The heyday of English schooling is set somewhere in the legends surrounding the great public schools of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the playing fields of Eton, Rugby under Dr Arnold, and Mr Quelch’s reign of terror over Greyfriars Remove. Games, gowns, Latin and the birch (or their modern equivalents: PE, blazers, applied maths and permanent exclusion) all seem to be of an era long past the Elizabethan age with which Nicholas Orme ends his fascinating study of medieval schools. 

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