The Canterbury school that claims fourteen centuries of unbroken lessons
The King's School in Canterbury traces its teaching back to AD 597, when St Augustine arrived to bring Christianity back to Kent, making it arguably the oldest continuously running school anywhere. Christopher Marlowe and William Harvey studied there, and the oldest surviving buildings on its grounds date from around 1060.
Nobody can prove the founding date directly. The best clue comes from Bede, who wrote in 731 that when another English king wanted a grammar school around 630, he copied the Kentish model with help from a bishop sent from Kent. Historians including C.E. Woodruff read that as evidence of thriving schools already in Canterbury, the Kentish capital. In Augustine's time a school was not a separate institution but simply the teaching done by the cathedral and abbey he founded; as the writer D.L. Edwards put it in 1957, the oldest great church implies the oldest education.
Teaching blossomed after 668, when the scholar Theodore of Tarsus became archbishop and brought Hadrian from Monte Cassino. Pupils learned Latin, Greek, music, astronomy and arithmetic. During the Dissolution of the Monasteries, a royal charter of 1541 refounded it with a headmaster, a lower master and fifty scholars, and the name King's School, after Henry VIII, appeared for the first time. Over the following century former pupils such as Marlowe, Harvey and the gardener John Tradescant the Younger built its fame.
Canon John Shirley, headmaster from 1935, steered it through the Depression and wartime evacuation to Cornwall and grew it to about 600 pupils. A new royal charter arrived in 1946, and in 1952 Shirley launched an end-of-year arts festival that now runs more than 100 events. Girls first joined the sixth form in the early 1970s, after nearly 1,400 years of boys only, and the school has been fully mixed since 1990. It is also Britain's oldest charity.
Its campus is an architectural sampler: a Norman gatehouse and hall, a monastic bakery and brewery, 14th-century abbey gates, and Victorian college buildings acquired in 1992. It even owns Canterbury's Old Synagogue, a notable example of Egyptian Revival design. On the last day of each year, departing pupils wear white tie and breeches as 42 benefactors are honoured by name.
Source: The King's School, Canterbury
