family
removed to the free schoolhouse. The cottage was demolished in 1854 by
one Richard Linnell, who placed on the still meaner structure now
occupying the site the memorial slab that guides many visitors to the
spot. The schoolhouse, in which William Carey spent the eight most
important years of his childhood till he was fourteen, and the school
made way for the present pretty buildings.

The village surroundings and the country scenery coloured the whole of
the boy's after life, and did much to make him the first agricultural
improver and naturalist of Bengal, which he became. The lordship of
Pirie, as it was called by Gitda, its Saxon owner, was given by the
Conqueror, with much else, to his natural son, William Peverel, as we
see from the Domesday survey. His descendants passed it on to Robert
de Paveli, whence its present name, but in Carey's time it was held by
the second Earl Bathurst, who was Lord Chancellor. Up to the very
schoolhouse came the royal forest of Whittlebury, its walks leading
north to the woods of Salcey, of Yardley Chase and Rockingham, from the
beeches which give Buckingham its name. Carey must have often sat
under the Queen's Oak, still venerable in its riven form, where Edward
IV., when hunting, first saw Elizabeth, unhappy mother of the two
princes murdered in the Tower. The silent robbery of the people's
rights called "inclosures" has done much, before and since Carey's
time, to sweep away or shut up the woodlands. The country may be less
beautiful, while the population has grown so that Paulerspury has now
nearly double the eight hundred inhabitants of a century ago. But its
oolitic hills, gently swelling to above 700 feet, and the valleys of
the many rivers which flow from this central watershed, west and east,
are covered with fat vegetation almost equally divided between grass
and corn, with green crops. The many large estates are rich in gardens
and orchards. The farmers, chiefly on small holdings, are famous for
their shorthorns and Leicester sheep. Except for the rapidly-developing
production of iron from the Lias, begun by the Romans, there is but one
manufacture--that of shoes. It is now centred by modern machinery and
labour arrangements in Northampton itself, which has 24,000 shoemakers,
and in the other towns, but a century ago the craft was common to every
hamlet. For botany and agriculture, however, Northamptonshire was the
finest county in England, and young Carey