ABSTRACT
The eighteenth century has been characterized as the era of the ‘charity school movement’. 1 In fact, there is considerable ambiguity in this phrase, since schools of many types and periods were in a sense charity schools, while the principle of public subscription in order to finance a school was not an invention of the eighteenth century, 2 nor were other features of ‘charity schools’, such as the practice of providing clothes for the children or apprenticing them when they left school. There is also evidence to suggest that the S.P.C.K., which popularized the phrase ‘charity school’—and gave it a special meaning—early in the eighteenth century, included in their lists of schools many which had originated at an earlier date, or which were not of the catechetical type which they advocated. 3 The customary view of the early eighteenth century as the first great period of elementary-school expansion does not take sufficiently into account the earlier rise of the parish schools, referred to in an earlier chapter, and many of these schools continued throughout the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth.
