ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth century many of the endowed grammar schools underwent a period of decay, from which some never emerged. Their statutes often limited the curriculum they could offer to Latin and Greek and, as the case of Leeds Grammar School in 1805 showed, this limitation was binding according to Lord Eldon’s judgment. Thus these schools offered little attraction to the parents of the newly emerging manufacturing and trading classes who wanted a more modern utilitarian curriculum for their sons and who turned to the private schools and academies to secure it. The endowed schools were often poorly staffed by underpaid masters, and this also led to their loss of pupils.* The following extracts refer to Oundle School, Northamptonshire. It eventually survived its decay and, by taking more boarders, adding modern subjects to its curriculum and increasing its efficiency, it transformed itself in the nineteenth century from a grammar school into a ‘public school’. In 1779-when John Evanson, M.A., of Brasenose College, Oxford, became schoolmaster at Oundle – it had four pupils. He increased the number to twelve, but then, as the extracts show, he lost all his pupils and was eventually dismissed in 1795 by the Court of the Grocers’ Company, to whom the founder, Sir William Laxton, had entrusted the school he had endowed in 1556.
