a member. Appendix V of the Report of the Schools Inquiry commission contained a list of endowed schools, arranged in chronological order of foundation. Leach worked over this material de novo, and in 1896 published his English Schools at the Reformation (1546–1548), in which he showed that the attribution of fifty-one ‘new’ foundations to Edward VI's reign is a misreading of history. The study of the Chantry Acts of 1546–1548 (edited in the same book) showed that the government of Edward VI was the spoiler rather than the founder of schools, and that in his reign 200 grammar schools were abolished or crippled, and that other schools were apparently swept away without record. Leach investigated the provision of pre-Reformation schools connected with cathedral churches, monasteries, collegiate churches, hospitals, guilds, chantries, and independent institutions, and gave the results in his Schools of Medieval England (1915), the first connected history of English schools down to the accession of Edward VI. He there maintained the view (which he had first put forward in The Times, 12 September 1896) that the King's School, Canterbury, is the oldest English school. Originally he had preferred the claim of St. Peter's School at York to this distinction (Fortnightly Review, November 1892). His book established the sense of the continuity in development of English grammar schools from the time of the conversion of England to Christianity.
In the Victoria History of the Counties of England (1900–1914) Leach supplied, almost single-handed, the history of schools in nineteen counties. His summaries of county school-history at the head of each of his contributions are of interest for social as well as for educational history. His opinions are sometimes hasty and unsafe, but his comprehensive collection of facts puts the student in a position to judge for himself.
In addition to county school-histories, Leach wrote histories of Winchester College (1899) and Bradfield College (1900), Early Yorkshire Schools (for the Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 1899 and 1903), a History of Warwick School (1906), and Early Education in Worcester (1913). He produced a representative collection of materials for the study of the history of education in England, Educational Charters and Documents, 598 to 1909 a.d. (1911), his aim being to do for the educational history of England what Bishop Stubbs's Select Charters did for its constitutional history. His work placed the subject of the history of schools and education in England on a high level of research and called attention to the continuity of their development.
Leach married in 1881 Emily Archer, daughter of Silas Kemball Cook, secretary of the Seamen's Hospital, Greenwich, and sister of Sir Edward Tyas Cook [q.v.]. They had four sons and two daughters. He died at the Bolingbroke Hospital, after an operation, 28 September 1915.
[Leach's works; private information. His Schools of Medieval England gives a bibliography of his writings on the history of schools.]
LEDWIDGE, FRANCIS (1891–1917), poet, born 19 June 1891 at Slane, co. Meath, was the eighth child of Patrick Ledwidge, an evicted tenant-farmer, afterwards a farm labourer, by his wife, Annie Lynch. Leaving the Slane national school at twelve, Ledwidge worked in the fields and also in domestic service. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a Dublin grocer; but this, like a later episode in a draper's shop, lasted only a few weeks. He went back to his native fields, which henceforth provided the many occupations which he followed for a livelihood. He was a ganger on the roads; then a copper-miner, until dismissed for fomenting a strike; then an overseer of roads for the Slane area. These occupations were tolerable, because they kept him close to the hedgerows, the birds, and the people that he loved. His first verses had already been printed in the Drogheda Independent, and he contemplated training himself for journalism. In June 1912 he sent a bookful of verse to Lord Dunsany, who gave him advice, material help, and introduction to the literary world. Though reviews began to take his poems, Ledwidge stuck to his rural occupation, interesting himself more deeply in the welfare of his village. He was secretary of the county Meath farm labourers' union, served on the Navan district council, and was insurance commissioner for the county. In October 1914, although a strong nationalist, he joined the 5th battalion Royal Inniskillings, to fight ‘neither for a principle, nor a people, nor a law, but for the fields along the Boyne, for the birds and the blue sky over them’. He served as lance-corporal at the Suvla Bay landing in Gallipoli (August 1915), was with the first detachment sent from Gallipoli to Salonika (October 1915), and fought through the Vardar retreat (December 1915). After a spell in hospital in Egypt, he was sent to France, and was killed in
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