One other question must be considered. The great public schools to-day are attended by the sons of wealthy parents: were these schools founded originally for children of the social grade who now attend them? The foundation deeds state explicitly that they were established for "pauperes et indigentes scolares." Mr. Leach writes vehemently on the subject. "A great deal of discussion has taken place, and much excellent eloquence run to waste on the qualification of 'poor and needy.' It was alleged ... that there had been a robbery of the poor in the matter of endowed schools; that the persons entitled, under the founder's statutes, to the benefits of Winchester College, were the poor in the sense of the poor law, the destitute poor, the gutter poor, or, at least, the poor labouring classes. There is not, I believe, a title or a shred of justification for any such allegation in the case of any public or endowed grammar school founded before 1627."[616] The following arguments are advanced by Mr. Leach in support of the views he enunciates:-- (1) He urges that the test of poverty from the school point of view, was the oath which every scholar had to take on reaching fifteen years of age: "I have nothing whereby I know I can spend beyond five marks a year."[617] Now, as there were at this date sixty-seven livings in the diocese of Winchester below this value, and as L1 6s. 8d. was the pay of a skilled artisan of that date, Mr. Leach maintains that the possession of L3 6s. 8d. was a very considerable income for a boy. In reply it may be pointed out that the oath would provide for extreme cases only. In this connection, it may be mentioned that it was proposed, towards the close of the reign of Henry VIII., to establish a free grammar school in connection with Exeter Cathedral. Forty of the scholars of this school were to be admitted without making any payment for their instruction and, in addition, they were to receive a shilling a week for the purpose of paying for "their commons within the citie." Now, the test of poverty to qualify the candidates for this position was, that their parents were not to be in receipt of a higher income than L300 a year, possibly equal to L5,000 to-day.[618] If we assume that the money payments of the opening years of the twentieth century were forty times the value of such payments in the fourteenth century, even then the extreme limit of the income of a candidate for admission to Winchester was L133 6s. 8d. of modern money. It is, therefore, obvious that the class of boy for which Winchester College was intended must have been of a lower social scale than that for which the proposed cathedral grammar school at Exeter was to be established.