Local events

Ten little gems
Did you know that piped water for the town was provided by the Greyfriars monks in 1314?... More

Markets, fairs, carnivals
The town has had a market for more than 1,000 years, and from 1484 to 1634 it actually had two... More

Town's history

First footings
About 4,000 years ago farmers used bronze tools to clear woods between the Witham and Mowbeck... More

Royal charter
Grantham 'officially' became a town on March 8, 1463, under a Royal Charter granted by Edward IV... More

Wool and iron
Agriculture played a great role in the early centuries of Grantham. The fertile land produced crops... More

People and places

St Wulfram's Church
Built in the 1100s on the site of a Saxon church, St Wulfram's is known as the Glory of Grantham... More

Margaret Thatcher
Britain's first woman Prime Minister was born on October 13, 1925, above a shop at 1 North Parade... More

King's School
King's School, possibly once St Wulfram's Church song school, is one of the oldest in the country... More

Sir Isaac Newton
Newton's lifetime of discoveries started at King's School, Grantham where he was head boy... More

Grantham Journal

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The King's School

King's School, Grantham, is one of the oldest schools in the country.

Records tell of the appointment of Walter Pigot as master on June 15, 1329, but the school may have existed during Saxon times, attached to St Wulfram's Church as a 'song' school.

In 1479, rich merchant Alderman Henry Curteys (later spelled Curteis) died and left money to the parish church to establish a chapel (chantry) and to pay two chaplains to pray for his soul" ... one of whom should instruct boys both in good manners and the art of grammar in a certain fine house built near the church".

Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, who was born at Ropsley, built a new schoolhouse in Church Street in 1517. It was connected with corpus Christi College, Oxford, and the college paid the master's wages of £6 13s 4d (£6.64) a year.

The school became the Free Grammar School of King Edward VI on March 28, 1553. The pupils mainly learned Latin and Greek.

For 200 years the school provided a good education. Many notable men of the 16th and 17th Centuries were pupils, among them William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, secretary to Elizabeth I, the poet Colly Cibber, the philosopher Henry More and Isaac Newton.

The good times, however, came to and end. In 1768, the Rev Joseph Hall became headmaster. He spent a great deal of money and opened a private fee-paying academy in the master's house while turning the schoolroom into a wood and coal store, wash-house, laundry, stables and brew-house. Hall remained in the job until he died in 1815, by which time the school was in a mess, with only 21 pupils.

Towards the middle of the 19th Century there was improvement under headmaster the Rev J. W. 'Jockey' Inman, but he blotted his copybook when he spent a Sunday afternoon 'thrashing' a boy called Payne who had been caught pouring water on the heads of people going home from church. The boy ran away and Inman was sued by the boy's father.

At that time there were 200 boys in the school, most of them aged under 11. It had become little more than a primary school of today.

New buildings were added on Brook Street around the turn of the century, but there were more problems. When the Rev William Dawson quit as headmaster in 1906, five master and 40 boarders followed him to Brighton College.

Today, the school has become one of the best in the country with almost 1,000 pupils studying many subjects - but not Latin and Greek.

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