ABSTRACT
The term ‘public places’ had been used, as we saw, by Mulcaster in the sixteenth century to describe schools founded for general or public use, especially those which provided education free of charge. Much the same definition was used by the schoolmaster-author, John Clarke, when he wrote in 1730 that ‘by what I call public I mean an education in a school, where all comers are admitted; and by a private one, an education in the house and under the eye of a parent, or in a boarding-school, where none but boarders are received’. 1 But in the course of the eighteenth century we find that a small number of schools emerged from the general run of old-established grammar schools and increased greatly in size and importance owing to the admission of fee-paying boarders on an unprecedented scale. It was to this select group that Gibbon and others, writing later in the century, seem to be referring when they use the term ‘the public schools’. 2
