Schools

Education was not compulsory until 1880 and the state did not sponsor schooling in any form until 1833. However there were a great number of private schools. Many were very small and left no record, save for adverts in the local press and entries in directories. Even well-established ones, with some renown – the Great Ealing School was attended, amongst others, by W S Gilbert, John Henry Newman and Thomas Huxley, for instance – failed to leave any corpus of records. The records of former private schools, where they exist, tend to be in local authority archives. For schools which still survive, records may remain in situ.

Then there are the great public schools, such as Eton, Harrow, Westminster and Winchester, and for boys attending these, research is usually straightforward. A researcher should first check that there are published lists of former pupils – as there are for Harrow and Westminster from the eighteenth century. These can be found on the open shelves of TNA library for instance and should always be consulted prior to contacting a particular school. Many published lists of alumni are to be found at the Society of Genealogists’ Library, too, along with school histories. These lists are arranged in chronological order, and there is usually an index. They give details of home and parents, school career (dates of entry and discharge) and subsequent career details and (perhaps) death.

There were also special schools aimed at particular groups. Lewisham Archives have the records of the Congregational School, for sons of Congregational ministers, and the Royal Naval School, for sons of naval officers. Archives of grammar schools and charity schools may also exist. These may also include lists of pupils.

The Inns of Chancery and of Court

Although civil law was taught at Oxford and Cambridge from the Middle Ages, they did not teach common law until the mid-nineteenth century. Any youth wanting to be a solicitor could attend a number of Inns of Chancery in London from the Middle Ages until their extinction in the nineteenth century. These were preparatory schools for lawyers. Unfortunately pupil lists for only four of at least a dozen have survived. Records survive at TNA for Clement’s Inn and the Library of the Middle Temple for New Inn. The Law Society (Staple Inn) and those for Barnard’s Inn were published by the Selden Society in 1995.

Would-be barristers had to spend seven to eight years at one of the Inns of Court (until the 1840s), these four being Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn, the Middle Temple and the Inner Temple. Numbers too increased, with 230 barristers practising in 1780. Admission registers exist for all four inns. Many have been published and so are relatively easily available, Middle Temple (1501–1975), Inner Temple (1547–1850, available on a database); Gray’s Inn (1521–1889) and Lincoln’s Inn (1420–1893). All these courts have libraries which have much other information, as well as that already mentioned. Lawyers will be discussed further in Chapter 7.

These registers often detail pupils’ fathers, too, with name and occupation.

The Apprenticeship System

Apart from schools and colleges, there was another once common method of educating youths of both sexes, which was particularly prevalent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was the system of apprenticeship. A master of a trade was paid to take a youth to serve under him in order that the young man would learn the business on the job. He would enter into a formal contract with his master, usually when aged 14, but possibly as young as 12, and would normally serve seven years. He would work in return for pocket money and board and lodgings. The lot of apprentices varied considerably, as Hogarth’s painting of the idle and the industrious apprentices shows – the former ends up on the gallows, the second ends up marrying his master’s daughter.

This system began following the Statute of Apprentices of 1563, which forbade anyone from entering a trade who had not served the said apprenticeship. This legislation remained in force, with modifications, until 1814. Stamp duty was payable on the indentures of apprenticeship from 1710. These survive in the form of apprenticeship books and are held at TNA (IR 1) and must be seen on microfilm. These include lists of articled clerks. They are arranged geographically (for London see the ‘City’ registers, and ‘Country’ registers for the rest of the country), and then roughly chronologically. They list the name, address and trade of the master, the name of the apprentice and the date of the indenture. Sometimes the names of the apprentice’s parents are also given. There are indexes for the years 1710–74. However the tax was not collected until a few years after the apprenticeship was completed.

Some apprentices enlisted in the armed forces, contrary to the terms of their apprenticeship indentures, and once this was discovered, they were returned to their masters. Lists of these youths for 1806–35 can be found in TNA, WO 25/2962. There were also military and naval apprenticeships, for boys from the Royal Naval Asylum at Greenwich and at the Duke of York’s Military School, Chelsea (often sons of former sailors or soldiers, many were orphans). They can be found in TNA, WO 143/52, covering 1806–48 and in ADM 73/421–48, covering 1808–38, respectively. There were also apprenticeships in the Merchant Navy from 1823 too. For London, these can be found in TNA, BT 150/1–14 (covering 1824–79). These give details of the apprentice’s name, age, date, terms of apprenticeship and his master’s name.

The Watermen and Lightermen’s Company were responsible for traffic on the Thames from the sixteenth to the twentieth century and many of their employees were previously apprentices. The Guildhall Library has the apprentice binding books for 1688–1908 (MS 6289) and the apprentice affidavit books, 1759–1897 (MS 6291). These give the apprentice’s name, the date and place of baptism, the date he began his apprenticeship and the date he became a free waterman, as well as naming his master, who may be his father – occasionally his mother, if the father was deceased.

Many apprenticeships were exempt from the stamp duty already mentioned and so do not appear in the registers above. These would include children apprenticed by charities or by parish vestries or if those apprenticed to their father. Vestry minute books refer to children of poor parents, or orphans, whom the parish paid to have apprenticed so they would no longer be a burden on the parish rates. There may be additional references to the apprentice if there was trouble – Hanwell Vestry investigated a case where it was alleged that a master had ill used his apprentice and steps were taken against the master to try and ensure it would not recur. One charity which paid to apprentice children was Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital. The London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) has registers of apprentices which are accessible for 1751–1891 (A/FH/A12/003/001–3). These are indexed alphabetically. JPs also authorized the apprenticeships of poor children; minutes of the Blackheath JPs are to be found at the Greenwich History Centre.

Apprentices sometimes found themselves in trouble with the law. The Middlesex Quarter Sessions refers to apprentices in dispute with their masters. Pepys makes reference in the later 1660s to apprentices being involved in riots; and they were said to be prominent in the anti-Catholic rioting in London in 1688. It may be worth checking criminal records, if your ancestor was an apprentice, therefore. It should also be noted that it is estimated that about half of those who began apprenticeships in London failed to complete them.

Some apprenticeship records are online, at Origins.net (London apprenticeship abstracts, 1442–1850) and at Findmypast.co.uk (apprenticeship records, 1710–74).

The Church, Law and Medicine

Doctors, lawyers and clergymen are all easy to track down in published sources other than those already mentioned. The Law List, has names from 1775 onwards. We should also note G Hennessey’s Novum Repertorum Ecclesiasticum Parochiale Londinense, covering London clergy from 1321 to 1898, and which is indexed. They are organized in alphabetical order by surname, though often within subsections – medical listings in the nineteenth century are divided into two sections – ‘London’ and ‘Country’, whereas the Law Lists have different sections for barristers, London solicitors and provincial lawyers. They give the age, address, educational and career history of the professional; retired members are also included. When names cease to appear, they are probably dead.

Once you have traced your ancestor by these lists, it may be sensible to carry on looking through the series of these volumes as far as you can in both directions, learning more information (and seeing much of the same, too) as you proceed. Significant runs of these volumes can be found at the LMA, TNA and the Guildhall Library.

Directories will also list these people, perhaps in both the ‘Court’ and ‘Business’ sections. They are more likely to have obituaries (for dates of death see burial registers or wills) in the local press as they are often significant figures in the local community. Newspapers carried adverts for private schools, giving details of the curriculum, fees, when the school was established and so on. Clergymen were often schoolmasters, too; in theeighteenth century, the Revd William Dodd ran a boys’ school in Ealing as well as being a royal chaplain (and a forger).