ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the funding of educational provision by laypeople. It examines how personal and communal devotion acted as a motive for providing this funding either directly or indirectly. Schooling in monastic houses across Kent was significant but lies outside the scope of this study. A number of chantries were established in Kent in the high Middle Ages, probably 300 chantries and chapels before 1350. They included, for example, the ones in Sevenoaks and Ashford parish churches where education took place by, and most likely before, the fifteenth century. Colleges of priests in Kent, like chantries, entered the historiography of the Dissolution and Reformation as ‘decayed’ institutions of the late Middle Ages. The most comment on schooling and literacy in Kent between 1500 and 1700 is based largely on Clark and accepts the focus on school buildings and founders so often presented as a feature of post-medieval financial support of education.
