblins, and they had the nerve to try and enslave the Goblins as their servants. The Goblins look to no human as their master, and they might have let it slide with a warning if it weren't for the fact that the humans attempted to enslave the king. Anyways, I digress, after the warriors were killed, the castle was owned by a powerful mage, Leonard le Blount, who was obsessed with the future. He would spend hours in the tallest tower of the castle trying to scry into the future to see what would become of the world, and more importantly, how he would die. He found out that he was going to be poisoned by his young nephew, and so he had the young boy killed, avoiding that future. In another possible future, he saw himself being killed by a stranger that he invited into his castle for a meal. He never saw the strangers face, nor did he see if it was a man or a woman, and so he completely shut himself off from the world. He refused to see anyone including his family, for they could be the stranger he saw, and he refused to be killed. He alone would live forever.
He didn't.
He was killed two years later by a man, Robert le Blount, who was looking for his crazy uncle who had sent a servant to kill him as a child. The castle then fell to him, and in 980 he sold it to a young Norseman and a young Spaniard and two women. These young people were Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff.
The four young friends spent five years studying everything they could about magic. The found out so many new things; potions were able to cure anything, so long as they were made correctly, you could transfigure anything in to anything else as long as you understood the theory, and there were names for spells, and with these names you could do so many more things! Before this, witches and wizards had wands to focus their magic, but it was unspoken magic, they just thought their intent and what they wanted would happen. A lot of the time though, the magic was finicky and wouldn't work properly. Once they found incantation though, the spells generally always worked as long as the caster had a strong enough magical core.
After five years of studying on their own, the friends decided they wanted to teach others the things they had learned. They sent out their house elves to anyone magical with an invitation to attend their school to learn new ways of learning their craft. Each year, a new set of eleven year olds would come to the school, and eventually, the friends decided to teach the students for seven years, that way they could get the maximum amount of learning in without taking the students away from the work they would need to do once they became 'adults'.
[[Adult is in quotes because back then, you were an adult by the time you hit puberty. Once a girl started her cycle, she was old enough to be married off to have a family of her own. The school saved hundreds of girls from a fate of pretty much being enslaved within her home; they had a way out]]
Back when the school was new, the founders even had some classes for non-magicals-or as they called themselves, muggles. They would teach them about potions and herbology, because everyone could do these two subjects, and the muggles needed a way to help keep themselves from becoming sick and dying too. After fifty years, Witches and Wizards had to go into hiding, and they had to wipe all their former muggle students' minds of what they had learned. It was a sad day, and sadly to say, it was the end of something great. But, that is a story to be learned in tandem with one of the founders' personal stories.