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 incompatible purposes of grammar and elementary schools, with the result too often that the grammar school was degraded and the elementary school inefficient.

The number of school foundations credited to Queen Elizabeth or her era is very much larger than the facts justify. The greatest of all, Westminster, which during the 18th century was facile princeps in the numbers, social rank and academic and literary achievement of its scholars, had in fact never ceased after its foundation, or refoundation, as a cathedral school under Henry VIII. Though Mary had restored the monks, the school went on throughout her reign and until Elizabeth formally refounded it with the restored canons. It is more extraordinary to find St Albans, founded under act of parliament of Edward VI., with Coventry, restored under patent of Henry VIII., and Lincoln, which had existed uninterruptedly from the 11th century, credited to her time. Similarly Bristol, Mansfield, Worcester, Darlington, Leicester, Eye, Bromyard, Richmond, Bodmin, Penryn, Fotheringay and others long previously existing and deriving no benefit from her or augmentation in her time, are erroneously dubbed Elizabethan.

There is one not wholly novel but notable feature which may be remarked in Elizabethan school foundations, mostly no doubt replacing old ones, and that is that many were the product of joint effort, partly in annual subscriptions and partly in donations of land or money down, not from one benefactor but from many persons. This is the case in many which have been attributed to the queen herself or to individual founders. Wakefield and Halifax in Yorkshire; Ashbourne, Derbyshire; Sandwich, Kent; Hexham, Northumberland; and St Saviour’s and St Olave’s, Southwark, are cases in which the evidence of joint stock enterprise has been fortunately preserved, as it has in that of Nottingham, which, after an existence of at least 300 years as a fee school, was refounded as a free school in 1512. Another and less fortunate feature may be observed in the frequent attempt to make the grammar schools do double work, and supply the loss caused by the suppression of the song schools, by doing duty also as elementary schools to teach the three R’s. It is an attempt which is being continually renewed and always results in failure; generally ending in degrading the secondary school while not making the elementary school efficient. Wellingborough in Northamptonshire is a remarkable example of this. It is a school which, founded by joint effort and out of common town estate, always languished until in recent years it shook off the elementary school and became one of the most flourishing secondary schools in the county (Vict. Co. Hist., Northants., ii.).

During the Civil War and the Commonwealth, when new ideas on every subject were broached, education received new impetus, and under the fostering care of parliament schools were increased in numbers. Many new schools were created, many old schools obtained an increase of endowment and efficiency. Among the great schools it was during this time that Westminster, with a parliamentary committee of lords and commons substituted for the dean and chapter, under Busby, definitely placed itself in that position of pre-eminence which it retained till the first decade of the 19th century. It is significant

that the two oldest extant school-lists are of this period, that for Winchester, which flourished under a Puritan warden and headmaster, for 1653, and that for Westminster for 1655. The care that parliament showed for schools was most conspicuous, where it might have least been expected, in regard to the cathedral schools. On the 14th of October 1642 the estates of deans and chapters were ordered to be sequestered, subject to a direction that “allowances assigned for scholars, almsmen and other charitable uses might not be interrupted.” On the 9th of October 1643 parliament extended to schoolmasters the functions of the Committee for Plundered Ministers, to remove those scandalous in life or doctrine or who had deserted their cures.

A more permanent result of the abolition of bishops and chapters and their licensing powers was the immense development given to private schools all over the country, and not least in London. Among them, John Farnaby, a royalist, who had been employed to produce a revised Lilly’s grammar in anticipation of Kennedy’s Latin Primer of two centuries later, was the most famous and successful at the time; and John