Our knowledge of school education in medieval England has been immeasurably advanced during the last fifty years or so by the study of school textbooks. When the topic of medieval English schools was first identified in the 1890s, by A. F. Leach and others, it centered chiefly on their organization. Scholars collected references to their existence and continuity, together with the rather sparse records of their constitutions, masters, and pupils. Then, in the 1940s, the late R. W. Hunt drew attention to the manuscripts by which Latin and English were taught and studied in schools, a source that has since been explored by other writers. The study of manuscripts, it is now clear, enables us to understand much of what the schools taught, to gauge better the objectives and standards of school education, and to measure the similarities and differences between schools. Some of the surviving manuscripts cannot be attributed to particular schools, masters, or pupils, and therefore form a guide to education only in general. Others can be more exactly located. Dr. David Thomson, who has studied twenty-four fifteenth-century school manuscripts that contain material in Latin and English, is able to link at least half to particular schools, including Basingwerk Abbey (north Wales), Battlefield College (Shropshire), Beccles (Suffolk), Eton College (Bucks.), Exeter (Devon), St. Anthony's School (London), Magdalen College School (Oxford), St. Albans (Herts.), and Winchester College (Hants.). Other manuscripts can be attributed to Barlinch Priory (Somerset), Newgate School Bristol (Gloucs.), and Lincoln or its vicinity. This is a wide selection of places, geographically and institutionally. There are schools connected with monasteries (Barlinch and Basingstoke), fee-paying town grammar schools (Beccles, Exeter, and St. Albans), and the free grammar schools endowed during the later Middle Ages, such as Eton, St. Anthony's London, Magdalen College Oxford, and Winchester.