Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Leach, Arthur Francis
LEACH, ARTHUR FRANCIS (1851–1915), historical writer, the third son of Thomas Leach, barrister, of Seaford Lodge, Ryde, Isle of Wight, by his wife, Sarah Green, was born in London 16 March 1851. He was educated at Winchester College, and gained a scholarship at New College, Oxford, in 1869. In 1872 he won the Stanhope historical essay prize, and in 1873 obtained a first class in literae humaniores. From 1874 to 1881 he was a fellow of All Souls College, and in 1876 he was called to the bar by the Middle Temple. In 1884 he was appointed an assistant charity commissioner (Endowed Schools department). From 1901 to 1903 he was administrative examiner at the Board of Education, from April to December 1903 senior examiner, and from 1904 to 1906 assistant secretary. He was appointed second charity commissioner in 1906, a post which he held till his death in 1915.
Leach was associated with the Endowed Schools department at a particularly interesting period of its development, namely that following the Public Schools Act of 1868 (which was based on the recommendations of the royal commission of 1861–1864 on the public schools) and the Endowed Schools Act of 1869 (which embodied the recommendations of the Schools Inquiry commission of 1864–1868). The latter commission had dealt with 782 grammar schools and 2,175 endowed elementary schools, and the provision of new schemes for these schools was transferred to an augmented Charity Commission, of which body Leach was 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.]