Stamford School

Stamford School is an independent school for boys in Stamford, Lincolnshire in the English public school tradition. Founded in 1532, it has been a member of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference since 1920. With the girls-only Stamford High School and the coeducational Stamford Junior School, it is part of the Stamford Endowed Schools (SES). From September 2023, Stamford became co-educational. History The school was founded in 1532 by a local merchant and alderman, William Radcliffe, who had been encouraged when younger by Lady Margaret Beaufort, (died 1509) mother of Henry VII, though there is evidence to suggest that a school existed from the beginning of the fourteenth century. Founded as a chantry school, it fell foul of the Protestant reformers and was only saved from destruction under the Chantries Act of Edward VI by the personal intervention of Sir William Cecil (later Lord Burghley) who worked in the service of Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset and who secured a specific Act of Parliament in 1548 ensuring its survival. Apart from the chantries of the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, only those of Eton College, Winchester College, Berkhamsted, St Albans and Stamford schools survived. Teaching is believed to have begun in the Corpus Christi chapel of Stamford's twelfth-century church of St Mary, but by 1566 was taking place in the remaining portion of the redundant St Paul's Church, originally built no later than 1152. This building continued in use as a school room until the early twentieth century when it was restored and extended and, in 1930, returned to use as a chapel. In 1961, a nineteenth-century Gray and Davison pipe organ was installed although this was removed in the 1990s and replaced with an electronic substitute. Over its history the school has built or absorbed seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings, besides the site of a further demolished medieval church (Holy Trinity/St Stephen's) and remains of Brazenose College built by the secessionists from the University of Oxford in the fourteenth century. Brasenose College, Oxford bought Brazenose House in 1890 to recover the original medieval brass Brazenose knocker.