Education, philanthropy, and governance: a new look at lincolnshire schools in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Through an examination of cases filed in Chancery under the Law of Charitable Uses and local documents from the Lincolnshire Archives, this article explores how schools in Lincolnshire functioned as charitable institutions in the early modern period. The historiography of education in early modern England has focused almost exclusively on the nature of the curriculum and on the number of schools founded during the period. Instead, this research is concerned with how existing schools were governed and maintained, problems experienced or caused by administrators, and how that governance fit into the structure of local Lincolnshire communities. It also reveals change over time in attitudes towards charities and the development of the legal language of trust, shedding light on changes in culture and governance in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.