History
The School was first founded in 1577; however, like so many others, it lapsed during the Civil War. In 1662 Robert Marryott, known as ‘the great eater’, hosted a feast for local worthies in Woodbridge which started at the Crown Hotel and finished at the King’s Head in Woodbridge. From this feast came the reincarnation of the School which today enjoys the curious claim of being the only independent school in the country to have been founded in two public houses.
The Free School, Woodbridge, was an expression of the new confidence in England following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Local citizens contributed generously to the founding of the School in 1662, appointing a headmaster on an annual salary of £25 to teach, without charge, ten ‘sons of the meaner sort of the inhabitants of the town’. Additional pupils paid an annual fee of £1.
After a difficult start, including the ravages of the plague in 1666, the School flourished and enjoyed a glorious era in the eighteenth century when the East Anglian gentry enrolled their sons in great numbers. By the mid-nineteenth century, the cramped School building was proving inadequate and in 1861 the School integrated with the Seckford Trust, an almshouse charity, becoming a part beneficiary of an endowment left to the town of Woodbridge in 1587 by Thomas Seckford, Master of the Court of Requests to Queen Elizabeth I.
In 1864 the School moved from the centre of town to its present site with 45 acres (180,000 m2) of wooded grounds overlooking Woodbridge on the site of the former Augustine Woodbridge Priory.
The intervening years have seen Woodbridge School develop considerably into one of the top independent schools in the east of the country. In 1974 the School became fully co-educational and today thrives with over 950 pupils attending its three schools.
Despite an early low point in 1847 when the townspeople boarded up their windows because of the threat of the ‘disruptive behaviour of the scholars’, the Woodbridge town has always been aware of the participative role the School plays in the local community. It both contributes to the local community and relies on it for many aspects of its daily life.
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