ABSTRACT
The consensus of scholarly opinion is that English educational institutions suffered comparatively little damage as a result of the disturbances of the Civil War period. Successive governments during the Commonwealth protected school endowments and in some places (notably in Wales) actively intervened to support or establish schools. If we accept the figures given by Professor Jordan for school endowments, it seems that the flow of charitable gifts had begun to abate even before the Civil War broke out: there was in fact, as we saw in ch. 3, a small increase in the total amount donated for schools in Jordan’s ten counties during the 1640s and a further rise in the 1650s. This, however, was still not much more than half the total for 1611–20 and, so far as the evidence of surviving school buildings goes, it would seem that relatively few new buildings were put in hand during the Civil War period. It may indeed be the case that historians of education have underestimated the amount of dislocation caused, at least in some parts of the country, by the Civil War. In the West Riding of Yorkshire, for example, some schools were used as barracks (at Rotherham the boys themselves took part in the fighting) and others suffered through the imprisonment or death of governors, which sometimes resulted in the mismanagement of school estates. 1
