Hello Jag

I checked and Roud does in fact refer to a couple of Waugh's works. Didn't check for Laycock, but I don't suppose Roud will have missed that.

Re blacksmiths: another set of my ancestors were blacksmiths generation after generation, across Cheshire, then comes the mid-to-late 18th century and you find a descendent putting a cross on a certificate! So literacy definitely came and went. Agree on families and children going up and down (within limits of course!)

Another lot were publicans and at the same time coal merchants in Lancashire at about the time of the famine. I must look back over the records in the light of the famine. Because I don't suppose pubs or coal merchants did too well then.

Agree with Laycock's biographer on Sunday schools too, and not just Lancashire. It was partly about reading the bible, and yes, some people could read but not write or just write their names but not always even that. One of my Lancashire ancestors appears to have ended up at some sort of charity day school after being partially crippled as a child, and ended up working in printing and publishing(of anti-alcohol tracts as I understand it). So literacy came to him as a result of a combination of bad luck and charity.   

My father in law (long since passed away) used to go to Sunday Schools because they fed him: he ended up with the Methodists, so he told me, because they had the best dinners! This would be the thirties, I guess. So the role of Sunday Schools lasted into the 20th century.