1 - Bedford

Summary

Bedford School was established in pre-Reformation days and there is evidence of a school from the eleventh century. The school was founded and maintained by Newnham Priory, a monastic house on the outskirts of Bedford, and when the monastery was dissolved during the Reformation the school closed with it. Arrangements to refound the school were put into action with the assistance of New College, Oxford, and in 1548 the Mayor of Bedford appointed Edmund Greene, a New College man, to be Master and the school was again up and running. New College is still involved in the school's governance and New College men continued to hold the office of Master (later Head Master) until well into the twentieth century. In 1552 Edward VI granted Letters Patent and this enabled the school to receive funds which could be made secure. Sir William Harper, who had been brought up in Bedford and probably attended the pre-Reformation School, was the principal benefactor and from his endowment the Harpur Trust was formed to govern the school, and later the boys' Modern School and two girls' schools. The change of spelling from Harper to Harpur was a Victorian affectation. Like many town-centred schools of its type, Bedford was a small school until the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries, when boarding greatly increased and the school grew extensively. Indeed, because of the growth in pupil numbers, the school moved from cramped accommodation in the town centre next to St Paul's Church to its present site in 1891 so that it could further expand.