Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/417

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and its Green Border-Land.
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remains of the old White Friars' Monastery, and absorbing them into its walls, is another interesting building for this concrete work of early and late centuries. The educational institutions rest on equally religious foundations and seem to grow favourably upon them. As the walls of one monastery were wrought into a workhouse, so the "dissolved" Hospital of St. John, with all its lands, furnished the foundation of The Free School. They yielded about £67 net revenue at the Dissolution, and £1,100 in 1862. Few schools in the country afford such help as this to young men desirous of obtaining a college education. Wealthy and benevolent men in the seventeenth century gave lands and other property to found prizes, scholarships, and fellowships at Oxford. The school-room, eighty-four feet long and twenty-four in width, is supposed to have been the church of St. John's Hospital; the very doubt proving the antiquity of the building. Bablake's Boys' School is another educational establishment founded in Elizabeth's time, and built on the site of the ancient Hospital of Bablake. It is an excellent institution, which, in all its expansion, has carried out the original design of the first founder. It lodges, feeds, clothes, and instructs about seventy boys, and puts them out as apprentices at fourteen years of age, giving each £2 for clothes, and £2 to the master to whom he is bound. There are