Educating in Faith: A History of the English Catholic Public School

Roman Catholic public schools in England emerged from the early 1800s as part of the wider educational mission of a Catholic church seeking to support a growing Catholic population.

Around a dozen such schools – male, boarding, upper class and staffed by priests, monks and brothers from the dioceses and religious orders – had emerged by the early twentieth century. Some – Ampleforth, Stonyhurst, St Edmund’s, Beaumont, the Oratory, Downside, or Prior Park – catered for an aristocratic client...