Leach (1915)

(page numbers in brackets)

Preliminary pages

Chapter I (1-13)
Our oldest school - Canterbury
Chapter II (14-30)
The Greek and Roman models
Chapter III (31-45)
Theodore of Tarsus and Aldhelm of Winchester
Chapter IV (46-66)
The schools of Northumbria: Bede and Alcuin
Chapter V (67-75)
Alfred the Great and the school of Winchester
Chapter VI (76-95)
The schools from Edward the Elder to Edward the Confessor
Chapter VII (96-155)
The schools from Lanfranc to Becket
Chapter VIII (156-178)
University colleges, collegiate churches, and schools
Chapter IX (179-200)
The era of school statutes
Chapter X (201-212)
The Black Death and Winchester College
Chapter XI (213-234)
The almonry of choristers' schools in the monasteries
Chapter XII (235-276)
The fifteenth century and humanism
Chapter XIII (277-332)
Henry VIII and the schools

Index (333-308)

Notes on the text

Leach described his book as 'the first attempt at a history of English Schools before the Reformation, reckoned from the accession of Edward VI' (Preface page v) and argued that it was needed because, while 'some idea of the true history of our schools' had 'penetrated to scholastic circles', it certainly hadn't reached 'most antiquaries or historians, still less the general public' (Preface page vi).

The full text is online. I have added nothing: any [square brackets] shown are as used by Leach himself. The only exception to this is where Leach occasionally quotes Greek words. As I don't have the ability to render these in HTML, I have indicated the position of these words thus: [Greek].

Blank pages have been omitted.

I have taken three liberties with the text:

1. I have used single speech marks instead of doubles;

2. I have changed the spelling of 'to-day' to 'today'; and

3. I have corrected Leach's incorrect positioning of speech marks where they occur at the end of a sentence (strangely this occurs only in the first three chapters). Thus

... to become part of the 'Holy Catholic Church,'

... to become part of the 'Holy Catholic Church',

The formatting of the text (bold, italics, centred etc) is a reasonably accurate representation of the printed version. However, please note that the pages presented here are not exact facsimiles of the original printed version: the font (Times, Arial etc) and size of print - and therefore the number of words to a line and lines to a page - are determined by the settings you have chosen for your web browser.