royal schools

royal schools were planned by James I as part of the plantation of Ulster. Lands were assigned in the escheated counties of Armagh, Cavan, Coleraine (Londonderry), Donegal, and Tyrone ‘for the endowment of several free schools and maintenance of schoolmasters’. Finding the settlers slow to implement his intentions, the king imposed on the respective archbishops and bishops of the Church of Ireland the obligation to appoint the schoolmasters and endow the schools. By 1625 royal free schools had been established in Cos. Tyrone (Dungannon), Fermanagh (Enniskillen), Cavan, Armagh, and Donegal (Raphoe). In 1629 Charles I created two further schools on royal lands in King's Country (Banagher) and Wicklow (Carysfort). The institutions had many vicissitudes, and several official inquiries in the 19th century found, to quote commissioners of 1857–8, that ‘no regular or systematic control or supervision’ had been exercised over them. The endowed schools' commissioners reported in 1878 the existence of royal free schools at Armagh, Banagher, Carysfort, Cavan, Dungannon, Enniskillen, and Raphoe. All were grammar schools with limited numbers of free places (with the exception of Carysfort, which they designated an ‘English school’).

Kenneth Milne