Many accounts of nineteenth century elementary education have tended to concentrate on what happened in England’s towns and cities. Although there has been more awareness in recent years of the importance of the rural scene, there has still been comparatively little written on the village schools of Bedfordshire, and certainly no attempt has been made to place what happened in the county in the context of national movements and developments. This is not because of a lack of material and the present volume can do no more than record some of the most important returns and reports so that they might be readily available both to those who are interested in particular parishes and to those who wish to gain a picture of the wider rural scene.

In many ways Bedfordshire is a very suitable county for studying the development of elementary education. In his General Report for 1872 the Rev C F Johnstone, H.M.I., wrote: ‘Two counties, Bedford and Huntingdon, fall under my charge. They are purely agricultural, with no large towns in them, and are probably as good examples as any others of the rural education of England.’ Such a comment would have been inconceivable a generation earlier, as it was said that in about 1840 Bedfordshire was ‘the lowest in intellectual education in England’. This would seem to indicate that for many years educational provision in Bedfordshire was very poor but that there was a notable upsurge around the middle years of the century which led to a considerable improvement.

Bedford itself always appears to have been well provided with schools, especially after the famous gift of Sir William Harpur ensured security and continuity. However, the Bedford Charity did not benefit the county at large, and any suggestion that it should was resisted by Bedford people. It would seem that before the nineteenth century many Bedfordshire villages never had any school worthy of the name, while in others schools came and went without any tradition of continuity being established because they never received any endowment, which would have provided them with stability. In some parishes philanthropic landlords, such as Howard at Cardington or the Trevors at Bromham, did enable their tenants to receive some education, but many landlords seem to have thought it unimportant. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, some thirty parishes, around 25% of the county total, were in receipt of some form of permanent help through various charitable endowments.