The traditional historian's view of eighteenth-century English education is that it was an era moribund in both educational ideas and practice. “It is a dark picture” in William Boyd's phrase; “a dull and barren record”; or in J. E. G. de Montmorency's term, “a century of educational sleep.” Studies of the dissenting academies and charity schools by Irene Parker and Herbert McLachlan and others, however, have suggested that there was at least some restlessness in the sleep. More recently Nicholas Hans in New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century maintains that the era was in fact the beginning of “modern” education in England: “Many of the ideas of the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries, which at the time were declared to be radical innovations, were enunciated and practiced in the eighteenth century.” The private academy especially, Hans points out, was a seminal institution. The academy masters, he states, “… were able and efficient teachers who must be considered as pioneers of modern education.”