Perhaps a more charismatic man, or less of a loner than Willis, might have established a ‘school’ of architectural scholarship. Nevertheless, without either state responsibility for heritage (as in France, where medieval architecture was on the syllabus of the École des Chartes from 1847), or a long-standing tradition of academic study of the arts (as in Germany), formal study of architectural history in Britain was unlikely to have gathered much support. Yet there remained a strong tradition of amateur study and, gradually, some paid posts. For the younger generation, as for his own, Willis was a vital source of data – required both by the continued tradition of AI congresses and for the architectural sections of the new Victoria History of the Counties of England (VCH, founded in 1899), of which Charles Peers was made Architectural Editor in 1903, before becoming an Inspector of Ancient Monuments under the Act of 1913. Archaeological research continued to be required for restoration work and, in the years following the First World War, antiquarianism – in the form of ‘local history’ – achieved renewed popular interest, with new series of guides such as those for the Great Western Railway, the Batsford series of Antiquary's Books, Bell's Cathedral Guides and the Little Guides. For all its popularity, however, architectural history had an ambiguous academic status. Whilst history and the archaeology of the ancient and prehistoric worlds were beginning to be taught as separate university subjects, architectural history was merely a subsidiary element in an architect's training (still only rarely undertaken via a university degree), or otherwise an amateur enthusiasm.