annual aggregate amount paid in exhibitions in 1865 was about £1,280.

The Clarendon Commissioners inaugurated and set their seal upon the time-dishonoured alienation of the poor man's heritage. The reign of the FEE school commenced. They recommended "that after the expiration of twenty-five years [i.e., at about 1892] all local and other particular rights to free education at the School be abolished." The headmaster had complained that his school was not respected, as Eton was, because it had so many local boys. So the original and fundamental purpose of the Shrewsbury School has faded away with "les neiges d'antan.”

Among its alumni have been Sir Philip Sidney; the Restoration dramatist Wycherley; Ambrose Philips (Pope's "namby-pamby "); Marquis of Halifax (the "Trimmer "); Judge Jeffreys, Charles Darwin, Geo. Sandys, James Harrington (the republican author of Oceana and friend of Charles I.), and Mr. Stanley Weyman, the well-known, living, historical romantic novelist.

One cannot resist telling here a pleasant "April fool story" associated with the memory of Dr. B. H. Kennedy, a former headmaster of Shrewsbury, mentioned above.

One year, on April 1st, an audacious schoolboy put the school clock forward, and the chapel bell was rung an hour too soon. The culprit duly received the alarming

order to come to the headmaster's room a little before noon.

Preparations were made for the usual form of punishment. The cane whizzed in the air, but, bracing his nerves to meet its descent, the victim found himself untouched. A second time he heard it swung with sound and fury, yet it signified nothing. The boy was still trembling for the third stroke when he heard the master's voice :

"Go away, you April fool!"

N.B.-His name was not Willett !

The old buildings completed in 1630, for the Royal Grammar School of Edward VI., are now occupied by

the county museum and free library, the school having been transferred in 1882 to a fine new site of 50 acres in the suburb of Kingsland, south of the river.

The inclusive fees at Shrewsbury School are now £180 per annum, says the Public Schools Year Book for 1923. A fund, it adds, exists for the benefit of parents who satisfy the headmaster and a committee of their inability to send their sons to the school without assistance. Scholarships, two or three in number, and of the value of £70 per annum, and four more of the value of £60 per annum are each year offered to boys, whether or no they are members of the school. Other scholarships, ranging in value from £37 to £120 per annum, are offered as they fall vacant; but in all cases the beneficiaries are boys of any social origin than that of the working class, whether it consists of hand or brain workers.

CHAPTER XX

SOME OTHER SCHOOLS, AND THE FUTURE OF THE

GREATER PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

It is not proposed to cite at any length the cases of the very numerous other public and grammar schools up and down the country which have been diverted from the spirit and letter of their founders' intentions, and entirely alienated from the boys of the locality. Such are Bromsgrove (Worcs.); Felsted (Essex); Repton (Derby); Sherborne (Dorset); Tonbridge (Kent); Uppingham (Rutland); Sedbergh and Giggleswick (West Riding). These are all typical examples drawn from a countless host, and they shine only with lesser brightness than Eton or Winchester, but are equally as exclusive. "One gentleman with £2,000 a year had six scholar sons in various endowed schools," said a witness before the Royal Commission on Secondary Education, in 1895, and the same body condemned the practice of the governing bodies of these public schools spending, in 1880, £10,000 a year in order to compete with Eton and Winchester, and other foundations. "There is much evidence to show that a considerable portion of these scholarships go to the sons of well-to-do parents . . . and that the children of poorer parents have comparatively little chance of obtaining them."

The evil in this respect at the moment is aggravated by the fact that many of the lesser grammar schools have for years applied their endowments and resources to cheapening the cost of education for the well-to-do classes. In fact, every readjustment of the endowments and scheme of administration of English public and secondary

schools and older universities made since Brougham's Charity Commissioners, who published their final report in 1837, down to the Bryce Commission on Secondary Education of 1892-5, has profited the middle and farming classes rather than the children of the working class. Where, as in about ten cases, at Alcester, Abingdon, Nottingham, Birmingham, Newbury, Croydon (Whitgift's school), Newark, Andover, Manchester and Bradford, schemes in the Victorian era so rearranged the schools as to admit poor children, the parents of the prosperous middle classes withdrew their children and sent them to Rugby, or Winchester, or Westminster, because of their fear of social contact with working-class children. No wonder, then, that the most recent of all State enquiries into English educational endowments, that of the Royal Commission on Oxford and Cambridge Universities (1919-22) should, after explaining that the terms "poor and indigent" in founders' charters of endowment meant just nothing at all, hasten to stifle twinges of conscience by roundly saying that "to some extent the existing disabilities of poor students are clearly inevitable . . . and there are practical limitations to the remedies that can be devised."

Education, alike with religion and world history, is, of course, subject to that play of economic forces which determines not only the basis of life and production but the social ideas and institutions of a given historical epoch. As we have seen, in the Middle Ages when the basis of life, with its town guilds, its semi-Socialistic administration of vast abbey lands and ecclesiastical tenures was crudely collectivist, we had in England a landed aristocracy given to feats of arms and barbaric field sports, but simple as aristocracies often are and despising learning and the cultivation of the arts as soft and effeminate and unworthy of the warrior.

One may remember the remark of John de Trevisa, chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, implying that the

children of the greater nobility did not attend the medieval fourteenth century grammar school, and that gentlemen had, in the main, left off teaching their children French. For its own purposes, and bound by the unnatural law of celibacy, the Anglican Church of the Middle Ages took the sons of villeins into the bosom of mighty Mother Church and conferred upon them the clerical status.

But mediævalism in its semi-collectivist phase went down before a wave of individualism which spread over Western Europe from the confines of the Danube to the Severn. The new bourgeoisie which Henry VIII. elevated into the ranks of the older decimated aristocracy" fleshed themselves" with abbey lands, seized upon educational endowments, ruined the guild system, except in London, and enclosed vast tracts of common land, which process drove thousands of the villein class into destitution and beggary on the highway, and reduced the class of yeomen to a state of dependent poverty. In a word, sheep counted for more than men.

This economic transformation practically abolished poor scholars in Universities and public grammar schools, filling them with the sons of the ennobled bourgeoisie, squires, court patrons, and members of wealthy families.

With the coming of the industrial revolution, the class of merchants and manufacturers, enriched by trade at home and in foreign fields, sent their sons to the schools along with budding lawyers and clergymen. It was the age of capitalist industrialism before the coming of the joint stock corporation, so that not a voice was raised when the Victorian Public Schools Commissioners reestablished the schools on a newer bourgeois basis, and carefully omitted the poverty clause. Poor boys were wanted in the factories, as they had been on the land.

Our post-war conditions are crystallising into a general trustification of industry in Great Britain, and one of the consequences of that process is the growing impoverishment of the middle and professional classes, whose sons