7. About the year 1685 the Middlesex magistrates established a "College for Infants", as they called it, where poor children might be trained and taught; and the same plan was followed in other places.

8. Then, too, about the same time, we find private persons establishing charity schools for a similar purpose. The boys and girls, however, in these schools were not always boarded and fed, but lived at home and went to school day by day. The rules drawn up for them by their founders seem very quaint and almost laughable to us. We must remember that there were good reasons for those rules when they were made. There were charity schools in almost every town, and most of them were carried on in the old way till well into the nineteenth century.

9. The dress of the school-boys looks queer to us, because it is the style of dress worn when the school was founded. A blue-coat boy wears still the dress worn in the sixteenth century. The little charity-school boys wore leather breeches, coloured stockings, coats of a quaint cut of brown or blue or green or grey, and flat caps, with two little pieces of fine linen fluttering under their chins—bands as they were called. This was the boys' dress of the seventeenth century, and they wore it long after it was out of fashion. The girls, too, had frocks and cloaks of a wonderful cut and colour, white aprons, and "such mob-caps".

10. They went to school in queer old buildings on Sundays and on week-days. They were often taken to church, where they were perched up aloft by the organ in dreadfully uncomfortable galleries, so uncomfortable that it is a wonder that some of them did not fall over into the church below. There they led the singing—what little there was. Their hours in school were pretty long, but they managed to get in a very fair amount of play, and always had time for falling into mischief.

11. People often laugh at these old-fashioned charity schools, and the work they did. That is a pity, because they were founded long before Parliament troubled itself about the education of the people. All honour to those good old-fashioned men and women who did what they could to provide teaching and training for poor boys and girls, and to put them in the way of being able to earn their own living.

Summary.—Most of Edward VI grammar-schools were founded out of small portions of property which had belonged to religious houses. Generally they were only for a small number of scholars. In the eighteenth century many of these schools were in a very poor condition. Most of them now are alive and flourishing. In the seventeenth century a good many attempts were made to teach the children of the poor on a small scale. Some took charge of the children altogether; others, the charity schools, were day-schools. These lasted without much change till the middle of the nineteenth century. The blue-coat boys' dress and the dress of these charity children was the dress of the time when they were founded.

[CHAPTER XLVI]
APPRENTICES

1. From many of these old-fashioned schools boys and girls were apprenticed. Connected with old parishes there are still funds for so placing out boys and girls.

2. All through the Middle Ages the only way by which a man could become a craftsman was by being first of all an apprentice, and the rules by which a lad was bound to a master were very strict. Things did not alter much in this respect in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. An apprentice was always bound for seven years in the presence of magistrates. The master had to find his apprentice in food, clothing, lodging, and to instruct him in his art, or "mystery" as it was called. The apprentice lived in his master's house, and was bound to serve him.